and the
accumulation of our experience.

The idea which prevails among the vulgar of mankind is, that we must
make haste to be wise. The erroneousness of this notion however has from
time to time been detected by moralists and philosophers; and it has
been felt that he who proceeds in a hurry towards the goal, exposes
himself to the imminent risk of never reaching it.

The consciousness of this danger has led to the adoption of the modified
maxim, Festina lente, Hasten, but with steps deliberate and cautious.

It would however be a more correct advice to the aspirant, to say, Be
earnest in your application, but let your march be vigilant and slow.

There is a doggrel couplet which I have met with in a book on elocution:

Learn to speak slow: all other graces
Will follow in their proper places.

I could wish to recommend a similar process to the student in the course
of his reading.

Toplady, a celebrated methodist preacher of the last age, somewhere
relates a story of a coxcomb, who told him that he had read over
Euclid's Elements of Geometry one afternoon at his tea, only leaving out
the A's and B's and crooked lines, which seemed to be intruded merely to
retard his progress.

Nothing is more easy than to gabble through a work replete with the
profoundest elements of thinking, and to carry away almost nothing, when
we have finished.

The book does not deserve even to be read, which does not impose on
us the duty of frequent pauses, much reflecting and inward debate,
or require that we should often go back, compare one observation and
statement with another, and does not call upon us to combine and knit
together the disjecta membra.

It is an observation which has often been repeated, that, when we come
to read an excellent author a second and a third time, we find in him a
multitude of things, that we did not in the slightest degree perceive
in a first reading. A careful first reading would have a tendency in a
considerable degree to anticipate this following crop.

Nothing is more certain than that a schoolboy gathers much of his most
valuable instruction when his lesson is not absolutely before him.
In the same sense the more mature student will receive most important
benefit, when he shuts his book, and goes forth in the field, and
ruminates on what he has read. It is with the intellectual, as with the
corporeal eye: we must retire to a certain distance from the object we
would examine, befo