se intellectual
signs of the time which, when he goes up to college, he will find young
men of eighteen or twenty only just _prepared_ to comprehend, he
will produce a deep impression of his powers for reasoning and their
adaptation to actual life, which will be of great service to him later.
Now the ideas that influence the mass of the rising generation never
have their well-head in the generation itself. They have their source in
the generation before them, generally in a small minority, neglected or
contemned by the great majority which adopt them later. Therefore a lad
at the age of sixteen, if he wants to get at such ideas, must come
into close contact with some superior mind in which they were conceived
twenty or thirty years before. I am consequently for placing Kenelm with
a person from whom the new ideas can be learned. I am also for his being
placed in the metropolis during the process of this initiation. With
such introductions as are at our command, he may come in contact not
only with new ideas, but with eminent men in all vocations. It is a
great thing to mix betimes with clever people. One picks their brains
unconsciously. There is another advantage, and not a small one, in
this early entrance into good society. A youth learns manners,
self-possession, readiness of resource; and he is much less likely to
get into scrapes and contract tastes for low vices and mean dissipation,
when he comes into life wholly his own master, after having acquired
a predilection for refined companionship under the guidance of those
competent to select it. There, I have talked myself out of breath. And
you had better decide at once in favour of my advice; for as I am of a
contradictory temperament, myself of to-morrow may probably contradict
myself of to-day."

Sir Peter was greatly impressed with his cousin's argumentative
eloquence.

The Parson smoked his cutty-pipe in silence until appealed to by Sir
Peter, and he then said, "In this programme of education for a Christian
gentleman, the part of Christian seems to me left out."

"The tendency of the age," observed Mr. Mivers, calmly, "is towards that
omission. Secular education is the necessary reaction from the special
theological training which arose in the dislike of one set of Christians
to the teaching of another set; and as these antagonists will not agree
how religion is to be taught, either there must be no teaching at all,
or religion must be eliminated from the