r instance
imaginative literature and the higher mathematics, the critical and
practical study of fine art and the natural sciences, music, and
political economy. The class of intellects which arrogate to themselves
the epithet "practical," but which we call _Philistine_, always oppose
this love of variety, and have an unaffected contempt for it, but these
are matters beyond their power of judgment. They cannot know the needs
of the intellectual life, because they have never lived it. The practice
of all the greatest intellects has been to cultivate themselves
variously, and if they have always done so, it must be because they have
felt the need of it.

The encouraging inference which you may draw from this in reference to
your own case is that, since all intellectual men have had more than one
pursuit, you may set off your business against the most absorbing of
their pursuits, and for the rest be still almost as rich in time as they
have been. You may study literature as some painters have studied it, or
science as some literary men have studied it.

The first step is to establish a regulated economy of your time, so
that, without interfering with a due attention to business and to
health, you may get two clear hours every day for reading of the best
kind. It is not much, some men would tell you that it is not enough, but
I purposely fix the expenditure of time at a low figure because I want
it to be always practicable consistently with all the duties and
necessary pleasures of your life. If I told you to read four hours every
day, I know beforehand what would be the consequence. You would keep the
rule for three days, by an effort, then some engagement would occur to
break it, and you would have no rule at all. And please observe that the
two hours are to be given quite regularly, because, when the time given
is not much, regularity is quite essential. Two hours a day, regularly,
make more than seven hundred hours in a year, and in seven hundred
hours, wisely and uninterruptedly occupied, much may be done in
anything.

Permit me to insist upon that word _uninterruptedly_. Few people realize
the full evil of an interruption, few people know all that is implied
by it. After warning nurses against the evils of interruption, Florence
Nightingale says:--

"These things are not fancy. If we consider that, with sick as with
well, every thought decomposes some nervous matter--that decomposition
as well as re-composition