through life that
self-instruction begun in youth."

When thirteen years old Herbert went to live with his uncle, the
Reverend Thomas Spencer, at Bath. Here the same methods of education
were continued that had been begun at home--conversation, history in the
form of story-telling, walks and talks, and mathematical calculations
carried out as pleasing puzzles. In mathematics the boy made rapid
progress, but the faculty of observation was the dominant one. Every
phase of cloud and sky, of water and earth, rock and mountain, bird and
bush, plant and tree, was curious to him. He kept a journal of his
observations, which had the double advantage of deepening his
impressions by recounting them, and second, it taught him the use of
language.

The best way to learn to write is to write. Herbert Spencer never
studied grammar until he had learned to write. He took his grammar at
sixty, which is a good age to begin this interesting study, as by that
time you have largely lost your capacity to sin. Men who swim
exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses in the theory of
swimming at natatoriums from professors of the amphibian art--they were
boys who just jumped in. Correspondence-schools for the taming of
broncos are as naught; and treatises on the gentle art of wooing are of
no avail--follow Nature's lead. Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of
pedagogics: it is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or as the
proverbial two tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat
in the world, the Manx cat, has no tail at all.

"The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not
positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age. "Educated
Englishmen all write alike," said Taine. That is to say, they have no
literary style, for style is character, individuality--the style is the
man. And grammar tends to obliterate all individuality. No study is so
irksome to everybody, except to the sciolists who teach it, as grammar.
It remains forever a bad taste in the mouth of the man of ideas, and has
weaned bright minds innumerable from all desire to express themselves
through the written word. Grammar is the etiquette of words, and the man
who does not know how to properly salute his grandmother on the street
until he has consulted a book, is always so troubled about his tenses
that his fancies break through language and escape.

Orators who keep their thoughts upon the proper way to gesticulate