ull share of her
benefits. Let us seek accurate and varied knowledge and scholarship,
endeavoring (although it is a difficult and subtle process) to find out
for what our youth are best fitted, by evoking the latent special talents
with which their Maker has gifted them, and thus train them in the expert
use of that weapon which will enable them to do yeoman service in the wide
arena of the world. But, while we do all this, let us beware. We have
before now been taunted as a nation of shopkeepers. This was no evil, if
true; but who can calculate the direness of that calamity which shall turn
us into a nation of smatterers. This is a looming evil of unparalleled
magnitude. There can be no doubt that at the present moment there is a
tendency to rest content with very superficial acquirements, if they be
only heterogeneous enough. A man who can gabble the alphabet of any
science or subject may, if he has sufficient presumption, gain credit for
possessing a knowledge of its arcana--for the ability necessary to plumb
its profounder depths and unravel its intricacies. The successful practice
of this imposture, for it is nothing less, has led, and is still leading,
many to sacrifice accuracy for variety, both in those departments which
their circumstances, rightly considered, demand that they should
thoroughly understand, and in those branches which tend only to add grace
and finish to a liberal education.

In "those days," the chance was that genius often passed away unnoticed or
neglected. In "the good time come," we fear that a similar injustice will
be done, and in a larger measure. The modest, the sound-thinking, and
really learned, will withdraw from a field where they find as companions
or competitors only strutting jackdaws and noisy shallow smatterers, who
have decided that they were born for other purposes than to tread in the
work-a-day paths of life. A portion of the old as well as the "rising
generation" would do well to look to the present state of things. There is
too often a desire on the part of parents to push their children into
positions for which they are totally unfitted. There is a sphere for all,
which, when chosen with a due regard to ability, and not adopted through
caprice or vanity, will lead to usefulness in society and comfort to the
individual.

We have little fear of that audacious phase in the character of the
"rising generation," which devotes itself to a probing of those things
which have to