rsally admitted
to be the worst. The sterility and uninstructiveness of such a person's
social hours are quite proverbial. Or if he escape being dull, it is only
by launching into ill-timed, learned loquacity. We do not desire of him
lectures or speeches; and he has nothing else to give. Among benches he
may be powerful; but seated on a chair he is quite another person. On the
other hand, we may affirm, that one of the best companions is a man who,
to the accuracy and research of a profession, has joined a free excursive
acquaintance with various learning, and caught from it the spirit of
general observation."

9.

Having thus shown that a liberal education is a real benefit to the
subjects of it, as members of society, in the various duties and
circumstances and accidents of life, he goes on, in the next place, to
show that, over and above those direct services which might fairly be
expected of it, it actually subserves the discharge of those particular
functions, and the pursuit of those particular advantages, which are
connected with professional exertion, and to which Professional Education
is directed.

"We admit," he observes, "that when a person makes a business of one
pursuit, he is in the right way to eminence in it; and that divided
attention will rarely give excellence in many. But our assent will go no
further. For, to think that the way to prepare a person for excelling in
any one pursuit (and that is the only point in hand), is to fetter his
early studies, and cramp the first development of his mind, by a reference
to the exigencies of that pursuit barely, is a very different notion, and
one which, we apprehend, deserves to be exploded rather than received.
Possibly a few of the abstract, insulated kinds of learning might be
approached in that way. The exceptions to be made are very few, and need
not be recited. But for the acquisition of professional and practical
ability such maxims are death to it. The main ingredients of that ability
are requisite knowledge and cultivated faculties; but, of the two, the
latter is by far the chief. A man of well improved faculties has the
command of another's knowledge. A man without them, has not the command of
his own.

"Of the intellectual powers, the judgment is that which takes the foremost
lead in life. How to form it to the two habits it ought to possess, of
exactness and vigour, is the problem. It would be ignorant presumption so
much as to hint at an