e stages on the
road to nowhere but second childhood and the grave. To have a catchword
in your mouth is not the same thing as to hold an opinion; still less is
it the same thing as to have made one for yourself.

*****

It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from school
honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is
educating himself, or suffering others to educate him.... Books are good
enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for
life. It seems a pity to sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a
mirror, with your back turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality.
And if a man reads very hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will
have little time for thought.

*****

It is supposed that all knowledge is at the bottom of a well, or the far
end of a telescope. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking
out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all
the time, will get more true education than many another in a life of
heroic vigils. There is certainly some chill and arid knowledge to be
found upon the summits of formal and laborious science; but it is all
round about you, and for the trouble of looking, that you will acquire
the warm and palpitating facts of life. While others are filling their
memory with a lumber of words, one-half of which they will forget before
the week is out, your truant may learn some really useful art: to play
the fiddle, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of
men. Many who have 'plied their book diligently,' and know all about
some one branch or another of accepted lore, come out of the study
with an ancient and owl-like demeanour, and prove dry, stockish, and
dyspeptic in all the better and brighter parts of life. Many make a
large fortune who remain underbred and pathetically stupid to the last.
And meantime there goes the idler, who began life along with them--by
your leave, a different picture. He has had time to take care of his
health and his spirits; he has been a great deal in the open air, which
is the most salutary of all things for both body and mind; and if he has
never read the great Book in very recondite places, he has dipped into