nd the other I will not do. I am fond of arguing: yet with a
good deal of pains and practice it is often as much as I can do to beat
my man; though he may be an indifferent hand. A common fencer would
disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a
professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this
effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reas
hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere
clown.(1)

I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of
intellectual compared to mechanical excellence, and it has always made
me somewhat dissatisfied. It is a great many years since I saw Richer,
the famous rope-dancer, perform at Sadler's Wells. He was matchless
in his art, and added to his extraordinary skill exquisite ease, and
unaffected, natural grace. I was at that time employed in copying a
half-length picture of Sir Joshua Reynolds's; and it put me out of
conceit with it. How ill this part was made out in the drawing! How
heavy, how slovenly this other was painted! I could not help saying
to myself, 'If the rope-dancer had performed his task in this manner,
leaving so many gaps and botches in his work, he would have broken his
neck long ago; I should never have seen that vigorous elasticity of
nerve and precision of movement!'--Is it, then, so easy an undertaking
(comparatively) to dance on a tight-rope? Let any one who thinks so get
up and try. There is the thing. It is that which at first we cannot do
at all which in the end is done to such perfection. To account for this
in some degree, I might observe that mechanical dexterity is confined
to doing some one particular thing, which you can repeat as often as
you please, in which you know whether you succeed or fail, and where the
point of perfection consists in succeeding in a given undertaking.--In
mechanical efforts you improve by perpetual practice, and you do so
infallibly, because the object to be attained is not a matter of taste
or fancy or opinion, but of actual experiment, in which you must either
do the thing or not do it. If a man is put to aim at a mark with a bow
and arrow, he must hit it or miss it, that's certain. He cannot deceive
himself, and go on shooting wide or falling short, and still fancy that
he is making progress. No distinction between right and wrong, between
true and false, is here palpable; and he must either correct his aim or
persevere in his