o have
enjoyed the advantages of our common schools only, where thorough
instruction in national and general political history cannot be given.
This kind of learning must be self-acquired, and acquired by some
temporary sacrifice; and the sooner, in the case of every young man,
this sacrifice is contemplated and offered, the more acceptable and
useful it will be. And the acquisition of this kind of learning does
not, in a majority of cases, admit of delay. It should be the work of
youth and early manhood. The duties of life are so constant and pressing
that we find it difficult to abstract ourselves and our thoughts from
the world; but, from the age of sixteen to the age of twenty-five, the
attention may be concentrated upon special subjects, and their elements
mastered.

By the Athenian law, minority terminated at the age of sixteen years;
and Demosthenes, at that period of his life, commenced a course of
self-education by which he became the first orator of Athens, and the
admiration of the after-world. The father of Demosthenes died worth
fourteen talents; and the son, though defrauded by his guardians, was,
as his father had been, enrolled in the wealthiest class of citizens;
yet he did not hesitate to subject himself to the severest mental and
physical discipline, in preparation for the great life he was to lead.

"Demosthenes received, during his youth, the ordinary grammatical and
rhetorical education of a wealthy Athenian.... It appears also that he
was, from childhood, of sickly constitution and feeble muscular frame;
so that, partly from his own disinclination, partly from the solicitude
of his mother, he took little part, as boy or youth, in the exercises of
the palaestra.... Such comparative bodily disability probably contributed
to incite his thirst for mental and rhetorical acquisitions, as the only
road to celebrity open. But it at the same time disqualified him from
appropriating to himself the full range of a comprehensive Grecian
education, as conceived by Plato, Isokrates, and Aristotle; an education
applying alike to thought, word, and action--combining bodily strength,
endurance, and fearlessness, with an enlarged mental capacity, and a
power of making it felt by speech.

"The disproportion between the physical energy and the mental force of
Demosthenes, beginning in childhood, is recorded and lamented in the
inscription placed on his statue after his death.... Demosthenes put
himself under the t