The Sun.
London, England, 1849-12-04 00:00:00

individual excellence. You have all your work before 1
you. You have much to do before you will have done 1
even coma on justice to our capabilities. And that is
what every man ought to do. "We aE.:k no more
from you, and wid not tak:.‘ less." But to accomplish
it for us, you must apprneli the fountains of instruc •
Lion with humility, and in the full conviction that at
the end of the longezt life man is still only a scholar
at the feet of science, knowledge, and improvement.
Do not then, even if on perfectly good terms with
yourselves, fancy yourselves so clever that there is
nothing left- for you to learn. Such a fancy is the
sure mark and characteristic of the man who is so
very ignorant that he is even ignorant of his own
ignorance. Neither, again, fall into the error of
judging of your own acquirements by those of other
people. Comparison, always deceitful, is most trea-
cherous when taken as the standard of intelligence

and knowledge. It exalts the man with one
eye into a king among the blind. Let your rule
be always to be aiming at improvements, re-
collecting the maxim of the sculptor to his pupils,
"This and better will do—but this and
worse
will never do." Indurtry will reduce mountains into
molehills, while indolence will magnify molehills into
mountains. The mind must be disciplined into emi-
nence. It cannot take it by storm, but only by sap
and siege. In order to achieve it you must work,
work, work. Miracles of brilliancy can only be ac-
complished by miracles of perseverance. The boy, if
he lives, must ripen into the man—it is nature's ordi-
nance—he must grow on from the cradle to maturity
—but the babe in knowledge may remain a babe for
ever—his growth may be stunted—he may abide in
the cradle to the end of his existence. It is the rule
in all things. The poet has written—
" For no laggard in sieve, no dastard in war,
Shall wed tie fair Ellen of brave Lochinvar ;"
and, in like manner, ignorance must not expect to
woo and win the prizes of knowledge and education,
nor idleness hope to grasp the rewards of energy
and industry. And while lam warning you, let me
give you a hint on another point. Never be led away
by that fond and foolish vanity of modern times,
whiefh is so often heard exclaiming and exulting,
" that the child in the nursery is now acquainted
with secrets and mysteries of science which were hid
from a Bacon, and into which a Newton vainly
sought to penetrate." For my part, I never hear this
kind of boasting without being reminded of the
saying, that " a dwarf upon a giant's shoulders can
see farther than the giant," but put the tiny creature
on his own legs again, and how far will he see then ?
In one of his stories Dickens makes Mr. Short ask the
showman, " What becomes of the old giants ?" to
which the reply is "They're usually kept in caravans
to wait upon the dwarfs." And many a small dabbler
in the shallows of science in these days talks of the
old giants, and fathers, and patriarchs of intellect, as
if they were born and fit for no other use, and as if
they who opened to us the great roads of mind, upon
which we all now journey with so much ease, were in-
ferior to the lounging travellers who glide along them
without a thought of the pioneers who, unguided, un-
helped, hewed their way through the desert and the
wilderness, and left the fruits of their labours as an
inheritance to future generations. Born amidst the
intellectual sunlight of their kindling, we cannot ap-
preciate the value of their toils and discoveries. Only
the blind man restored to sight can tell all the horrors
of the darkness from which he has escaped. But let
us strive to realise the same feelings, and look back
with reverential awe upon the genius of the past.
The genius of the present, with all its brilliancy, is
only a further development of it, and in its greatest
triumphs should yet render homage and tribute to
" The dead, but sceetred, sovereigns, who still rule
Our spirits from her r urns."
And another word to the younger members of your
institution. In the selection of books which
you read, although mental relaxation is as necessary
as biddy, do not devote yourselves too much to those
lighter works, which will only encourage and
strengthen imagination in its flight and dreams.
Fancy is a strolling player, whose vagrant courses
should be checked, and brought within the rule and
line of discipline and system, But read the best of
the old, and the best of the new, the cream of both,
with as little of the blue milk as possible; and even
so you will be able to make yourselves acquainted
with only a slight sprinkling of the volumes which
the teeming press is pouring forth day by day ; and
even so you will only be like the ploughboy at the
harvest home feast, who, when he had swallowed so
many good things that he had brought himself to a
state of surfeit, burst into tears, as the tables were
cleared, and cried cut, "There's all that pudding left
and I can't eat any more." And, in doing all this,
make yourselves the masters, not the slaves of the
books which you read, bringing all their contents
before the bar of your judgment, and the test of your
reason and common sense. I have always thought
that a glorious exclamation of an eminent writer, in
which he says, " I had better never see a book, than
to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own
orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system." All
cannot he so ambitious as to become the authors and
founders of a system, but all should strive, in the
course of their reading, to extract the honey and
leave the poison behind them. But why all this ?
Young persons—very young ones—sometimes ask,
Do we not see ignorant men grow rich and flourish,
and obtain a larger share of the good things of' the
world than the educated and enlightened ? Occa•
sionally we do; but the exception does not shake
the rule. There is such a thing as tumbling up
stairs. But this is an exception; the general rule is
to rumble down theta. I heard of a man lately who
offered some painted sparrows for sale as canaries,
and the trick succeeded; but no one could hope to
give to such a trade a fixity of tenure. We hare
been told of a merchant who shipped a consignment
of warming-pans for the West Indies, and made
money by the same, the sagacity of his agent having
disposed of them as sugar ladles for him ; but the
experiment was never repeated. Mazeppa, by an
ingenious device of cruelty, was chained on his wild
horse to be borne through all the agonies of torture,
to a slow and lingering death, and was carried to a
crown on his strange and maddened courser ; but the
same royal road to power and dominion has never
found a rider since. And, even so, though the un-
educated, by some chance or accident, do not unfre-
quently succeed better in worldly matters than the
educated, still you may depend upon it, that, in the
long run, ignorance is about the worst merchandise
which a man can carry to market with him. Gene-
rally speaking, the ignorant man has to lean upon the
crutches of extraneous support, while the educated
man is self dependent and self sustaining. The one
confides in the miseries and serf badge of importunity.
The other waits for opportunity's flood-tide to sail
oa to success if not to eminence. I will give- you
an illustration of this, from an example just brought
within my own experience. Not long since, only
last week indeed, I met a labouring man :n my parish
who with no small degree of pride and pleasure
showed me a Canadian newspaper in which his bro-
ther was spoken of as So and So, Esq. I turned
upon him at once to read the riddle for me, why one
brother was earning his daily bread by his daily toil,
while the other had attained the social position desig-
nated by the journalist. The thing was made plain
to me in an instant. The one bad been receiving
simple interest on a pair of hands, while the other had
bad a pair of hands and a head out at compound in-
terest. The labouring man had been taught very
little reading and no writing in his childhood. The
Esquire, who is some years his junior, was not born
until the family were in somewhat better circum-
stances, and had been instructed in reading, writing,
arithmetic, and some other plain and solid acquire-
ments. Ido not mean to say that the possession
of these acquirements necessarily carried him to
the point which he occupies, but Ido mean to say
that without them he would never have climbed
to it. When the hour came there was the man
ready for it. When the opportunity offered itself, he
was prepared to take advantage of it, to jump into
the saddle, and ride it on to fortune. I know that it
is often asked, " But is not fortune blind ?" I think
not ; after long watching, I should say that she has
her eyes as wide open as any lady in the world. Dien
are often blind to the opportunities which fortune
places in their way, and then cry out that fortune is
blind to their merits. They idle and daily on the
river's banks while the tide is running in, and then
when it has turned and is running out, exclaim that
they are of all men the most miserable and unlucky.
The sleeping hare was beaten in the race by the
tortoise ; but where was the fault, whose the blame ?
Fortune's or the hare's ? Besides, if ignorance does
sometimes succeed by a lucky speculation, or the
accident of inheritance, its roads to advancement are
few and narrow. There are points of social dis-
tinction and eminence, professional celebrity, and ten
thousand elevated arid exalted positions which it
cannot possibly reach. The great gulf between it
and them must be bridged, not jumped, and education
is the architect which alone can span the chasm with
its intellectual arches. Blot out, then, the very words,
luck and chance, from your vocabulary. The sailing
vessel waits for a wind, but the steamer buffets the
way against both wind and tide. And so do you de-
pend upon the steam of education, the steam of self-
reliance, the steam of energy and industry. Get them
well up, and fear nothing. When the Grand Seignior
hid heard the stories of the two brothers, whom he
...cited in disguise, he said, "Henceforth let Murad
he called Murad the Imprudent, instead of the Un-
lucky, and Saladin, Seladin the Prudent, instead of
the Lucky." Ile was right. And, even so, should
you, I say again, depend upon sell reliance and self-
cultivation, and not upon luck. A drifting ship, let
her escape ever so long, must be wrecked at last,
Ignorance must reach the end of its tether at some
time. Take the corks away from the man whom
they float, without swimming, and sink he must. You
should, therefore, leave nothing to the lottery of chance.
For even those who have faith even to credulity in
the supremacy of fortune, will allow that there are
more blanks than prizes in her wheel. In one