The Sun.
London, England, 1860-07-05 00:00:00

present form of that mother-tongue which is already
spoken over half the world, which is destined to
yet further geographical extension, and which em-
bodies many of the noblest thoughts which have
ever issued .from the brain of man. To use words

with precision you ought to know their history as
well as their present meaning; and, depend upon
it, it is the plain Saxon phrase—not the term bor-
rowed from Greek or Roman literature—that

whether in speech or writing, goes straightest and
strongest to men's heads and hearts. And now,
passing from these matters, let me offer my hearty
congratulations—and here I am sure I am entitled
to speak in the name of this assembly—to those who
have appeared here to receive their prizes to-day. It
is always a pleasant task to speak words of approval
and encouragement to those who are entering on
active life, when the approval is well borne out by
facts, and when the encouragement can be given
without holding out delusive hopes. I believe there
are few after-successes which a man can obtain which
give him half the pleasure of these early triumphs
of school and college. He may win battles ; he
may write books which half Europe shall read; he
may rise to the head of his profession, or take part
in the government of his country; but he will sel-
dom again, unless he is more fortunate than the
majority of those who have become eminent before
men, receive a reward which no one envies him,
which every one admits to be legitimately his,
which comes to him embittered by no jealousy and
saddened by no regret. I say, then, to those who
have won the prizes of this day, don't be ashamed
of enjoying the honours you have gained ; they
have been well competed for, they are hardly earned,
they are fairly yours, and I think I know enough
of the feeling of young men to say that even among
those who have themselves been not so fortunate
there is not one who grudges or who wishes them
less. But while you look back with pleasure on
what you have done, remember, that in the struggle
of this world, in the keen competition of all classes
and of all professions, it is not allowed to any one
to look back, except for a moment, as a max climb-
ing a hillside pauses to take breath, to see the height
he has gained and to calculate how much of the
ascent remains. In your case,little, very little has
yet been accomplished. Your work has been prac-
tice for the battle, not the battle itself. You have,
however, gained some real advantages from your
present position. You have the advantage of a
good start—we all remember the old saying, "well
begun is half done"—yox have had some degree of
attention called to your names, and you have ex-
cited expectations which it will be with you a
point of honour to satisfy. You have mastered for
the present—you may lose it again, many men do,
but you have it now—the habit of continual and
mental application—a very rare habit, so far as I
can judge, in any occupation where real mental
exertion is required. And you have acqiired the
right to feel—which in many moods of mind and
many circumstances of life, it will be almost
necessary for your support and encouragement
that you should feel—a reasonable reliance on
your own powers, a reasonable conviction that
if opportunities fall in your way (or rather, I
will say, when opportunities fall in your
way, for sooner or late they come to all),
they will not be lost for want of capacity to use
them. Ido not know that I can give you, stand-
ing here, any counsel which will be better than the
promoting of your own honourable ambition, acting
upon fresh and unexhausted energies like yours.
The most appropriate encouragements, the most
useful warnings, are those which, formally repeated
from this place, would sound the most familiar and
the most commonplace. In former, aid even in very
recent days, it was a common fashion for young
men of talent (ay, and for older men too) to affect
to disparage industry as the resource of the plod-
ding and of the dull, and to conceal the labours
which their works had cost them. The common
sense of the present age has got rid of that folly,
and no rule is more certainly recognised in all
departments of intellectual labour than this—that
real work, work which will stand the test of time
and the criticism of competent judges, can never be
the result of hasty or careless or desultory efforts.
I believe that law is universal, and that it applies
even to those branches of study or of business in
which action has to be taken on the spur of the
moment, without the possibility of special prepara-
tion. We have heard at the bar, or in Parlia-
ment, men whose instantaneous command of
words, whose readiness of thought as well as of
expression, seems the effect of instinct rather than
of training ! but what is the secret of that readi-
ness ? Why this—that the mind has previously
been so exercised on similar subjects that not
merely the necessary words but the necessary
arguments and combinations of thought have
become, by practice, as intuitive as those motions
of the body by which we walk, or speak, or do any
habitual and familiar act. One man will pore and
perplex himself over a difficult point, be it in law,
in science, what you will ; another will come in and
see at a glance where the difficulty lies and what
is the solution. Does that necessarily prove that
the latter has more natural genius ? No, but it
proves that his faculties have been sharpened by
familiarity with such topics; and the ease with
which he now does his work, so far from proving
that he has always worked with ease, is a measure,
so to speak, of the labour with which he has pre-
pared himself for doing it. You will not suppose
that I am denying the wide differences of organisa-
tion which exist between man and man, or that I
hold, as some wise men professed to do in the last
century, that we are all born with equal gifts, and
that only education makes one to excel another.
But this, I say, and with a deep conviction of its
truth, that the tendency of all of us is to over-
rate those natural differences, and to underrate the
extent to which they lie within our power to modify
or to increase. I am sure that we should one and all
be startled if, taking any large number of young
men of nearly the same age, and ascertaining what
was thought in their schooldays of their relative
capacities, we were to compare the judgment
formed then with the actual result in later life. It
is not, probably, that the early judgment was
mistaken, but in the long run success has de-
pended, even in purely intellectual pursuits, on
moral quite as much as on intellectual qualities.
The stronger brain, unworked or overworked, has
lost its tone ; the weaker, steadily and moderately
exercised, has gained in power until the positions
of the two are the reverse of what they once were.
And to this rule of labour which I lay down, it is
no answer to cite the cases of eminent men who
have been eminent apparently with little of exer-
tion. It is no answer, becanse you cannot prove
the fact. What is industry, and what is idleness?
One man may sit all day over his books, and yet do
but little in that time ; another, of less outwardly,
regular habit, applies himself intensely during the
hours that he is at work, and never wholly loses
sight of the object which he has in view. I am not
disparaging the value of regularity and method ;
what I contend for is, that where you see men suc-
cessful whose professional preparation has not been
marked by those qualities, you ara not therefore to
assume that they have been idlers, who have made
their way by the force of genius alone. Whatever
a man's habits and outward show of life may be,
depend upon it no man ever reached eminence in
any department who did not concentrate the whole
of his mind on that pursuit. When once a man has
thrown himself heart and soul, into the turmoil and
anxiety of professional life, there is not for him much
more—in 99 cases out of 100 there is no more—of
that free and liberalising study which has for its
object, not the sharpening of one special faculty,
but the development of the mental powers as a whole.
It may be a matter of regret that the fact should be
so, but the fact is so, and the inference I would draw
from it is seriously to warn you (and I know the
i warning is not superfluous) to resist, so far as you
reasonably and prudently may, that natural and al-
most universal impatience which prompts men con-
scious of capacity for active life to throw aside
their books and rush into business at the earliest
moment, under the impression that they have no
time to lose, that there is nothing more they need
learn, and that the best preparation for work is the
work itself. No man, I
am certain,
heevemr k
ighntewhathvee
work of his profession as well as
known it, who did not go a good deal beyond his
profession. You can't isolate any one branch of
" This is my province ; to
human thought, and say,
everything outside of it I am indifferent." The
narrowness of mind which a merely one-aided cul-
ture produces not only spoils the man for being
anything more than a tool, but even prevents him
from being as useful a tool as he might become.
Study, therefore, as long as in prudence you can,
and don't fear that life will not be long enough to
reap what you have sown.
I
that any one gets implanted into verynto
his seldom
mind happens
a n idea
worth keeping there without finding sooner or
later, the means of turning it to account. One word
more. Most of those whom I address I presume
are destined for professional life. The risks of pro-
fessional life are great, and it would be idle to tell
men whose fortunes depend on success not to be
anxious or uneasy as to the result. There come to
us, whatever our occupation, moments of doubt and

despondency, such as iry the most constant natures
and overcloud the brightest prospects. Such trials
of fortitude cannot be wholly escaped ; but they
may be lessened. They depend in part on physical
causes ; the peens sana must lodge in corpore rano ;
and it should be a rule with every one whose aims
in life are high never to sacrifice the future to the
present—never, in his anxiety to accomplish some
immediate result, to neglect the warning which
nature gives of exhausted strength and energies
overtaxed. You are engaged in a race which is to
la-lt.. pot fora few weeks or months, but for all
yotr lives, and in such a race success will ultimately
turn on endurance far more than on speed. But,