to become a mutinous rabble. And it ought to be the guiding principle of all education, high and low. We have not to look any longer to this island only. There is an abiding place now for Englishmen and Scots wherever our flag is flying. This narrow Britain, once our only home, has become the breeding-place and nursery of a race which is spreading over the world. Year after year we are swarming as the bees swarm; and year after year, and I hope more and more, high-minded young men of all ranks will prefer free air and free elbow-room for mind and body to the stool and desk of the dingy office, the illpaid drudgery of the crowded ranks of the professions, or the hopeless labor of our home farmsteads and workshops.

Education always should contemplate this larger sphere, and cultivate the capacities which will command success there. Britain may yet have a future before it grander than its past: instead of a country standing alone, complete in itself, it may become the metropolis of an enormous and coherent empire: but on this condition only, that her children, when they leave her shores, shall look back upon her, not-like the poor Irish when they fly to America-as a stepmother who gave them stones for bread, but as a mother to whose care and nurture they shall owe their after prosperity. Whether this shall be so, whether England has reached its highest point of greatness, and will now descend to a second place among the nations, or whether it has yet before it another era of brighter glory, depends on ourselves, and depends more than anything on the breeding which we give to our children. The boy that is kindly nurtured, and wisely taught and assisted to make his way in life, does not forget his father and his mother. He is proud of his family, and jealous for the honor of the name that he bears. If the million lads that swarm in our towns and villages are so trained that at home or in the colonies they can provide for themselves, without passing first through a painful interval of suffering, they will be loyal wherever they may be; good citizens at home, and still Englishmen and Scots on the Cana

dian lakes or in New Zealand. Our island shores will be stretched till they cover half the globe. It was not so that we colonized America, and we are reaping now the reward of our carelessness. We sent America our convicts. We sent America our Pilgrim Fathers, flinging them out as worse than felons. We said to the Irish cottier, You are a burden upon the rates; go find a home elsewhere. Had we offered him a home in the enormous territories that belong to us, we might have sent him to places where he would have been no burden but a blessing. But we bade him carelessly go where he would, and shift as he could for himself; he went with a sense of burning wrong, and he left a root of bitterness behind him. Injustice and heedlessness have borne their proper fruits. We have raised up against us a mighty empire to be the rival, it may be the successful rival, of our power.

Loyalty, love of kindred, love of country, we know not what we are doing when we trifle with feelings the most precious and beautiful that belong to usmost beautiful, most enduring, most hard to be obliterated-yet feelings which, when they are obliterated, cannot change to neutrality and cold friendship. Americans still, in spite of themselves, speak of England as home. They tell us they must be our brothers or our enemies, and which of the two they will ultimately be is still uncertain.

I beg your pardon for this digression; but there are subjects on which we feel sometimes compelled to speak in season and out of it.

To go back.

I shall be asked whether, after all, this earning our living, this getting on in the world, are not low objects for human beings to set before themselves. Is not spirit more than matter? Is there no such thing as pure intellectual culture? 'Philosophy,' says Novalis, 'will bake no bread, but it gives us our souls; it gives us Heaven; it gives us knowledge of those grand truths which concern us as immortal beings.' Was it not said, 'Take no thought what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal ye shall be clothed?

Your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. Behold the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' Is this a dream? No, indeed! But such directions as these are addressed only to a few; and perhaps fewer still have heart to follow them. If you choose the counsels of perfection, count the cost, and understand what they mean. I knew a student once from whose tongue dropped the sublimest of sentiments; who was never weary of discoursing on beauty and truth and lofty motives; who seemed to be longing for some gulf to jump into, like the Roman Curtius-some 'fine opening for a young man' into which to plunge and devote himself for the benefit of mankind. Yet he was running all the while into debt, squandering the money on idle luxuries which his father was sparing out of a narrow income to give him a college education; dreaming of martyrdom, and unable to sacrifice a single pleasure?

Consider to whom the words which I quoted were spoken; not to all the disciples, but to the Apostles who were about to wander over the world as missionaries.

High above all occupations which have their beginning and end in the seventy years of mortal life, stand undoubtedly the unproductive callings which belong to spiritual culture. Only, let not those who say we will devote ourselves to truth, to wisdom, to science, to art, expect to be rewarded with the wages of the other professions.

University education in England was devoted to spiritual culture, and assumed its present character in consequence; but, as I told you before, it taught originally the accompanying necessary lesson of poverty. The ancient scholar lived, during his course, upon alms-alms either from living patrons, or founders and benefactors. But the scale of his allowance provided for no indulgences; either he learnt something besides his Latin, or he learnt to endure hardship. And if a University persists in teaching nothing but what it calls the humanities, it is bound

to insist also on rough clothing, hard beds, and common food. For myself, I admire that ancient rule of the Jews that every man, no matter of what grade or calling, shall learn some handicraft; that the man of intellect, while, like St. Paul, he is teaching the world, yet, like St. Paul, may be burdensome to no one. A man was not considered entitled to live if he could not keep himself from starving. Surely those University men who had taken honors, breaking stones on an Australian road, were sorry spectacles; and still more sorry and disgraceful is the outery coming by every mail from our colonies: 'Send us no more of what you call educated men; send us smiths, masons, carpenters, day laborers; all of those will thrive, will earn their eight, ten, or twelve shillings a day; but your educated man is a log on our hands; he loafs in uselessness till his means are spent, he then turns billiard-marker, enlists as a soldier, or starves.' It hurts no intellect to be able to make a door or hammer a horse-shoe; and if you can do either of these, you have nothing to fear from fortune. 'I will work with my hands, and keep my brain for myself,' said some one proudly, when it was proposed to him that he should make a profession of literature. Spinoza, the most powerful intellectual worker that Europe has produced during the last two centuries, waving aside the pensions and legacies that were thrust upon him, chose to maintain himself by grinding objectglasses for microscopes and telescopes.

If a son of mine told me that he wished to devote himself to intellectual pursuits, I would act as I should act if he wished to make an imprudent marriage. I would absolutely prohibit him for a time, till the firmness of his purpose had been tried. It he stood the test, and showed real talent, I would insist that he should in some way make himself independent of the profits of intellectual work for subsistence. Scholars and philosophers were originally clergymen. Nowadays a great many people whose tendencies lie in the clerical direction yet for various reasons shrink from the obligations which the office imposes. They take, therefore, to litera

Now, without taking a transcendental view of the matter, literature happer is to be the only occupation in which he wages are not in proportion to the goodness of the work done. It is not that they are generally small, but the adjustment of them is awry. It is true that in all callings nothing great will be produced if the first object be what you can make by them. To do what you do well should be the first thing, the wages the second; but except in the instances of which I am speaking, the rewards of a man are in proportion to his skill and industry. The best carpenter receives the highest pay. The better he works, the better for his prospects. The best lawyer, the best doctor commands most practice and makes the largest fortune. But with literature, a different element is introduced into the problem. The present rule on which authors are paid is by the page and the sheet; the more words the more pay. It ought to be exactly the reverse. Great poetry, great philosophy, great scientific discovery, every intellectual production which has genius, work, and permanence in it, is the fruit of long thought and patient and painful elaboration. Work of this kind, done hastily, would be better not done at all. When completed, it will be small in bulk; it will address itself for a long time to the few and not to the many. The reward for it will not be measurable, and not obtainable in money except after many generations, when the brain out of which it was spun has long returned to its dust. Only by accident is a work of genius immediately popular, in the sense of being widely bought. No collected edition of Shakespeare's plays was demanded in Shakespeare's life. Milton received five pounds for 'Paradise Lost.' The distilled essence of the thought of Bishop Butler, the greatest prelate that the English Church ever produced, fills a moderate-sized octavo volume; Spinoza's works, including his surviving letters, fill but three; and though they have revolutionized the philosophy of Europe, have no attractions for the multitude. A real

nich he is to be enjoyed. There are splendid exceptions of merit eagerly recognized and early rewarded—our honored English Laureate for instance, Alfred. Tennyson, or your own countryman Thomas Carlyle. Yet even Tennyson waited through ten years of depreciation before poems which are now on every one's lips passed into a second edition. Carlyle, whose transcendent powers were welcomed in their infancy by Goethe, who long years ago was recognized by statesmen and thinkers in both hemispheres as the most remarkable of living men; yet, if success be measured by what has been paid him for his services, stands far below your Belgravian novelist. A hundred years hence, perhaps, people at large will begin to understand how vast a man has been among them.

If you make literature a trade to live by, you will be tempted always to take your talents to the most profitable market; and the most profitable market will be no assurance to you that you are making a noble or even a worthy use of them. Better a thousand times, if your object is to advance your position in life, that you should choose some other calling of which making money is a legitimate aim, and where your success will vary as the goodness of your work; better for yourselves, for your consciences, for your own souls, as we used to say, and for the world you live in.

Therefore, I say, if any of you choose this mode of spending your existence, choose it deliberately, with a full knowledge of what you are doing. Reconcile yourselves to the condition of the old scholars. Make up your minds to be poor: care only for what is true and right and good. On those conditions you may add something real to the intellectual stock of mankind, and mankind in return may perhaps give you bread enough to live upon, though bread extremely thinly spread with butter.

I have detained you long, but I cannot close without a few more general words. We live in times of change--political change, intellectual change, change of all

yourselves with them. You, who believe that you have hold of newer and wider truths, show it, as you may and must show it, unless you are misled by your own dreams, in leading wider, simpler, and nobler lives. Assert your own freedom if you will, but assert it modestly and quietly; respecting others as you wish to be respected yourselves. Only and especially I would say this: be hon

est with yourselves, whatever the temptation; say nothing to others that you do not think, and play no tricks with your own minds.

Of all the evil spirits abroad at this hour in the world, humbug is the most dangerous.

This above all. To your own selves be true,
And it will follow, as the night the day,
You cannot then be false to any man.

CHAPTER I.

AN OLD RELIGIOUS HOUSE.

I seem like one

Who treads alone

Some banquet hall deserted,

Whose lamps are fled,
Whose garlands dead,

And all but he departed.

O THE merry days at Compton Friars! At that time between daylight and dark, called "blind man's holiday," when people sit round the fire before candles are lighted, chatting or thinking of old times, I often recall memories of the dear family that lived once in that old country house. I see its gray moss-grown walls, its heavy roofs, its many gables, its glittering vane, its ancient sun-dial, its tall, dark, weird pines, its crooked cherry-trees and appl trees-the old place seems steeped in quiet, till the silence is broken perhaps by the chattering of jays, the caw of a rook, or the sweet, sudden laugh of a lovely little boy running out of the house and brightening the whole scene with joy and life. I sit and think on this

scene, I say, till surprised into a smile, or, it may be, into a tear.

This mansion, as may be inferred from its name, was monastic; or, as Crashaw says, "An old Religious House." The oldest part dated from the time of king Edward the Fourth, when it had been a lesser monastery of Cistercian monks; but later additions, made at widely different times, rendered it what I knew it—a good, substantial, and very quaint old family house.

I seem to see it now, as I first saw it, on a fine October evening. There had been a schoolgirl friendship between my mother and Mrs. Hartlepool, though their marriages placed them in spheres widely removed. They saw nothing of each other for many years, nor did they often exchange letters. But Mrs. Hartlepool was kindness itself; and when she heard I was drooping a little, she invited me for a month to Compton Friars. I need not say how delighted I was—I had never