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intellectually during life is that mass of miscellaneous fact and imagery which our senses have taken in busily and imperceptibly amid the scenes of their first exercise. In the lives of most men who have become eminent, whether in speculative science or in imaginative literature, a tinge of characteristic local colour may be traced to the last. Adam Smith meditated his "Wealth of Nations" on the sands of a strip of Fifeshire sea-coast, and drew the instances which suggested the doctrines of that work to his own mind, and by which he expounded them to others, from the petty circumstance of a small fishing-and-weaving community close by. And in Shakespeare himself, widely as his imagination ranged, it will be found that, in his descriptions of natural scenery at least, large use is made of the native circumstance of his woody Warwickshire, with its elms, its willows, its crow-flowers, daisies, and long-purples. However migratory a man has been, and however thickly, by his migrations, he may have covered the tablets of his memory with successive coatings of imagery, there are times when, as he shuts his eyes, all these seem washed away, and the original photographs of his early years the hill, the moor, the village-spire, the very turn of the road where he met the solitary horseman-start out fresh as ever. Nay more, it will be found (and this is a fact of which Hartley and his laws of the association of ideas have never made anything to the purpose), that perpetually, underneath our formal processes of thinking, apparently independent of these processes, and yet somehow playing into them and qualifying them, there is passing through our minds a series of such unbidden reappearing photographs, a flow of such recollected imagery.

So much for this school, on which I have dwelt so long, simply because, in doing so, I have accomplished half my exposition. I will now name together three other schools, which come next in theoretical order, though, in fact, they and the last are often attended simultaneously. These are the School of Travel, the School of Books, and the School of Friendship. Under the head of the Education of Travel I include, as you may guess, all that comes of migration or change of residence; and my remarks under the former head will have enabled you to see that all this, important and varied as it may seem, consists simply in the extension of the field of observed fact and circumstance. All the celebrated effects of travel, purely as such, in enlarging the mind, breaking down prejudice, and what not, will be found to resolve themselves into this. If I pass now to the Education of Books, here also I find that the same phrase-extension of the field of circumstance-answers to a good deal of what this education accomplishes. Books are travel, so to speak, reversed-they bring supplies of otherwise inaccessible fact and imagery to the feet of the reader. Books, too, have this advantage over travel, that they convey information from remote times as well as from distant places. "If the invention of the ship," says Bacon, "was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other!" In these words, however, there is a suggestion that the Education of Books consists not alone in the mere extension of the

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field of the concrete.

Books admit us to the accumu

lated past thought, as well as to the accumulated past fact and incident, of the human race; and, though much of that thought—as, for example, what comes to us in poetry-consists but of a new form of concrete (the concrete of the fantastic or ideal), yet a large proportion of it consists of something totally different-abstract or generalized science. It is in the School of Books, more particularly, that that great step in education takes place -the translation of the concrete into the abstract; the organization of mere fact and imagery into science. It is in conversation with books, more particularly, that one first sees unfolded, one by one, that splendid roll of the so-called sciences-Mathematics, Astronomy, Mechanics, Chemistry, Physiology, Moral Science, and Politics, with all their attached sciences and subdivisions -in which the aggregate thought of the human race on all subjects has been systematised; and that one first sees all knowledge laid out into certain great orders of ideas, any one of which will furnish occupation for a life. This great function, we say, peculiarly belongs to books.

And what shall we say of the Education of Friendship? In what does this consist, and what does it peculiarly achieve? It consists, evidently, in all that can result, in the way of culture, from a closer relation than ordinary with certain selected individuals out of the throng through which one passes in the course of one's life. It is given to every one to form such close sentimental relations with perhaps six or seven individuals in the course of the early period of life; and these relationships -far easier at this time of life than afterwards-are among the most powerful educating influences to which

youth can be subjected. Friendship educates mainly in two ways. In the first place, it educates by disposing and enabling one to make certain individual specimens of human character, and all that is connected with them, objects of more serious and minute study than is bestowed on men at large; and, in the second place, it takes a man out of his own personality, and doubles, triples, or quintuples his natural powers of insight, by compelling him to look at nature and life through the eyes of others, each of whom is, for the time being, another self. This second function of friendship, as an influence of intellectual culture, is by far the most important. There are, of course, various degrees of friendship, and various exercises of it in the same degree. There is friendship with equals, friendship with inferiors, and friendship with superiors. Of all forms of friendship in youth, by far the most effective, as a means of education, is that species of enthusiastic veneration which young men of loyal and well-conditioned minds are apt to contract for men of intellectual eminence within their own circles. The educating effect of such an attachment is prodigious; and happy the youth who forms one. We all know the advice given to young men to "think for themselves;" and there is sense and soundness in that advice; but, if I were to select what I account perhaps the most fortunate thing that can befall a young man during the early part of his life-the most fortunate, too, in the end, for his intellectual independence-it would be his being voluntarily subjected, for a time, to some powerful intellectual tyranny.

Having thus sufficiently illustrated the idea that it is not in one school, but in a plurality of schools, each having a characteristic effect, that a man receives his

education, and having named some of these schools, I am in a position to consider more particularly the nature of that education which is supplied by one of the schools mentioned-the School of Books. I have already said enough to show that, of all the varieties of education capable of being separately regarded, this education of books, in the matter of intellectual cultivation at least, deserves to stand paramount. As the depositories of the past thought and experience of the human race, books do yield us our largest supplies of knowledge. It is chiefly in books, too, as we have said, that we find that immense operation already performed to our hands-the distribution of knowledge into certain grand orders or progressions of ideas, called Sciences. But, besides this, it will be found, I think, that the School of Books performs a collateral function in regard to the other schools, and that only those who have been pupils in it can enjoy the higher education furnished by the others. It will be found, I think, that it is not the illiterate but the instructed inhabitants of a parish that have the full benefit of intimacy with its physical, its social, or even its legendary circumstance. An illiterate native of Stratford-on-Avon is dead to almost all that education which lies over and around the town in virtue of its having been the birthplace of Shakespeare; a boor dwelling by Stonehenge drinks no instruction from its mysterious monuments; and the human beings that nestle in the clefts of the Alps themselves are among the most mean and soulless of their kind. So with the School of Travel. You know the hero of Wordsworth's

tale,

"He, two and thirty years or more,

Had been a wild and woodland rover ;

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