te is volatile in its adorations, and to-morrow will be petting a
bronzed soldier, or a black African, or a prince, or a spiritualist:
ideas cannot take root in its ever-shifting soil. It is besides addicted
in self-defence to gabble exclusively of the affairs of its rapidly
revolving world, as children on a whirligoround bestow their attention on
the wooden horse or cradle ahead of them, to escape from giddiness and
preserve a notion of identity. The professor is better out of a circle
that often confounds by lionizing, sometimes annoys by abandoning, and
always confuses. The school that teaches gently what peril there is lest
a cultivated head should still be coxcomb's, and the collisions which may
befall high-soaring minds, empty or full, is more to be recommended than
the sphere of incessant motion supplying it with material.

Lands where the Comic spirit is obscure overhead are rank with raw crops
of matter. The traveller accustomed to smooth highways and people not
covered with burrs and prickles is amazed, amid so much that is fair and
cherishable, to come upon such curious barbarism. An Englishman paid a
visit of admiration to a professor in the Land of Culture, and was
introduced by him to another distinguished professor, to whom he took so
cordially as to walk out with him alone one afternoon. The first
professor, an erudite entirely worthy of the sentiment of scholarly
esteem prompting the visit, behaved (if we exclude the dagger) with the
vindictive jealousy of an injured Spanish beauty. After a short prelude
of gloom and obscure explosions, he discharged upon his faithless admirer
the bolts of passionate logic familiar to the ears of flighty
caballeros:--'Either I am a fit object of your admiration, or I am not.
Of these things one--either you are competent to judge, in which case I
stand condemned by you; or you are incompetent, and therefore
impertinent, and you may betake yourself to your country again,
hypocrite!' The admirer was for persuading the wounded scholar that it is
given to us to be able to admire two professors at a time. He was driven
forth.

Perhaps this might have occurred in any country, and a comedy of The
Pedant, discovering the greedy humanity within the dusty scholar, would
not bring it home to one in particular. I am mindful that it was in
Germany, when I observe that the Germans have gone through no comic
training to warn them of the sly, wise emanation eyeing them from aloft,
nor