;

A year and a half in learning to write his own name;

Seven long years and more (Greek)-ing it, at Greek and Latin;

Four years at his probations and his negations--the fine statue still
lying in the middle of the marble block,--and nothing done, but his
tools sharpened to hew it out!--'Tis a piteous delay!--Was not the great
Julius Scaliger within an ace of never getting his tools sharpened at
all?--Forty-four years old was he before he could manage his Greek;--and
Peter Damianus, lord bishop of Ostia, as all the world knows, could not
so much as read, when he was of man's estate.--And Baldus himself, as
eminent as he turned out after, entered upon the law so late in life,
that every body imagined he intended to be an advocate in the other
world: no wonder, when Eudamidas, the son of Archidamas, heard
Xenocrates at seventy-five disputing about wisdom, that he asked
gravely,--If the old man be yet disputing and enquiring concerning
wisdom,--what time will he have to make use of it?

Yorick listened to my father with great attention; there was a seasoning
of wisdom unaccountably mixed up with his strangest whims, and he had
sometimes such illuminations in the darkest of his eclipses, as almost
atoned for them:--be wary, Sir, when you imitate him.

I am convinced, Yorick, continued my father, half reading and half
discoursing, that there is a North-west passage to the intellectual
world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in
furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally take
with it.--But, alack! all fields have not a river or a spring running
besides them;--every child, Yorick, has not a parent to point it out.

--The whole entirely depends, added my father, in a low voice, upon the
auxiliary verbs, Mr. Yorick.

Had Yorick trod upon Virgil's snake, he could not have looked more
surprised.--I am surprised too, cried my father, observing it,--and
I reckon it as one of the greatest calamities which ever befel the
republic of letters, That those who have been entrusted with the
education of our children, and whose business it was to open their
minds, and stock them early with ideas, in order to set the imagination
loose upon them, have made so little use of the auxiliary verbs in doing
it, as they have done--So that, except Raymond Lullius, and the elder
Pelegrini, the last of which arrived to such perfection in the use of
'em, with his topics, that, in a few lessons,