our countrymen are
intelligent. They know a great deal. They have gathered up information
about many things. This information is desultory, unrelated. Their
minds are a Brummagem drawer. Here, by the way, lies the worthlessness
of President Eliot's list of books to the untrained mind. To the
educated mind such books mean much; to the uneducated, little. Yet, as
a college man, you may know less than not a few uneducated people may
know. I don't care. The life intellectual is more and most important.

VII

I also want you to go from the college a good combination of a good
worker and a good loafer. To be able to loaf well is not a bad purpose
of an education. The loafing that carries along with itself the
freedom from selfishness, appreciation of others' conditions, and
gentlemanliness, is worth commending. Loafing that follows hard work
and prepares for hard work is one of the best equipments of a man.
Loafing that has no object, loafing as a vocation, is to be despised.
The late Professor Jebb wrote to his father once from Cambridge,
saying:--

"I _will_ read but not very hard; because I know better than you or
any one can tell me, how much reading is good for the development of
my own powers at the present time, and will conduce to my success next
year and afterwards; and I will _not_ identify myself with what are
called in Cambridge 'the reading set,' _i. e._, men who read twelve
hours a day and never do anything else; (1) because I should lose ten
per cent. of reputation (which at the university is no bubble but real
living useful capital); (2) because the reading set, with a few
exceptions, are utterly uncongenial to me. My set is a set that
_reads_, but does not only read; that accomplishes one great end of
university life by mixing in cheerful and intellectual society, and
learning the ways of the world which its members are so soon to enter;
and which, without the pedantry and cant of the 'reading man,' turns
out as good Christians, better scholars, better men of the world, and
better gentlemen, than those mere plodders with whom a man is
inevitably associated if he identifies himself with the reading set."

I rather like the loafing which young Jebb indulged in, but I fear it
is a type of the life which some college men do not follow. They are
inclined to look upon the four college years as a respite between the
labor of the preparatory school and the labor of business, or rather
they may look upon