u wrote your prize essay,
fancied that in thought and style it was very like Macaulay,--and not
Macaulay in that stage of Vealy brilliancy in which he wrote his essay
on Milton, not Macaulay the fairest and most promising of calves, but
Macaulay the stateliest and most beautiful of oxen. Well, read over your
essay now at thirty, and tell us what you think of it. And you, clever,
warm-hearted, enthusiastic young preacher of twenty-four, wrote your
sermon; it was very ingenious, very brilliant in style, and you never
thought but that it would be felt by mature-minded Christian people as
suiting their case, as true to their inmost experience. You could not
see why you might not preach as well as a man of forty. And if people in
middle age had complained, that, eloquent as your preaching was, they
found it suited them better and profited them more to listen to the
plainer instructions of some good man with gray hair, you would not have
understood their feeling, and you might perhaps have attributed it to
many motives rather than the true one. But now at five-and-thirty,
find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will
venture to say, that, if you were a really clever and eloquent young
man, writing in an ambitious and rhetorical style, and prompted to do
so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your
imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary
style of that early composition,--you will see extravagance and
bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power. And as for
the graver and more important matter of the thought of the discourse,
I think you will be aware of a certain undefinable shallowness and
crudity. Your growing experience has borne you beyond it. Somehow you
feel it does not come home to you, and suit you as you would wish it
should. It will not do. That old sermon you cannot preach now, till you
have entirely recast and rewritten it. But you had no such notion when
you wrote the sermon. You were satisfied with it. You thought it even
better than the discourses of men as clever as yourself, and ten or
fifteen years older. Your case was as though the youthful calf should
walk beside the sturdy ox, and think itself rather bigger.

Let no clever young reader fancy, from what has been said, that I
am about to make an onslaught upon clever young men. I remember too
distinctly how bitter, and indeed ferocious, I used to feel, about
eleven or