as he goes on, and in a little you become aware that for a few
hundred pounds a year you may sometimes get a man who would have made
an Attorney-General or a Lord-Chancellor; you discern, that, under
the appearance of almost stolidity, there was the sharpest attention
watching every word of the argument of the other speaker, and ready to
come down on every weak point in it; and the other speaker is (in a
logical sense) pounded to jelly by a succession of straight-handed hits.
Yes, it is a wonderful thing to find a combination of coolness and
earnestness. But I am inclined to believe that the reason why some old
gentlemen look as if they did not care is that in fact they don't care.
And there is no particular merit in looking cool while a question is
being discussed, if you really do not mind a rush which way it may be
decided. A keen, unvarying, engrossing regard for one's self is a great
safeguard against over-excitement in regard to all the questions of the
day, political, social, and religious.

* * * * *

It is a curious, but certain fact, that clever young men, at that period
of their life when their own likings tend towards Veal, know quite
well the difference between Veal and Beef, and are quite able, when
necessary, to produce the latter. The tendency to boyishness of thought
and style may be repressed, when you know you are writing for the
perusal of readers with whom _that_ will not go down. A student of
twenty, who has in him great talent, no matter how undue a supremacy his
imagination may meanwhile have, if he be set to producing an essay in
Metaphysics to be read by professors of philosophy, will produce a
composition singularly free from any trace of immaturity. For such a
clever youth, though he may have a strong bent towards Veal, has in him
an instinctive perception that it _is_ Veal, and a keen sense of what
will and will not do for the particular readers he has to please. Go,
you essayist who carried off a host of university honors, and read over
now the prize essays you wrote at twenty-one or twenty-two. I think
the thing that will mainly strike you will be, how very mature these
compositions are,--how ingenious, how judicious, how free from
extravagance, how quietly and accurately and even felicitously
expressed. _They_ are not Veal. And yet you know that several years
after you wrote them you were still writing a great deal which was Veal
beyond all question. But t