hen a clever youth can produce material to any
given standard; and you wrote the essays not to suit your own taste, but
to suit what you intuitively knew was the taste of the grave and even
smoke-dried professors who were to read them and sit in judgment on
them.

And though it is very fit and right that the academic standard should be
an understood one, and quite different from the popular standard, still
it is not enough that a young man should be able to write to a standard
against which he in his heart rebels and protests. It is yet more
important that you should get him to approve and adopt a standard which
is accurate, if not severe. It is quite extraordinary what bombastic
and immature sermons are preached in their first years in the Church by
young clergymen who wrote many academic compositions in a style the
most classical. It seems to be essential that a man of feeling and
imagination should be allowed fairly to run himself out. The course
apparently is, that the tree should send out its rank shoots, and then
that you should prune them, rather than that by some repressive means
you should prevent the rank shoots coming forth at all. The way to get a
high-spirited horse to be content to stay peaceably in its stall is to
allow it to have a tearing gallop, and thus get out its superfluous
nervous excitement and vital spirit. Let the boiler blow off its steam.
All repression is dangerous. And some injudicious folk, instead of
encouraging the highly-charged mind and heart to relieve themselves
by blowing off in excited verse and extravagant bombast, would (so to
speak) sit on the safety-valve. Let the bursting spring flow! It will
run turbid at first; but it will clear itself day by day. Let a young
man write a vast deal: the more he writes, the sooner will the Veal be
done with. But if a man write very little, the bombast is not blown off;
and it may remain till advanced years. It seems as if a certain quantity
of fustian must be blown off before you reach the good material. I have
heard a mercantile man of fifty read a paper he had written on a social
subject. He had written very little save business letters all his life.
And I assure you that his paper was bombastic to a degree that you would
have said was barely tolerable in a youth of twenty. I have seldom
listened to Veal so outrageous. You see he had not worked through it in
his youth; and so here it was now. I have witnessed the like phenomenon
in a man who