f time to leave fortresses untaken in
our rear. Whatever has to be mastered ought to be mastered so thoroughly
that we shall not have to come back to it when we ought to be carrying
the war far into the enemy's country. But to study on this sound
principle, we require not to be hurried. And this is why, to a sincere
student, all external pressure, whether of examiners, or poverty, or
business engagements, which causes him to leave work behind him which
was not done as it ought to have been done, is so grievously, so
intolerably vexatious.

LETTER II.

TO A YOUNG MAN OF GREAT TALENT AND ENERGY WHO HAD MAGNIFICENT PLANS FOR
THE FUTURE.

Mistaken estimates about time and occasion--The Unknown
Element--Procrastination often time's best preserver--Napoleon's
advice to do nothing at all--Use of deliberation and of intervals of
leisure--Artistic advantages of calculating time--Prevalent
childishness about time--Illusions about reading--Bad economy of
reading in languages we have not mastered--That we ought to be thrifty
of time, but not avaricious--Time necessary in production--Men who
work best under the sense of pressure--Rossini--That these cases prove
nothing against time-thrift--The waste of tune from
miscalculation--People calculate accurately for short spaces, but do
not calculate so well for long ones--Reason for this--Stupidity of
the Philistines about wasted time--Toepffer and Claude
Tillier--Retrospective miscalculations, and the regrets that result
from them.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage
when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author? On the
same principle, people will give a higher price to a picture-dealer than
they would have given to the painter himself. The picture that has been
once bought has a recommendation, and the quoted passage is both
recommended and isolated from the context.

Trusting to this well-known principle, although I am aware that you have
read everything that Sir Arthur Helps has published, I proceed to make
the following quotation from one of his wisest books.

"Time and occasion are the two important circumstances in human life, as
regards which the most mistaken estimates are made. And the error is
universal. It besets even the most studious and philosophic men. This
may notably be seen in the present day, when many most distinguished men
have laid down projects for literature and philosophy