uated than we are, they often
got as good an intellectual training from the literature that was
accessible to them, as we from our vaster stores. We live in an age of
essayists, and yet what modern essayist writes better than old
Montaigne? All that a thoughtful and witty writer needs for the
sharpening of his intellect, Montaigne found in the ancient literature
that was accessible to him, and in the life of the age he lived in. Born
in our own century, he would have learned many other things, no doubt,
and read many other books, but these would have absorbed the hours that
he employed not less fruitfully with the authors that he loved in the
little library up in the third story of his tower, as he tells us, where
he could see all his books at once, set upon five rows of shelves round
about him. In earlier life he bought "this sort of furniture" for
"ornament and outward show," but afterwards quite abandoned that, and
procured such volumes only "as supplied his own need."

To supply our own need, within the narrow limits of the few and
transient hours that we can call our own, is enough for the wise
everywhere, as it was for Montaigne in his tower. Let us resolve to do
as much as that, not more, and then rely upon the golden compensations.

NOTE.--"Supposing that the executive and critical powers always exist
in some correspondent degree in the same person, still they cannot be
cultivated to the same extent. The attention required for the
development of a theory is necessarily withdrawn from the design of a
drawing, and the time devoted to the realization of a form is lost to
the solution of a problem."--MR. RUSKIN, _in the preface to the third
volume of_ "_Modern Painters_."

In the case of Mr. Ruskin, in that of Mr. Dante Rossetti, and in all
cases where the literary and artistic gifts are naturally pretty
evenly balanced, the preponderance of an hour a day given to one or
the other class of studies may have settled the question whether the
student was to be chiefly artist or chiefly author. The enormous
importance of the distribution of time is never more clearly
manifested than in cases of this kind. Mr. Ruskin might certainly have
attained rank as a painter, Rossetti might have been as prolific in
poetry as he is excellent. What these gifted men are now is not so
much a question of talent as of time. In like manner the question
whether Ingres was to be known as a painter or as