pension of education. All intellectual
lives, however much they may differ in the variety of their purposes,
have at least this purpose in common, that they are mainly devoted to
self-education of one kind or another. An intellectual man who is forty
years old is as much at school as an Etonian of fourteen, and if you set
him to earn more money than that which comes to him without especial
care about it, you interrupt his schooling, exactly as selfish parents
used to do when they sent their young children to the factory and
prevented them from learning to read. The idea of the intellectual life
is an existence passed almost entirely in study, yet preserving the
results of its investigations. A day's writing will usually suffice to
record the outcome of a month's research.

Necessity, instead of advancing your studies, stops them. Whenever her
harsh voice speaks it becomes your duty to shut your books, put aside
your instruments, and do something that will fetch a price in the
market. The man of science has to abandon the pursuit of a discovery to
go and deliver a popular lecture a hundred miles off, for which he gets
five pounds and his railway fare. The student of ancient literature has
to read some feeble novel, and give three days of a valuable life to
write an anonymous review which will bring him two pounds ten. The
artist has to leave his serious picture to manufacture "pot-boilers,"
which will teach him nothing, but only spoil his hands and vitiate the
public taste. The poet suspends his poem (which is promised to a
publisher for Christmas, and will be spoiled in consequence by hurry at
the last) in order to write newspaper articles on subjects of which he
has little knowledge and in which he takes no interest. And yet these
are instances of those comparatively happy and fortunate needy who are
only compelled to suspend their intellectual life, and who can cheer
themselves in their enforced labor with the hope of shortly renewing it.
What of those others who are pushed out of their path forever by the
buffets of unkindly fortune? Many a fine intellect has been driven into
the deep quagmire, and has struggled in it vainly till death came, which
but for that grim necessity might have scaled the immortal mountains.

This metaphor of the mountains has led me, by a natural association of
ideas, to think of a writer who has added to our enjoyment of their
beauty, and I think of him the more readily that his career will