five-barred gates.

The same caste prejudices have often kept the mass of the upper classes
in ignorance of most valuable and important branches of knowledge. The
poor have been ignorant, yet never proud of their ignorance; the
ignorance that men are proud of belongs to caste always, not always to
what we should call an aristocratic caste, but to the caste-feeling in
one class or another. The pride of the feudal baron in being totally
illiterate amounted to self-exclusion from all intellectual culture, and
we may still find living instances of partial self-exclusion from
culture, of which pride is the only motive. There are people who pass
their time in what are considered amusements (that do not amuse),
because it seems to them a more gentlemanly sort of life than the
devotion to some great and worthy pursuit which would have given the
keenest zest and relish to their whole existence (besides making them
useful members of society, which they are not), but which happens to be
tabooed for them by the prejudices of their caste. There are many
studies, in themselves noble and useful, that a man of good family
cannot follow with the earnestness and the sacrifice of time necessary
to success in them, without incurring the disapprobation of his
friends. If this disapprobation were visited on the breaker of
caste-regulations because he neglected some other culture, there would
still be something reasonable in it; but this is not the case. The
caste-regulation forbids the most honorable and instructive labor when
it does not forbid the most unprofitable idleness, the most utter
throwing away of valuable time and faculty. Tycho Brahe feared to lose
caste in becoming the most illustrious astronomer of his time; but he
would have had no such apprehension, nor any ground for such
apprehension, if instead of being impelled to noble work by a high
intellectual instinct, he had been impelled by meaner passions to
unlimited self-indulgence. Even, in our own day these prejudices are
still strong enough, or have been until very lately, to keep our upper
classes in great darkness about natural knowledge of all kinds, and
about its application to the arts of life. How few gentlemen have been
taught to draw accurately, and how few are accurately acquainted with
the great practical inventions of the age! The caste-sentiment does not,
in these days, keep them ignorant of literature, but it keeps them
ignorant of _things_. A friend who had a