there is a gulf of difference between our
life and theirs. Why should we toil at books that the poorest students
read, we who have lordly pastimes for every month in the year? To be
able to revel immensely in pleasures which those below us taste rarely
or not at all, this is the best evidence of our superiority. So let us
take them magnificently, like English princes and lords."

Even the invention of railways has produced the unforeseen result of a
return in the direction of barbarism. If there is one thing which
distinguishes civilization it is fixity of residence; and it is
essential to the tranquil following of serious intellectual purposes
that the student should remain for many months of the year in his own
library or laboratory, surrounded by all his implements of culture. But
there are people of the highest rank in the England of to-day whose
existence is as much nomadic as that of Red Indians in the reserved
territories of North America. You cannot ascertain their whereabouts
without consulting the most recent newspaper. Their life may be quite
accurately described as a return, on a scale of unprecedented splendor
and comfort, to the life of tribes in that stage of human development
which is known as the period of the chase. They migrate from one
hunting-ground to another as the diminution of the game impels them.
Their residences, vast and substantial as they are, serve only as tents
and wigwams. The existence of a monk in the cloister, of a prisoner in a
fortress, is more favorable to the intellect than theirs.

And yet notwithstanding these re-appearances of the savage nature at the
very summit of modern civilization, the life of a great English
nobleman of to-day commands so much of what the intellectual know to be
truly desirable, that it seems as if only a little firmness of
resolution were needed to make all advantages his own. Surrounded by
every aid, and having all gates open, he sees the paths of knowledge
converging towards him like railways to some rich central city. He has
but to choose his route, and travel along it with the least possible
hindrance from every kind of friction, in the society of the best
companions, and served by the most perfectly trained attendants. Might
not our lords be like those brilliant peers who shone like intellectual
stars around the throne of Elizabeth, and our ladies like that great
lady of whom said a learned Italian, "che non vi aveva altra dama al
mondo che la pa