ing agreeably
is better understood in the fashionable society of England than by
laborious students and _savans_. The life led by that society is the
true heaven of the natural man, who likes to have frequent feasts and a
hearty appetite, who enjoys the varying spectacle of wealth, and
splendor, and pleasure, who loves to watch, from the Olympus of his
personal ease, the curious results of labor in which he takes no part,
the interesting ingenuity of the toiling world below. In exchange for
these varied pleasures of the spectator the intellectual life can offer
you but one satisfaction, for all its promises are reducible simply to
this, that you shall come at last, after infinite labor, into contact
with some great _reality_--that you shall know, and do, in such sort
that you will feel yourself on firm ground and be recognized--probably
not much applauded, but yet recognized--as a fellow-laborer by other
knowers and doers. Before you come to this, most of your present
accomplishments will be abandoned by yourself as unsatisfactory and
insufficient, but one or two of them will be turned to better account,
and will give you after many years a tranquil self-respect, and, what is
still rarer and better, a very deep and earnest reverence for the
greatness which is above you. Severed from the vanities of the Illusory,
you will live with the realities of knowledge, as one who has quitted
the painted scenery of the theatre to listen by the eternal ocean or
gaze at the granite hills.

LETTER V.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN WHO KEPT ENTIRELY OUT OF COMPANY.

That Society which is frivolous in the mass contains individuals who
are not frivolous--A piece of the author's early experience--Those who
keep out of Society miss opportunities--People talk about what they
have in common--That we ought to be tolerant of dulness--The loss to
Society if superior men all held aloof--Utility of the gifted in
general society--They ought not to submit to expulsion.

I willingly concede all that you say against fashionable society as a
whole. It is, as you say, frivolous, bent on amusement, incapable of
attention sufficiently prolonged to grasp any serious subject, and
liable both to confusion and inaccuracy in the ideas which it hastily
forms or easily receives. You do right, assuredly, not to let it waste
your most valuable hours, but I believe also that you do wrong in
keeping out of it altogether.

The society which seems so frivo