arnt about men in times of recreation, in clubs and smoking-rooms, on
the hunting-field, on the cricket-ground, on the deck of the yacht, on
the box of the drag or the dog-cart, would the residue be worth very
much? would it not be a mere heap of dry bones without any warm flesh to
cover them? Even the education of most of us, such as it is, has been in
a great measure acquired out of school, as it were; I mean outside of
the acknowledged duties of our more serious existence. Few Englishmen
past forty have studied English literature either as a college exercise
or a professional preparation; they have read it privately, as an
amusement. Few Englishmen past forty have studied modern languages, or
science, or the fine arts, from any obedience to duty, but merely from
taste and inclination. And even if we studied these things formally, as
young men often do at the present day, it is not from the formal study
that we should get the _perfume_ of the language or the art, but from
idle hours in foreign lands and galleries. It is superfluous to
recommend idleness to the unintellectual, but the intellectual too often
undervalue it. The laborious intellect contracts a habit of
strenuousness which is some times a hindrance to its best activity.

"I have arrived," said Sainte-Beuve, "perhaps by way of secretly
excusing my own idleness, perhaps by a deeper feeling of the principle
that all comes to the same, at the conclusion that whatever I do or do
not, working in the study at continuous labor, scattering myself in
articles, spreading myself about in society, giving my time away to
troublesome callers, to poor people, to _rendez-vous_, in the street, no
matter to whom and to what, I cease not to do one and the same thing, to
read one and the same book, the infinite book of the world and of life,
that no one ever finishes, in which the wisest read farthest; I read it
then at all the pages which present themselves, in broken fragments,
backwards, what matters it? I never cease going on. The greater the
medley, the more frequent the interruption, the more I get on with this
book in which one is never beyond the middle; but the profit is to have
had it open before one at all sorts of different pages."

A distinguished author wrote to another author less distinguished: "You
have gone through a good deal of really vigorous study, but have not
_been in harness_ yet." By harness he meant discipline settled
beforehand like military drill.