ts of their pursuit.

There is a kind of slavery to which no really intellectual man would
ever voluntarily submit, a minute obedience to the clock. Very
conscientious people often impose upon themselves this sort of slavery.
A person who has hampered himself with rules of this kind will take up a
certain book, for instance, when the clock strikes nine, and begin at
yesterday's mark, perhaps in the middle of a paragraph. Then he will
read with great steadiness till a quarter-past nine, and exactly on the
instant when the minute-hand gets opposite the dot, he will shut his
book, however much the passage may happen to interest him. It was in
allusion to good people of this kind that Sir Walter Scott said he had
never known a man of genius who could be perfectly regular in his
habits, whilst he had known many blockheads who could. It is easy to see
that a minute obedience to the clock is unintellectual in its very
nature, for the intellect is not a piece of mechanism as a clock is, and
cannot easily be made to act like one. There may be perfect
correspondence between the locomotives and the clocks on a railway, for
if the clocks are pieces of mechanism the locomotives are so likewise,
but the intellect always needs a certain looseness and latitude as to
time. Very broad rules are the best, such as "Write in the morning, read
in the afternoon, see friends in the evening," or else "Study one day
and produce another, alternately," or even "Work one week and see the
world another week, alternately."

There is a fretting habit, much recommended by men of business and of
great use to them, of writing the evening before the duties of the day
in a book of agenda. If this is done at all by intellectual men with
reference to their pursuits, it ought to be done in a very broad, loose
way, never minutely. An intellectual worker ought never to make it a
matter of conscience (in intellectual labor) to do a predetermined
quantity of little things. This sort of conscientiousness frets and
worries, and is the enemy of all serenity of thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Lewes's "Life of Goethe," Book vii. chap. 8.

[11] The best employed time is that which one loses.

PART XI.

_TRADES AND PROFESSIONS._

LETTER I.

TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF ABILITY AND CULTURE WHO HAD NOT DECIDED ABOUT
HIS PROFESSION.

The Church--Felicities and advantages of the clerical profession--Its
elevated ideal--That it is favorable to noble stud