ies--French priests
and English Clergymen--The professional point of view--Difficulty of
disinterested thinking--Colored light--Want of strict
accuracy--Quotation from a sermon--The drawback to the clerical
life--Provisional nature of intellectual conclusions--The legal
profession--That it affords gratification to the intellectual
powers--Want of intellectual disinterestedness in lawyers--Their
absorption in professional life--Anecdote of a London
lawyer--Superiority of lawyers in their sense of
affairs--Medicine--The study of it a fine preparation for the
intellectual life--Social rise of medical men coincident with the
mental progress of communities--Their probable future influence on
education--The heroic side of their profession--The military and naval
professions--Bad effect of the privation of
solitude--Interruption--Anecdote of Cuvier--The fine arts--In what way
they are favorable to thought--Intellectual leisure of
artists--Reasoning artists--Sciences included in the fine arts.

It may be taken for granted that to a mind constituted as yours is, no
profession will be satisfactory which does not afford free play to the
intellectual powers. You might no doubt exercise resolution enough to
bind yourself down to uncongenial work for a term of years, but it would
be with the intention of retiring as soon as you had realized a
competency. The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and
educates what is best in us.

You had thoughts, at one time, of the Church, and the Church would have
suited you in many respects very happily, yet not, I think, in all
respects. The clerical profession has many great felicities and
advantages: it educates and develops, by its mild but regular
discipline, much of our higher nature; it sets before us an elevated
ideal, worth striving for at the cost of every sacrifice but one, of
which I intend to say something farther on; and it offers just that
mixture of public and private life which best affords the alternation of
activity and rest. It is an existence in many respects most favorable to
the noblest studies. It offers the happiest combination of duties that
satisfy the conscience with leisure for the cultivation of the mind; it
gives the easiest access to all classes of society, providing for the
parson himself a neutral and independent position, so safe that he need
only conduct himself properly to preserve it. How superior, from the
intelle