hing, hulking gait which gives such
a look of clumsiness and stupidity! If you could but have the
well-developed muscles and the fresh complexion of the country with the
smartness and alertness of the town! You have there the rough material
of which a vast deal may be made; you have the water-worn pebble which
will take on a beautiful polish. Take from the moorland cottage the
shepherd lad of sixteen; send him to a Scotch college for four years;
let him be tutor in a good family for a year or two; and if he be an
observant fellow, you will find in him the quiet, self-possessed air
and the easy address of the gentleman who has seen the world. And it is
curious to see one brother of a family thus educated and polished into
refinement, while the other three or four, remaining in their father's
simple lot, retain its rough manners and its unsophisticated feelings.
Well, look at the man who has been made a gentleman,--probably by the
hard labor and sore self-denial of the others,--and see in him what each
of the others might have been! Look with respect on the diamond which
needed only to be polished! Reverence the undeveloped potential which
circumstances have held down! Look with interest on these people of whom
more might have been made!

Such a sight as this sometimes sets us thinking how many germs of
excellence are in this world turned to no account. You see the polished
diamond and the rough one side by side. It is too late now; but the dull
colorless pebble might have been the bright glancing gem. And you may
polish the material diamond at any time; but if you miss your season in
the case of the human one, the loss can never be repaired. The bumpkin
who is a bumpkin at thirty must remain a bumpkin to threescore and ten.
But another thing that makes us think how many fair possibilities are
lost is to remark the fortuitous way in which great things have often
been done,--and done by people who never dreamt that they had in them
the power to do anything particular. These cases, one cannot but think,
are samples of millions more. There have been very popular writers who
were brought out by mere accident. They did not know what precious vein
of thought they had at command, till they stumbled upon it as if by
chance, like the Indian at the mines of Potosi. It is not much that we
know of Shakspeare, but it seems certain that it was in patching up
old plays for acting that he discovered within himself a capacity for
producin