Bible pictures; the seats deep and easy; a
single Titian in a gold frame; a white bust or so upon a bracket; a rack
for the journals of the week; a table for the books of the year; and
close in a corner the three shelves full of eternal books that never
weary: Shakespeare, Moliere, Montaigne, Lamb, Sterne, De Musset's
comedies (the one volume open at _Carmosine_ and the other at
_Fantasio_); the "Arabian Nights," and kindred stories, in Weber's
solemn volumes; Borrow's "Bible in Spain," the "Pilgrim's Progress,"
"Guy Mannering," and "Rob Roy," "Monte Cristo," and the "Vicomte de
Bragelonne," immortal Boswell sole among biographers, Chaucer, Herrick,
and the "State Trials."

The bedrooms are large, airy, with almost no furniture, floors of
varnished wood, and at the bed-head, in case of insomnia, one shelf of
books of a particular and dippable order, such as "Pepys," the "Paston
Letters," Burt's "Letters from the Highlands," or the "Newgate
Calendar." ...

[1884?]

LAY MORALS

_The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were
drafted at Edinburgh in the spring of 1879. They are unrevised, and
must not be taken as representing, either as to matter or form, their
author's final thoughts; but they contain much that is essentially
characteristic of his mind._

LAY MORALS

CHAPTER I

The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.
Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and
profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only
broken images of the truth which they perceive. Speech which goes from
one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two
experiences, is doubly relative. The speaker buries his meaning; it is
for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is
in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer. Such,
moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon
details in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the
best of education is to throw out some magnanimous hints. No man was
ever so poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or
actions; his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a
knowledge of himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of
the mind, but in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour
to hour in its dictates with the variation of