others.

168. That is a lesson, I repeat, which differs much, I fear, from the
one you are commonly taught. The vulgar and incomparably false saying of
Macaulay's, that the intellectual giants of one age become the
intellectual pigmies of the next, has been the text of too many sermons
lately preached to you.

You think you are going to do better things--each of you--than Titian
and Phidias--write better than Virgil--think more wisely than Solomon.

My good young people, this is the foolishest, quite
pre-eminently--perhaps almost the harmfullest--notion that could
possibly be put into your empty little eggshells of heads. There is not
one in a million of you who can ever be great in _any_ thing. To be
greater than the greatest that _have_ been, is permitted perhaps to one
man in Europe in the course of two or three centuries. But because you
cannot be Handel and Mozart--is it any reason why you should not learn
to sing "God save the Queen" properly, when you have a mind to? Because
a girl cannot be prima donna in the Italian Opera, is it any reason that
she should not learn to play a jig for her brothers and sisters in good
time, or a soft little tune for her tired mother, or that she should not
sing to please herself, among the dew, on a May morning? Believe me,
joy, humility, and usefulness, always go together: as insolence with
misery, and these both with destructiveness. You may learn with proud
teachers how to throw down the Vendome Column, and burn the Louvre, but
never how to lay so much as one touch of safe colour, or one layer of
steady stone: and if indeed there be among you a youth of true genius,
be assured that he will distinguish himself first, not by petulance or
by disdain, but by discerning firmly what to admire, and whom to obey.

169. It will, I hope, be the result of the interest lately awakened in
art through our provinces, to enable each town of importance to obtain,
in permanent possession, a few--and it is desirable there should be no
more than a few--examples of consummate and masterful art: an engraving
or two by Duerer--a single portrait by Reynolds--a fifteenth century
Florentine drawing--a thirteenth century French piece of painted glass,
and the like; and that, in every town occupied in a given manufacture,
examples of unquestionable excellence in that manufacture should be made
easily accessible in its civic museum.

I must ask you, however, to observe very carefully that I use the