stulate, I might bother him hugely. But
when we come to the Fourteenth Proposition of Euclid's Data,--when I am
required to admit, that, "if a magnitude together with a given magnitude
has a given ratio to another magnitude, the excess of this other
magnitude above a given magnitude has a given ratio to the first
magnitude; and if the excess of a magnitude above a given magnitude has
a given ratio to another magnitude, this other magnitude together with a
given ratio to the first magnitude,"--I own to a slight confusion of
my intellectual faculties, and a perfect contempt for John Buteo and
Ptolemy. Then, there is Butler's "Analogy"; an excellent work it is, I
have been told,--a charming work to master,--quite a bulwark of our
faith; but as, in my growing days, it was explained to me, or rather was
not explained, before breakfast, by a truculent Doctor of Divinity, whom
I knew to be ugly and felt to be great, of course, the good Bishop and I
are not upon the best of terms.

I suppose that for drilling, training, and pipe-claying the human mind
all these things are necessary. I suppose, that, in our callow days, it
is proper that we should be birched and wear fetters upon our little,
bandy, sausage-like legs. But let me, now that I have come to man's
estate, flout my old pedagogues, and, playing truant at my will, dawdle
or labor, walk, skip, or run, go to my middle in quagmires, or climb to
the hill-tops, take liberties with the venerable, snub the respectable,
and keep the company of the disreputable,--dismiss the Archbishop
without reading his homily,--pass by a folio in twenty grenadier volumes
to greet a little black-coated, yellow-faced duodecimo,--speak to the
forlorn and forsaken, who have been doing dusty penance upon cloistered
shelves in silent alcoves for a century, with none so poor to do them
reverence,--read here one little catch which came from lips long ago
as silent as the clod which they are kissing, and there some forgotten
fragment of history, too insignificant to make its way into the world's
magnificent chronologies,--snapping up unconsidered trifles of
anecdote,--tasting some long-interred _bon-mot_ and relishing some
disentombed scandal,--pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only
to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the
younger,--and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans
mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes
his trun