day-light
which is usually wasted; usually gossipped or lounged away; or spent in
some other manner productive of no pleasure, and generally producing
pain in the end. It is very becoming in all persons, and particularly in
the young, to be civil, and even polite: but it becomes neither young
nor old to have an everlasting simper on their faces, and their bodies
sawing in an everlasting bow: and, how many youths have I seen who, if
they had spent, in the learning of grammar, a tenth part of the time
that they have consumed in earning merited contempt for their affected
gentility, would have laid the foundation of sincere respect towards
them for the whole of their lives!

46. _Perseverance_ is a prime quality in every pursuit, and particularly
in this. Yours is, too, the time of life to acquire this inestimable
habit. Men fail much oftener from want of perseverance than from want of
talent and of good disposition: as the race was not to the hare but to
the tortoise, so the meed of success in study is to him who is not in
haste, but to him who proceeds with a steady and even step. It is not to
a want of taste or of desire or of disposition to learn that we have to
ascribe the rareness of good scholars, so much as to the want of patient
perseverance. Grammar is a branch of knowledge; like all other things of
high value, it is of difficult acquirement: the study is dry; the
subject is intricate; it engages not the passions; and, if the _great
end_ be not kept constantly in view; if you lose, for a moment, sight of
the _ample reward_, indifference begins, that is followed by weariness,
and disgust and despair close the book. To guard against this result be
not in _haste_; keep _steadily on_; and, when you find weariness
approaching, rouse yourself, and remember, that if you give up, all that
you have done has been done in vain. This is a matter of great moment;
for out of every ten, who undertake this task, there are, perhaps, nine
who abandon it in despair; and this, too, merely for the want of
resolution to overcome the first approaches of weariness. The most
effectual means of security against this mortifying result is to lay
down a rule to write or to read a certain fixed quantity _every day_,
Sunday excepted. Our minds are not always in the same state; they have
not, at all times, the same elasticity; to-day we are full of hope on
the very same grounds which, to-morrow, afford us no hope at all: every
human being is li