are
time; and, there are other branches of learning which ought immediately
to follow. If your own calling or profession require book-study, books
treating of that are to be preferred to all others; for, the first
thing, the first object in life, is to secure the honest means of
obtaining sustenance, raiment, and a state of being suitable to your
rank, be that rank what it may: excellence in your own calling is,
therefore, the first thing to be aimed at. After this may come _general
knowledge_, and of this, the first is a thorough knowledge of _your own
country_; for, how ridiculous is it to see an English youth engaged in
reading about the customs of the Chinese or of the Hindoos, while he is
content to be totally ignorant of those of Kent or of Cornwall! Well
employed he must be in ascertaining how Greece was divided and how the
Romans parcelled out their territory, while he knows not, and apparently
does not want to know, how England came to be divided into counties,
hundreds, parishes and tithings.

49. GEOGRAPHY naturally follows Grammar; and you should begin with that
of this kingdom, which you ought to understand well, perfectly well,
before you venture to look abroad. A rather slight knowledge of the
divisions and customs of other countries is, generally speaking,
sufficient; but, not to know these full well, as far as relates to our
own country, is, in one who pretends to be a gentleman or a scholar,
somewhat disgraceful. Yet how many men are there, and those called
_gentlemen_ too, who seem to think that counties and parishes, and
churches and parsons, and tithes and glebes, and manors and courts-leet,
and paupers and poor-houses, all grew up in England, or dropped down
upon it, immediately after Noah's flood! Surely, it is necessary for
every man, having any pretensions to scholarship, to know _how these
things came_; and, the sooner this knowledge is acquired the better;
for, until it be acquired, you read the _history_ of your country in
vain. Indeed, to communicate this knowledge is one main part of the
business of history; but it is a part which no historian, commonly so
called, has, that I know of, ever yet performed, except, in part,
myself, in the History of the PROTESTANT REFORMATION. I had read HUME'S
History of England, and the Continuation by SMOLLETT; but, in 1802, when
I wanted to write on the subject of the _non-residence of the clergy_, I
found, to my great mortification, that I knew nothing of