c, being plagued in
some serious matter by a reference to "public opinion," uttered the
impatient exclamation, "The public is just a great baby!" And the
reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix
themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the
more I see of our national faults and miseries, the more they resolve
themselves into conditions of childish illiterateness, and want of
education in the most ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not
vice, not selfishness, not dullness of brain, which we have to lament;
but an unreachable schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from the
true schoolboy's in its incapacity of being helped, because it
acknowledges no master.

41. There is a curious type of us given in one of the lovely,
neglected works of the last of our great painters. It is a drawing of
Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills,
and folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of
the dead who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, a
group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the words of the
dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter,
reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind
scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal
of an enchanted vault--nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings,
who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call
them by their names. How often, even if we lift the marble entrance
gate, do we but wander among those old kings in their repose, and
finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on their foreheads;
and still they are silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery; because
we know not the incantation of the heart that would wake them;--which,
if they once heard, they would start up to meet us in their power of
long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider us; and, as the fallen
kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, "Art thou also become
weak as we--art thou also become one of us?" so would these kings, with
their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, "Art thou also
become pure and mighty of heart as we? art thou also become one of us?"

42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind--"magnanimous"--to be this, is,
indeed, to be great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed,