nd; and little does he make
his own in a true sense of the word, living rather upon his neighbours all
around him. He has opinions, religious, political, and literary, and, for
a boy, is very positive in them and sure about them; but he gets them from
his schoolfellows, or his masters, or his parents, as the case may be.
Such as he is in his other relations, such also is he in his school
exercises; his mind is observant, sharp, ready, retentive; he is almost
passive in the acquisition of knowledge. I say this in no disparagement of
the idea of a clever boy. Geography, chronology, history, language,
natural history, he heaps up the matter of these studies as treasures for
a future day. It is the seven years of plenty with him: he gathers in by
handfuls, like the Egyptians, without counting; and though, as time goes
on, there is exercise for his argumentative powers in the Elements of
Mathematics, and for his taste in the Poets and Orators, still, while at
school, or at least, till quite the last years of his time, he acquires,
and little more; and when he is leaving for the University, he is mainly
the creature of foreign influences and circumstances, and made up of
accidents, homogeneous or not, as the case may be. Moreover, the moral
habits, which are a boy's praise, encourage and assist this result; that
is, diligence, assiduity, regularity, despatch, persevering application;
for these are the direct conditions of acquisition, and naturally lead to
it. Acquirements, again, are emphatically producible, and at a moment;
they are a something to show, both for master and scholar; an audience,
even though ignorant themselves of the subjects of an examination, can
comprehend when questions are answered and when they are not. Here again
is a reason why mental culture is in the minds of men identified with the
acquisition of knowledge.

The same notion possesses the public mind, when it passes on from the
thought of a school to that of a University: and with the best of reasons
so far as this, that there is no true culture without acquirements, and
that philosophy presupposes knowledge. It requires a great deal of
reading, or a wide range of information, to warrant us in putting forth
our opinions on any serious subject; and without such learning the most
original mind may be able indeed to dazzle, to amuse, to refute, to
perplex, but not to come to any useful result or any trustworthy
conclusion. There are indeed persons who