ongue, till the eye closes on
vacancy, and the book drops from the feeble hand! I would rather be a
wood-cutter, or the meanest hind, that all day 'sweats in the eye of
Phoebus, and at night sleeps in Elysium,' than wear out my life so,
'twixt dreaming and awake.' The learned author differs from the learned
student in this, that the one transcribes what the other reads. The
learned are mere literary drudges. If you set them upon original
composition, their heads turn, they don't know where they are. The
indefatigable readers of books are like the everlasting copiers of
pictures, who, when they attempt to do anything of their own, find
they want an eye quick enough, a hand steady enough, and colours bright
enough, to trace the living forms of nature.

Any one who has passed through the regular gradations of a classical
education, and is not made a fool by it, may consider himself as having
had a very narrow escape. It is an old remark, that boys who shine at
school do not make the greatest figure when they grow up and come out
into the world. The things, in fact, which a boy is set to learn at
school, and on which his success depends, are things which do not
require the exercise either of the highest or the most useful faculties
of the mind. Memory (and that of the lowest kind) is the chief faculty
called into play in conning over and repeating lessons by rote in
grammar, in languages, in geography, arithmetic, etc., so that he who
has the most of this technical memory, with the least turn for other
things, which have a stronger and more natural claim upon his childish
attention, will make the most forward school-boy. The jargon containing
the definitions of the parts of speech, the rules for casting up an
account, or the inflections of a Greek verb, can have no attraction to
the tyro of ten years old, except as they are imposed as a task upon
him by others, or from his feeling the want of sufficient relish of
amusement in other things. A lad with a sickly constitution and no very
active mind, who can just retain what is pointed out to him, and has
neither sagacity to distinguish nor spirit to enjoy for himself, will
generally be at the head of his form. An idler at school, on the other
hand, is one who has high health and spirits, who has the free use of
his limbs, with all his wits about him, who feels the circulation of his
blood and the motion of his heart, who is ready to laugh and cry in a
breath, and who had rathe