hool
honours with all his wits about him, most boys pay so dear for their
medals that they never afterwards have a shot in their locker, and begin
the world bankrupt. And the same holds true during all the time a lad is
educating himself, or suffering others to educate him. It must have been
a very foolish old gentleman who addressed Johnson at Oxford in these
words: "Young man, ply your book diligently now, and acquire a stock of
knowledge; for when years come upon you, you will find that poring upon
books will be but an irksome task." The old gentleman seems to have been
unaware that many other things besides reading grow irksome, and not a
few become impossible, by the time a man has to use spectacles and
cannot walk without a stick. Books are good enough in their own way, but
they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life. It seems a pity to
sit, like the Lady of Shalott, peering into a mirror, with your back
turned on all the bustle and glamour of reality. And if a man reads very
hard, as the old anecdote reminds us, he will have little time for
thought.

If you look back on your own education, I am sure it will not be the
full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that you regret; you would
rather cancel some lack-lustre periods between sleep and waking in the
class. For my own part, I have attended a good many lectures in my time.
I still remember that the spinning of a top is a case of Kinetic
Stability. I still remember that Emphyteusis is not a disease, nor
Stillicide a crime. But though I would not willingly part with such
scraps of science, I do not set the same store by them as by certain
other odds and ends that I came by in the open street while I was
playing truant. This is not the moment to dilate on that mighty place of
education, which was the favourite school of Dickens and of Balzac, and
turns out yearly many inglorious masters in the Science of the Aspects
of Life. Suffice it to say this: if a lad does not learn in the streets,
it is because he has no faculty of learning. Nor is the truant always in
the streets, for, if he prefers, he may go out by the gardened suburbs
into the country. He may pitch on some tuft of lilacs over a burn, and
smoke innumerable pipes to the tune of the water on the stones. A bird
will sing in the thicket, and there he may fall into a vein of kindly
thought, and see things in a new perspective. Why, if this be not
education, what is? We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman