Non-Fiction > Uncollected essays > Volumes 33-38, 1876-1878 - Cornhill magazine > Volume 36

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLEES. 81
a book of travels in Montenegro, is no reason wliy lie should never have
been to Richmond.
It is surely beyond a doubt that people should be a good deal idle in
youth. For though here and there a Lord Macaulay may escape from
school 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 Avorld 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 yom- 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 gen-
tleman seems to have been unaware that many other things besides read-
ing 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 siu'e it will not be the full, vivid, instructive hours of truantry that
you regret ; you would rather cancel some lack-lustre pei'iods 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 Emphytepsis 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 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 wUl
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 1 We may conceive Mr. Worldly Wiseman accosting such an one,
and the conversation that should thereupon ensue : —
" How now, young fellow, what dost thou here t "
" Truly, sir, I take mine ease."
" Is not this the hour of the class 1 and should'st thou not be plying
thy Book with diligence, to the end thou mayest obtain knowledge "
" Nay, but thus also I follow after Learning, by your leave."
VOL. XXXVI. — NO. 211. 5.