Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 11, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume III

AN APOLOGY FOR IDLERS
man has written a book of travels in Montenegro
is no reason why he 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 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 gentle-
man 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 wiU not be the full, vivid, instructive hours
of truantry that you regret ; you would rather cancel
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