intellectual inducements. Some localities, as we have said, allure to geology, others to botany, others to fondness for landscape and color, others to mechanics and engineering, others to archæology and historical lore. Of those supposed three hundred youths, for example,-even omitting such of them as had been born and brought up abroad, amid scenes, and a vegetation, and costumes, and customs, aye, and under constellations different from our own,-hardly any two of the British-born would be found trading intellectually, so to speak, on the same stock of recollected facts and images. Some might have been born on the sea-coast, and the images most familiar to their memories would be those of rocks, and shingle, and a breaking surf, and brown fishing boats, and gulls dipping in the waves, and heavy clouds gathering for a storm. "I see a wretched isle, that ghost-like stands, Others might have been born and bred in sweet pastoral districts, and the images most kindly to their fancy would be those of still green valleys, and little streams flowing through them, and flocks, led by tinkling sheep-bells, cropping the uplands. Others might be natives of rich English wheat flats; others of barren tracts of hill and torrent. Some might have been born in provincial towns, where the kinds of circumstance peculiar to street-life would preponderate over the purely agricultural or rural; others might be denizens of the great metropolis itself, with its endless extent of shops, warehouses, wharves, churches, and chimneys. In large towns, and, above all, in London, it is needless to say, the fact to be noted is the infinite preponderance of artificial and social circumstance over that of natural landscape, and its infinitely close intertexture. The spontaneous education there, accordingly, is chiefly in what is socially various, curious, highly developed, comic, and characteristic. So strong, however, is the instinct of local attachment, that natives of London do contract an affection for their own parishes and neighborhoods, and an acquaintance with their details and humors, over and above their general regard for those objects which claim the common worship of all. In short, however we turn the matter over, we still find that a large proportion of the most substantial education of every one consists of this unconscious and inevitable education of local circumstance; and that, in fact, much of the original capital on which we all trade intellectually during life is that mass of miscellaneous fact and imagery which our senses have taken in busily and imperceptibly amid the scenes of their first exercise. In the lives of most men who have become eminent, whether in speculative science or in imaginative literature, a tinge of characteristic local color may be traced to the last. Adam Smith meditated his "Wealth of Nations" on the sands of a strip of Fifeshire sea-coast, and drew the instances which suggested the doctrines of that work to his own mind, and by which he expounded them to others, from the petty circumstance of a small fishing and weaving community close by. And, in Shakspeare himself, widely as his imagination ranged, it will be found that, in his descriptions of natural scenery at least, large use is made of the native circumstance of his woody Warwickshire, with its elms, its willows, its crowflowers, daisies, and long-purples. However migratory a man has been, and however thickly, by his migrations, he may have covered the tablets of his memory with successive coatings of imagery, there are times when, as he shuts his eyes, all these seem washed away, and the original photographs of his early years, the hill, the moor, the village spire, the very turn of the road where he met the solitary horseman,-start out fresh as ever. Nay, more, it will be found, (and this is a fact of which Hartley and his laws of the association of ideas have never made any thing to the purpose,) that perpetually, underneath our formal processes of thinking, apparently independent of these processes, and yet somehow playing into them and qualifying them, there is passing through our minds a series of such unbidden reappearing photographs, a flow of such recollected imagery. The School of Travel, Books and Friendship.-Under the head of the education of travel I include, as you may guess, all that comes of migration or change of residence; and my remarks under the former head will have enabled you to see that all this, important and varied as it may seem, consists simply in the extension of the field of observed fact and circumstance. All the celebrated effects of travel, purely as such, in enlarging the mind, breaking down prejudice, and what not, will be found to resolve themselves into this. If I pass now to the education of books, here also I find that the same phrase,-extension of the field of circumstance,-answers to a good deal of what this education accomplishes. Books are travel, so to speak, reversed; they bring supplies of otherwise inaccessible fact and imagery to the feet of the reader. Books, too, have this advantage over travel, that they convey information from remote times as well as from distant places. "If the invention of the ship," says Bacon, "was thought so noble, which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, and consociateth the most remote regions in participation of their fruits, how much more are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass the vast seas of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom, illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other!" In these words, however, there is a suggestion that the education of books consists not alone in the mere extension of the field of the concrete. Books admit us to the accumulated past thought, as well as to the accumulated past fact and incident of the human race; and, though much of that thought, as, for example, what comes to us in poetry,-consists but of a new form of concrete, (the concrete of the fantastic or ideal,) yet a large proportion of it consists of something totally different,-abstract or generalized science. It is in the school of books, more particularly, that that great step in education takes place,—the translation of the concrete into the abstract, the organization of mere fact and imagery into science. It is in conversation with books, more particularly, that one first sees unfolded, one by one, that splendid roll of the so-called sciences,-mathematics, astronomy, mechanics, chemistry, physiology, moral science, and politics, with all their attached sciences and subdivisions,-in which the aggregate thought of the human race on all subjects has been systematized; and that one first sees all knowledge laid out into certain great orders of ideas, any one of which will furnish occupation for a life. This great function, we say, peculiarly belongs to books. And what shall we say of the education of friendship? In what does this consist, and what does it peculiarly achieve? It consists, evidently, in all that can result, in the way of culture, from a closer relation than ordinary with certain selected individuals out of the throng through which one passes in the course of one's life. It is given to every one to form such close sentimental relations with perhaps six or seven individuals in the course of the early period of life; and these relationships,— far easier at this time of life than afterward,-are among the most powerful educating influences to which youth can be subjected. Friendship educates mainly in two ways. In the first place, it educates by disposing and enabling one to make certain individual specimens of human character, and all that is connected with them, objects of more serious and minute study than is bestowed on men at large; and, in the second place, it takes a man out of his own personality, and doubles, triples, or quintuples his natural powers of insight, by compelling him to look at nature and life through the eyes of others, each of whom is, for the time being, another self. This second function of friendship, as an influence of intellectual culture, is by far the most important. There are, of course, various degrees of friendship, and various exercises of it in the same degree. There is friendship with equals, friendship with inferiors, and friendship with superiors. Of all forms of friendship in youth, by far the most effective, as a means of education, is that species of enthusiastic veneration which young men of loyal and well-conditioned minds are apt to contract for men of intellectual eminence within their own circles. The educating effect of such an attachment is prodigious; and happy the youth who forms one. We all know the advice given to young men to "think for themselves; " and there is sense and soundness in that advice; but, if I were to select what I account perhaps the most fortunate thing that can befall a young man during the early period of his life, the most fortunate, too, in the end, for his intellectual independence,it would be his being voluntarily subjected, for a time, to some powerful intellectual tyranny. Book Education.-All our schools, all our colleges, all our libraries, almost every thing, in fact, that we recognize as an educational institution, with the partial exception of recently founded industrial schools and schools of practical art, are but a machinery for forwarding what may be called book education. Here, however, we must make a distinction. This extensive machinery of book education, which is set up amongst us, consists of two portions. One portion has for its object simply the effective teaching of the art of reading, with its usual adjuncts; another has for its object the guidance of the community in the use of that art when it has been acquired. Let us say that the first function is performed by the schools of the country, and that the second is reserved for the colleges of the country. This does not exactly accord with the fact, many of our so-called schools going far beyond the mere teaching of reading and writing, and undertaking part of the duty we have assigned to colleges; and, many of our so-called colleges, alas! having devolved upon them too much of the proper drudgery of schools. Teach a man to read and write perfectly, and the rest, generally speaking, is in his own power. He is no longer a Helot; you have put him in possession of the franchise of books. With this possession, and with such access as he may have to libraries, he may be any thing he pleases and has faculty for. By reading in one direction, he may make himself a mathematician; by reading in another, he may become an adept in political economy; by reading in many he may become a variously cultured man. The accomplishment of perfect and easy reading in one's own language is, after all, the grand distinction between the educated and the non-educated. There are, indeed, degrees and differences among those above this line; but, between those above it and those below it there is a great gulf. Self Education.-Once in possession of the franchise of books, a man, as we have said, has, generally speaking, the rest in his own power. There is no limit to what, with talent and perseverance, he may attain. He may become a reason. classical scholar and a linguist; or, he may grow eminent in speculation and the sciences. We have instances in abundance of such perseverance; and we have a name for those who so distinguish themselves. A person who, availing himself of the spontaneous means of education afforded by the other great schools, which we have enumerated,-the school of family, the school of native local circumstance, the school of travel, and the school of friendship, and having, also, somehow or other, been put in possession of the franchise of books,-conducts the rest of his book education himself, and conducts it so successfully as to become eminent, is called a self-educated man. Society often distinguishes between self-educated men and men who are college-bred,—that is, who have not only been taught to read and write in plain schools, but have had the benefit, for a certain period of their more advanced youth, of that higher pedagogic apparatus which directs and systematizes reading, and, to some extent, supersedes its use by imparting its results in an oral form. Now, the question has been raised, whether this higher pedagogic apparatus,-whether colleges, in fact, --are really of so much use as has been fancied; and, whether it would not be enough if, in these days, pedagogy were to stop at the first stage,—that of thoroughly teaching the mechanical art of reading,-and were then to turn the youth of a community so instructed loose upon the libraries and the miscellaneous teaching of life. This question is gaining ground, and not without apparent Of the men of our own day who are eminent in station, influential in society, and distinguished in art, science, and letters, there are many who have not received what is generally called an academic education. I have only to glance round among those who are at present conspicuous in the various departments of British literature, and I find not a few who never studied in any university. And so, if I look back upon the past. The very king, the unapproachable monarch of our literature was a Warwickshire man, who had little Latin, less Greek, and, perhaps, no mathematics. True, the larger number of those examples of intellectual eminence attained without academic education, would be found to be not properly self-educated men, in the precise sense in which we are now using the term, but, to some extent, college-bred. Over Great Britain, and in England in particular, there are hundreds of public schools and private seminaries which do, though not to the same length as the great universities, perform the functions, as we have defined them, of colleges; and, it is in these that by far the largest proportion of young men, even of well-circumstanced families, are educated. Shakspeare was taught at the grammar-school of his native town, where the boys at this day wear square academic caps, whatever they did in his; so that the proper measure of Shakspeare's education, even scholastically, is that he was carried as far on by the pedagogy of his time as at least ninety-nine per cent. of his contemporaries. Perhaps the number of self-educated prodigies, in the present restricted sense of the term, is not so great as supposed. Still, there are examples of eminent men, self-educated even in this extreme sense of the term; that is, of men who, having received absolutely nothing from formal pedagogy but the plain faculty of reading and writing, if always that, have acquired all their subsequent book education privately for themselves. Educational office of Colleges.-The question simply is whether, when a community has, by one set of educational apparatus called schools, put its young men in possession of that faculty of reading and taste for the same, which are the key to all the knowledge contained in books, it may then leave them to their own private perseverance, according to their inclinations and opportunities; or, whether finer results may not be attained by handing them over, at this point, to another and a higher kind of educational apparatus, called colleges, which will take charge of them a few years longer, assist them in their first inroads upon the vast mass of thought and knowledge accumulated in books, and, in part, supersede and supplement that method of acquiring knowledge by oral instruction. In the first place, then, colleges fulfill this important function, that they guar- 2 antee to society a certain amount of competency in certain professions, in which previously guaranteed competency is necessary. The professions most ostensibly in this predicament are those of law, theology, and medicine; but, there are numberless other professions for the efficiency and respectability of which a certain amount of attested general acquirement, as well as of special professional training, in those who engage in them, is absolutely requisite. This function of insuring society against the intrusion of quacks and ignorant pretenders into important professions, is performed, as well as it admits of being performed, by colleges. Before a man can legally practice medicine, for example, it is required that he shall have attended courses of lectures, not only in what appertains to medical science but also in those general subjects which enter into a liberal education. And so, in various ways, and under various forms of regulation, with other professions. It is not only with a view to professional qualification that persons are the better for being detained, whether they will or not, in places where knowledge is systematically administered. Indolence, love of amusement, preference for the pleasant, the trivial, and the immediate, over what is important, substantial and lasting, are besetting sins even in manhood, but in youth they are especially natural. If a body of young men, fresh from school, were turned loose upon the huge library of printed literature, to find their way into it and through it as they liked, many of them, doubtless, would prove insatiable readers; but, it is questionable whether many of them, of their own accord, would choose the right directions, or would pursue their reading beyond that point where toil and patience began to be requisite. But, what is clearly wanted is a kind of intellectual generalship, if we may so speak, that shall muster youth in front of the masses of literature which have to be pierced through and conquered; drill them; infuse a bold spirit into them; point out to them the proper points of attack, the redoubts where glory is to be won; and, while leaving them as much scope as possible for individual energy and inclination, lead them on, according to a plan, in regular order and column. This duty is undertaken by colleges. There young men are assembled in classes, the business of which has been arranged, however imperfectly, according to an idea of the best manner in which knowledge may be partitioned. They are obliged to be present so many hours a day in the selected classes, and there to hear lectures on various subjects deliberately read to them, whether they will or not; and thus, as well as by the discipline of examinations and the like, certain orders of ideas as well as certain intellectual tendencies are worked into them which they could not otherwise have acquired, and which place them at an advantage all the rest of their lives. That I have not exaggerated this use of colleges I believe observation will prove. I believe it will be found that many of our first speculative and scientific minds have derived the special tendencies which have made their lives famous from impulses communicated in colleges. I think, also, it will be found that strictly self-educated men,-of course I except the higher and more illustrious |