and to inane, drivelling, doting books, the bastard progeny of vanity
and ignorance,--books over which one dawdles in an amusing dream and
pleasant spasm of amazement, and which teach us wisdom as tipsy Helots
taught the Spartan boys sobriety. Montaigne "never travelled without
books, either in peace or war"; and as I found them pleasant in happier
days, so I find them pleasant now. Of course, much of this omnivorous
reading is from habit, and, _invitâ Minervâ_, cannot be dignified by
the name of study,--that stiff, steady, persistent, uncompromising
application of the mind, by virtue of which alone the _Pons Asinorum_
can be crossed, and the Forty-Seventh Problem of Euclid--which I
entirely disbelieve--mastered.

I own to a prodigious respect, entertained since my Sophomore year at
the University, for those collegiate youth whose terribly hard study of
Bourdon and Legendre seems to have such a mollifying effect upon their
heads,--but, as the tradesmen say, that thing is "not in my line." I
would rather have a bundle of bad verses which have been consigned to
the pastry-cook. I suppose--for I have been told so upon good authority
--that, if "equals be taken from equals, the remainders are equal." I do
not see why they should not be, and, as a citizen of the United States
of America, the axiom seems to me to be entitled to respect. When a
youthful person, with a piece of chalk in his hand, before commencing
his artistic and scientific achievements upon the black-board, says:
"Let it be granted that a straight line may be drawn from any one point
to any other point," I invariably answer, "Of course,--by all manner of
means,"--although you know, dear Don, that, if I should put him upon
mathematical proof of the postulate, I might bother him hugely. But
when we come to the Fourteenth Proposition of Euclid's Data,--when I am
required to admit, that, "if a magnitude together with a given magnitude
has a given ratio to another magnitude, the excess of this other