How happened it your father did not make
A gentleman of you?"

_G. P. Morris_.




LESSON XLII

WORDS AND THEIR MEANING

I tell you earnestly, you must get into the habit of looking intensely
at words, and assuring yourself of their meaning, syllable by syllable,
nay, letter by letter. You might read all the books in the British
Museum, if you could live long enough, and remain an utterly
illiterate, uneducated person; but if you read ten pages of a good
book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--you are
forevermore, in some measure, an educated person.

The entire difference between education and non-education (as regards
the merely intellectual part of it) consists in this accuracy. A
well-educated gentleman may not know many languages, may not be able to
speak any but his own, may have read very few books; but whatever word
he pronounces, he pronounces rightly.

An ordinarily clever and sensible seaman will be able to make his way
ashore at most ports; yet he has only to speak a sentence to be known
for an illiterate person; so also the accent, or turn of expression of
a single sentence, will at once mark a scholar.