tendencies are more easily perceived in others than in
ourselves--especially when ambition, interest, or vanity is involved
in the consideration; and on this account the difficulty, perhaps,
might not be insurmountable, if the charge of it could be committed to
a really judicious educator. But to say anything further on the
subject would be out of place at present; and, accordingly, we return
to what is more immediately before us.

'The instinct of flight,' continues our author, 'is combined with the
instinct of labour. Genius lights its own fire; but it is constantly
collecting materials to keep alive the flame. When a new publication
was suggested to Addison, after the completion of the _Guardian_, he
answered: "I must now take some time, _pour me délasser_, and lay in
fuel for a future work." The strongest blaze soon goes out when a man
always blows and never feeds it. Johnson declined an introduction to a
popular author with the remark, that he did not desire to converse
with a person who had written more than he had read.

'It is interesting to follow great authors or painters in their
careful training and accomplishing of the mind. The long morning of
life is spent in making the weapons and the armour which manhood and
age are to polish and prove. Usher, when nearly twenty years old,
formed the daring resolution of reading all the Greek and Latin
fathers, and with the dawn of his thirty-ninth year he completed the
task. Hammond, at Oxford, gave thirteen hours of the day to philosophy
and classical literature, wrote commentaries on all, and compiled
indexes for his own use.

'With these calls to industry in our ears, we are not to be deaf to
the deep saying of Lord Brooke, the friend of Sidney, that some men