sixteen years of age. Those who tell or receive these stories
should consider, that nobody can be taught faster than he can learn.
The speed of the horseman must be limited by the power of his horse.
Every man that has ever undertaken to instruct others can tell what
slow advances he has been able to make, and how much patience it
requires to recall vagrant inattention, to stimulate sluggish
indifference, and to rectify absurd misapprehension.

The purpose of Milton, as it seems, was to teach something more
solid than the common literature of schools, by reading those
authors that treat of physical subjects, such as the Georgic, and
astronomical treatises of the ancients. This was a scheme of
improvement which seems to have busied many literary projectors of
that age. Cowley, who had more means than Milton of knowing what
was wanting to the embellishments of life, formed the same plan of
education in his imaginary college.

But the truth is, that the knowledge of external nature, and the
sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the
great or the frequent business of the human mind. Whether we
provide for action or conversation, whether we wish to be useful or
pleasing, the first requisite is the religious and moral knowledge
of right and wrong; the next is an acquaintance with the history of
mankind, and with those examples which may be said to embody truth,
and prove by events the reasonableness of opinions. Prudence and
justice are virtues and excellences of all times and of all places;
we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by
chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our
speculations upon matter are voluntary, and at leisure.
Physiological learning is of such rare emergence, that one may know