I would not be domesticated all my days with a person of very superior capacity to my own—­not, if I know myself at all, from any considerations of jealousy or self-comparison, for the occasional communion with such minds has constituted the fortune and felicity of my life—­but the habit of too constant intercourse with spirits above you, instead of raising you, keeps you down.  Too frequent doses of original thinking from others, restrain what lesser portion of that faculty you may possess of your own.  You get entangled in another man’s mind, even as you lose yourself in another man’s grounds.  You are walking with a tall varlet, whose strides out-pace yours to lassitude.  The constant operation of such potent agency would reduce me, I am convinced, to imbecility.  You may derive thoughts from others; your way of thinking, the mould in which your thoughts are cast, must be your own.  Intellect may be imparted, but not each man’s intellectual frame.—­

As little as I should wish to be always thus dragged upwards, as little (or rather still less) is it desirable to be stunted downwards by your associates.  The trumpet does not more stun you by its loudness, than a whisper teases you by its provoking inaudibility.

Why are we never quite at our ease in the presence of a schoolmaster?—­because we are conscious that he is not quite at his ease in ours.  He is awkward, and out of place, in the society of his equals.  He comes like Gulliver from among his little people, and he cannot fit the stature of his understanding to yours.  He cannot meet you on the square.  He wants a point given him, like an indifferent whist-player.  He is so used to teaching, that he wants to be teaching you.  One of these professors, upon my complaining that these little sketches of mine were any thing but methodical, and that I was unable to make them otherwise, kindly offered to instruct me in the method by which young gentlemen in his seminary were taught to compose English themes.—­The jests of a schoolmaster are coarse, or thin.  They do not tell out of school.  He is under the restraint of a formal and didactive hypocrisy in company, as a clergyman is under a moral one.  He can no more let his intellect loose in society, than the other can his inclinations.—­He is forlorn among his co-evals; his juniors cannot be his friends.

“I take blame to myself,” said a sensible man of this profession, writing to a friend respecting a youth who had quitted his school abruptly, “that your nephew was not more attached to me.  But persons in my situation are more to be pitied, than can well be imagined.  We are surrounded by young, and, consequently, ardently affectionate hearts, but we can never hope to share an atom of their affections.  The relation of master and scholar forbids this. How pleasing this must be to you, how I envy your feelings, my friends will sometimes say to me, when they see young men, whom I have educated, return after some