Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter into our notion of culture.  The best heads that ever existed, Pericles, Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read, universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters.  Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite opinion.  We look that a great man should be a good reader, or in proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.  Good criticism is very rare, and always precious.  I am always happy to meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare over all other writers.  I like people who like Plato.  Because this love does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them.  He sometimes gets ready very slowly.  You send your child to the schoolmaster; but ’tis the schoolboys who educate him.  You send him to the Latin class; but much of his tuition comes on his way to school, from the shop-windows.  You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any companions but of his choosing.  He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns, fishing-rods, horses, and boats.  Well, the boy is right; and you are not fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic training.  Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk; and—­provided only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain—­these will not serve him less than the books.  He learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals.  The father observes that another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same time.  But the first boy has acquired much more than these poor games along with them.  He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find out, as you did, that, when he rises from the game too long played, he is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself.  Thenceforward it takes place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience.  These minor skills and accomplishments—­for example, dancing—­are tickets of admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them enables the youth to judge intelligently of much on which otherwise he would give a pedantic squint.  Landor said, “I have suffered more from my bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life put together.”  Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery, swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of power, which it is his main business to learn,—­riding specially, of which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, “A good rider on a good horse is as much above himself and others as the world can make him.”  Besides, the gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them, secret freemasonries.