and sensible man of middle age knows thoroughly well the answer to the question, Who was the greatest fool that he himself ever knew?  And after all, it is your diary, especially if you were wont to introduce into it poetical remarks and moral reflections, that will mainly help you to the humiliating conclusion.  Other things, some of which I have already named, will point in the same direction.  Look at the prize essays you wrote when you were a boy at school; look even at your earlier prize essays written at college (though of these last I have something to say hereafter); look at the letters you wrote home when away at school or even at college, especially if you were a clever boy, trying to write in a graphic and witty fashion; and if you have reached sense at last, (which some, it may be remarked, never do,) I think you will blush even through the unblushing front of manhood, and think what a terrific, unutterable, conceited, intolerable blockhead you were.  It is not till people attain somewhat mature years that they can rightly understand the wonderful forbearance their parents must have shown in listening patiently to the frightful nonsense they talked and wrote.  I have already spoken of sermons.  If you go early into the Church, say at twenty-three or twenty-four, and write sermons regularly and diligently, you know what landmarks they will be of your mental progress.  The first runnings of the stream are turbid, but it clears itself into sense and taste month by month and year by year.  You wrote many sermons in your first year or two; you preached them with entire confidence in them, and they did really keep up the attention of the congregation in a remarkable way.  You accumulate in a box a store of that valuable literature and theology, and when by-and-by you go to another parish, you have a comfortable feeling that you have a capital stock to go on with.  You think that any Monday morning, when you have the prospect of a very busy week, or when you feel very weary, you may resolve that you shall write no sermon that week, but just go and draw forth one from the box.  I have already said what you will probably find, even if you draw forth a discourse which cost much labor.  You cannot use it as it stands.  Possibly it may be structural and essential Veal:  the whole framework of thought may be immature.  Possibly it may be Veal only in style; and by cutting out a turgid sentence here and there, and, above all, by cutting out all the passages which you thought particularly eloquent, the discourse may do yet.  But even then you cannot give it with much confidence.  Your mind can yield something better than that now.  I imagine how a fine old orange-tree, that bears oranges with the thinnest possible skin and with no pips, juicy and rich, might feel that it has outgrown the fruit of its first years, when the skin was half an inch thick, the pips innumerable, and the eatable portion small and poor.  It is with a feeling such as that that you read over your early sermon.  Still, mingling with the sense of shame, there is a certain satisfaction.  You have not been standing still; you have been getting on.  And we always like to think that.