calibre!  It would be a grand thing, if somewhere in a very conspicuous position—­say on the site of the National Gallery at Charing Cross—­there were a pillar erected, graduated by some new Fahrenheit, on which we could measure the height of a man’s mind.  How delightful it would be to drag up some pompous pretender who passes off at once upon himself and others as a profound and able man, and make him measure his height upon that pillar, and understand beyond all cavil what a pigmy he is!  And how pleasant, too, it would be to bring up some man of unacknowledged genius, and make the world see the reach of his intellectual stature!  The mass of educated people, even, are so incapable of forming any estimate of a man’s ability, that it would be a blessing, if men could be sent out into the world with the stamp upon them, telling what are their weight and value, plain for every one to see.  But of course there are many ways in which a book, sermon, or essay may be bad without being Vealy.  It may be dull, stupid, illogical, and the like, and yet have nothing of boyishness about it.  It may be insufferably bad, yet quite mature.  Beef may be bad, and yet undoubtedly Beef.  And the question now is, not so much whether there be a standard of what is in a literary sense good or bad, as whether there be a standard of what is Veal and what is Beef.  And there is a great difficulty here.  Is a thing to be regarded as mature, when it suits your present taste, when it is approved by your present deliberate judgment?  For your taste is always changing:  your standard is not the same for three successive years of your early youth.  The Veal you now despise you thought Beef when you wrote it.  And so, too, with the productions of other men.  You cannot read now without amazement the books which used to enchant you as a child.  I remember when I used to read Hervey’s “Meditations” with great delight.  That was when I was about five years old.  A year or two later I greatly affected Macpherson’s translation of Ossian.  It is not so very long since I felt the liveliest interest in Tupper’s “Proverbial Philosophy.”  Let me confess that I retain a kindly feeling towards it yet; and that I am glad to see that some hundreds of thousands of readers appear to be still in the stage out of which I passed some years since.  Yes, as you grow older, your taste changes:  it becomes more fastidious; and especially you come to have always less toleration for sentimental feeling and for flights of fancy.  And besides this gradual and constant progression, which holds on uniformly year after year, there are changes in mood and taste sometimes from day to day and from hour to hour.  The man who did a very silly thing thought it was a wise thing when he did it.  He sees the matter differently in a little while.  On the evening after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of Wellington wrote a certain letter.  History does not record its matter or style.  But history does record, that some years