thing may be regarded as mature when it is deliberately and dispassionately approved by an educated man of good ability and above thirty years of age.  No doubt a man of fifty may hold that fifty is the age of sound taste and sense; and a youth of twenty-three may maintain that he is as good a judge of human doings now as he will ever be.  I do not claim to have proposed an infallible standard.  I give you my present belief, being well aware that it is very likely to alter.

It is not desirable that one’s taste should become too fastidious, or that natural feeling should be refined away.  And a cynical young man is bad, but a cynical old one is a great deal worse.  The cynical young man is probably shamming; he is a humbug, not a cynic.  But the old man probably is a cynic, as heartless as he seems.  And without thinking of cynicism, real or affected, let us remember, that, though the taste ought to be refined, and daily refining, it ought not to be refined beyond being practically serviceable.  Let things be good, but not too good to be workable.  It is expedient that a cart for conveying coals should be of neat and decent appearance.  Let the shafts be symmetrical, the boards well-planed, the whole strong, yet not clumsy; and over the whole let the painter’s skill induce a hue rosy as beauty’s cheek, or dark-blue as her eye.  All that is well; and while the cart will carry its coals satisfactorily, it will stand a good deal of rough usage, and it will please the eye of the rustic who sits in it on an empty sack and whistles as it moves along.  But it would be highly inexpedient to make that cart of walnut of the finest grain and marking, and to have it French-polished.  It would be too fine to be of use; and its possessor would fear to scratch it, and would preserve it as a show, seeking some plainer vehicle to carry his coals.  In like manner, do not refine too much either the products of the mind, or the sensibilities of the taste which is to appreciate them.  I know an amiable professor very different from Dr. Dryasdust.  He was a country clergyman,—­a very interesting plain preacher.  But when he got his chair, he had to preach a good deal in the college chapel; and by way of accommodating his discourses to an academic audience, he rewrote them carefully, rubbed off all the salient points, cooled down whatever warmth was in them to frigid accuracy, toned down everything striking.  The result was that his sermons became eminently classical and elegant; only they became impossible to attend to, and impossible to remember; and when you heard the good man preach, you sighed for the rough and striking heartiness of former days.  And we have all heard of such a thing as taste refined to that painful sensitiveness, that it became a source of torment,—­that is, unfitted for common enjoyments and even for common duties.  There was once a great man, let us say at Melipotamus, who never went to church.  A clergyman once, in speaking