It is a curious, but certain fact, that clever young men, at that period of their life when their own likings tend towards Veal, know quite well the difference between Veal and Beef, and are quite able, when necessary, to produce the latter.  The tendency to boyishness of thought and style may be repressed, when you know you are writing for the perusal of readers with whom that will not go down.  A student of twenty, who has in him great talent, no matter how undue a supremacy his imagination may meanwhile have, if he be set to producing an essay in Metaphysics to be read by professors of philosophy, will produce a composition singularly free from any trace of immaturity.  For such a clever youth, though he may have a strong bent towards Veal, has in him an instinctive perception that it is Veal, and a keen sense of what will and will not do for the particular readers he has to please.  Go, you essayist who carried off a host of university honors, and read over now the prize essays you wrote at twenty-one or twenty-two.  I think the thing that will mainly strike you will be, how very mature these compositions are,—­how ingenious, how judicious, how free from extravagance, how quietly and accurately and even felicitously expressed. They are not Veal.  And yet you know that several years after you wrote them you were still writing a great deal which was Veal beyond all question.  But then a clever youth can produce material to any given standard; and you wrote the essays not to suit your own taste, but to suit what you intuitively knew was the taste of the grave and even smoke-dried professors who were to read them and sit in judgment on them.

And though it is very fit and right that the academic standard should be an understood one, and quite different from the popular standard, still it is not enough that a young man should be able to write to a standard against which he in his heart rebels and protests.  It is yet more important that you should get him to approve and adopt a standard which is accurate, if not severe.  It is quite extraordinary what bombastic and immature sermons are preached in their first years in the Church by young clergymen who wrote many academic compositions in a style the most classical.  It seems to be essential that a man of feeling and imagination should be allowed fairly to run himself out.  The course apparently is, that the tree should send out its rank shoots, and then that you should prune them, rather than that by some repressive means you should prevent the rank shoots coming forth at all.  The way to get a high-spirited horse to be content to stay peaceably in its stall is to allow it to have a tearing gallop, and thus get out its superfluous nervous excitement and vital spirit.  Let the boiler blow off its steam.  All repression is dangerous.  And some injudicious folk, instead of encouraging the highly-charged mind and heart to relieve themselves by blowing off in excited verse and extravagant bombast,