would (so to speak) sit on the safety-valve.  Let the bursting spring flow!  It will run turbid at first; but it will clear itself day by day.  Let a young man write a vast deal:  the more he writes, the sooner will the Veal be done with.  But if a man write very little, the bombast is not blown off; and it may remain till advanced years.  It seems as if a certain quantity of fustian must be blown off before you reach the good material.  I have heard a mercantile man of fifty read a paper he had written on a social subject.  He had written very little save business letters all his life.  And I assure you that his paper was bombastic to a degree that you would have said was barely tolerable in a youth of twenty.  I have seldom listened to Veal so outrageous.  You see he had not worked through it in his youth; and so here it was now.  I have witnessed the like phenomenon in a man who went into the Church at five-and-forty.  I heard him preach one of his earliest sermons, and I have hardly ever heard such boyish rhodomontade.  The imaginations of some men last out in liveliness longer than those of others; and the taste of some men never becomes perfect; and it is no doubt owing to these things that you find some men producing Veal so much later in life than others.  You will find men who are very turgid and magniloquent at five-and-thirty, at forty, at fifty.  But I attribute the phenomenon in no small measure to the fact that such men had not the opportunity of blowing off their steam in youth.  Give a man at four-and-twenty two sermons to write a week, and he will very soon work through his Veal.  It is probably because ladies write comparatively so little, that you find them writing at fifty poetry and prose of the most awfully romantic and sentimental strain.

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We have been thinking, my friend, as you have doubtless observed, almost exclusively of intellectual and aesthetical immaturity, and of its products in composition, spoken or written.  But combining with that immaturity, and going very much to affect the character of that Veal, there is moral immaturity, resulting in views, feelings, and conduct which may be described as Moral Veal.  But, indeed, it is very difficult to distinguish between the different kinds of immaturity, and to say exactly what in the moods and doings of youth proceeds from each.  It is safest to rest in the general proposition, that, even as the calf yields Veal, so does the immature human mind yield immature productions.  It is a stage which you outgrow, and therefore a stage of comparative immaturity, in which you read a vast deal of poetry, and repeat much poetry to yourself when alone, working yourself up thereby to an enthusiastic excitement.  And very like a calf you look, when some one suddenly enters the room in which you are wildly gesticulating or moodily laughing, and thinking yourself poetical, and, indeed, sublime.  The person probably takes you for a fool; and the best,