of this other magnitude above a given magnitude has a given ratio to the first magnitude; and if the excess of a magnitude above a given magnitude has a given ratio to another magnitude, this other magnitude together with a given ratio to the first magnitude,”—­I own to a slight confusion of my intellectual faculties, and a perfect contempt for John Buteo and Ptolemy.  Then, there is Butler’s “Analogy”; an excellent work it is, I have been told,—­a charming work to master,—­quite a bulwark of our faith; but as, in my growing days, it was explained to me, or rather was not explained, before breakfast, by a truculent Doctor of Divinity, whom I knew to be ugly and felt to be great, of course, the good Bishop and I are not upon the best of terms.

I suppose that for drilling, training, and pipe-claying the human mind all these things are necessary.  I suppose, that, in our callow days, it is proper that we should be birched and wear fetters upon our little, bandy, sausage-like legs.  But let me, now that I have come to man’s estate, flout my old pedagogues, and, playing truant at my will, dawdle or labor, walk, skip, or run, go to my middle in quagmires, or climb to the hill-tops, take liberties with the venerable, snub the respectable, and keep the company of the disreputable,—­dismiss the Archbishop without reading his homily,—­pass by a folio in twenty grenadier volumes to greet a little black-coated, yellow-faced duodecimo,—­speak to the forlorn and forsaken, who have been doing dusty penance upon cloistered shelves in silent alcoves for a century, with none so poor to do them reverence,—­read here one little catch which came from lips long ago as silent as the clod which they are kissing, and there some forgotten fragment of history, too insignificant to make its way into the world’s magnificent chronologies,—­snapping up unconsidered trifles of anecdote,—­tasting some long-interred bon-mot and relishing some disentombed scandal,—­pausing over the symphonic prose of Milton, only to run, the next moment, to the Silenian ribaldry of Tom Brown the younger,—­and so keeping up a Saturnalia, in which goat-footed sylvans mix with the maidens of Diana, and the party-colored jester shakes his truncheon in the face of Plato.  Only in this wild and promiscuous license can we taste the genuine joys of true perusal.

I suppose, my dear friend, that, when you were younger and foolisher than you now are, you were wont, after the reading of some dismal work upon diet and health, to take long, constitutional walks.  You “toddled”—­pardon the vulgar word!—­so many miles out and so many miles in, at just such a pace, in just the prescribed time, during hours fixed as the Fates; and you wondered, when you came home to your Graham bread and cold water, that you did not bring an appetite with you.  You had performed incredible pedestrian achievements, and were not hungry, but simply weary.  It is of small use to try to be good with malice prepense.