would have rolled off from your pen, when you sat down and tried to write your best!  If we are to believe Robert Burns, some people have been made more of than was originally intended.  A certain poem records how that which, in his homely phrase, he calls “stuff to mak’ a swine,” was ultimately converted into a very poor specimen of a human being.  The poet had no irreverent intention, I dare say; but I am not about to go into the field of speculation which is opened up by his words.  I know, indeed, that, in the hands of the Creator, each of us might have been made a different man.  The pounds of material which were fashioned into Shakspeare might have made a bumpkin with little thought beyond pigs and turnips, or, by some slight difference beyond man’s skill to trace, might have made an idiot.  A little infusion of energy into the mental constitution might have made the mild, pensive day-dreamer who is wandering listlessly by the river-side, sometimes chancing upon noble thoughts, which he does not carry out into action, and does not even write down on paper, into an active worker, with Arnold’s keen look, who would have carved out a great career for himself, and exercised a real influence over the views and conduct of numbers of other men.  A very little alteration in feature might have made a plain face into a beautiful one; and some slight change in the position or the contractibility of certain of the muscles might have made the most awkward of manners and gaits into the most dignified and graceful.  All that we all understand.  But my present subject is the making which is in circumstances after our natural disposition is fixed,—­the training, coming from a hundred quarters, which forms the material supplied by Nature into the character which each of us actually bears.  And setting apart the case of great genius, whose bent towards the thing in which it will excel is so strong that it will find its own field by inevitable selection, and whose strength is such that no unfavorable circumstances can hold it down, almost any ordinary human being may be formed into almost any development.  I know a huge massive beam of rough iron, which supports a great weight.  Whenever I pass it, I cannot help giving it a pat with my hand, and saying to it, “You might have been hair-springs for watches.”  I know an odd-looking little man attached to a certain railway-station, whose business it is, when a train comes in, to go round it with a large box of a yellow concoction and supply grease to the wheels.  I have often looked out of the carriage-window at that odd little man and thought to myself, “Now you might have been a chief-justice.”  And, indeed, I can say from personal observation that the stuff ultimately converted into cabinet-ministers does not at an early stage at all appreciably differ from that which never becomes more than country-parsons.  There is a great gulf between the human being who gratefully receives a shilling, and touches his cap as he receives