ken naething aboot ploughin’ and sawin’.  And then,” said the sagacious old farmer, with extreme earnestness, “if he comes to think that ye ken naething aboot ploughin’ and sawin’, he’ll think that ye ken naething aboot onything!” Yes, it is natural to us all to think, that, if the machine breaks down at that work in which we are competent to test it, then the machine cannot do any work at all.

If you have a strong current of water, you may turn it into any channel you please, and make it do any work you please.  With equal energy and success it will flow north or south; it will turn a corn-mill, or a threshing-machine, or a grindstone.  Many people live under a vague impression that the human mind is like that.  They think,—­Here is so much ability, so much energy, which may be turned in any direction, and made to do any work; and they are surprised to find that the power, available and great for one kind of work, is worth nothing for another.  A man very clever at one thing is positively weak and stupid at another thing.  A very good judge may be a wretchedly bad joker; and he must go through his career at this disadvantage, that people, finding him silly at the thing they are able to estimate, find it hard to believe that he is not silly at everything.  I know, for myself, that it would not be right that the Premier should request me to look out for a suitable Chancellor.  I am not competent to appreciate the depth of a man’s knowledge of equity; by which I do not mean justice, but chancery law.  But, though quite unable to understand how great a Chancellor Lord Eldon was, I am quite able to estimate how great a poet he was, also how great a wit.  Here is a poem by that eminent person.  Doubtless he regarded it as a wonder of happy versification, as well as instinct with the most convulsing fun.  It is intended to set out in a metrical form the career of a certain judge, who went up as a poor lad from Scotland to England, but did well at the bar, and ultimately found his place upon the bench.  Here is Lord Chancellor Eldon’s humorous poem:—­

  “James Allan Parke
  Came naked stark
    From Scotland: 
  But he got clothes,
  Like other beaux,
    In England!”

Now the fact that Lord Eldon wrote that poem, and valued it highly, would lead some folk to suppose that Lord Eldon was next door to an idiot.  And a good many other things which that Chancellor did, such as his quotations from Scripture in the House of Commons, and his attempts to convince that assemblage (when Attorney-General) that Napoleon I. was the Apocalyptic Beast or the Little Horn, certainly point towards the same conclusion.  But the conclusion, as a general one, would be wrong.  No doubt, Lord Eldon was a wise and sagacious man as judge and statesman, though as wit and poet he was almost an idiot.  So with other great men.  It is easy to remember occasions on which great men have done very foolish things.  There never was a truer hero nor a greater commander