How large and varied is the educational bill of fare set before every young gentleman in Great Britain; and to judge by the mental stamina it affords him in most cases, what a waste of good food it is!  The dishes are so numerous and so quickly changed, that he has no time to decide on which he likes best.  Like an industrious flea, rather than a bee, he hops from flower to flower in the educational garden, without one penny-worth of honey to show for it.  And then—­though I feel how degrading it is to allude to so vulgar a matter—­how high is the price of admission to the feast in question!  Its purveyors do not pretend to have filled his stomach, but only to have put him in the way of filling it for himself, whereas, unhappily, Paterfamilias discovers that that is the very thing that they have not done.  His young Hopeful at twenty-one is almost as unable to run alone as when he first entered the nursery.  To discourse airily upon the beauties of classical education, and on the social advantages of acquiring ‘the tone’ at a public school at whatever cost, is an agreeable exercise of the intelligence; but such arguments have been taken too seriously, and the result is that our young gentlemen are incapable of gaining their own living.  It is not only that ‘all the gates are thronged with suitors, all the markets overflow,’ but even when the candidates are so fortunate as to attain admittance, they are still a burden upon their fathers for years, from having had no especial preparation for the work they have to do.  Folks who can afford to spend L250 a year on their sons at Eton or Harrow, and to add another fifty or two for their support at the universities, do not feel this; but those who have done it without affording it—­i.e., by cutting and contriving, if not by pinching and saving—­feel their position very bitterly.  There are hundreds of clever young men who are now living at home and doing nothing—­or work that pays nothing, and even costs something for doing it—­who might be earning very tolerable incomes by their pen if they only knew how, and had not wasted their young wits on Greek plays and Latin verses; nor do I find that the attractions of such objects of study are permanent, or afford the least solace to these young gentlemen in their enforced leisure.

The idea of bringing young people up to Literature is doubtless calculated to raise the eyebrows almost as much as the suggestion of bringing them up to the Stage.  The notions of Paterfamilias in this respect are very much what they were fifty years ago.  ’What! put my boy in Grub Street?  I would rather see him in his coffin.’  In his mind’s eye he beholds Savage on his bunk and Chatterton on his deathbed.  He does not know that there are many hundreds of persons of both sexes who have found out this vocation for themselves, and are diligently pursuing it—­under circumstances of quite unnecessary difficulty—­to their material advantage.  He is unaware that the conditions of literature in England have been as completely changed within a single generation as those of locomotion.