That one consideration alone vividly illustrates my correspondent’s quaint and pregnant inquiry.  Macaulay was “colour-blind” to science, and the most painful times in his happy life were the hours devoted at Cambridge to mathematical and mechanical formulae.  The genuinely cultured person is the one who thinks nothing of fashion and yields to his natural bent as directed by his unerring instinct.  A certain modern celebrity has told us how his early days were wasted; he was first of all forced to learn Latin and Greek, though his powers fitted him to be a scientific student, and he was next forced to impart his own fatal facility to others.  Thus his fame came to him late, and the most precious years of his life were thrown away.  He was colour-blind to certain departments of literature which have gained a mighty reputation, yet he was obliged by sacred use and wont to act as though he relished things which he really abhorred.  In a minor degree the same process of lavish waste is going on all around us.  The most utterly incompetent persons of both sexes are those who, in obedience to convention, have tried to read everything that was sufficiently bepraised instead of choosing for themselves; in conversation they are objectionable bores, and it would puzzle the best of thinkers to discover their precise use in life.  Take it once and for all for granted that no human creature attains fruitful culture unless he learns his own powers and then resolves to apply them only in the directions where they tell best; without so much of self-knowledge he is no more a complete man than he would be were he deficient in self-reverence and self-control.  He must dare to think for himself, or he will assuredly become a mediocrity, and probably more or less offensive.  All his possible influence on his fellow-creatures must depart unless he thinks for himself; and he cannot think for himself unless he is released from insincerity—­the insincerity imposed by usage.

V.

THE SURFEIT OF BOOKS.

Sir John Lubbock once spoke to a company of working-men, and gave them some advice on the subject of reading.  Sir John is the very type of the modern cultured man; he has managed to learn something of everything.  Finance is of course his strong point; but he stands in the first rank of scientific workers; he is a profound political student; and his knowledge of literature would suffice to make a great reputation for any one who chose to stand before the world as a mere literary specialist alone.  This consummate all-round scholar picked out one hundred books which he thought might be read with profit, and, after reciting his appalling list, he cheerfully remarked that any reader who got through the whole set might consider himself a well-read man.  I most fervently agree with this opinion.  If any student in the known world contrived to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Sir John’s hundred works, he would be equipped at all points;