him the faults to be avoided.  Before his boyhood was over, he read his Byron with minute attention, and once more he was introduced to a master of expression.  Byron is a little out of fashion now, alas! and yet what a thinker the man was!  His lightning eye pierced to the very heart of things, and his intense grip on the facts of life makes his style seem alive.  No wonder that the young Ruskin learned to think daringly under such a master!  Now many people fancy that our great critic must be a man of universal knowledge.  What do they think of this narrow early training?  The use and purport of it all are plain enough to us, for we see that the gentle student’s intellect was kept clear of lumber; his thoughts were not battened down under mountains of other men’s, and, when he wanted to fix an idea, he was not obliged to grope for it in a rubbish heap of second-hand notions.  Of course he read many other authors by slow degrees; but, until his manhood came, his range was restricted.  The flawless perfection of his work is due mainly to his mother’s sedulous insistence on perfection within strict bounds.  Again, and keeping still to authors, Charles Dickens knew very little about books.  His keen business-like intellect perceived that the study of life and of the world’s forces is worth more than the study of letters, and he also kept himself clear of scholarly lumber.  He read Fielding, Smollett, Gibbon, and, in his later life, he was passionately fond of Tennyson’s poetry; but his greatest charm as a writer and his success as a social reformer were both gained through his simple power of looking at things for himself without interposing the dimness that falls like a darkening shadow on a mind that is crammed with the conceptions of other folk.  Look at the practical men!  Nasmyth scarcely read at all; Napoleon always spoke of literary persons as “ideologists;” Stephenson was nineteen before he mastered his Bible; Mahomet was totally uneducated; Gordon was content with the Bible, “Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Thomas a Kempis; Hugh Miller became an admirable editor without having read twoscore books in his lifetime.  Go right through the names on the roll of history, and it will be found that in all walks of life the men who most influenced their generation despised superfluous knowledge.  They learned thoroughly all that they thought it necessary to learn within a very limited compass; they learned, above all, to think; and they then were ready to speak or act without reference to any authority save their own intellect.  If we turn to the great book-men, we find mostly a deplorable record of failure and futility.  Their lives were passed in making useless comments on the works of others.  Look at the one hundred and eighty volumes of the huge catalogue in which are inscribed the names of Shakspere’s commentators.  Most of these poor laborious creatures were learned in the extreme, and yet their work is humiliating to read, so gross is its pettiness, so foolish is its wire-drawn scholarship.