I heard lately from young Mr. Watt a noble instance of magnanimity in an eminent French chemist.  He had made a discovery, which he was informed would, if he took out a patent, realise a large fortune.  ‘No,’ said he, ’I do not live to amass money, but to discover Truth; and as long as she attends me in my investigations so long will I serve her and her only.’

Sir ——­ I know from my own experience was ruined by prosperity.  The age of Leo X. would have shone with greater brilliance if it had had more clouds to struggle with.  The age of Louis XIV. was formed by the Port Royal amid the storms and thunders of the League.  Racine lived in a court till it became necessary to his existence, as his miserable death proved.  Those petty courts of Germany have been injurious to its literature.  They who move in them are too prone to imagine themselves to be the whole world, and compared with the whole world they are nothing more than these little specks in the texture of this hearth-rug.

As I was riding Dora’s pony from Rydal to Cambridge, I got off, as I occasionally did, to walk.  I fell in with a sweet-looking peasant girl of nine or ten years old.  She had been to carry her father’s dinner, who was working in the fields, and she was wheeling a little wheelbarrow, in which she collected manure from the roads for her garden at home.  After some talk I gave her a penny, for which she thanked me in the sweetest way imaginable.  I wish I had asked her whether she could read, and whether she went to school.  But I could not help being struck with the happy arrangement which Nature has made for the education of the heart, an arrangement which it seems the object of the present age to counteract instead of to cherish and confirm.  I imagined the happy delight of the father in seeing his child at a distance, and watching her as she approached to perform her errand of love.  I imagined the joy of the mother in seeing her return.  I am strongly of opinion (an opinion you, perhaps, have seen expressed by me in a letter to Mr. Rose[263]) that this is the discipline which is more calculated by a thousand degrees to make a virtuous and happy nation than the all-engrossing, estranging, eleemosynary institutions for education, which perhaps communicate more knowledge.  In these institutions what the pupils gain in knowledge they often lose in wisdom.  This is a distinction which must never be lost sight of.

[263] See vol. i. pp. 340-8.  G.

Education should never be wholly eleemosynary.  But must the parent suffer privations for the sake of the child?  Yes; for these privations endear the child to the parent, and the parent to the child; and whatever education the parent may thus gain or lose for his child, he has thus gained the noblest result of the most liberal education for himself—­the habit of self-denial.

Next to your principles, and affections, and health, value your time.[264]