Lord Bacon, in his forty-third essay, thus sums up the qualities of youth:  “Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business.  For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things abuseth them.  The errors of young men are the ruin of business;

BUT THE ERRORS OF AGED MEN

amount to but this, that more might have been done, or sooner.  Young men in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end without consideration of the means and degrees, pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and, that which doubleth all errors, will not acknowledge or retract them—­like an unready horse, they will neither stop nor turn.”

THE HARD-PAN SERIES.

Now with this wise parallel of youth and age before me, with the importance which I attach to this period of life as the precise moment at which the final cast of the clay of life is set, and with the belief in Goethe’s statement that the destiny of any nation, at any given time, depends on the opinions of its young men under twenty-five years of age, I beg to call the especial attention of the young to a Hard-Pan Series of ten chapters which follow, devoted largely to just this forming-period of life, when the mould is ready and the governing characteristics are fast pouring in.  I beg parents and preceptors, if they approve my efforts, to lend their aid in attracting toward these admonitions such consideration as their merit shall warrant, and I have so endeavored to dispose the bitterness of practical advice as to both somewhat cover its presence and gratify a youthful and adventurous literary taste.

PRUDENCE IN SPEECH.

               Give thy thoughts no tongue,
     Nor any unproportioned thought his act. 
     Be thou familiar but by no means vulgar;

     Do not dull thy palm with entertainment
     Of each new hatched unfledged comrade

     Give every man thine ear but few thy voice;
     Take each man’s counsel but reserve thy judgment. 
     —­Shakspeare.

You live.  To live is costly.  Who will pay for it?  Your soul cries out “I.”  But how will you get the money?  “Oh!  I’ll get it!”—­that is the confident cry of youth.  The confidence oozes out as life lengthens—­and yet there are certain lines of action which, if followed, in this bright land of liberty, are sure to result in the accumulation of something for our old age.

THE MYSTERIOUS JUNIUS