That is exactly what the other young man is.  He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England.  This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy referred to, and which many readers will at once acknowledge.  There are races of scholars among us, in which aptitude for learning, and all these marks of it I have spoken of, are congenital and hereditary.  Their names are always on some college catalogue or other.  They break out every generation or two in some learned labor which calls them up after they seem to have died out.  At last some newer name takes their place, it maybe,—­but you inquire a little and you find it is the blood of the Edwardses or the Chauncys or the Ellerys or some of the old historic scholars, disguised under the altered name of a female descendant.

There probably is not an experienced instructor anywhere in our Northern States who will not recognize at once the truth of this general distinction.  But the reader who has never been a teacher will very probably object, that some of our most illustrious public men have come direct from the homespun-clad class of the people,—­and he may, perhaps, even find a noted scholar or two whose parents were masters of the English alphabet, but of no other.

It is not fair to pit a few chosen families against the great multitude of those who are continually working their way up into the intellectual classes.  The results which are habitually reached by hereditary training are occasionally brought about without it.  There are natural filters as well as artificial ones; and though the great rivers are commonly more or less turbid, if you will look long enough, you may find a spring that sparkles as no water does which drips through your apparatus of sands and sponges.  So there are families which refine themselves into intellectual aptitude without having had much opportunity for intellectual acquirements.  A series of felicitous crosses develops an improved strain of blood, and reaches its maximum perfection at last in the large uncombed youth who goes to college and startles the hereditary class-leaders by striding past them all.  That is Nature’s republicanism; thank God for it, but do not let it make you illogical.  The race of the hereditary scholar has exchanged a certain portion of its animal vigor for its new instincts, and it is hard to lead men without a good deal of animal vigor.  The scholar who comes by Nature’s special grace from an unworn stock of broad-chested sires and deep-bosomed mothers must always overmatch an equal intelligence with a compromised and lowered vitality.  A man’s breathing and digestive apparatus (one is tempted to add muscular) are just as important to him on the floor of the Senate as his thinking organs.  You broke down in your great speech, did you?  Yes, your grandfather had an attack of dyspepsia in ’82, after working too hard on his famous Election Sermon.  All this does not touch the main fact:  our scholars come chiefly from a privileged order, just as our best fruits come from well-known grafts, though now and then a seedling apple, like the Northern Spy, or a seedling pear, like the Seckel, springs from a nameless ancestry and grows to be the pride of all the gardens in the land.