It maybe said,
"Would not your hints tend to make people frivolous?" Certainly not,
if my hints are wisely used. Let it be observed that I merely wish to
do away with hypocritical conventions whereby timid men like my
correspondent are subjected to extreme misery and a vast waste of
intellectual power is inflicted on the world. Suppose that some
ridiculous guardian had taken up the modern notions about scientific
culture, and had forced Macaulay to read science alone; should we not
have lost the Essays and the History?
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.
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