A year and a half in learning to write his own name;
Seven long years and more τυπιω-ing it, at Greek and Latin;
Four years at his _probations_ and his _negations_—the fine statue
still lying in the middle of the marble block,—and nothing done, but
his tools sharpened to hew it out!—’Tis a piteous delay!—Was not the
great _Julius Scaliger_ within an ace of never getting his tools
sharpened at all?——Forty-four years old was he before he could manage
his Greek;—and _Peter Damianus_, lord bishop of _Ostia_, as all the
world knows, could not so much as read, when he was of man’s
estate.—And _Baldus_ himself, as eminent as he turned out after,
entered upon the law so late in life, that every body imagined he
intended to be an advocate in the other world: no wonder, when
_Eudamidas_, the son of _Archidamas_, heard _Xenocrates_ at
seventy-five disputing about _wisdom_, that he asked gravely,—_If the
old man be yet disputing and enquiring concerning wisdom,—what time
will he have to make use of it?_
_Yorick_ listened to my father with great attention; there was a
seasoning of wisdom unaccountably mixed up with his strangest whims,
and he had sometimes such illuminations in the darkest of his eclipses,
as almost atoned for them:—be wary, Sir, when you imitate him.
I am convinced, _Yorick_, continued my father, half reading and half
discoursing, that there is a North-west passage to the intellectual
world; and that the soul of man has shorter ways of going to work, in
furnishing itself with knowledge and instruction, than we generally
take with it.——But, alack! all fields have not a river or a spring
running besides them;—every child, _Yorick_, has not a parent to point
it out.
——The whole entirely depends, added my father, in a low voice, upon the
_auxiliary verbs_, Mr. _Yorick._
Had _Yorick_ trod upon _Virgil_ ’s snake, he could not have looked more
surprised.—I am surprised too, cried my father, observing it,—and I
reckon it as one of the greatest calamities which ever befel the
republic of letters, That those who have been entrusted with the
education of our children, and whose business it was to open their
minds, and stock them early with ideas, in order to set the imagination
loose upon them, have made so little use of the auxiliary verbs in
doing it, as they have done——So that, except _Raymond Lullius_, and the
elder _Pelegrini_, the last of which arrived to such perfection in the
use of ’em, with his topics, that, in a few lessons, he could teach a
young gentleman to discourse with plausibility upon any subject, _pro_
and _con_, and to say and write all that could be spoken or written
concerning it, without blotting a word, to the admiration of all who
beheld him.—I should be glad, said _Yorick_, interrupting my father, to
be made to comprehend this matter. You shall, said my father.
The highest stretch of improvement a single word is capable of, is a
high metaphor,——for which, in my opinion, the idea is generally the
worse, and not the better;——but be that as it may,—when the mind has
done that with it—there is an end,—the mind and the idea are at
rest,—until a second idea enters;—and so on.
Now the use of the _Auxiliaries_ is, at once to set the soul a-going by
herself upon the materials as they are brought her; and by the
versability of this great engine, round which they are twisted, to open
new tracts of enquiry, and make every idea engender millions.