⸺Five years with a bib under his chin;
Four years in travelling from Christ-cross-row to Malachi ;
A year and a half in learning to write his own name;
Seven long years and more τυπτω -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 everybody 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 Northwest 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