Learning useful to Noblemen.
Excellent wisdom, which is the means of advancing grave and politic counsellors, is but a single cause of preferment; likewise valour, which is the means of making a noble and gallant captain, is but a single cause of advancement; but where these two qualities, wisdom and courage, are combined in the same man, the merit is doubled. The means of preferment which depend upon learning are either martial, for war and defence in relation to foreign countries, or political, for peace and tranquillity at home. The warrior seems to depend most on his personal courage and experience, which without any learning or reading at all, have often brought forth excellent leaders, but with those helps in addition produce most rare and famous generals. Those who use the pen most in taking part in the direction of public government, or in filling the necessary offices in the administrative or judicial service of the State, for the common peace and quietness, without profession of further learning, though they have their chief instrument of credit from books, are not debtors to book-knowledge only, because industry, experience, and discretion have much to do with their success. It is those who depend wholly upon learning that I am most concerned with, when I ask how gentlemen should be trained to have them learned.
The highest position to which learned valour doth give advancement, is that of a wise counsellor, the fruit of whose learning is policy, not in the limited sense where it is opposed to straightforwardness, but in the philosophical sense, as meaning the general skill to judge things rightly, to see them in their due proportions, to adapt them to any given circumstances, with as little disturbance as possible to existing arrangements, whether it be in matters religious or secular, public or private, professional or industrial. Such a man is, in the sphere of religion, a divine who is able to judge soundly of the general principles and applications of divinity; in the sphere of government, a lawyer who makes the laws in the first instance, and knows best how to have them kept; in short he is the man, whether he be concerned with ecclesiastical or temporal affairs, and whatever his rank or his profession may be, who is most sound and able, and sufficient in all points. And though the specialist may know more than he in any particular matter which he has not leisure to get up thoroughly himself, yet he will be able to make such skilful and methodical enquiries of the special student that he will probe his knowledge to the bottom, and then handle the material he gains to better purpose than the other could with all his scholarship. Of all those that depend upon learning I hold this kind of man worthiest to be preferred, in divinity a chief among divines, though he do not preach, in law, the first of lawyers, though he do not plead, and similarly in all the other departments of public direction. But wherefore is all this? To show how necessary a thing it is to have young gentlemen well brought up. For if these causes do make the man of mean birth noble, what will they do in him whose honour is augmented with perpetual increase, if he add personal worth to his nobility in blood? Wherefore the necessity of the training being evidently so great, I will handle that as well as I can, by way of general precept, with reference to those whose wisdom is their weight, learning their line, justice their balance, honour their armour, and all the different virtues their greatest ornaments in the eyes of all men.