Go by all means; but do not sit in the lecture hall week by week, and expect the words of the speaker to do everything that is needful. Study the books he recommends to you diligently and conscientiously. Do not be so much occupied in trying to scribble down what he says verbatim in your notebook that you are left far behind in hopeless bewilderment at an early stage of the proceedings; but listen attentively, and above all do the paper work set every week. When you have accomplished this much, do not be deterred by the alarms of wounded vanity from going in for the examination at the close of the course. You need not, and will not if you are sensible, suppose that you have received in any sense a university education; but you will, especially if the lecturer be one of the noted men we could name, have acquired a distinct addition to your mental store of wealth; and this is no slight advantage, for it may urge you to go on and on acquiring more and more.
“’Tis the taught already that profits by teaching,”
as Browning says.
The “University Extension” movement has been touched upon because these lectures seem to appeal specially to girls who wish somehow or other to “take themselves in hand.” But, after all, the main instrument of self-culture must be reading, and, before turning to the question of what books shall be chosen, we may repeat Carlyle’s words—
“Learn to be good readers—which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in—a real, not an imaginary—and which you find to be really fit for what you are engaged in. The most unhappy of all men is the man who cannot tell what he is going to do, who has got no work cut out for him in the world, and does not go into it. In work is the grand cure of all the maladies and miseries that ever beset mankind—honest work which you intend getting done.”
Lily Watson.
(To be continued.)