CHAPTER IV.
HIS PURSUIT OF AN EDUCATION.
When I arrived at an age when my character should have been in some measure “moulded,” I was, like most persons of a peculiar nervous temperament, very vacillating and changeful. No one knew how to size me up; in fact, I didn’t know myself. I was now constantly developing new, short-lived ambitions. Occasionally I became industrious for short periods of time. Indulgent and now prosperous parents provided a way for me to pursue my little ambitions. I had secured the rudimentary part of an education and I determined to build upon it. I was going to reach the topmost rung.
It was my ambition—for a short time—to obtain a classical education and become one of the literati; but I soon became weary of one line of study, and when a thing got to be too irksome I passed it by for something else. I could not be occupied with any study long unless I seemed to be progressing in it with marvelous speed. This rapid-transit progress was, of course, very unusual. I had read that quasi-science, phrenology, and came to the conclusion that I could not stick to any one thing because my bump of “continuity” was poorly developed.
My bump of continuity was poorly developed.
I read that a very learned man used to admire Blackstone; so I dropped everything and began perusing Blackstone’s Commentaries. Soon after I chanced to hear that Oliver Ellsworth gained the greater part of his information from conversation, and I determined upon this method for a while. I soon grew tired of it, however, and next took up general history and literature. While taking my collegiate course, I pursued a number of different studies, but the pursuit as well as the possession amounted to very little. I had taken up Greek and Latin and had begun to manifest some interest in these studies, when a friend, in whom I had some confidence, advised me against wasting my time on obsolete words. He said: “Learn English first, young man. I’ll wager there are plenty of good Anglo-Saxon words that you can’t pronounce or define. For example, tell me what ‘y-c-l-e-p-t’ spells and what it means.”
Thus being picked up on a trifling, useless English word, I decided to give up the study of dead languages and confine myself to my mother-tongue. Rhetoric and lexicography were hobbies with me for a time, but before a great while I thought I needed “mental drill”; so I turned my attention to mathematics. The subject became dry and uninteresting in the usual length of time; besides, I began seriously to question mathematics as being in the utilitarian class of studies. Certainly very little of it was necessary as a business qualification. I recalled the fact that one of the best business men, in a mediocre station of life, whom I had ever known, could not write his own name and his wife had to count his money for him. So I threw away my Euclid and tried something else; but I would voluntarily tire of each study in a little while, or drop it at the counter-suggestion of some friend. Thus I changed from one course to another as a weather-cock is veered by the ever-changing wind to every point of the compass.