Belmont Chronicle

Education.

Hazlitt affirms that if a youth shows no aptitude for languages, but dances well, that it were better to give up all ideas of scholarship for him, and hand him over to the dancing-master. We, who lay a claim to consistency, cannot go to that length.--As long as there is a certain associated rank attached to the professor of postures by the conventional ideas of society, considerations of a like kind must affect the judgment equally with those we favor, and in such a case. we should say, select for your son that profession which accords most nearly with his inclination, and which he can embrace without compromise of social standing.

How much wiser was the dominie of the parish school, who reputed David Wilkie "much fonder of drawing than reading, could paint better than he could write," than if, possessed of the insane idea that Greek & Latin could only make a man, he had been drilled and whipped until the youthful spirit had become scared, and incapacitated for its themes of humor! If the boy Carnot, who cried out his disapprobation of some poor tactics in a military show on the stage, had been sent into a mine, we might never have known of the man who could direct, at the same time, the movements of fourteen armies. But this natural fitness of the youth is not always so clearly manifested; but it is not the less strong, however, for being latent. How to probe the mind, then, is the question most important for a tutor. With the skill of a chemist, he must apply the various tests till he gets an answer.--Sometimes it is better to watch the unrestrained seekings, than to bring of the world's stores, and place them at its feet for its choice. Although Bulwer made the head of the Caxtons a secluded student. he gives him good discrimination when he makes him the director of his son's studies. when philosophizing one day upon the point be bethinks himself that he had read, in a certain Greek writer, how some man, to save his bees a troublesome flight to Hymmets, cut their wings, and placed before them the finest flowers he could select; but the poor bees made no honey; so he determined that young Pisistratus should search for his own honey, There is another sensible thought, for which we must give Mr. Caxton credit, and he divulges it thus:

"We students and abstract thinkers are apt, too much, in our first youth, to look to the depth of a man's mind or knowledge, and not enough to the surface it may cover.--There may be more water in a flowing stream, only four feet deep, and certainly more force and health, than in a sullen pool, thirty yards to the bottom." And this involves what certain scholastics are, in such a self-satisfied manner, prone to stigmatize as a smattering, a style of acquisition we are forced to believe best adapted to make every gentleman more pleasant and useful to himself and neighbors; while we admit it would not become a professor--and we are not all of that ilk. This cant about profundity has received some biting sarcasm from Macaulay, who remarks, moreover, that it has never yet been his fortune to prevail upon any person who pronounces superficial knowledge a curse, and profound knowledge a blessing, to tell him what makes the standard of profundity. There was a time when the branches of knowledge were so few that constant application produced necessarily a depth of learning; but it must not be forgotten that in an age when a school-boy knows more than the sage of those times, that profundity in one or two departments involves, in the nature of things, a neglect of very many others, that it would not be becoming in a man of education to be ignorant of, while we might pardon it in a professor that professedly applies himself to but a single branch.

Now, since a little knowledge is not the dangerous thing it may once have been,--when we have that little of many things, it would seem to be a necessity, that to the mind of youth a great variety should be presented. Let not this alarm those who hold to the cant, that a boy had better know a little thoroughly; for we anticipate that among this diversity there will be some one thing that strikes at once the chord that is waiting to vibrate, and when once the glow of satisfaction is felt that comes from cordial interest in a genial pursuit, we think that the danger will lie in his pursuing too deeply a favorite study, till he becomes no longer a scholar, but a professor The danger, however, no longer exists, if the bent of his mind, thus discovered, leads to what was desired--a fit sphere for his talent