This is the only constant and infallible test of progress. That you wonder more at the work of great men, and that you care more for natural objects. You have often been told by your teachers to expect this last result: but I fear that the tendency of modern thought is to reject the idea of that essential difference in rank between one intellect and another, of which increasing reverence is the wise acknowledgment. You may, at least in early years, test accurately your power of doing anything in the least rightly, by your increasing conviction that you never will be able to do it as well as it has been done by others. 168. That is a lesson, I repeat, which differs much, I fear, from the one you are commonly taught. The vulgar and incomparably false saying of Macaulay's, that the intellectual giants of one age become the intellectual pigmies of the next, has been the text of too many sermons lately preached to you. You think you are going to do better things--each of you--than Titian and Phidias--write better than Virgil--think more wisely than Solomon. My good young people, this is the foolishest, quite pre-eminently--perhaps almost the harmfullest--notion that could possibly be put into your empty little eggshells of heads. There is not one in a million of you who can ever be great in _any_ thing. To be greater than the greatest that _have_ been, is permitted perhaps to one man in Europe in the course of two or three centuries. But because you cannot be Handel and Mozart--is it any reason why you should not learn to sing "God save the Queen" properly, when you have a mind to? Because a girl cannot be prima donna in the Italian Opera, is it any reason that she should not learn to play a jig for her brothers and sisters in good time, or a soft little tune for her tired mother, or that she should not sing to please herself, among the dew, on a May morning? Believe me, joy, humility, and usefulness, always go together: as insolence with misery, and these both with destructiveness. You may learn with proud teachers how to throw down the Vendome Column, and burn the Louvre, but never how to lay so much as one touch of safe colour, or one layer of steady stone: and if indeed there be among you a youth of true genius, be assured that he will distinguish himself first, not by petulance or by disdain, but by discerning firmly what to admire, and whom to obey.