Immature Mind, fruit of recent study! Be quiet, urge not the pen into my hands: even without writing one may pass the fleeting days of life and gain honours, though one be not a poet. Many easy paths lead in our days to honours, and bold feet need not stumble upon them: the least acceptable is the one the nine barefooted sisters have laid out. Many a man has lost his strength thereon, without reaching a goal. You have to toil and moil there, and while you labour, people avoid you like the plague, rail at you, loathe you. He who bends over the table, fixing his eyes upon books, will gain no magnificent palaces, nor gardens adorned with marbles; will add no sheep to his paternal flock. ’Tis true, in our young monarch[127] a mighty hope has risen for the Muses, and the ignorant flee in shame from him. Apollo has found in him a strong defender of his glory, and has seen him honouring his suite and steadily intent upon increasing the dwellers on Parnassus.[128] The trouble is, many loudly praise in the Tsar what in the subject they haughtily condemn. “Schisms and heresies are begot by science.[129] He lies most who knows most; who pores over books becomes an atheist.” Thus Crito grumbles, his rosary in his hands, and sighs, and with bitter tears the saintly soul bids us see how dangerous is the seed of learning that is cast among us: our children, who heretofore gently and meekly walked in the path of their forefathers, eagerly attending divine service and listening in fear to what they did not understand, now, to the horror of the Church, have begun to read the Bible; they discuss all, want to know the cause of all, and put little faith in the clerical profession; they have lost their good habits, have forgotten how to drink kvas, and will not be driven with a stick to partake of salt meat. They place no candles before the images, observe no feasts. They regard the worldly power misplaced in clerical hands, and whisper that worldly possessions ill become those who have renounced a worldly life. Sylvan finds another fault with science: “Education,” he says, “brings famine in its track. We managed to get along before this without knowing Latin much better than we live now. We used to harvest more grain in our ignorance, but now that we have learned a foreign language, we lose our corn. What of it if my argument be weak and without sense and connection,--what matters that to a nobleman? Proof, order of words, is the affair of low-born men; for aristocrats it suffices boldly to assent, or contradict. Insane is he who examines the force and limitations of his soul; who toils whole days in his sweat, in order to learn the structure of the world and the change or cause of things: ’tis like making pease to stick to the wall. Will all that add one day to my life, or one penny to my coffers? Can I by means of it find out how much my clerk and superintendent steal a year or how to add water to my pond, or to increase the number of barrels in my still?