[208] “Life,” ii. 300. At this time the Post Office staff numbered over 24,000, of whom more than 3,000 served in the London district. [209] A thirty or more years old example of this rejection returns to memory. A young man—a born soldier, and son to a distinguished officer in the Engineers—failed to pass the inevitable Army examination. The subject over which he broke down was some poem of Chaucer's, I think the immortal Prologue to _The Canterbury Tales_—that wonderful collection of masterly-drawn portraits of men and women who must have been living people over five hundred years ago. Even an ardent lover of him “whose sweet breath preluded those melodious bursts that fill the spacious times of great Elizabeth with sounds that echo still,” has never yet been able to perceive what connection the strains of “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler,” can have with the science of modern warfare. The born soldier, it was said, was fain to turn ranchman in the American Far West. [210] As regards this oft-discussed matter, it seems that Herbert Spencer was of like mind with my father. Speaking in his “Autobiography of Edison,” the great philosopher says that “that remarkable, self-educated man” was of opinion that “college-bred men were of no use to him. It is astonishing,” continues Herbert Spencer, “how general, among distinguished engineers, has been the absence of education, or of high education. James Brindley and George Stephenson were without any early instruction at all: the one taught himself writing when an apprentice, and the other put himself to school when a grown man. Telford too, a shepherd boy, had no culture beyond that which a parish school afforded. Though Smeaton and Rennie and Watt had the discipline of grammar schools, and two of them that of High Schools, yet in no case did they pass through a _curriculum_ appropriate to the profession they followed. Another piece of evidence, no less remarkable, is furnished by the case of Sir Benjamin Baker, who designed and executed the Forth Bridge—the greatest and most remarkable bridge in the world, I believe. He received no regular engineering instruction. Such men who, more than nearly all other men, exercise constructive imagination, and rise to distinction only when they are largely endowed with this faculty, seem thus to show by implication the repressive influence of an educational system which imposes ideas from without instead of evolving them from within.” (“Autobiography,” i. 337, 338.) The remarks are the outcome of Herbert Spencer's perusal of a biographical sketch of the celebrated engineer, John Ericsson. In this occurred a significant passage: “When a friend spoke to him with regret of his not having been graduated from some technical institute, he answered that the fact, on the other hand, was very fortunate. If he had taken a course at such an institution, he would have acquired such a belief in authority that he would never