“Culture is a study of perfection.”—_Matthew Arnold._ “Culture is the passion for sweetness and light, and (what is more) the passion for making them prevail.”—_Matthew Arnold._ “Culture is the process by which a man becomes all that he was created capable of being.”—_Carlyle._ The third of these is, perhaps, the best working definition of culture, for it shows its real importance and significance, and also makes it simpler to understand. Look at a neglected garden. The grass is long and rank; the beds are a mere tangle of weeds and of straggling flowers that have run to seed, or deteriorated in size and sweetness until they can hardly be called flowers at all. It is a wilderness. The garden is taken in hand and cultivated, not by a mechanical ignorant gardener, but by someone who understands the capacities of the soil, and knows what will do well and repay his care. See the transformation in time to come! There is everything by turn that is beautiful in its season; the lovely herbaceous border, the standard rose-trees, the sheltered bed of lilies of the valley, the peaches on the warm southern wall, the ferns waving in feathery profusion in the cool corner near the well—all that the garden can produce for delight to the eye or for food is there. The ground is not given over exclusively to one flower, one vegetable; it is not stocked mechanically for the summer with geraniums and calceolarias; but it is, as we say in homely parlance, “made the most of” in every particular, and is a delight to behold. This may seem a simple illustration, and we are writing not for the erudite, but for the simple reader. The man or woman of culture is the man or woman whose nature has been cultivated in such a way as to develop all its capabilities in the best possible direction; whose education has been adapted skilfully to taste and capacity, and who has been taught the art of self-instruction. It is hardly necessary to urge the value of this “cultivation.” “Cultivation is as necessary to the mind as food to the body,” said a wise man, and this is gradually coming to be believed. Culture is something more by far than mere instruction, though instruction is a means by which it may be attained. Bearing in mind our simile of the garden, we are led on from one thought to another. It was a very wise man indeed who pointed out that, even as ground will produce something, “herbs or weeds,” the mind will not remain empty if it is not cultivated; it tends to become full of silly or ignorant thoughts like “an unweeded garden.” Again, in a well-ordered, cultivated plot of ground we have what is useful as well as what is lovely. In culture, not only the acquirement of “useful knowledge” plays a part, but the storing of the mind with what is beautiful, the development of taste in all directions.