Sympathy is an accompaniment of true culture; the sympathy that comes of understanding. Ignorant people are very often hard just because of ignorance. They cannot in the least enter into the feelings of others, nor do they understand that there is a world beyond their own miserable little enclosure. For instance, what a puzzle a clever, sensitive, imaginative child is to people of contented matter-of-fact stupidity! One need not think of Maggie and Mrs. Tulliver, or Aurora Leigh and her aunt, to illustrate this—there are plenty of examples from real life. The girl does not take to sewing and the baking of bread and puddings; she is always wanting to get hold of a book—never so happy as when she is reading. Or the boy is always poring over the mysteries of fern and flower—never so happy as when he is afoot to secure some fresh specimen. People of culture would foresee that the one may be a student, the other a botanist, in days to come, and, while of course insisting that practical duty is not selfishly overlooked, they would try to give scope for the individual taste. People without culture would set the whole thing down as laziness and vagabond trifling and “shirking,” to be severely repressed. Sympathetic insight is one of the most valuable attributes of culture; valuable all through life, especially when dealing with others. But we can imagine that the reader may be thinking rather hopelessly, “It is not necessary to preach to me on the advantages of culture; I am fully convinced of them; but all you say makes me hopeless of ever attaining such a degree of perfection. In fact, I can see culture is not for me at all, and I must just go on as I am.” The dictionary definition of culture is “the application of labour, or other means, to improve good qualities, or growth.” This does not sound quite like the other definitions, and a great deal of confusion has been caused by people forgetting that the word “culture” is used for two things—the “process” of cultivation, and the “result” of that process. Now it is quite true that “culture,” in the last and highest sense, is not within the reach of all our readers; but surely there is no reader who would say she cannot “apply labour or other means” to improve her intelligence, be it in ever so small a degree. It is better to cultivate a garden ever so little than to leave it a wilderness. Culture, looked upon as a process, may begin and go on almost indefinitely. Goethe well says— “Woe to every sort of culture which destroys the most effectual means of all true culture, and directs us to the end, instead of rendering us happy on the way.”