Still, there are some things that may be rationally and truly said to a poor man who desires culture, and which are not without a sort of Spartan encouragement. You are restricted by your poverty, but it is not always a bad thing to be restricted, even from the intellectual point of view. The intellectual powers of well-to-do people are very commonly made ineffective by the enormous multiplicity of objects that are presented to their attention, and which claim from them a sort of polite notice like the greeting of a great lady to each of her thousand guests. It requires the very rarest strength of mind, in a rich man, to concentrate his attention on anything there are so many things that he is expected to make a pretence of knowing; but nobody expects _you_ to know anything, and this is an incalculable advantage. I think that all poor men who have risen to subsequent distinction have been greatly indebted to this independence of public opinion as to what they ought to know. In trying to satisfy that public opinion by getting up a pretence of various sorts of knowledge, which is only a sham, we sacrifice not only much precious time, but we blunt our natural interest in things. That interest you preserve in all its virgin force, and this force carries a man far. Then, again, although the opportunities of rich people are very superior to yours, they are not altogether so superior as they seem. There exists a great equalizing power, the limitation of human energy. A rich man may sit down to an enormous banquet, but he can only make a good use of the little that he is able to digest. So it is with the splendid intellectual banquet that is spread before the rich man's eyes. He can only possess what he has energy to master, and too frequently the manifest impossibility of mastering everything produces a feeling of discouragement that ends in his mastering nothing. A poor student, especially if he lives in an out-of-the-way place where there are no big libraries to bewilder him, may apply his energy with effect in the study of a few authors.