Above all, in the exercise of our intellectual charities, let us accustom ourselves to feel satisfied with humble results and small successes; and here let me make a confession which may be of some possible use to others. When a young man, I taught a drawing-class gratuitously, beginning with thirty-six pupils, who dwindled gradually to eleven. Soon afterwards I gave up the work from dissatisfaction, on account of the meagre attendance. This was very wrong--the eleven were worth the thirty-six; and so long as one of the eleven remained I ought to have contentedly taught him. The success of a teacher is not to be measured by the numbers whom he immediately influences. It is enough, it has been proved to be enough in more than one remarkable instance, that a single living soul should be in unison with the soul of a master, and receive his thought by sympathy. The one disciple teaches in his turn, and the idea is propagated. LETTER IV. TO THE FRIEND OF A MAN OF HIGH CULTURE WHO PRODUCED NOTHING. Joubert--"Not yet time," or else "The time is past"--His weakness for production--Three classes of minds--A more perfect intellectual life attainable by the silent student than by authors--He may follow his own genius--Saving of time effected by abstinence from writing--The unproductive may be more influential than the prolific. When I met B. at your house last week, you whispered to me in the drawing-room that he was a man of the most remarkable attainments, who, to the great regret of all his friends, had never employed his abilities to any visible purpose. We had not time for a conversation on this subject, because B. himself immediately joined us. His talk reminded me very much of Joubert--not that I ever knew Joubert personally, though I have lived very near to Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where Joubert lived; but he is one of those characters whom it is possible to know without having seen them in the flesh. His friends used to urge him to write something, and then he said, "_Pas encore._" "Not yet; I need a long peace." Tranquillity came, and then he said that God had only given force to his mind for a limited time, and that the time was past. Therefore, as Sainte-Beuve observed, for Joubert there was no medium; either it was not yet time, or else the time was past. Nothing is more common than for _other_ people to say this of us. They often say "He is too young," as Napoleon said of Ingres, or else "He is too old," as Napoleon said of Greuze. It is more rare for a man himself to shrink from every enterprise, first under the persuasion that he is unprepared, and afterwards because the time is no longer opportune. Yet there does exist a certain very peculiar class of highly-gifted, diffident, delicate, unproductive minds, which impress those around them with an almost superstitious belief in their possibilities, yet never do anything to justify that belief.