It seems to me in looking back over the last thirty years, that the only time really wasted has been that spent in laborious obedience to some external authority. It may be a dangerous doctrine which Claude Tillier expressed in an immortal sentence, but dangerous or not, it is full of intellectual truth: "Le temps le mieux employé est celui que l'on perd."[11] If what we are accustomed to consider lost time could be removed, as to its effects at least, from the sum of our existence, it is certain that we should suffer from a great intellectual impoverishment. All the best knowledge of mankind, to begin with, is acquired in hours which hard-working people consider lost hours--in hours, that is, of pleasure and recreation. Deduct all that we have learnt about men in times of recreation, in clubs and smoking-rooms, on the hunting-field, on the cricket-ground, on the deck of the yacht, on the box of the drag or the dog-cart, would the residue be worth very much? would it not be a mere heap of dry bones without any warm flesh to cover them? Even the education of most of us, such as it is, has been in a great measure acquired out of school, as it were; I mean outside of the acknowledged duties of our more serious existence. Few Englishmen past forty have studied English literature either as a college exercise or a professional preparation; they have read it privately, as an amusement. Few Englishmen past forty have studied modern languages, or science, or the fine arts, from any obedience to duty, but merely from taste and inclination. And even if we studied these things formally, as young men often do at the present day, it is not from the formal study that we should get the _perfume_ of the language or the art, but from idle hours in foreign lands and galleries. It is superfluous to recommend idleness to the unintellectual, but the intellectual too often undervalue it. The laborious intellect contracts a habit of strenuousness which is some times a hindrance to its best activity. "I have arrived," said Sainte-Beuve, "perhaps by way of secretly excusing my own idleness, perhaps by a deeper feeling of the principle that all comes to the same, at the conclusion that whatever I do or do not, working in the study at continuous labor, scattering myself in articles, spreading myself about in society, giving my time away to troublesome callers, to poor people, to _rendez-vous_, in the street, no matter to whom and to what, I cease not to do one and the same thing, to read one and the same book, the infinite book of the world and of life, that no one ever finishes, in which the wisest read farthest; I read it then at all the pages which present themselves, in broken fragments, backwards, what matters it? I never cease going on. The greater the medley, the more frequent the interruption, the more I get on with this book in which one is never beyond the middle; but the profit is to have had it open before one at all sorts of different pages."