To have one favorite study and live in it with happy familiarity, and cultivate every portion of it diligently and lovingly, as a small yeoman proprietor cultivates his own land, this, as to study, at least, is the most enviable intellectual life. But there is another side to the question which has to be considered. The first difficulty for us is in our education. Modern education is a beginning of many things, and it is little more than a beginning. "My notion of educating my boy," said a rich Englishman, "is not to make him particularly clever at anything during his minority, but to make him overcome the rudimentary difficulties of many things, so that when he selects for himself his own line of culture in the future, it cannot be altogether strange to him, whatever line he may happen to select." A modern father usually allows his son to learn many things from a feeling of timidity about making a choice, if only one thing had to be chosen. He might so easily make a wrong choice! When the inheritance of the human race was less rich, there was no embarrassment of that kind. Look at the education of an ancient Greek, at the education of one of the most celebrated Athenians, a man living in the most refined and intellectual society, himself mentally and bodily the perfect type of his splendid race, an eloquent and powerful speaker, a most capable commander both by sea and land--look at the education of the brilliant Alcibiades! When Socrates gave the list of the things that Alcibiades had learned, Alcibiades could add to it no other even nominal accomplishment, and what a meagre, short catalogue it was! "But indeed I also pretty accurately know what thou hast learned; thou wilt tell me if anything has escaped my notice. Thou hast learned then thy letters ([Greek: grammata]), to play on the cithara ([Greek: kitharizein]) and to wrestle ([Greek: palaiein]), for thou hast not cared to learn to play upon the flute. This is all that thou hast learned, unless something has escaped me." The [Greek: grammata] which Alcibiades had learned with a master meant reading and writing, for he expressly says later on, that as for speaking Greek, [Greek: hellênizein], he learned that of no other master than the people. An English education equivalent to that of Alcibiades would therefore consist of reading and writing, wrestling and guitar-playing, the last accomplishment being limited to very simple music. Such an education was possible to an Athenian (though it is fair to add that Socrates does not seem to have thought much of it) because a man situated as Alcibiades was situated in the intellectual history of the world, had no past behind him which deserved his attention more than the present which surrounded him. Simply to speak Greek, [Greek: hellênizein], was really then the most precious of all accomplishments, and the fact that Alcibiades came by it easily does not lessen its value. Amongst a people like the Athenians, fond of intellectual talk,