By the help of the above passage from an article written sixty-three years ago by Sydney Smith, and by the help of another passage in the same paper where he tells us that the English clergy bring up the first young men of the country as if they were all to keep grammar schools in little country towns, I begin to understand what you mean by a half-educated person. You mean a person who is only half qualified for keeping a grammar school. In this sense it is very possible that our friend the painter possesses nothing beyond a miserable fraction of education. And yet he has picked up a good deal of valuable knowledge outside the technical acquirement of a most difficult profession. He studied two years in Paris, and four years in Florence and Rome. He speaks French and Italian quite fluently, and with a fair degree of correctness. His knowledge of those two languages is incomparably more complete, in the sense of practical possession, than our fossilized knowledge of Latin, and he reads them almost as we read English, currently, and without translating. He has the heartiest enjoyment of good literature; there is evidence in his pictures of a most intelligent sympathy with the greatest inventive writers. Without having a scientific nature, he knows a good deal about anatomy. He has not read Greek poetry, but he has studied the old Greek mind in its architecture and sculpture. Nature has also endowed him with a just appreciation of music, and he knows the immortal masterpieces of the most illustrious composers. All these things would not qualify him to teach a grammar school, and yet what Greek of the age of Pericles ever knew half so much? This for the acquisition of knowledge; now for the development of faculty. In this respect he excels us as performing athletes excel the people in the streets. Consider the marvellous accuracy of his eye, the precision of his hand, the closeness of his observation, the vigor of his memory and invention! How clumsy and rude is the most learned pedant in comparison with the refinement of this delicate organization! Try to imagine what a disciplined creature he has become, how obedient are all his faculties to the commands of the central will! The brain conceives some image of beauty or wit, and immediately that clear conception is telegraphed to the well-trained fingers. Surely, if the results of education may be estimated from the evidences of skill, here are some of the most wonderful of such results. FOOTNOTE: [1] According to M. Taine. I have elsewhere expressed a doubt about polyglots. PART IV. THE POWER OF TIME. LETTER I. TO A MAN OF LEISURE WHO COMPLAINED OF WANT OF TIME.