“Let me impress upon you that the best motto you can take for yourselves in this respect is that which was taken by a most eminent man who made his way from a hair-dresser’s shop to be Chief Justice Tenterden. What was his motto? When a man is made a judge, he is made a serjeant; and as serjeant he gives rings to some of the great officers of State, with a motto upon each. His motto was ‘Labore.’ He did not refer to his own talents. It was not ‘Invita Minerva.’ To his immortal honour be it said—from the hair-dresser’s shop in Canterbury to the Free School in Canterbury; from the Free School in Canterbury to Corpus Christi College; from Corpus Christi College to the bar; from the bar to the bench; from the bench to the peerage—he achieved all with unimpeachable honour, and always practising that which was his motto at last. One of the most gratifying scenes I have ever witnessed was when that man went up to the House of Peers in his robes for the first time, attended by the whole bar of England.” SELF-FORMATION. The one great object—the finality—of rational Education is Self-instruction. In mind as well as body we are children at first, only that we may afterwards become men; dependent upon others, in order that we may learn from them such lessons as may tend eventually to our edification on an independent basis of our own. The knowledge of facts, or what is generally called learning, however much we may possess of it, is useful so far only as we erect its materials into a mental framework; but useless, utterly, as long as we suffer it to lie in a heap, inert and without form. The instruction of others, compared with self-instruction, is like the law compared with faith; a discipline of preparation, beggarly elements, a schoolmaster to lead us on to a state of greater worthiness, and there give up the charge of us. “Every man,” says Gibbon, “who rises above the common level, receives two educations—the first from his instructors; the second, the most personal and important, from himself.” Almost all Lord Eldon’s legal education was from himself, without even the ordinary helps, which he disdainfully flung from him; and of no one could it be more truly predicated, that he was not “rocked and dandled” into a lawyer.