Page:The Works of Samuel Johnson ... A journey to the Hebrides. The vision of Theodore, the hermit of Teneriffe. The fountains. Prayers and meditations. Sermons.v. 10-11. Parliamentary debates.pdf/399

 found through the intricacies of opposite systems, but by tracing the steps of those that have gone before; that willingness to receive implicitly what further advances only can enable him to prove, which initiation always supposes, are very little to be expected from him, who looks down with scorn upon his teacher, and is more ready to censure the obscurity of precepts, than to suspect the force of his own understanding. Knowledge is to be attained by slow and gradual acquisitions, by a careful review of our ideas, and a regular superstructure of one proposition on another; and is, therefore, the reward only of diligence and patience. But patience is the effect of modesty; pride grasps at the whole; and what it cannot hold, it affects to despise; it is rather solicitous to display, than increase its acquisitions; and rather endeavours by fame to supply the want of knowledge, than by knowledge to arrive at fame.

That these are not imaginary representations, but true copies of real life, most of those to whom the instruction of young men is intrusted will be ready to confess; since they have often the dissatisfaction of finding, that, in proportion as greater advances have been made in the first period of life, there is less diligence in the second. And that, as it was said of the ancient Gauls, that they were more than men in the onset, and less than women in the shock; it may be said in our literary contentions, that many, who were men at school, are boys at the college.

Their ardour remits, their diligence relaxes, and they give themselves to a lazy contemplation of comparative excellence, without considering that the comparison is hourly growing less advantageous, and that the acquisitions which they boast are mouldering away.

Such is the danger to a learner, of too early an opinion of his own importance: but if we suppose him to have escaped in his first years this fatal confidence, and to be betrayed into it by a longer series of successful application, its effects will then be equally dangerous; and as it hin