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5

eminently practical and useful life.

Your students should even avoid these
elevated flights of fancy, and confine themselves,

"to things averred and known,
And daily, hourly seen."

To be qualified to be a County Surveyor,
Clerk, Bookkeeper, Treasurer, Banker,
Merchant, or Intelligent Farmer is all
sufficient. To the effort to teach the extraordinary,
"the abstrue, and things removed from common
use" may be attributed the failure
to make useful characters, and the filling
of society with failures, the effete, incompetent,
cranky and visionary, if not the
swindler and the thief. Be useful first;
and let ornament and superexcellence come
where the soil is rich, and they may spring
spontaneous. To attempt to train the common
mind to all the achievements of
Newton, Euclid, Cuvier and Spencer,
is to overwhelm the weak, and to waste
our money and time on natural dullness.

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hesperus

abstruse, Spenser