NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11538, 24 November 1900, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

Dr. Macnahara, the learned and brilliant editor of the Schoolmaster, and the author of many books on educational method, gives some excellent advice to those just starting life. He says; —"First and last, let me urge you to utilise to the very utmost the splendid educational advantages by which you are surrounded. There is the free library, the evening school, the Technical Education Committee's lectures. All are yours for nothing, or next to nothing. Use them for all they are worth. Thirty years ago, when I wa# a little chap, a read of Shakespere meant a weary tramp of a mile or so, and a science lecture was a thing not to be dreamt of. And yet John Anthony Mundella, Leicester's errand boy, became England's Cabinet Minister. To-day it is all so different. The means of advancement are at yoia very door. For the past two years Senior Wranglers at Cambridge have been young men who commenced their studies at the elementary school desk. Isn't the fact significant of much? In the past all the best offices in this country have only been open to people of one class —that class which had the means of superior education. But those means are now within the reach of the humblest of us. And in 20 years' time half the members of the House of Commons, and practically all the heads of commercial and mercantile concerns, will have, like the Senior Wranglers of 1899 and 1900, begun their training in the elementary schools. Therefore, I would say seize the chano* at hand, especially while you are young. Every stroke of work you put in now is an investment at magnificent interest. Look at a life annuity table. Put in a few pence at 16, and you can secure a decent .competence at 60. Start at 30 to buy the same result, and see what you will have to invest! It is the same with your- work. Five minutes at 15 are worth 50 minutes at 55. Anothei point. Don't imagine that your education is complete when you leave school. So far from that, it has only just begun. The most valuable education you will ever receive is that which you will get when you are your own schoolmaster. Again. When you go out to work avoid as the plague the notion that if your people had only made you

something else, what a genius you would ■ have been! I started life as a pnpiUeaehei, and fox about a year I deceived myself into thinking there was nothing under the son that I couldn't have done better. If they had only made me a soldier ! Ah I what 'a heaven-born I should have been! If they had only made ma a minister of religion! -With, what irresistible eloquence I should have filled the pulpit 1 Had I only been a. journalist ! - Such brilliant leading articles had never been penned. Anything but teaching And I rather fancy lots of young people dream as I did. My advice is to drop it at once; and stick in heart and soul into the work upon which you are engaged. Make the performance of the smallest duty inj it a rehearsal of the parable of the talents—to your credit. '•> Believe in yourself and have ground for your conviction. A final word. Have a motto or two. Get off by heart some of the condensed wisdom of the world's great minds, and when in doubt apply your motto. For instance, it would be impossible for me to tell you how four lines of Monckton Mimes' have literally thousands of times helped me over a stile. It so happens that. lam an Irishman, and therefore emotional. The lines that acted as a necessary corrective, when despondency hit me hard, are: — If what shone afar so grand Turn to nothing in the hand, On again, the virtue lies In the struggle not the prize. I cannot help you better than by leaving you with these lines ringing in your ears. There died the other day in a common lodging house in London, in circumstance* of abject destitution, a man who in his time was know to thousands— Dolby. He was the manager, of Dickens' later reading tours, their relations being close, constant, and cordial, and it was on his advice that the last voyage to America was taken. He is constantly mentioned in the published "Letters," being spoken of as the "Dolby who would do anything to lighten work, and does everything." "He hardly ever dines, and is always tearing about at unreasonable hours.'' Again (in illness), "Dolby is as tender as e woman, and as ; watchful as a doctor." It was Dolby who was chosen tc. help the novelist in making presents of bank notes to old friends who had not prospered ; and it was Dolby who, on an off night of the Liverpool readings, j was asked to buy some books, for the novel- ! ist's amusemenW" anything of Sir Walter Scott's or my own." "The Old Curiosity Shop" was purchased, and Dolby used to describe how he found Dickens laughing immoderately over its perusal—not so much at the book as at the recollection of the circumstances under which certain parte of it had been written (Dickens was never slow to praise Scott; he considered " The Bride of Lammennoor" the best of the novels). It fell to Dolby's share to rouse Dickens wh<m there was a fire at his New York Hotel in Decemlwr, 1867, and in the same letter Miss Hogarth told that "Dolby continues to be the most unpopular man in America (mainly because he can't get 4000 people into a room that holds 2000), and is reviled in print daily. Yesterday morning a newspaper proclaims of him : ' Surely it is time that the pudding-headed Dolby retired into the native gloom from which he has emerged.' He takes it very coolly, and does his best." Space will not allow quotation of the many bright passages in the " Letters" in which Dolby figures— the account of an amazing walking match must be omitted an extract from a letter to Mr. Jamea T. Fields (1868) is so characteristic that it clamours to be given: — " Last Thursday I attended, as sponsor, the christening of Dolby's son and heira most jolly baby, who held on tight by the rector's left whisker while the service was performed. What time, too, his little sister, connecting me with the pony, trotted up and down the centre aisle, noisily driving herself as that celebrated animal, so that it went very hard with the sponsorial dignity." Mr. Dolby published a volume of recollections some years ago, " The Chief as I Knew Him." He was the brother of the famous Madame Sainton Dolby, who died in 1885.