Do anything a sufficient number of times, and you acquire facility in doing it. Every action tends to repeat itself; repeated action begets habit, and habit is second nature. All the powers and possibilities within us lie subject to this law of habit. Practice puts the law in operation, evokes latent possibilities, and calls into action powers which would otherwise have lain ingloriously dormant.

A child has all the organs of speech that the consummate orator has, but he has not acquired the power of using them. That power was gained by practice. Gladstone was once a prattling, stammering boy, but by practice his vocal organs became flexible, and adapted to all the intricacies of expression, until at length listening assemblies sat charmed by the music of his resounding periods.

Listen to a great pianist like Paderewski, whose touch is marvelous, whose fingers glide over the keys as if instinct with life, and it seems as though it must always have been easy for him to play; but on inquiry you learn that it was by practice, incessant and severe, from early years to manhood, that he acquired that exquisite skill.

"Those who are resolved to excel," said Sir Joshua Reynolds, "must go to their work willing or unwilling, morning, noon, and night; they will find it no play, but very hard labor." Some one has said that no great work is ever done in a hurry. With equal truth it may be said that the power to produce a great work is never acquired in a hurry. No one ever wrote an immortal poem, painted a great picture, or delivered a famous oration without serving his apprenticeship, and doing what we may call the drudgery of his art. It may have been in secret that the drudgery was done, but done it had to be. Vasari relates in his "Lives of the Painters," that Giotto could with his hand draw a perfect circle, but he does not tell us how many imperfect ones he drew before he made a perfect one. Even Titian and Raphael had to begin by drawing straight lines; Beethoven and Mozart by picking out the notes one by one; and Shakespeare himself had to learn the alphabet before he wrote

Hamlet and King Lear. Little by little these things are learned. "There is no such thing," said Daniel Webster, "as extemporaneous acquisition." Perfection is not gained, any more than heaven, "at a single bound." "We build the ladder by which we rise."

Charles J. Fox was a gifted man, but his gifts had to be gradually developed by practice. He made it a point to speak in Parliament every night for his own improvement. Henry Clay's advice to young lawyers was not to let a day pass without exercising their powers. His own early practice of the art of speaking is well known. At the age of twenty-seven he began and for years he continued the practice of daily reading and speaking upon the contents of some historical or scientific book. These offhand efforts, he says, were sometimes made in a cornfield, and not unfrequently in a barn with only horses and oxen for his auditors. Not sudden inspiration or illumination while speaking, but careful cultivation, he gives as the secret of his oratorical power.

Be not discouraged if progress seems slow. Time and toil will work wonders. Practice is the prelude to the song of victory. Do your best every time. Remember Beethoven's maxim, "The barriers are not erected which say to aspiring talents and industry, thus far and no farther.'"

Learning is Not Wisdom.

MERRILL EDWARDS GATES, LL.D., President Amherst College, Mass.

"To what purpose should our thought be directed to various kinds of knowledge, unless room be afforded for putting it into practice, so that public advantage may be the result!" -SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

I

N certain moods you may spend an hour in turning over the leaves of a dictionary when you are not "using" it. But you will hardly call a dictionary interesting reading! Why? Not because there is too much learning in it, but because the knowledge contained in it is not alive. There is no such orderly arrangement of facts, no such systematic unfolding of principles, as marks the scientific treatise. It lacks the interest that attaches to the progress of events in a history, to the growth of character, the unfolding of plot in the novel. The dictionary is a mass of knowledge, valuable for reference; but it presupposes a man with intelligence, purpose, and will, to use this knowledge.

For the successful conduct of life, mere learning is not enough. We do not undervalue learning. All knowledge has a certain value. Probably the danger that least of all threatens your life is the danger of knowing too much! But it is possible to be very learned, and yet to be singularly destitute of the ability to make learning of any use, to one's self, to one's friends, or to the world at large. Learning is not wisdom. In order that learning may be intelligently acquired, even, there must be a wise appreciation of the ends for which it is to be attained, of the relations which the knowledge you are acquiring bears to other departments of knowledge, to the conduct of your own life, to the thought and the life of your fellow men. It is not merely a question of what