The Note-Books of Samuel Butler Part 38

Oxford and Cambridge

The dons are too busy educating the young men to be able to teach them anything.

Cooking

There is a higher average of good cooking at Oxford and Cambridge than elsewhere. The cooking is better than the curriculum. But there is no Chair of Cookery, it is taught by apprentices.h.i.+p in the kitchens.

Perseus and St. George

These dragon-slayers did not take lessons in dragon-slaying, nor do leaders of forlorn hopes generally rehea.r.s.e their parts beforehand.

Small things may be rehea.r.s.ed, but the greatest are always do-or-die, neck-or-nothing matters.

Specialism and Generalism

Woe to the specialist who is not a pretty fair generalist, and woe to the generalist who is not also a bit of a specialist.

Silence and Tact

Silence is not always tact and it is tact that is golden, not silence.

Truth-tellers

Professional truth-tellers may be trusted to profess that they are telling the truth.

Street Preachers

These are the costermongers and barrow men of the religious world.

Providence and Oth.e.l.lo

Providence, in making the rain fall also upon the sea, was like the man who, when he was to play Oth.e.l.lo, must needs black himself all over.

Providence and Improvidence

i

We should no longer say: Put your trust in Providence, but in Improvidence, for this is what we mean.

ii

To put one's trust in G.o.d is only a longer way of saying that one will chance it.

iii

There is nothing so imprudent or so improvident as over-prudence or over-providence.

Epiphany

If Providence could be seen at all, he would probably turn out to be a very disappointing person--a little wizened old gentleman with a cold in his head, a red nose and a comforter round his neck, whistling o'er the furrow'd land or crooning to himself as he goes aimlessly along the streets, poking his way about and loitering continually at shop-windows and second-hand book-stalls.

Fortune

Like Wisdom, Fortune crieth in the streets, and no man regardeth.

There is not an advertis.e.m.e.nt supplement to the Times--nay, hardly a half sheet of newspaper that comes into a house wrapping up this or that, but it gives information which would make a man's fortune, if he could only spot it and detect the one paragraph that would do this among the 99 which would wreck him if he had anything to do with them.

Gold-Mines

Gold is not found in quartz alone; its richest lodes are in the eyes and ears of the public, but these are harder to work and to prospect than any quartz vein.

Things and Purses

Everything is like a purse--there may be money in it, and we can generally say by the feel of it whether there is or is not.

Sometimes, however, we must turn it inside out before we can be quite sure whether there is anything in it or no. When I have turned a proposition inside out, put it to stand on its head, and shaken it, I have often been surprised to find how much came out of it.

Solomon in all his Glory

But, in the first place, the lilies do toil and spin after their own fas.h.i.+on, and, in the next, it was not desirable that Solomon should be dressed like a lily of the valley.

David's Teachers