Now if you were to qualify yourself for all this as a scholar
should, and in two years, you would certainly deserve to be
addressed by Mr Hamerton as 'A Young Man of Letters who worked
Excessively'; and to work excessively is not good for anyone.
Yet, on the other hand, you are precluded from using, for your
'cerebral inconveniences,' the heroic remedy exhibited by Mr
Hamerton's enterprising tradesman, since on that method you would
not attain to the main object of your laudable ambition, a
Cambridge degree.
But the matter is very much worse than your Statute makes it out.
Take one of the papers in which some actual acquaintance with
Literature is required the Special Period from 1700 to 1785; then
turn to your "Cambridge History of English Literature", and you
will find that the mere bibliography of those eighty-five years
occupies something like five or six hundred pages--five or six
hundred pages of titles and authors in simple enumeration! The
brain reels; it already suffers 'cerebral inconveniences.
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