The Tale of the "Ripe Scholar".

Not many years ago, a certain traditional prestige, independent of all considerations of practical utility, attached to the scholastic character, at least in New England, where the clergy long held a monopoly of what passed for learning. New England colleges were once little more than schools for making ministers. The tendency of a partial education, such as the best popular education must of necessity be, is to produce an excess of self-confidence; and one of its results in this country is a prodigious number of persons who think, and persuade others to think, that they know everything necessary to be known, and are fully competent to form opinions and make speeches upon all questions whatever.