We are critics, and, as you say, not such fools as to commit ourselves to the proposition of amendments that can be criticised by others.

Nevertheless, for your sake, Cousin Peter, and on the condition that if I give my advice you will never say that I gave it, and if you take it that you will never reproach me if it turns out, as most advice does, very ill,--I will depart from my custom and hazard my opinion." "I accept the conditions." "Well then, with every new generation there springs up a new order of ideas.

The earlier the age at which a man seizes the ideas that will influence his own generation, the more he has a start in the race with his contemporaries.

If Kenelm comprehends at sixteen those intellectual signs of the time which, when he goes up to college, he will find young men of eighteen or twenty only just _prepared_ to comprehend, he will produce a deep impression of his powers for reasoning and their adaptation to actual life, which will be of great service to him later.
Now the ideas that influence the mass of the rising generation never have their well-head in the generation itself.

They have their source in the generation before them, generally in a small minority, neglected or contemned by the great majority which adopt them later.