APPRENTICESHIP EDUCATION. 91 



either fails to serve out his regular time, or who, though 

 he fulfils his term, is discharged an inferior workman, 

 has very few ; and further, nothing can be more certain 

 than that inferiority as a workman bears much more dis- 

 astrously on the condition of the mechanic than inferi- 

 ority as a scholar. Unable to maintain his place among 

 brother journeymen, or to render himself worthy of the 

 average wages of his craft, the ill-taught mechanic falls 

 out of regular employment, subsists precariously for a< 

 time on occasional jobs, and either, forming idle habits, 

 becomes a vagabond tramper, or, getting into the toils of 

 some rapacious taskmaster, becomes an enslaved sweater. 

 For one workman injured by neglect of his school edu- 

 cation, there are scores ruined by neglect of their ap- 

 prenticeship education. Three-fourths of the distress of 

 the country's mechanics (of course not reckoning that of 

 the unhappy class who have to compete with machinery), 

 and nine-tenths of their vagabondism, will be found 

 restricted to inferior workmen, who, like Hogarth's 

 " careless apprentice," neglected the opportunities of their 

 second term of education. The sagacious painter had a 

 truer insight into this matter than most of our modern 

 educationists.' 



During his apprenticeship the * character of Miller 

 began to reveal the essential traits which we afterwards 

 find in it. ' Gloomy ' -many of its seasons were ; the 

 ' gloomiest ' of his life, at least until he became a liter- 

 ary celebrity and editor of a religious newspaper : but 

 both its gloom and its gladness went to the making and 

 maturing of his character. The aching joint, the fevered 

 pulse, the breast oppressed with pain, the eye swimming 

 in bewildered trance of agony and exhaustion ; the 

 meditative midnight hour, when his eye marked the stars 

 as they crossed the rent in the roof, the evening wander- 



