Neither to a politician nor to a business-man nor to any of the learned professions did the West promise any certain advantage, while it offered uncertainties in plenty.
The masses were, of course, uneducated, but even the learned few-the leisure class-were not educated in the sense that they had to sit at the feet of foreign masters.
She was not abnormally deficient, and she mustered learning enough to acquit herself respectably in conversation with her contemporaries, among whom it must be avowed, however, that she occupied a secondary place.
Very able they were, acute and full of learning; but the trouble was that his feelings no longer communicated;his mind seemed separated into different chambers; not a sound carried from one to the other.
In pursuance of this resolve, he took up his residence in the Puritan town, as Roger Chillingworth, without other introduction than the learning and intelligence of which he possessed more than a common measure.
The want of means deprived him of the advantages of a University education; and lacking the stamp of a degree, he could not hope for that position which his scholarship and his talents entitled him to claim.
The Common Reader Volume 1 26 Essays on Jane Austen, George Eliot, Conrad, Montaigne and Others
His learning may be as profound as Mark Pattison's, but in an essay it must be so fused by the magic of writing that not a fact juts out, not a dogma tears the surface of the texture.