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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: this real fact:- that you might read all the books in the British
Museum (if you could live long enough), and remain an utterly
"illiterate," uneducated person; but that if you read ten pages of a
good book, letter by letter,--that is to say, with real accuracy,--
you are for evermore in some measure an educated person. The entire
difference between education and non-education (as regards the
merely intellectual part of it), consists in this accuracy. A well-
educated gentleman may not know many languages,--may not be able to
speak any but his own,--may have read very few books. But whatever
language he knows, he knows precisely; whatever word he pronounces,
he pronounces rightly; above all, he is learned in the PEERAGE of
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