Self-training in a sentence

His self-training merely developed the great qualities of which he was conscious, as was Disraeli when he made his early failures in Parliament.

It began one summer morning about two years after the close of the war-an interval which she had spent in various efforts at self-help, at self-training.

And though Miss Fennimore thought her science puerile, her credulity extensive, and her observations inaccurate, yet she deemed even this ladylike dabbling worthy of respect as an element of rational pleasure and self-training, and tried to make Bertha respect it, and abstain from inundating Miss Charlecote with sesquipedalian names for systems and families, and, above all, from her principal delight, setting the two ladies together by the ears, by appealing to her governess to support her abuse of Linnaeus as an old 'dictionary-maker,' or for some bold geological theory that poor Honor was utterly unprepared to swallow.

Chaucer's works form a clearly recognisable series of steps towards the highest achievement of which, under the circumstances in which he lived and wrote, he can be held to have been capable; and his long and arduous self-training, whether consciously or not directed to a particular end, was of that sure kind from which genius itself derives strength.