THE time was when every man whose business lay in intellectual matters was bound to be his own encyclopædia. Having picked up, one way or another, the amount of knowledge which he required, he walked about, carrying this stock with him, increasing it as means offered, and serving as a source of information to which others could refer that chanced to be in his neighbourhood. Nor, in those days, did the knowledge of a man so situated necessarily fall far short of all the knowledge that was to be obtained. The world was yet young; and, as all that we call learning or erudition really resolves itself into history -into a recollection of what has happened among men, or men have thought and found out the burden of legends that had been rolled down from the beginning of things in any one land was not too great for one man's memory. Homer, if there was such a person, was not only the poet of the Greek world, but also a walking compendium, from one Greek "storefarm" to another, of all the history and science then existing on both sides of the Ægean. Herodotus carried in his single head a recollection, most diligently got together, of all that it seemed worth while for a Greek to know respecting the present and the past of mankind as ranged round and away from the vast margin of the Mediterranean. What with the strong memories of those old worthies, what with the small helps of tablets, note-books, and scrolls, which the later of them may have had about No. 29.-VOL. V.

them, it does not appear that, in any article of erudition, they could be taxed with ignorance, or with knowledge under the highest contemporary mark. Later still, the alleged necessity of something like universal learning, each one for himself, among those whom nations would recognise as their intellectual chiefs, was not palpably opposed to the fact. When Plato philosophized, it was not the mere flight of a splendid speculative faculty in empty space, but the action of a mind that had grasped and digested all accessible knowledge respecting the whole world of matter and men round which it flew and whose sublimer relations it sought to establish. In Aristotle, even more conspicuously, we behold, with wonder unabated to this day, universality and minuteness of acquisition, combined, as a matter of course, with the spirit of philosophic system.

Nor did the tradition which required universality of knowledge in those who would tower highest in a community, as its men of intellect, die out with the Greeks. Different ages and countries have had different notions as to the kind of intellectual functionary most to be held in honour. Over large tracts of time, as with us perhaps now, the poet has had the undisputed pre-eminence, and been voted, nem. con., the tip-top of created beings; but there have been times when-possibly because a poet of the right order seemed a blessing past praying for-men have been content to

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offer their highest worship to the philosopher, or even, at a pinch, to such a tortoise or toad of earth as the scholar or historian. The Romans, in this respect, made a rather characteristic choice. For a time, at least, it was neither poet, philosopher, nor historian that the imperial people honoured the most and hoisted on their shoulders with the loudest shouts, but that nondescript compound of the practical parts of all three to whom they gave the name of orator. But then what a prodigy their orator had to be, to satisfy them! According to Cicero, for one real orator that was produced, Nature produced poets, philosophers, and historians, nay generals and statesmen also, by the bushel; and what he meant by making this assertion, over and above the sly reference he may have had to No. 1, we see better when we read his inventory of the things necessary for the outfit of a first-class orator. We flatter ourselves that we have orators among us; but how our House-of-Commons men would stare if this enumeration of Cicero's were made imperative! First of all, universal knowledge-not the smattering on many subjects which pleaders must acquire in handling their successive briefs, but real well-grounded knowledge in every possible department of science, art, and practice. The orator must know as much of philosophy as the philosopher, as much of history as the historian, as much of war as the general, as much of law as the jurist, as much of business as the merchant, and so on! Then, in addition to this, and to vitalize all this heap of acquisitions, there must be the whole set of the orator's special qualifications besides the voice, the presence, the energy, the training in rhetoric, the action, action, action. In other words, it was upon the orator rather than upon any other man that the Romans of this age laid that awful necessity of being his own encyclopædia which the Greeks had laid rather upon their poets and philosophers-with this farther demand, that the orator had to be an encyclopædia beautifully bound, that could stand on its legs at a moment's notice, gesticulate and speak to

perfection, and act on the nerves of a crowd like an electric battery. A generation or two later, as we see from the Dialogue of Tacitus concerning Eloquence, it had begun to be a question among the cultivated Romans whether after all oratory was the grandest of human occupations, and whether it might not be more judicious for a man of intellect to retire into the country, and there, if he would work with his brains, work in quiet, and merely "sing to the praise and glory of God," like the parish-clerk in Lincolnshire, "a little 'ymn of his own composin'." But, wheresoever and in whatsoever one were to work, it was required of every man who would be an intellectual chief among his fellows, that he should be master of the universal learning of his time.

The same tradition, with the same evidence of facts at first sight to make it plausible, has descended even into the modern world. In the early centuries of our era there were men in the monasteries or about the Courts of Europe-take our own Bede, or the Alcuin whom we lent to Charlemagne, for example-who, according to the rude standard of the age, were prodigies of universal lore and made it subserve theology. Then, on the first establishment of the great European Universities, their luminaries-the Abelards, the Aquinases, and others of those princes of the schools who lectured to their thousands of pupils were men who, though their business was logic and speculation, would not have stood their ground in the midst of such packs of hungry students clamant for knowledge unless they had been living reservoirs of the totum scibile. And what of the first great poet in any of the European vernaculars? Is it not part of the greatness of Dante that, even in a poem which is unique among the productions of genius as the expression of one extraordinary personality, he presents to us in summary the entire system of thought and knowledge of medieval Italy? A while after Dante it was when, in consequence of the so-called Revival of Letters, Scholarship or Learning in a special sense of the word-more particu