larly as including Greek, Latin, and Oriental Philology, and the necessary accompaniments-became, for a considerable period, the most honoured form of intellectual activity everywhere in Europe. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were peculiarly the age of scholars-not in the sense that there have not been individual scholars since comparable, with the advantage too of new lights on their side, to the scholars of those centuries; but in the sense that scholarship was then the kind of intellectual occupation most in requisition, that it was the scholars who were then pensioned and laurelled, and that an unusual amount of the mind that might have been available for intellectual purposes generally then ran towards erudition and was locked up in the exercise of memory. Looking back now, it is the eagles and lynxes of those centuries, their great poets and their great men of science, that we descry with admiration; but decidedly the largest amount of contemporary notice was given to the tortoises. Or, if a mind of the poetical or the speculative order-a Bacon, a Galileo, or a Spenser-did, by reason of the magnitude of its display, arrest the due degree of attention, it was always supposed, and justly supposed, that that mind was a full and not an empty one that, whatever might be its constitutional mode of action, it was provided with a vast fund of material in the shape of universal acquisition. There were men, on the other hand, who perhaps would have been called more expressly men of erudition, but who, because they were not mere plodders, but combined with their erudition a competent share of wit, poetic vigour, or active faculty, rivalled the very greatest, and were heard of over larger tracts of space. Such were Erasmus, Buchanan, and Grotius.

But this age of the supreme reputation of scholarship passed away; and there came in that era of more multifarious activity, extending down to the present day, in which Learning and its votaries have been packed away in corners, and in which, though the glance

of favour still follows them, the public gaze is distracted by hosts marching hither and thither under many varied banners, and yet all equally in the service of Intellect. We have our men of science, our artists, our engineers, and so on, in such crowds as were never seen before; our subdivisions of each class are becom ing more numerous, and the distances between classes and subdivisions are widening; and in each, apart from the others, such excellence is attainable as shall be dignified with the name of greatness. Fortunately, however, there still lingers among us, amid all this complexity of intellectual occupation, something of the old conception that no man can do much without a large basis of acquired knowledge, and something of the old respect for knowledge that seems universal. Remembering in a vague way the old division of Intellect (still the most useful we have for popular purposes) into its chief modes or faculties-Memory, Reason, and Imagination -we are aware of three main kinds of eminence that there may be and are among intellectual men, each by itself deserving the name of greatness. There is the greatness of a mind in which memory is the paramount mode-i.e. the greatness of vast information or erudition; there is the greatness of a mind in which the speculative faculty has been paramount-i.e. the greatness of the Thinker; and there is the greatness of a mind in which Imagination has determined the form of the resultsi.e. the greatness of the Poet. Object as you like to metaphysical distinctions of this sort, you cannot, for the life of you, avoid some recognition of this classification if you talk about men; and you cannot safely blot out such distinctions till you have first made them very strongly. Now, whatever preferences we may have for greatness of the two last kinds, we do welcome among us anything approaching to greatness of the first. A man of universal information, a man with the whole history of the world in the back of his head, like Niebuhr, or Bunsen, or Hallam, has the mass and force of an

elephant in the society in which he is. You are discussing a matter beautifully, not knowing anything about it, but simply out of the ready resources of your own mind! Tramp, crash, goes the elephant, if he can be stirred to it; and your little fabric is gone. You were wrong in your dates and precedents; there was some confounded Egyptian or Lower Greek, of whom you had never heard, who had settled all that ages before you were born; if you would

take the trouble to refer to such and such a work, page so and so, you would find a complete account of it, and be highly interested! Or, if the elephant is good-humoured and communicative, and you are docile, and can be happy without the incessant clack-clack of your own tongue, what riches of lore and anecdote you might get out of him. Talk of a night with Burns! All very good in its way; but what a night one might have had also with Niebuhr or Porson! This, we say, is felt whenever the opportunity is furnished by a man of the right order; and, whatever amount of premium we may put on the Poet and the Philosopher, we have not ceased to reverence the man of erudition.

But this is not all. Even while making the distinction of minds according to the mood or faculty which is constitutionally, or by habit, paramount in them, we have not lost sight of the fact that the moods or faculties may alternate or co-exist in the same mind, and that in any case it is a certain total force or capacity of mind that is thrown into this or that faculty. And so, while, on the one hand, we cannot allow the title of greatness, on account of memory, to a mind which we recognise as deficient in judgment or invention-while we tacitly assume that an ass or a clod will remember only as an ass or a clod remembers, and will have, at the end of the chapter, only a farrago of recollections corresponding to its nature-in the same manner we are chary in supposing that there can be truly great speculation, a truly noble poetry, where there is a poor cargo in the memory. Ex nihilo nil fit; and the material that any mind can work

with in any way can only consist in that mind's recollections. By extension it may be said that, as regards individuals, there can be no massive and powerful construction of intellect, of any kind whatever, where there is not solid and varied learning, whether accumulated through reading and tradition or by experience, and that, as regards communities, no great national literature can found itself, be it in poetry or in philosophy, where the soil of acquired knowledge is not broad and rich. "We artists can't do without a little 'istory, ma'am," said a painter of some note to a lady of our acquaintance; and the maxim which delighted Usher, though more general, is to the same effect: "Nescire "quid antea quam natus sis acciderit, id est

semper esse puerum:""Not to know what "happened before you were born is to be "always a child." But as good a statement of the matter as is to be found anywhere is that given by a man who made some disturbance in his day, but is not now much heard of-the historian and geographer Pinkerton. "In all ages, since the invention of letters," he says in the preface to his Inquiry into the History of Scotland, "two opposite "paths have conducted to the temple of "fame-the path of GENIUS and that of "ERUDITION. These qualities, in a lesser "degree, bear the names of Ingenuity "and Learning. Every one who has "looked into literary history must know "that Erudition or even Learning is perhaps a surer path to fame than Genius

or Ingenuity; inasmuch as innumerable "ancient works of mere learning have "reached our time, whereas not one of

mere genius has had that fortune. For "Homer, Pindar, and the other famous poets, were all men as remarkable for "learning as for genius; which qualities "conjoined alone stamp perfection on a "work. Homer's learning arose from "travelling and conversation, as Shake"speare's from books in his own language. Of all the ancient poets-that "is, of those whose essential form is "genius-it is impossible to point out

one who was not profoundly learned; "if we only except Anacreon, whose

"remains are so few that we cannot "judge of his learning from them. It "is indeed as impossible to be a great "writer without learning as to be wealthy "without property, or to unite any "other contradiction in terms. Nay, in "modern times, men of vast erudition " and men of vast genius have generally "been contemporary in the same country

-as Shakespeare and Saville, Milton "and Selden, in England; Corneille and "Salmasius in France; Tasso and Sigo"nius in Italy; Cervantes and Aldrete " in Spain."

Though expressed in language a little out of fashion now, these remarks are sound; and the use of the word Ingenuity to denote a lesser form of what is called Genius might be happily revived. The special application which Pinkerton meant to make of his remarks was that, up to the time at which he wrote (1789), Scotland, owing to the want of means, had been a less learned country than England, and had consequently, though prolific in ingenious spirits and not without men of genius, been unable to generate or to support a literature so rich, firm, and varied as that of the sister nation. Had Pinkerton looked about him, he might have cited contemporary instances in farther illustration of his remark that the most powerful minds of a country are apt to be those who join learning to their other excellencies, and that great movements in speculation and strong bursts of creative genius in a nation, where such things occur, will be found to derive their nutriment, more or less visibly, from a surrounding loam and subsoil of unusual erudition. In England, Johnson, then just dead, and Burke, then still living, were both men who were regarded as prodigies of information. In Germany, as if to shatter by one absolute instance the notion that at least greatness of philosophic intellect might consist with a small stock of learning, or even be favoured by it, Kant-the man whose main work was a new analysis of the human mind itself, and who might be supposed therefore to require but a small load of external stuff for his purpose

was, in reality, a man who had gone through the whole round of the physical sciences, knew all geography and all history, read the archives of all societies, and could entertain his guests with abundance of biographic anecdote from every land, and the last morsels of political gossip. Nay, in Scotland itself, whether or not Pinkerton was strictly just as to the past, there was to be confirmation of his main remark in the near future. James Watt, to whose kind of life-labour, as little as to Kant's, lore or history in excess might have seemed necessary-who needed only, one might have thought, mathematics of double strength, a knack of construction, and plenty of iron-is remembered yet as a man of the most universal information, and the most omnivorous appetite for reading, within as wide a circle of friends as any one then commanded. Scott found in him as much of even his own peculiar lore of history, antiquities, and legend as would have furnished forth another set of Waverley Novels. As regards Scott himself, according to no definition of learning save that of a pedant, could it be denied that he was a very learned

man.

Only the other day, too, in that Sir William Hamilton, a dilution of whose speculations, thirty years after the gist of them was published, has been trickling with strange effect over the field of English Theology, there was lost to Scotland a mind, not only of the hardest grasp, but of erudition that seemed boundless. England, the while, had amply within herself kept up her more ancient fame. In Coleridge, the English philosophic mind of richest and subtlest influence on those whose youth dates from between 1810 and 1830, the value of abundant and varied nutrition for the thinking faculty is strikingly seen. The fulness and retentiveness of Lord Macaulay's memory were proverbial; and he was also one of those men of prodigious information who pour it out in talk. Nor let poor De Quincey be forgotten-De Quincey, who, in his later days, flitted about like a small superannuated wizard in the lanes and highways of an obscure country neigh

bourhood, a few miles from Edinburgh, while Macaulay's robuster figure was known in the crowds of Westminster and Holborn, and whose death and burial in his place of retreat had scarce a notice from the newspapers in the year which removed Macaulay, but who was, nevertheless, a finer and deeper than Macaulay in some things, and whose volumes of stray remains, the gatherings from many periodicals, will hold, in the eyes of true criticism, the same relation to Macaulay's works that a tree of carved and filagreed silver might hold to a more square and solid work of highly burnished and yellower, but somewhat less precious, metal.

Alas! all the while that we speak of universality of knowledge the thing is impossible. There may, as we have said, have been a time when any one man could be the encyclopædia of his neighbourhood or country, and could hold in his single memory as much lore as his generation distributively possessed. When this time was whether it ceased with Homer, or with Herodotus, or with Aristotle, or whether any of those mediæval schoolmen, of whom we hear such incredible things, were really, in any tolerably strict sense, reservoirs of the totum scibile of the Europe of their days-we need not inquire. For us, at least, now, the time is irrecoverably past. Our universality of learning is but a figure of speech. Our Kants, our Hamiltons, our Hallams, our Bunsens, our Burkes, our Bentleys, or even their predecessors, the Seldens, the Ushers, the Grotii, the Salmasii, the Scaligers, were colossi of knowledge only relatively-Gullivers among the Lilliputians. A man seems learned to you who knows what you do not chance to know; and we wonder at the copiousness of some memories, for the same reason that the believers in Neptune worshipped in his temple because it is the shields of the saved men that make the array on the walls, and there is no representation to tell us of the number of the drowned. For, consider a moment. At whatever time it was, if it ever was, that one man might know, in any plausible sense, as

much as all men knew besides, the world has been rushing on since then. Generation has followed generation, each with its millions of lives, and thousands of millions of events, with its battles, its treaties, its books; and, in grappling with this mere increase of what is ordinarily called history, the powers of the most prodigious memory that there is would be baffled, burst, and overwhelmed. Try some of your reputedly learned friends. Ask any of them who has not recently been cramming on the subject, to repeat Macaulay's feat of enumerating in chronological order the Archbishops of Canterbury. Or be more merciful, and only beg one of them to be good enough, in this time of interest in America, to favour you on the spot with a list of the presidents of the United States. Yet these are but drops in the ocean of past facts of which Universal History consists. Then, separate from History or Biography, in the common acceptation, but equally matters to be grasped by him who aspires to universal knowledge, are all those orders of observations, ideas, and conclusions, which form the cycle of the sciences and arts-the great sciences of matter and life, with their thousand and one applications and ramifications. What activity in these during the few ages past! Who, in addition to the bulk of the History of the World, ordinarily so called, from the first pant of Humanity until now, shall pretend to keep up with mathematical knowledge to its last developments in the hands of Cayley, and Sylvester, and Irish Sir William of the Quaternions-with astronomical knowledge, to its state in the mind of Herschel-with mechanical science, as represented in its chief living teachers, and in the mills and meshwork of our globe-with the science and art of metallurgy, as they are being expounded at large in Dr. Percy's workwith chemistry as far as Faraday-with anatomy and all biological science, as known to our Sharpeys, and Huxleys, and Owens-and with the whole medley of pure or mixed sciences besides, as seen in conclave in the Royal Society,

or on circuit in the British Association? Sometimes a demarcation is drawn by the votaries of these sciences, or of science in general, between the kind of knowledge of which these sciences consist, and that which is more usually known as learning or knowledge of history. Convenient in a certain respect, the demarcation, in other respects, is vicious. These sciences themselves belong to History; they are registers and summaries of what men have thought and found out. All recollection is History; any one science as it exists in the head of any one person is a recollection of so much observation or speculation; and the time may come when the law of gravitation itself, as we now read it, shall be chiefly interesting as the mode of human thought of a particular era. But, whether all knowledge may philosophically be resolved into History or not, this is certain, that all knowledge is too much for us. Universal knowledge is impossible. That proportion which the skull of man bears to the dome of heaven above it, which our Gothic forefathers called the skull of the giant Ymer, the same proportion our capacity for knowing or remembering bears to all that is to be known or remembered.

Hence, as has been hinted, a perception among the judicious that there may be various kinds of learning, all entitled to the name. For one thing, any time this hundred years, the sole pretensions of Philology, once not unnatural, to the name of Learning, have been knocked on the head. Philology, or even the portion of it which consists of Greek and Latin Scholarship, remains, indeed, a department of universal learning surpassingly interesting, of rich fruit and promise, and with the singular advantage in its favour that it has been organized as no other has been for the uses of tuition. But when, as sometimes happens, a Greek and Latin scholar makes a blunder in a matter of recent history or of contemporary fact, he is so far less "learned" than the nonacademic person who can correct him. To know something of the municipal

history of London, of its divisions into wards and parishes, and the like, is as much a bit of "learning" as to know the constitution of a Roman colony. If a man were thoroughly up in the political history of Europe since 1789, not only would his intelligence of passing affairs and his worth for any public practical purpose be greater than that of any classical scholar going who had not that knowledge, but he would be entitled to accuse the scholar of a disgraceful defect of "learning." And so, in a thousand ways, Learning-that which really and truly ought to be called Learning-divides itself into pools and streams. An Englishman may be very learned, as Pinkerton thinks Shakespeare was, through the medium of his own English tongue-may be learned now, through this medium, even about the Greeks and Romans. Then there is the learning of the Mathematician, the learning of the Chemist, the learning of the Physiologist, the learning of the Natural Historian, the learning of the Political Economist, and so on. We do not live now in the seventeenth century; and whoever has a considerable fund of information in any one of these departments of science is as much entitled to kick out of his way the mere grammarian, or the mere plodder in Church History, or the mere searcher in the antiquities of Literary History, as any of these gentlemen would be to return the compliment. As there are various crafts and intellectual walks, so that kind of knowledge which is the best working capital in each is true learning in its place. Out of the whole accumulation of existing or accessible knowledge let every man help himself, and let each be tolerant of a choice or a possession different from his own.

But what of him who will be content with no one branch of knowledge, who will range widely, who will be a power at large in the realm of intellect, who retains the old aspiration after the totum scibile, who craves after as near an approach to universality of information as the limits of things will permit? Life is short for such a person, be his facul