ties of acquisition what they may; and, since he cannot learn all, what shall he learn, and what let go? Similar, and indeed identical, within a narrower field, is the question as to the kind of instruction to be imparted to youth in the process of general, as distinct from special, education. The child has but a few years at school, the youth but a few years more at college; what shall be taught them during these years of training? The knowledge imparted to youth, it is said, ought to be that which will prove of most worth, which will be the best working capital throughout life. To which proposition, rightly understood, there can be no objection. But what a problem to determine absolutely what cannot be of use! There is a notion abroad as if the wave of contemporary facts and doctrines amid which we live were to all intents and purposes our sole proper intellectual element. This is what Time has rolled down to us; as it is our inheritance, so should it be our capital to work with.

What our own age holds in solution in a natural and unforced way amounts actually, without any trouble on our part, to the whole essence of the Past so far as it retains vitality and productiveness; whatever is foregone and forgotten is defunct, and why angle back with our antiquarian fishing-rods in a sea of refuse? Count your pigs, says Mr. Roebuck; take stock of the four-footed things on your own farm or within your own neighbourhood; what have you to do with old rubbish about Jehoshaphat and Jeroboam In the positive part of this advice, Dr. Arnott, from whom Mr. Roebuck borrowed it, put in a humorous form a just maxim of education which he has done much to enforce in the course of his life; but, if the negative part is Mr. Roebuck's own, we fear he has not fathomed that depth of sound psychology which the old woman

reached when she told of the intellectual and moral comfort she derived from "that grand word Mesopotamia," pronounced so frequently in the sermon. To the effects of sound add those of association. The valley of Jehoshaphat

may seem full of dry bones; but prophesy unto these dry bones, and they shall live. And so, even when the doctrine which Mr. Roebuck was driving at is expressed in more exact and perfect shape when it is demonstrated to us that the most useful knowledge, and therefore the proper knowledge to be imparted in rational education, must necessarily be that which includes the last and strongest certainties in the sciences of human health and conductthere is danger of a Chinese narrowness of view as to what else may be useful. In short, there must be great licence in this matter; and, just as even those who hold the Utilitarian theory of Morals profess that it would be absurd to expect a calculation of utilities to be gone through with reference to every intended action, and that in the main past experience in such things has become organic in the form of an instinct, so it is with knowledge. To be up in the best contemporary science, not to be behindhand in the facts, conclusions, and results, which form the visible working capital of our own generation as a whole, may be the most essential learning for a man of the present who will rule in the intellectual realm, whether as a poet or as a thinker; but let us be cautious in saying, for such a man, what knowledge shall be refuse. A dead frog hung on an iron rail, and twitching or seeming to twitch its limbs, might appear as fatherless and motherless and kinless a fact as could well be; and yet out of such a waif of a fact has come the whole science of Galvanism. For aught we know, the whole past history of the world may be a yet unexplored wilderness of dead frogs hanging on iron railings, and wasting their twitches on the desert air. At least,

then, let those few in every community who will be men of universal lore in the old sense, have the full liberty of the wilderness. It is enough to lay down the law, that what shall justly be called learning varies with the age, that thorough and complete learning in any age must involve all that exists as History in that age down to its latest

tittle, and so that any scholar now that should be learned only in the range of things that formed the lore of Grotius, and should not be widely and accurately informed in those sciences and arts which have come into being since Grotius lived, would not be the man of learning in this time that Grotius was in his.

Whether one is to help oneself to the species of information that one wants, or is to strive after universal information, much of the necessary means consists now, as it has consisted in all ages since the very earliest, in access to books. Observation, conversation, and experience are wondrous caterers even now, and one may grow fat even on them alone; but, since Homer's time or thereabouts-if, indeed, Homer himself had not a private subscription at Mudie'sreading and the convenience of books have been the sovereign sources of knowledge for those who have possessed it in large extent. The history of the world's learning, in short, is the history of libraries; and the measure of the learning of any particular country now, and of the intellectual strength that may be dependent on learning, is furnished by the number, the size, and the accessibility of its libraries. To found a library where one did not exist has been in many a case the most splendid public service that a king could have thought of; and those who have more money than they know what to do with might find this mode of doing good still worth their consideration. As it is, who shall calculate the amount of nutritive juice that finds its way into the veins of our body-politic, through a thousand pipes and channels, from the central reservoir of the British Museum, and from the other libraries, great and small, distributed through the Empire? If Scotland has, in any degree, made up her leeway in point of learning since Pinkerton's time, it is because she has since then increased the number of her libraries, although in this respect there is still much for Scottish patriotism to effect north of Edinburgh. For, though it is a great thing to have, on a few shelves in private houses, the master

pieces of our own British, or even of general literature-the select classics of different lands and tongues, whether in Poetry, Philosophy, or History-this does not answer to the idea of a library that shall feed and sustain the learning of a district. De Quincey it was who, borrowing a mode of speaking which he had heard from Wordsworth, made a distribution of the books comprising universal literature into two kindsBooks of Knowledge and Books of Power. By the last he meant those classics of various kinds-few, in proportion, in any language-in which the essential character is that they rouse, stir, delight, and warm, or even irritate and enrage the mind, in a subtle and complex manner, through art and genius, rather than convey information. These are the classics or master-works; and to have these or a few of them by one as one's own property, is to have the means always at hand of the highest enjoyment and the richest culture. The Books of Knowledge, on the other hand, are the myriads and myriads of books besides, whose main aim it is to convey information-books of facts, books of receipts, books of instruction in the thousand and one sciences, books of technical knowledge, Grammars, Lexicons, Atlases, the Statutes at large, Almanacks, County-histories, Directories, Pharmacopoeias. These form the main ocean of books in all languages, on whose coarse multitudinous breadth the true Books of Power are discernible nantes rari. So much for Wordsworth's and De Quincey's distinction. It will not perhaps bear very strict application; for in reality the two orders of books shade inextricably into each other. Much of the power of books recognised as of the highest power depends really on the matter of information which they convey; and books that profess to be chiefly books of knowledge may take rank among books of power through the force of their form and style as well as through the exciting greatness of their matter. The distinction, nevertheless, has a certain obvious worth; and one may say, in terms of it, that

Books of Power will take care of themselves, and that it is abundance and variety more peculiarly of Books of Knowledge of that immense class of books that have no persuasive voices and no wide circles of private friendsthat ought to be aimed at in great public libraries. It is in vast accumulations of such books, forming as it were colossal organs of memory expressly instituted for the general mind, that communities have the security for the maintenance of learning among them, and of all that learning involves-which may include, unless Pinkerton was more mistaken than appears, the prospect of long being able to procreate additional Books of Power.

The liberty of libraries, therefore, is what our men of learning will always crave; nor can any agency be devised that should reconcile such, or the society in which they live, to the slightest restriction of their right to range through libraries at their pleasure, seeking for knowledge even in their dingiest recesses, and detaching from their main body, for the pursuit of it when the quantities become excessively minute, little forces of bookworms. What miraculous feats, too, may be done by single men, and these by no means monsters of untidiness, in grappling with the contents of libraries, there are records to attest. But yet the thought of being turned loose to find one's own way towards the acquisition of universal knowledge, or even of one variety of knowledge, amid the libraries of books in which it may be distributed, is positively appalling. The British Museum Library, allowing its duplicates and various editions to be set off against its deficiencies, may stand as representing the universal literature of the world, in all countries and languages, up to the present time. Well, when the library was scarcely so large as it is now, we made this calculationthat to pass all the volumes it contains merely through hand, allowing an average of half-an-hour for the inspection of each volume, would take a man eighty years, working three hundred days in every year, and ten hours in every day.

Moreover, by this process, all that would be acquired would only be a certain knowledge, at first hand, of universal Bibliography, or of books as objects, apart from their substance or contents. Hence, in all ages, since knowledge through books was first precious to man, the existence and multiplication of a class of books intended to economize time and trouble by saving to a great extent the necessity of ranging among books of knowledge generally. These are books of Digest and Reference, killing down and superseding other books in great masses and numbers. To trace the history of this class of books, and of the art of systematizing knowledge which they represent, might be very interesting. It has been by successive stages, even within the last two hundred years, that the art has reached its highest development in what are now familiarly known as Encyclopædias-a name formerly used to designate the round of sciences and arts deemed essential to a liberal education, but now used more extensively to imply Dictionaries of Universal Information, historical as well as scientific.

It needs not again to protest against the notion that such works ever can really supersede the use of libraries as such, the miscellaneous range which scholarship demands and has been accustomed to among all original books back to Adam, or to warn that the prevalence of such a notion, or exclusive faith in Encyclopædias, would be the death of true learning in a choking increase of that detestable conceit of proximate knowledge which is already rife enough. All this well understood, one need not be afraid of speaking too highly of the services rendered in the cause of learning by good Encyclopædias, not only to the public at large, but also to the wisest and most learned. services are great and splendid. Encyclopædia in any man's house is a possession in itself for him and his family; an Encyclopædia chained at Charing-cross for public reference would be a boon to London worth fifty drinking-fountains. Let those judge who

These

An

know, and who, if they are honest, ought to confess. No need to go so far as that greatest of all existing Encyclopædias-of course, a German one-the Encyclopædia of Ersch and Gruber, which has been in course of publication since 1818, and which is not completed yet, although there are 123 quarto volumes of it, and, if you bought a copy, you would have to take it home in a cart. Instances nearer at hand are two Encyclopædias, or reissues of Encyclopædias, which have been recently brought out among ourselves, of more British dimensions and with more of British expedition-the eighth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica in twenty-one volumes, price twenty-four guineas, and the English Cyclopædia of Mr. Charles Knight in twenty-two volumes, price twelve pounds. Oh, if the public at large but knew what secret pillage goes on night and day of these and similar works of reference! It is almost the interest of those who professionally instruct the public that these works should not be generally bought. What would become of them if there were an Encyclopædia in every house, or even in every parish? You read a fine leading article in a newspaper. It tells you much in small compass about the constitution of the United States, or the area of slavery, or about Mexico, or about the life of the last public man that has dropped into the grave, or about whatever other topic is uppermost; and the writer seems to you a man of extraordinary information. Whew! it is all out of the Encyclopædia; and the writer knew nothing about the matter himself till he prigged it out of the Encyclopædia last night for your benefit. An Encyclopædia is kept on tap for the contributors in every newspaper office; half the contents of a certain kind in all our Magazines and Reviews are only minced or mashed Encyclopædia. Within the last two paragraphs, in writing about Encyclopædias, I have myself consulted an Encyclopædia. Why is the public such an ass? Can't every man get an Encyclopædia for himself, and be independent?

Whoever wants an Encyclopædia, extensive and yet cheap, and compiled throughout on the principle of compendious and accurate information on all subjects rather than on that of collected individual dissertations, cannot do better than procure the English Cyclopædia of Mr. Charles Knight. There are other Encyclopædias which may have their characteristic excellencies, or even, in some things, superiorities; and of such a work as the new edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, eclipsing, as it does, even the national fame of the previous editions, the country may well be proud. But, as a digest of universal knowledge which shall serve for the popular and miscellaneous purposes of all, and at the same time furnish materials and abstracts for those who are studying special subjects, and aim at substantial and exact science, the English Cyclopædia may be confidently recommended.1 This also is a noble work; and it is to the credit of Mr. Knight that, during years of his life in which he has been so busy with important labours of his own, such a work should have gone on regularly to completion under his superintendence. The work is, so far as that might be, a reissue of the old "Penny Cyclopædia," published between 1833 and 1843, under the able and scholarly editorship of Mr. George Long, and the great merits of which are well known, and would have been more loudly proclaimed by those that had reason to know them best, but for a cowardly shame at acknowledging obligations to a work of reference which had the unfortunate word "Penny" as part of its name. What author, not a paragon of conscientiousness, could

1 A work, of smaller dimensions than either the Encyclopædia Britannica or the English Cyclopædia, which deserves honourable mention, and promises to have a place of its own-not only because its smaller dimensions may adapt it to a wide class, but also on other grounds--is Chambers's Encyclopædia, now in course of publication by Messrs. Chambers of Edinburgh. Three volumes of this work, reaching from A to ELE, have appeared; which, so far as we have consulted them, seem peculiarly well editedmasses of various and far-sought information, admirably compressed.

venture to cite the "Penny Cyclopædia" in the text of a book as his authority for a statement, or to let the words "Penny Cyc." figure among his footnotes? It would have been like walking down Regent Street at four o'clock, arm-in-arm with your uncle Hodge from the country, in his grey frieze, white bone buttons, and fluffy hat. And yet, as people do not hesitate to sponge secretly on honest and well-to-do men they would not be seen walking with, so there were large transactions in private by many a bookmaking magnate with the convenient bank of the "Penny Cyc." This is remedied now; and, in its new form of The English Cyclopædia, a really great and trustworthy work of reference will have more justice done to it. In the new work there has been accurate revision of all the matter of the oldwhich matter consisted wholly of original articles expressly written for the work by a great number of the most competent men in the kingdom; and by this means, together with the addition of a large mass of new authorship on subjects that have turned up within the last twenty years, the work has been brought down, as closely as possible, to the present state of knowledge. Moreover, there is now a subdivision of the total work into four parts, any one of which may be purchased separatelyArts and Sciences, in eight volumes; Natural History, in four volumes; Biography, in six volumes; and Geography, in four volumes. On the whole, there is no use in making four bites of an Encyclopædia, and the best policy will be to get the work entire.

Whoever does so will have a little library worth having. Where such an Encyclopædia is at hand in a household, it will become a daily habit to consult it. You are interested in what goes on in the world, and read your newspaper of a morning. Something fresh is always turning up there in the way of intelligence of war, enterprise, or political excitement, in some region or spot about which your ideas are rather dim-in Central America, on the Potomac, in

Queensland, in Morocco, on the Yangtse-Kiang, in Moscow, at Timbuctoo, at Pesth; and, if it did not cost you too much trouble, you would rather like to follow the Muse of History, with some clearness of vision, in these her capricious zigzags over the surface of the earth. Well, you set your boys and girls on the hunt through the Cyclopædia of Geography; it is good amusement for them; and, when you come home in the evening, there you have the information all ready for you, at the cost of a penny to Curly-head, or a kiss to Golden-hair! And no trumpery information either, but the soundest geography that can be got from authorities like Wittich and Ritter! Or your boys and girls have been out walking in the fields, and have brought home ferns, and have no end of beetles and things to tell of that they saw under a bush; or they have been at the Zoological gardens, and are full of questions; or you yourself are disturbed in your mind, more than you would have your wife know for the world, about the Mosaic account of the Deluge, or about the action of your own heart, or about the exact amount of your anatomical identity with that accursed brute of a Gorilla, which has been walking at such a rate recently into our comfortable ways of thinking, raising a row in Edinburgh itself, and making even bishops shake in their shoes. Well, you have only to search a little in the Cyclopædia of Natural History, or among the Arts and Sciences, and there, from such men as Lindley, or Lankester, or the late Mr. Broderip, or Professor Edward Forbes, you may get as much light as will answer your purpose. Or some eminent man, living or dead, is named about whom your curiosity is raised; or you have made a bet with some one whose chronology is as shaky as your own about the age of Lord Lyndhurst, or about the date of Wellington's first command in the Peninsular War, or

about the number of children born to George the Third, or about the duration of Chatham's first ministry, or about the reign in which the poet Herrick died, or about the year when Hildebrand