read eagerly for a few days or weeks in order to get up a subject; but
the pure delight in literature for its own sake has left him, and he
is as decidedly prosaic a tradesman as his own hosier. Such a man soon
joins the written-out division, and, unless he travels much or has a
keenly humorous eye for the things about him, he runs a very good
chance of becoming an intolerable bore. He forgets that the substance
of his brain is constantly fading, and that he needs not only to
replenish the physical substance of the organ by constant care, but to
replenish all his dwindling stores of knowledge, ideas, and even of
verbal resources. Among the older authors there were some who offered
melancholy spectacles of mental exhaustion; and the practised reader
knows how to look for particular features in their work, just as he
looks for Wouvermans' white horse and Beaumont's brown tree. These
literary spinners forget the example of Macaulay, who was quite
contented if he turned out two foolscap pages as his actual completed
task in mere writing for one day. He was never tired of laying in new
stores, and he persistently refreshed his memory by running over books
which he had read oftentimes before. The books and manuscripts which
Gibbon read in twenty years reached such an enormous number that, when
he attempted to form a catalogue of them, he was compelled to give up
the task in despair; he was constantly adding to the enormous
reservoir of knowledge which he had at command, and thus his work
never grew stale, and he was ready instantly with a hundred
illustrative lights on any point which chanced to crop up either in
conversation or in the course of his reading. The cheap and flashy
writer is inclined to disdain the men who are thorough in their
studies; but, while his work grows thin and poor, the judicious
reader's becomes marked by more and more of richness and fulness.

Burke kept his vast accumulations of knowledge perfectly fresh; and I