world has known and done in all the great fields of its activity gave his
discussions of specific questions breadth, variety, charm, and literary
interest. He brought to the particular measure largeness of view,
dispassionateness of temper, and the philosophic mind; and his work came
to have cultural significance and quality.

Such a career, the record of which may be clearly traced not only in
public history but in a vast mass of preparatory notes and memoranda of
every description, illustrates in a very noble way the importance of that
constant and general preparation which ought to include special
preparation as a landscape includes the individual field. That field may
have great value and ought to have the most careful tillage; but it cannot
be separated, in any just and true vision, from the other fields which it
touches and which run, in unbroken continuity, to the horizon; and this
preparation not only involves the fruitful attitude towards life upon
which comment has been made, but it involves also constant study in many
directions with the definite purpose of enrichment and enlargement. No
kind of knowledge comes amiss in this larger training. History,
literature, art, and science have their different kinds of nurture to
impart, and their different kinds of material to supply; and the wise man
will open his mind to their teaching and his nature to their ripening
touch. The widely accepted idea that a man not only needs nothing more for
a specific task than the specific skill which it demands, but that any
larger skill tends to superficiality, is the product of that tendency to
excessive specialisation which has impaired the harmony of modern
education and dwarfed many men of large native capacity.

In some departments of knowledge and activity the demands are so great on
time and strength that the man who works in them can hardly venture
outside of them without impairing the totality of his achievement; but