of his life, I must own that I am less moved by pity than admiration for
that poor great-hearted student. We have seen that out of the learned
indolence of twenty years, the ambition which is the instinct of a man
of genius had emerged; the serious preparation of the Great Book for the
perusal of the world had insensibly restored the claims of that noisy
world on the silent individual. And therewith came a noble remorse that
he had hitherto done so little for his species. Was it enough to write
quartos upon the past history of Human Error? Was it not his duty, when
the occasion was fairly presented, to enter upon that present, daily,
hourly war with Error, which is the sworn chivalry of Knowledge? Saint
George did not dissect dead dragons, he fought the live one. And
London, with that magnetic atmosphere which in great capitals fills the
breath of life with stimulating particles, had its share in quickening
the slow pulse of the student. In the country he read but his old
authors, and lived with them through the gone ages. In the city, my
father, during the intervals of repose from the Great Book, and still
more now that the Great Book had come to a pause, inspected the
literature of his own time. It had a prodigious effect upon him. He
was unlike the ordinary run of scholars, and, indeed, of readers, for
that matter, who, in their superstitious homage to the dead, are always
willing enough to sacrifice the living. He did justice to the
marvellous fertility of intellect which characterizes the authorship of
the present age. By the present age, I do not only mean the present
day, I commence with the century. "What," said my father one day in
dispute with Trevanion, "what characterizes the literature of our time
is its human interest. It is true that we do not see scholars
addressing scholars, but men addressing men,--not that scholars are
fewer, but that the reading public is more large. Authors in all ages
address themselves to what interests their readers; the same things do
not interest a vast community which interested half a score of monks or