Milord Bolingbroke, and ask him whether England can produce a scholar
equal to Peter Huet, who in twenty years wrote notes to sixty-two
volumes of Classics,* for the sake of a prince who never read a line in
one of them?"


* The Delphin Classics.


"We have some scholars," answered Bolingbroke; "but we certainly have no
Huet. It is strange enough, but learning seems to me like a circle: it
grows weaker the more it spreads. We now see many people capable of
reading commentaries, but very few indeed capable of writing them."

"True," answered Huet; and in his reply he introduced the celebrated
illustration which is at this day mentioned among his most felicitous
/bons mots/. "Scholarship, formerly the most difficult and unaided
enterprise of Genius, has now been made, by the very toils of the first
mariners, but an easy and commonplace voyage of leisure. But who would
compare the great men, whose very difficulties not only proved their
ardour, but brought them the patience and the courage which alone are
the parents of a genuine triumph, to the indolent loiterers of the
present day, who, having little of difficulty to conquer, have nothing
of glory to attain? For my part, there seems to me the same difference
between a scholar of our days and one of the past as there is between
Christopher Columbus and the master of a packet-boat from Calais to
Dover!"

"But," cried Anthony Hamilton, taking a pinch of snuff with the air of a
man about to utter a witty thing, "but what have we--we spirits of the