well-informed clever fellows. From dunderheads and dunces we can protect
ourselves, but from your sharpwitted gentleman, all enlightenment and no
prejudice, we have but to cry, "Heaven defend us!" It is true, that the
rogue (let him be ever so enlightened) usually comes to no good himself,
--though not before he has done harm enough to his neighbours. But that
only shows that the world wants something else in those it rewards
besides intelligence per se and in the abstract; and is much too old a
world to allow any Jack Horner to pick out its plums for his own personal
gratification. Hence a man of very moderate intelligence, who believes
in God, suffers his heart to beat with human sympathies, and keeps his
eyes off your strongbox, will perhaps gain a vast deal more power than
knowledge ever gives to a rogue.

Wherefore, though I anticipate an outcry against me on the part of the
blockheads, who, strange to say, are the most credulous idolators of
Enlightenment, and if knowledge were power, would rot on a dunghill, yet,
nevertheless, I think all really enlightened men will agree with me, that
when one falls in with detached sharpshooters from the general March of
Enlightenment, it is no reason that we should make ourselves a target,
because Enlightenment has furnished them with a gun. It has, doubtless,
been already remarked by the judicious reader that of the numerous
characters introduced into this work, the larger portion belong to that
species which we call the INTELLECTUAL,--that through them are analyzed
and developed human intellect, in various forms and directions. So that
this History, rightly considered, is a kind of humble familiar Epic, or,
if you prefer it, a long Serio-Comedy, upon the Varieties of English Life
in this our Century, set in movement by the intelligences most prevalent.
And where more ordinary and less refined types of the species round and
complete the survey of our passing generation, they will often suggest,
by contrast, the deficiencies which mere intellectual culture leaves in