The master had thus first employed his neophyte in arranging and
compiling materials for a great critical work in which Norreys himself
was engaged. In this stage of scholastic preparation, Leonard was
necessarily led to the acquisition of languages, for which he had great
aptitude; the foundations of a large and comprehensive erudition were
solidly constructed. He traced by the ploughshare the walls of the
destined city. Habits of accuracy and of generalization became formed
insensibly; and that precious faculty which seizes, amidst accumulated
materials, those that serve the object for which they are explored,--that
faculty which quadruples all force, by concentrating it on one point,--
once roused into action, gave purpose to every toil and quickness to each
perception. But Norreys did not confine his pupil solely to the mute
world of a library; he introduced him to some of the first minds in arts,
science, and letters, and active life. "These," said he, "are the living
ideas of the present, out of which books for the future will be written:
study them; and here, as in the volumes of the past, diligently amass and
deliberately compile."

By degrees Norreys led on that young ardent mind from the selection of
ideas to their aesthetic analysis,--from compilation to criticism; but
criticism severe, close, and logical,--a reason for each word of praise
or of blame. Led in this stage of his career to examine into the laws of
beauty, a new light broke upon his mind; from amidst the masses of marble
he had piled around him rose the vision of the statue.

And so, suddenly, one day Norreys said to him, "I need a compiler no
longer,--maintain yourself by your own creations." And Leonard wrote,
and a work flowered up from the seed deep buried, and the soil well
cleared to the rays of the sun and the healthful influence of expanded