of such a date!" You know nothing of antiqui- |" universal scholar," imposed during the last few ties." The minute geographer, if he discovers years. Let us think only of some few of those that you have never heard of some obscure town voluminous authors who have appeared, in our at the antipodes, will tell you-you know nothing own country alone, and in the single departments of geography. The minute historian, if he finds of history and polite letters, within the last that you never knew, or perhaps have known century, or even within two generations, and twenty times, and never cared to remember, some with whom not only all who pretend to profound event utterly insignificant to all real or imaginable scholarship, but all, "well-informed men," are purposes of history-will tell you that you know presumed to have some acquaintance;-to say nothing of history. And yet, discerning the lim- nothing of living writers and the vast mass of its within which the several branches of knowl-excellent literature which they are every year edge should be pursued, you may, after all, for all | pouring into the world! Let us think only of the important objects, have attained a more serviceable voluminous remains of Johnson, Burke, Gibbon, and prompt command over those very branches in Hume, Robertson, Goldsmith, Cowper, Crabbe, which your complacent censor flatters himself that Byron, Walter Scott, (with his hundred volumes,) he excels. and some scores of other great names. human life, it has been justly said, remains brief as ever, while its task is daily enlarging, there is no alternative but that the " general scholar" of each succeeding age must be content with possessing a less and less fraction of the entire products of the human mind. Happy men," we are half inclined ungratefully to say, "who lived when a library consisted, like that of a mediæval monastery, of some thirty or forty volumes, and who thought they knew everything when they had read these! Happy our fathers, who were not tormented with the sight of unnumbered creations of genius which we must sigh to think we can never make our own!" Now as But to return to the prospects of the so-called "universal scholar." There have been in every age men who, gifted with gigantic powers, prodigious memory, and peculiar modes of arranging and retaining knowledge, have aspired to a comprehensive acquaintance with all the chief productions of the human intellect in all time; who have made extensive incursions into every branch of human learning; and whose knowledge has borne something like an appreciable ratio to the sum total of literature and science; who, as Fontenelle expressively says of Leibnitz, have managed "to drive all the sciences abreast." Such minds have always been rare; but, as we have observed, they must soon become extinct. For what is to be- The final disposal of all this mass of literature come of them, in after ages, as the domain of hu- is with some easily managed. The bad will man knowledge indefinitely widens, and the crea- perish, it is said, and the good remain. The tions of human genius indefinitely multiply? Not former statement is true enough; the latter not that there will not be men who will then know so clear. "Bad books," says Menzel, “have absolutely more, and with far greater accuracy, their season just as vermin have. They come in than their less favored predecessors; nevertheless, swarms, and perish before we are aware. their knowledge must bear a continually diminish- How many thousand books have gone the way of ing ratio to the sum of human science and litera- all paper, or are now mouldering in our libraries? ture; they must traverse a smaller and smaller Many of our books, however, will not last even so segment of the ever widening circle! Nay, it long, for the paper itself is as bad as its contents." may well be, that the accumulations of even one All this may be true; but we cannot disguise science (chemistry, or astronomy, for instance) from ourselves, that not the bad writer alone is may be too vast, for one brief life to master. forgotten. It is but too evident that immense Or, since that thought is really too immense to be treasures of thought-of beautiful poetry, viva other than vague, let us confine ourselves to some cious wit, ingenious argument—which men would very slender additions to the task of the future not suffer to die if they could help it, must perish too; the great spoiler here acts with his accustomed impartiality. Equo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas * In "Germany alone," says Menzel, "according to a moderate calculation, ten millions (?) of volumes are annually printed. As the catalogue of every Leipzig halfyearly book-fair contains the names of more than a thousand German authors, we may compute that at the present moment there are living in Germany about fifty thousand men who have written one or more books. For the truth is, that the creations of the human Should that number increase at the same rate that it has mind transcend its capacity to collect and preserve hitherto done, the time will soon come when a catalogue them; and, like the seeds of life in the vegetaof ancient and modern German authors will contain more names than there are living readers. *** In the year ble world, the intellectual powers of man are so 1816 there were published for the first time more than prolific that they run to waste. Some readers, three thousand books; in 1822, for the first time, above four thousand books; in 1827, for the first time, above perhaps, as a bright company of splendid names five thousand; in 1932, for the first time, above six rushes on their recollection, may be disposed to say thousand; the numbers thus increasing one thousand "avaunt" to these melancholy forebodings. Sureevery five years."-(Gordon's "Translation of Menzel's German Literature.") The translator adds, from the ly, it can be only necessary to remind them of the Conversations-Lexicon, the numbers published annually votive tablets in the Temple of Neptune recording to 1837, in which year they were nearly eight thousand. The literary activity of France and England, though not escape from shipwreck. How many men have so great, has been prodigious. suffered shipwreck, and whose tablets therefore are not to be found! Others may think it impos- | lived worthies of such an age would be composed sible that great writers, with whom their own in forty folios, or more; and the history of nations generation has been so familiar, and who occupy projected on a scale which would render De Thou's such a space in its eye, can ever dwindle into in- huge seven tomes a mere sketch or abstract. The significance. The illusion vanishes the moment author who began the history of Athens by a we take them to catalogues and indexes, and show dissertation on the geological formation of the them names of authors who once made as loud a Acropolis, or the work of Leibnitz on the house noise in the world, of whom they never read a of Brunswick, in which he commences with his line. We should be too happy to believe the "Protogæa,” would be but a type of the prodigious statement of Menzel correct : "Of three good gyrations of such writers; so that the hopeless authors, one at least will be remembered by pos- student, "toiling after them in vain," would be terity; while of a hundred bad ones, who are obliged to exclaim with Voltaire's "little man of distinguished at present, not above one will hand Saturn," who only lived during five hundred revodown his evil example."* lutions, (or fifteen thousand of our years,) that scarcely had he begun to pick up a little knowledge, when he was summoned to depart; and that to live only for such a span, is, as one may say, to die as soon as one is born. It is with no cynical, but with simply mournful, feelings that we thus dwell on the mortality of the productions even of genius. We would be just, both to the living and the dead, by admitting that thousands of the latter who are forgotten, deserved But let us not be dismayed. The difference in to be remembered, and that the former would re- the position of the "general scholar” of earlier as member them if they could. Most pleasant it compared with one of later times, is not so vast as would be, no doubt, in case human life were pro- might at first be imagined. Even the former, with longed in some proportion with the augmented sum all his advantages, had far more books before him of human knowledge-to lay out our studies on than he could digest. We have but to look at the a corresponding scale. Possessed of antediluvian index of their collected works, and to mark the longevity, we might devote some twenty years or limited class of authors with whom they were faso (a year or two more or less would be of no con- miliar, to be convinced that each, after all, had sequence) to purely elementary studies and disci- travelled over but a small portion of the entire pline; the " promising lad" of fifty might com- ground. We have stated that of the literature mence his more serious school studies, under which chiefly occupies each generation, the bulk, judicious masters, in their full vigor and prime of even of its treasures, perishes; and as time makes three or four centuries; and at the age of ninety fresh accumulations, those of preceding ages pass or a hundred, the young student, just entering upon for the most part into quiet oblivion. The process life, (though as yet raw and inexperienced,) might which has taken effect on the past will be repeated be supposed to have laid a tolerably solid founda- on the present age and on every subsequent one; tion, whereon in the course of his progress to- so that the period will assuredly come when even wards manhood through the next two centuries, the great writers of our days, who seem to have he might, by due diligence and perseverance, build such enduring claims upon our gratitude and adsuch a superstructure as should justify some pre-miration, will be as little remembered as others of tensions to accurate and sound scholarship. But equal genius who have gone before them; when, alas! we forget that, even then, the old obstruc- if not wholly forgotten or superseded, they will tions to universal knowledge would soon be repro- exist only in fragments or specimens—these fragduced in a new form. The same insatiable curi-ments and specimens themselves shrinking into osity, and the same restless activity, operating narrower compass as time advances. In this way through longer periods, would rapidly extend the circle of science and literature beyond the reach of even such a student. The tremendous authors who enjoyed a career of five centuries of popularity, would be voluminous in proportion; Jeremy Taylor and Baxter, Voltaire and Walter Scott, would appear but pamphleteers in comparison. Their " opera omnia" would extend to libraries. Novels would be written to which the Great Cyrus and Clelia would be mere novellettes; wherein the heroes and heroines would be married, hanged, or drowned, after a courtship and adventures of two or three centuries. The biographies of the long "Die Gegenwart duldet keinen Richter, aber die Vergangenheit findet immer den gerechtesten." Menzel, th. i. s. 95. But our author forgets that it is possible for the courts of criticism, like those of law, to be overdone with business; that the list may contain more causes than industry and skill can get through-except by a process which leaves justice out of the question, and dares to decide without a hearing. Time is perpetually compiling a vast index expurgatorius; and though the press more than repairs his ravages on the mere matter of books, the immense masses he heaps up insure the purpose of oblivion just as effectually. Not that his contemporary waste has ceased, or become very moderate. Probably scarcely a day now passes but sees the last leaf, the last tattered remnant of the last copy of some work (great or small) of some author or other perish by violence or accident-by fire, flood, or the crumbling of mere decay. It is surely an impressive thought—this silent, unnoticed extinction of another product of some once busy and aspiring mind! Paradoxical as it may seem, the chief cause of the virtual oblivion of books is no longer their extinction, but the fond care with which they are preserved, and their immensely rapid multiplication. The press is more than a match for the moth and the worm, or the mouldering hand of time; yet It has been often affirmed-and there is some truth in it-that of all the forms of celebrity which promise to gratify man's natural longing for immortality, there is none which looks so plausible as that of literary glory. The great statesman and warrior, it is said, are known only by report, and for even that are indebted to the poet and historian. Sir Walter Scott, (a man by no means disposed to over-estimate the importance of a literary as compared with a practical life,) after looking at certain drawings of some splendid architectural monuments of ancient India, the names of whose founders have perished, justly remarks, in his diary, "Fame depends on literature, not on archi the great destroyer equally fulfils his commission, But even where a Pindar or a Tacitus undertakes the task of celebrating munificence or greatness, we are compelled to feel that after all it is but the conqueror's or statesman's portrait rather than the conqueror or statesman himself that is presented to us. On the other hand, a book is fondly presumed to be an author's second self; by it he comes, as it were, into contactinto personal communion-with the minds of his readers. It is a pleasant illusion, no doubt; and in the very few instances in which the author does attain this permanent popularity, and becomes a "household word" with posterity, the illusion ceases to be such, and the hopes of ambition are, indeed, splendidly realized. But it is not only most true that very few can attain this eminence; it has not been sufficiently observed, that as the world grows older, a still smaller and smaller portion of those who seem to have attained it will retain their position. A minute fraction of even these will be consigned to the future, and fractions even of these fractions will gradually drop away in the long march of time. The great mass of the writers whom But while thus administering consolation to the "posterity would not willingly let die," if there were "general scholar," by showing that time has been possibility of escape, must share the fate of those certainly limiting as well as extending his task, other great men over whom the author is supposed there is another class who will find no consolation to have an advantage; they themselves will live in the thought-and that is the class of authors. only by the historian's pen. The empty titles of There is no help, however; humbling as it may their books will be recorded in catalogues; and a seem, to represent the higher products of man's few lines be granted to them in biographical dicmind as destined to decay, like his body—and the tionaries-with what may be truly called a post thoughts and interests which he knows must per-mortem examination of criticism; a space which, ish with it—it is the truth, nevertheless, in the vast majority of instances. And in by far the greater number of the seeming instances to the contrary, authors still do not live; they are merely embalmed, and made mummies of. The works of the great mass of extant authors are deposited in libraries and museums, like the bodies of Egyptian kings in their pyramids-retaining only a grim semblance of life, amidst neglect, darkness, and decay. as those church-yards of intellect become more and more crowded, necessarily also becomes smaller and smaller, till for thousands not even room for a sepulchral stone will be found. Nor is it easy to say how far this oblivion will go, or what luminaries will be in time eclipsed. Supposing only a scantling of the products of the genius of the age-its richest and ripest fruitshanded down to posterity, (and there is already gathered into the garner, far more than any one To Mr. D'Israeli's enthusiastic gaze, the sight man has read or can read,) the collection of these of the rows of goodly volumes in their rich bind- scantlings gradually rises into a prodigious pile. ings, gleaming behind the glittering trellis-work The time must come when not only mediocrity, of their carved cases, suggested the idea of "east- which has been always the case; not only excelern beauties peeping through their jalousies!" To lence, which has been long the case, will stand a the eye of a severe philosopher they might more chance of being rejected, but when even gold and naturally suggest the idea of the aforesaid mum-diamonds will be cast into the sieve! Hardy mies. must those be who shall then venture to hope for the permanent attention of mankind! for it will be found that the greater part of authors have bought, not, as they fondly imagined, a copyhold of inheritance. Their interest for life or years soon runs out, and every year rapidly diminishes the value of the estate. 66 hundred years longer, what a task will await the poetical readers of 1949! * * * Then—if the future editor have anything like the indulgence and veneration for antiquity of his predecessorsthen shall posterity hang with rapture on the half of Campbell-and the fourth part of Byron-and We already see this mournfully realized in rela- the sixth of Scott-and the scattered tithes of tion to a thousand bright names of the last two Crabbe-and the three per cents. of Southey,centuries. How much beautiful poetry, scarcely while some good-natured critic shall sit in our second in merit to any, is all but forgotten in the mouldering chair, and more than half prefer them crowd, and reduced to a single fragment or two in to those by whom they have been superseded!" some book of specimens or elegant extracts;" Thus does the fame which looks most like immorhardly more than sufficient to serve for an epi-tality, resemble every other form of that painted taph! A future, however, is approaching, when shadow; in most instances it dwindles into a even volumes of specimens (to be complete) must name; and that name not always legible. "Vanbe in folios, and the very abstracts of excellence ity of vanities, saith the preacher; all is vanvoluminous; or rather, when, if men would read ity!"'* only one page of each great genius, they must be content to construct a spicilegium something like that of the desultory student mentioned by Steele in one of the Guardians; who had such an inordinate habit of skipping from book to book, that, to gratify this taste, he fabricated a volume in which each page was from a different author, torn out at random, and bound up together. With the exception, then, of the very few who shine on from age to age, like lights in the firmament, with undiminished lustre-the Homers, the Shakspeares, the Miltons, the Bacons, enshrined, like the heroes of old, among the constellations the great bulk of writers must be contented, after having shone for a while, to be wholly or nearly lost to the world. Entering our system like comets which move in hyperbolic orbits, they may strike their immediate generation with a sudden splendor; but receding gradually into the depths of space, they will twinkle with a fainter and a fainter lustre, till they fade away forever. Jeffrey. As we had occa In one point we can hardly concur with Lord He seems to think that the lot of the relation to fame, is yet more infelicitous than that of the man of science. He says, "The fame of a poet is popular or nothing. He does not address himself, like the man of science, to the learned or those who desire to learn, but to all mankind; and his purpose being to delight and be praised, necessarily extends to all who can receive pleasure or join in applause." Now we think it certain, that if the poet and the man of science are relatively of equal merit, the chances of being remembered are far more favorable to the former than to the latter. sion to remark some time back, in the case of no less a genius than Leibnitz : "The condition of great philosophers is far less enviable than that of great poets. The former can never possess so large a circle of readers under any circumstances; but that number is still further abridged by the fact, that even the truths the philosopher has taught or discovered form but stepping-stones in the progress of science, and are afterwards digested, systematized, and better expounded in other works composed by smaller men. The creations of poetry, on the contrary, remain ever beautiful as long as the language in which they are embodied shall endure even to translate is to injure them. Thus it is, that for one reader of Archimedes, (even amongst those who know just what Archimedes achieved,) there are thousands of readers of Homer; and of Newton it may be truly said, that nine tenths of those who are familiar with his doctrines have never studied him, except at second hand. Far more intimate, no doubt, is that sympathy which Shakspeare and Milton inspire; being dead they yet speak,' and may even be said to form a part of the very : Not the least instructive of the essays of Lord Jeffrey, reprinted from this journal, is that suggested by Campbell's Specimens of the British Poets. After remarking that many authors of no trivial popularity in their day, occupy the smallest possible amount of space in such a collection, he proceeds most strikingly, but sadly, to predict the possible condition of famous contemporaries a century hence. "Of near two hundred and fifty authors whose works are cited in these volumes, by far the greater part of whom were celebrated in their generation, there are not thirty who now enjoy anything that can be called popularity whose works are to be found in the hands of ordinary readers—in the shops of ordinary booksellers -or in the press for republication. About fifty more may be tolerably familiar to men of taste or literature: the rest slumber on the shelves of colAfter penning the above words, we were reminded lectors, and are partially known to a few antiqua- of another of the maxims of the same inspired writer, that there is "nothing new under the sun;" for, in turnrians and scholars." "The last ten years ing over old Morhof's Polyhistor for another purpose, we have produced, we think, an annual supply of stumbled on the following sentence:-"Scribendorum about ten thousand lines of good staple poetry lomon dicebat ; ac est revera res infinita; ut enim cogilibrorum nullum esse finem jam tum sapientissimus Sapoetry from the very first hands that we can boast tationibus hominum nullus statui finis potest, ita nec of that runs quickly to three or four large edi-libris, qui cogitationum partus sunt; quibus lectores tantions--and is as likely to be permanent as present sui genium accommodatiores sunt, et antiquorum lumidem deerunt! redeuntibus semper novis qui ad temporis success can make it. Now, if this goes on for a nibus officiunt." minds of their readers." If comparative neglect |ly to elude the hand of violence and the casualbe the lot of the writings even of Newton, what ties of time. "I sincerely regret," says the hismust be naturally and universally the fate of in- torian, "the more valuable libraries which have ferior men? Of that treatise of Descartes, in been involved in the ruin of the Roman empire; which he lays the foundation of analytical geom- but when I seriously compute the lapse of ages, etry, how few of those who have pursued that the waste of ignorance, and the calamities of war, science to heights and depths of which Descartes our treasures rather than our losses are the object never dreamed, ever perused a syllable! The of my surprise. We should gratefully recase of the cultivators of chemistry, and of many member, that the mischances of time and accident other modern sciences, is still more desperate. have spared the classic works to which the sufA few years obliterate all traces of their works; frage of antiquity had adjudged the first place of the fortune of which it is, to become antiquated genius and glory; the teachers of ancient knowlwhile their authors yet survive-virtually obso-edge who are still extant, had perused and comlete, while the type is fresh and the date recent. pared the writings of their predecessors; nor can Their names will soon be known only in the page it fairly be presumed that any important truth, of the historian of science, who will duly record any useful discovery in art or nature, has been in a few brief lines the discoveries their authors snatched away from the curiosity of modern made, and the still greater blunders they com- ages." it is not without reason that we mourn mitted; will tell us that they were strenuous We have but to glance at our own great wrimen in their day, and for their day did well; and ters, to see how wide is the interval between their that they are now gathered to their fathers!-best and their worst productions. Is there one, Such is often the caput mortuum of a life of ex- at all voluminous, of whom it can be said that all periments. he has left is worthy of being transmitted to posIn that deluge of books with which the world terity? It is true, indeed, that once possessed of is inundated, the lamentations, with which the anything of theirs, we are naturally reluctant to bibliomaniac bemoans the waste of time and the lose it; and should even consider it a species of barbarous ravages of bigotry and ignorance, ap-sacrilege to destroy it. Yet, in effect, very much pear at first sight somewhat fantastical. Yet they have left is as if it were lost-for it is never over read. As in other cases, we neglect what we many of those losses, especially in reference to have, and pine for what we have not, though if history; and this, not merely as they have in- we had it we could not use it. Are there of the volved in obscurity some important truths, but thousands most familiar with their chief writings for a reason more neatly related to our pres- fifty who have read all Bacon, all Milton, all ent subject, and which has seldom suggested Locke? itself. Paradoxical as it may seem, it may prob- We therefore acquiesce in the judgment of Gibably be said with truth, that the very multiplic- bon, not only as the best consolation under our inity of books with which we are now perplexed, evitable losses, but, as in all probability, the true is in part owing to the loss of some and that if estimate of it; not, however, intending thereby we had had a few volumes more, we should prob- any apology for the acts which reduce us to this ably have had many less. The countless mul- exercise of faith; neither does Gibbon. On the titudes of speculations, conjectures, and criticisms contrary, as Mr. D'Israeli says, “he pathetically on those ample fields of doubt, which the ravages describes the empty library of Alexandria after of time have left open to interminable discussion, the Christians had destroyed it;" while he does would then have been spared to us. An "hiatus not in that place suggest any of the alleviations to valde deflendus" too often leads to conjectures which we have just adverted; but reserves them still more lamentable ;" and a moderate "lacuna" becomes the text of an immoderate disquisition. for the time when he has to describe the second and greater desolation on the same spot by the Mahometans! On this last occasion, he softens somewhat of his pathos, perhaps of his indignation, and makes the philosophic estimate which we have cited. Without abating any of the indignation and contempt due to such fanatical ignorance, whether Christian or Mahomedan-it is impossible, we think, to deny the sound sense and discrimination of the great historian's observations.* On the other hand, it is doubtful whether-except in the case of history-the treasures of literature, of which time has deprived us and the loss of which literary enthusiasts so bitterly regret, have been so inestimable. We are disposed to think with Gibbon, in his remarks on the burning of the Alexandrian library, that by far the greater part of the masterpieces of antiquity have been secured to us; and that though some few have "I believe that a philosopher," says Mr. D'Israeli, assuredly been lost, there is no reason to believe Perhaps so; if the exchange were always between a "would consent to lose any poet to regain an historian." that they have been numerous. The lost works, Claudian and a Tacitus. But the latter must be great, ineven of the greatest masters, were most probably deed, to outweigh a Homer, a Shakspeare, or a Milton. inferior to those which have come down to us. lost in the annals of mankind, leaves a chasm never to be "Fancy may be supplied," he remarks, "but truth once Their best must have been those most admired, filled." We fear that the fancy of the highest poetry most frequently copied, most faithfully preserved; other hand, Niebuhr has pretty clearly shown that hisis not quite so promptly made to order; while, on the and therefore on all these accounts, the most like-tory is far from being always truth; not to mention that |