others like him--became imbued with a repugnance for all scholarly
reputation, to such an extent, indeed, that he partly tore up and
partly burnt several works which he had long had in hand.

Wolf says: "The amount of intellectual food that can be got from
well-digested scholarship is a very insignificant item."

In Winckelmann's youth there were no philological studies apart from the
ordinary bread-winning branches of the science--people read and
explained the ancients in order to prepare themselves for the better
interpretation of the Bible and the Corpus Juris.

59

In Wolf's estimation, a man has reached the highest point of historical
research when he is able to take a wide and general view of the whole
and of the profoundly conceived distinctions in the developments in art
and the different styles of art. Wolf acknowledges, however, that
Winckelmann was lacking in the more common talent of philological
criticism, or else he could not use it properly: "A rare mixture of a
cool head and a minute and restless solicitude for hundreds of things
which, insignificant in themselves, were combined in his case with a
fire that swallowed up those little things, and with a gift of
divination which is a vexation and an annoyance to the uninitiated."

60

Wolf draws our attention to the fact that antiquity was acquainted only
with theories of oratory and poetry which facilitated production,
[Greek: technai] and _artes_ that formed real orators and poets, "while
at the present day we shall soon have theories upon which it would be
as impossible to build up a speech or a poem as it would be to form a
thunderstorm upon a brontological treatise."

61

Wolf's judgment on the amateurs of philological knowledge is noteworthy:
"If they found themselves provided by nature with a mind corresponding
to that of the ancients, or if they were capable of adapting themselves
to other points of view and other circumstances of life, then, with even
a nodding acquaintance with the best writers, they certainly acquired
more from those vigorous natures, those splendid examples of thinking
and acting, than most of those did who during their whole life merely
offered themselves to them as interpreters."

62

Says Wolf again . "In the end, only those few ought to attain really
complete knowledge who are born with artistic talent and furnished with
scholarship, and who make use of the best opportunities of securing,
both theoretic