rmance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a
fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's
time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found
cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when
in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special
acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of
men's thoughts and working faculties.

"In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated
intellect. In the right state he is _Man thinking_. In the
degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a
mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
In this view of him, as Man thinking, the theory of his office is
continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."

Emerson proceeds to describe and illustrate the influences of nature
upon the mind, returning to the strain of thought with which his
previous Essay has made us familiar. He next considers the influence of
the past, and especially of books as the best type of that influence.
"Books are the best of things well used; abused among the worst." It is
hard to distil what is already a quintessence without loss of what is
just as good as the product of our labor. A sentence or two may serve to
give an impression of the epigrammatic wisdom of his counsel.

"Each age must write its own books, or, rather, each generation
for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit
this."

When a book has gained a certain hold on the mind, it is liable to
become an object of idolatrous regard.

"Instantly the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The
sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, slow to open to the
incursions of reason, having once so opened, having received this
book, stands upon it and makes an outcry if it is disparaged.
Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not
by Man thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set
out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principle.
Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to
accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given;
forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in
libraries when they wrote these books.--