e more for every juiceless, unnutritious
abstraction he devours. Though famished for the lack of a morsel of the
true mental food of facts and ideas, he still swaggeringly despises all
relative information in his ambition to clutch at absolute truth, and
accordingly goes directly to ultimates by the short cuts of cheap
generalities. Why, to be sure, should he, who can, Napoleon-like, march
straight on to the interior capital, submit, Marlborough-like, to the
drudgery of besieging the frontier fortresses? Why should he, who can
throw a girdle of generalization round the universe in less than forty
minutes, stoop to master details? And this easy and sprightly amplitude
of understanding, which consists not in including, but in excluding all
relative facts and principles, he calls comprehensiveness; the mental
decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose;
and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course
qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with
Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap
on the shoulder,--the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners,
equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have
a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their
wide-reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating the
condescension of some contemporary philosophers of the Infinite, he
graciously accepts Christianity and patronizes the idea of Deity, though
he gives you to understand that he could easily pitch a generalization
outside of both. And thus, mistaking his slab-sidedness for
many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is no insight without force
to back it,--bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness,--he is
thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to
be upset and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles
against. A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by presenting
a vision of the object to which it leads;--beware of the conceit that
dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little solid
knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such
a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was
saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! "Who," he asked,
"is this self-sufficient, all-sufficient, insufficient man?"

Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more opposed to that