hing shrewd or petulant
in the observations of the other, as if he should astonish the
bye-standers, or was astonished himself at his own discoveries. Good taste
and good sense, like common politeness, are, or are supposed to be,
matters of course. One is distinguished by an appearance of marked
attention to every one present; the other manifests an habitual air of
abstraction and absence of mind. The one is not an upstart with all the
self-important airs of the founder of his own fortune; nor the other a
self-taught man, with the repulsive self-sufficiency which arises from an
ignorance of what hundreds have known before him. We must excuse perhaps a
little conscious family-pride in the one, and a little harmless pedantry
in the other.--As there is a class of the first character which sinks into
the mere gentleman, that is, which has nothing but this sense of
respectability and propriety to support it--so the character of a scholar
not unfrequently dwindles down into the shadow of a shade, till nothing is
left of it but the mere book-worm. There is often something amiable as
well as enviable in this last character. I know one such instance, at
least. The person I mean has an admiration for learning, if he is only
dazzled by its light. He lives among old authors, if he does not enter
much into their spirit. He handles the covers, and turns over the page,
and is familiar with the names and dates. He is busy and self-involved. He
hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters, or is like the dust upon the
outside of knowledge, which should not be rudely brushed aside. He follows
learning as its shadow; but as such, he is respectable. He browzes on the
husk and leaves of books, as the young fawn browzes on the bark and leaves
of trees. Such a one lives all his life in a dream of learning, and has
never once had his sleep broken by a real sense of things. He believes
implicitly in genius, truth, virtue, liberty, because he finds the names
of these things in books. He thinks that love and friendship are the
finest things imaginable, both in practice and theory. The legend of good
women is to him no fiction. When he steals from the twilight of his cell,
the scene breaks upon him like an illuminated missal, and all the people
he sees are but so many figures in a _camera obscura_. He reads the world,
like a favourite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an edition
of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to ma