er and acuteness of which
astonish the unlearned. "Reading with the fingers," as Basnage said of
Bayle--turning the pages rapidly over and alighting on the exact spot
where the thing wanted is to be found--is far from a superficial
faculty, as some deem it to be,--it is the thoroughest test of active
scholarship. It was what enabled Bayle to collect so many flowers of
literature, all so interesting, and yet all found in corners so distant
and obscure.

In fact, there are subtle dexterities, acquired by sagacious experience
in searching for valuable little trinkets in great libraries, just as in
other pursuits. A great deal of that appearance of dry drudgery which
excites the pitying amazement of the bystander is nimbly evaded. People
acquire a sort of instinct, picking the valuables out of the useless
verbiage, or the passages repeated from former authors. It is soon found
what a great deal of literature has been the mere "pouring out of one
bottle into another," as the Anatomist of melancholy terms it. There are
those terrible folios of the scholastic divines, the civilians, and the
canonists, their majestic stream of central print overflowing into
rivulets of marginal notes sedgy with citations. Compared with these,
all the intellectual efforts of our recent degenerate days seem the work
of pigmies; and for any of us even to profess to read all that some of
those indomitable giants wrote, would seem an audacious undertaking.
But, in fact, they were to a great extent solemn shams, since the bulk
of their work was merely that of the clerk who copies page after page
from other people's writings.

Surely these laborious old writers exhibited in this matter the
perfection of literary modesty. Far from secretly pilfering, like the
modern plagiarist, it was their great boast that they themselves had not
suggested the great thought or struck out the brilliant metaphor, but
that it had been done by some one of old, and was found in its
legitimate place--a book. I believe that if one of these laborious
persons hatched a good idea of his own, he could experience no peace of
mind until he found it legitimated by having passed through an earlier
brain, and that the author who failed thus to establish a paternity for
his thought would sometimes audaciously set down some great name in his
crowded margin, in the hope that the imposition might pass undiscovered.
Authorities, of course, enjoy priority according to their rank in
liter