plated singly. Great as was the prostration of my powers at this
time, yet I could not forget my knowledge; and my understanding had been
for too many years intimate with severe thinkers, with logic, and the
great masters of knowledge, not to be aware of the utter feebleness of
the main herd of modern economists. I had been led in 1811 to look into
loads of books and pamphlets on many branches of economy; and, at my
desire, M. sometimes read to me chapters from more recent works, or parts
of parliamentary debates. I saw that these were generally the very dregs
and rinsings of the human intellect; and that any man of sound head, and
practised in wielding logic with a scholastic adroitness, might take up
the whole academy of modern economists, and throttle them between heaven
and earth with his finger and thumb, or bray their fungus-heads to powder
with a lady's fan. At length, in 1819, a friend in Edinburgh sent me
down Mr. Ricardo's book; and recurring to my own prophetic anticipation
of the advent of some legislator for this science, I said, before I had
finished the first chapter, "Thou art the man!" Wonder and curiosity
were emotions that had long been dead in me. Yet I wondered once more: I
wondered at myself that I could once again be stimulated to the effort of
reading, and much more I wondered at the book. Had this profound work
been really written in England during the nineteenth century? Was it
possible? I supposed thinking {19} had been extinct in England. Could
it be that an Englishman, and he not in academic bowers, but oppressed by
mercantile and senatorial cares, had accomplished what all the
universities of Europe and a century of thought had failed even to
advance by one hair's breadth? All other writers had been crushed and
overlaid by the enormous weight of facts and documents. Mr. Ricardo had
deduced _a priori_ from the understanding itself laws which first gave a
ray of light into the unwieldy chaos of materials, and had constructed
what had been but a collection of tentative discussions into a science of
regular proportions, now first standing on an eternal basis.

Thus did one single work of a profound understanding avail to give me a
pleasure and an activity which I had not known for years. It roused me
even to write, or at least to dictate what M. wrote for me. It seemed to
me that some important truths had escaped even "the inevitable eye" of
Mr. Ricardo; and as these were for the mo