s true; and emphatically so
in this age. Considering the prodigious powers of the press, and how
they are developed at this time in the never-intermitting issue of
periodicals, tracts, pamphlets, works in series, and light literature,
we must allow there never was a time which promised fairer for
dispensing with every other means of information and instruction. What
can we want more, you will say, for the intellectual education of the
whole man, and for every man, than so exuberant and diversified and
persistent a promulgation of all kinds of knowledge? Why, you will
ask, need we go up to knowledge, when knowledge comes down to us? The
Sibyl wrote her prophecies upon the leaves of the forest, and wasted
them; but here such careless profusion might be prudently indulged, for
it can be afforded without loss, in consequence of the almost fabulous
fecundity of the instrument which these latter ages have invented. We
have sermons in stones, and books in the running brooks; works larger
and more comprehensive than those which have gained for ancients an
immortality, issue forth every morning, and are projected onwards to
the ends of the earth at the rate of hundreds of miles a day. Our
seats are strewed, our pavements are powdered, with swarms of little
tracts; and the very bricks of our city walls preach wisdom, by
informing us by their placards where we can at once cheaply purchase it.

I allow all this, and much more; such certainly is our popular
education, and its effects are remarkable. Nevertheless, after all,
even in this age, whenever men are really serious about getting what,
in the language of trade, is called "a good article," when they aim at
something precise, something refined, something really luminous,
something really large, something choice, they go to another market;
they avail themselves, in some shape or other, of the rival method, the
ancient method, of oral instruction, of present communication between
man and man, of teachers instead of learning, of the personal influence
of a master, and the humble initiation of a disciple, and, in
consequence, of great centres of pilgrimage and throng, which such a
method of education necessarily involves. This, I think, will be found
to hold good in all those departments or aspects of society, which
possess an interest sufficient to bind men together, or to constitute
what is called "a world." It holds in the political world, and in the
high world, and in