y willing
that each one should have his innings at the proper time, when the
company were ready for him. But the time is coming when everybody will
know something about every thing. How can one have the illustrated
magazines, the "Popular Science Monthly," the Psychological journals,
the theological periodicals, books on all subjects, forced on his
attention, in their own persons, so to speak, or in the reviews which
analyze and pass judgment upon them, without getting some ideas which
belong to many provinces of human intelligence? The air we breathe is
made up of four elements, at least: oxygen, nitrogen, carbonic acid gas,
and knowledge. There is something quite delightful to witness in the
absorption and devotion of a genuine specialist. There is a certain
sublimity in that picture of the dying scholar in Browning's "A
Grammarian's Funeral:"--

"So with the throttling hands of death at strife,
Ground he at grammar;
Still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife;
While he could stammer
He settled Hoti's business--let it be--
Properly based Oun
Gave us the doctrine of the enclitic De,
Dead from the waist down."

A genuine enthusiasm, which will never be satisfied until it has pumped
the well dry at the bottom of which truth is lying, always excites our
interest, if not our admiration.

One of the pleasantest of our American writers, whom we all remember
as Ik Marvel, and greet in his more recent appearance as Donald Grant
Mitchell, speaks of the awkwardness which he feels in offering to
the public a "panoramic view of British writers in these days of
specialists,--when students devote half a lifetime to the analysis
of the works of a single author, and to the proper study of a single
period."

He need not have feared that his connected sketches of "English Lands,
Letters and Kings" would be any less welcome because they do not pretend
to fill up all the details or cover all the incidents they hint in
vivid outline. How many of us ever read or ever will read Drayton's
"Poly-Olbion?" Twenty thousand long Alexandrines are filled with
admirable descriptions of scenery, natural productions, and historical
events, but how many of us in these days have time to read and inwardly
digest twenty thousand Alexandrine verses? I fear that the specialist is
apt to hold his intelligent reader or hearer too cheap. So far as I
have observed in medical specialties, what he knows in addition t