first of human beings, if we could call up Newton and ask him whether, even in those sciences in which he had no rival, he considered himself as profoundly knowing, he would have told us that he was but a smatterer like ourselves and that the difference between his knowledge and ours vanished when compared with the quantity of truth still undiscovered, just as the distance between a person at the foot of Ben Lomond and one at the top of Ben Lomond vanishes when compared with the distance of the fixed stars.

It is evident, then, that those who are afraid of superficial knowledge do not mean by superficial knowledge, knowledge which is superficial when compared with the whole quantity of truth capable of being known. For, in that sense, all human knowledge is, and always has been, and always must be, superficial. What, then, is the standard? Is it the same two years together in any country? Is it the same, at the same moment, in any two countries? Is it not notorious that the profundity of one age is the shallowness of the next; that the profundity of one nation is the shallowness of a neighboring nation? Ramohun Roy passed, among Hindoos, for a man of profound Western learning; but he would have been but a very superficial member of this institute. Strabo was justly entitled to be called a profound geographer eighteen hundred years ago; but a teacher of geography who had never heard of America would now be laughed at by the girls of a boarding school. What would now be thought of the greatest chemist of 1746 or of the greatest geologist of 1746? The truth is that, in all experimental science, mankind is, of necessity, constantly advancing. Every generation, of course, has its front rank and its rear rank; but the rear rank of a later generation occupies the ground which was occupied by the front rank of a former generation.

You remember Gulliver's adventures. First he is shipwrecked in a country of little men, and he is a Colossus among them. He strides over the walls of their capital; he stands higher than the cupola of their great temple; he tugs after him a royal fleet; he stretches his legs, and a royal army, with drums beating and colors flying, marches through the gigantic arch; he devours a whole granary for breakfast, eats a herd of cattle for dinner, and washes down his meal with all the hogsheads of a cellar. In his next voyage he is among men sixty feet high. He who in Lilliput used to take people up in his hand in order that he

might be able to hear them, is himself taken up in the hands and held to the ears of his masters. It is all that he can do to defend himself with his hanger against the rats and mice. The court ladies amuse themselves with seeing him fight wasps and frogs; the monkey runs off with him to the chimney top; the dwarf drops him into the cream jug and leaves him to swim for his life. Now, was Gulliver a tall or a short man? Why, in his own house at Rotherhithe, he was thought a man of the ordinary stature. Take him to Lilliput, and he is Quinbus Flestrin, the Man Mountain. Take him to Brobdingnag, and he is Grildig, the little Manikin. It is the same in science. The pigmies of one society would have passed for giants in another.

It might be amusing to institute a comparison between one of the profoundly learned men of the thirteenth century and one of the superficial students who will frequent our library. Take the great philosopher of the time of Henry III. of England, or Alexander III. of Scotland, the man renowned all over the island, and even as far as Italy and Spain, as the first of astronomers and chemists. What is his astronomy? He is a firm believer in the Ptolemaic system. He never heard of the law of gravitation. Tell him that the succession of day and night is caused by the turning of the earth on its axis. Tell him that in consequence of this motion, the polar diameter of the earth is shorter than the equatorial diameter. Tell him that the succession of summer and winter is caused by the revolution of the earth round the sun. If he does not set you down for an idiot, he lays an information against you before the Bishop and has you burned for a heretic. To do him justice, however, if he is ill informed on these points, there are other points on which Newton and Laplace were mere children when compared with him. He can cast your nativity. He knows what will happen when Saturn is in the House of Life, and what will happen when Mars is in conjunction with the Dragon's Tail. He can read in the stars whether an expedition will be successful; whether the next harvest will be plentiful; which of your children will be fortunate in marriage, and which will be lost at sea. Happy the State, happy the family, which is guided by the counsels of so profound a man! And what but mischief, public and private, can we expect from the temerity and conceit of sciolists who know no more about the heavenly bodies than what they have learned from Sir John Herschel's beautiful little volume? But, to speak

seriously, is not a little truth better than a great deal of falsehood? Is not the man who, in the evenings of a fortnight, has acquired a correct notion of the solar system a more profound astronomer than a man who has passed thirty years in reading lectures about the primum mobile and in drawing schemes of horoscopes?

Or take chemistry. Our philosopher of the thirteenth century shall be, if you please, a universal genius, chemist as well as astronomer. He has, perhaps, got so far as to know that if he mix charcoal and saltpetre in certain proportions and then apply fire, there will be an explosion which will shatter all his retorts and aludels; and he is proud of knowing what will, in a later age, be familiar to all the idle boys in the kingdom. But there are departments of science in which he need not fear the rivalry of Black, or Lavoisier, or Cavendish, or Davy. He is in hot pursuit of the Philosopher's Stone, of the stone that is to bestow wealth, and health, and longevity. He has a long array of strangely shaped vessels, filled with red oil and white oil, constantly boiling. The moment of projection is at hand, and soon all his kettles and gridirons will be turned into pure gold. Poor Professor Faraday can do nothing of the sort. I should deceive you if I held out to you the smallest hope that he will ever turn your halfpence into sovereigns. But if you can induce him to give at our institute a course of lectures such as I once heard him give at the Royal Institution to children in the Christmas holidays, I can promise you that you will know more about the effects produced on bodies by heat and moisture than was known to some alchemists who, in the Middle Ages, were thought worthy of the patronage of kings.

As it has been in science, so it has been in literature. Compare the literary acquirements of the great men of the thirteenth century with those which will be within the reach of many who will frequent our reading room. As to Greek learning, the profound man of the thirteenth century was absolutely on a par with the superficial man of the nineteenth. In the modern lan

guages, there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books. We will suppose him to have had both a large and choice collection. We will allow him thirty, nay forty manuscripts, and among them a Virgil, a Terence, a Lucan, an Ovid, a Statius, a great deal of Livy, a great

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deal of Cicero. In allowing him all this, we are dealing most liberally with him; for it is much more likely that his shelves. were filled with treatises on school divinity and canon law, composed by writers whose names the world has very wisely forgotten. But even if we suppose him to have possessed all that is most valuable in the literature of Rome, I say with perfect confidence that, both in respect of intellectual improvement and in respect of intellectual pleasures, he was far less favorably situated than a man who now, knowing only the English language, has a bookcase filled with the best English works. Our great man of the Middle Ages could not form any conception of any tragedy approaching 'Macbeth' or 'Lear,' or of any comedy equal to 'Henry IV.' or 'Twelfth Night.' The best epic poem that he had read was far inferior to the 'Paradise Lost'; and all the tomes of his philosophers were not worth a page of the 'Novum Organum.'

The Novum Organum,' it is true, persons who know only English must read in a translation, and this reminds me of one great advantage which such persons will derive from our institution. They will, in our library, be able to form some acquaintance with the master minds of remote ages and foreign countries. A large part of what is best worth knowing in ancient literature, and in the literature of France, Italy, Germany, and Spain, has been translated into our own tongue. It is scarcely possible that the translation of any book of the highest class can be equal to the original. But, though the finer touches may be lost in the copy, the great outlines will remain. An Englishman who never saw the frescoes in the Vatican may yet, from engravings, form some notion of the exquisite grace of Raphael and of the sublimity and energy of Michael Angelo. And so the genius of Homer is seen in the poorest version of the Iliad'; the genius of Cervantes is seen in the poorest version of Don Quixote.' Let it not be supposed that I wish to dissuade any person from studying either the ancient languages or the languages of modern Europe. Far from it. I prize most highly those keys of knowledge, and I think that no man who has leisure for study ought to be content until he possesses several of them. I have always much admired a saying of the Emperor Charles V.: -"When I learn a new language, I feel as if I had got a new soul." But I would console those who have not time to make themselves linguists, by assuring them that, by means of their own mother tongue, they may

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obtain ready access to vast intellectual treasures, to treasures such as might have been envied by the greatest linguists of the age of Charles V., to treasures surpassing those which were possessed by Aldus, by Erasmus, and by Melanchthon.

And thus I am brought back to the point from which I started. I have been requested to invite you to fill your glasses to the Literature of Britain; to that literature, the brightest, the purest, the most durable of all the glories of our country; to that literature, so rich in precious truth and precious fiction; to that literature which boasts of the prince of all poets and of the prince of all philosophers; to that literature which has exercised an influence wider than that of our commerce, and mightier than that of our arms; to that literature which has taught France the principles of liberty, and has furnished Germany with models of art; to that literature which forms a tie closer than the tie of consanguinity between us and the commonwealths of the Valley of the Mississippi; to that literature before the light of which impious and cruel superstitions are fast taking flight on the banks of the Ganges; to that literature which will, in future ages, instruct and delight the unborn millions who will have turned the Australasian and Caffrarian deserts into cities and gardens. To the Literature of Britain, then! And, wherever British literature spreads, may it be attended by British virtue and by British freedom!

THE

POPULAR EDUCATION

(From a Speech in the House of Commons, April 19th, 1847)

HE education of the people is not only a means, but the best means, of attaining that which all allow to be a chief end of government; and, if this be so, it passes my faculties to understand how any man can gravely contend that government has nothing to do with the education of the people.

My confidence in my opinion is strengthened when I recollect that I hold that opinion in common with all the greatest lawgivers, statesmen, and political philosophers of all nations and ages, with all the most illustrious champions of civil and spiritual freedom, and especially with those men whose names were once held in the highest veneration by the Protestant Dissenters of England. I might cite many of the most venerable names of