any as a hundred and eighty lines of verse, after hearing
them twice, or sometimes even once. He knew by heart most of Voltaire's
fugitive pieces, and long passages in his poems and tragedies. His
predominant characteristics are described as penetration, and that other
valuable faculty to which penetration is an indispensable adjunct, but
which it by no means invariably implies--a spirit of broad and
systematic co-ordination. The unusual precocity of his intelligence was
perhaps imperfectly appreciated by his fellow-students, it led him so
far beyond any point within their sight. It has been justly said of him
that he passed at once from infancy to manhood, and was in the rank of
sages before he had shaken off the dust of the playground. He was of the
type of those who strangle serpents while yet in the cradle. We know the
temperament which from the earliest hour consumes with eager desire for
knowledge, and energises spontaneously with unceasing and joyful
activity in that bright and pure morning of intellectual curiosity,
which neither the dull tumultuous needs of life nor the mists of
spiritual misgiving have yet come up to make dim. Of this temperament
was Turgot in a superlative degree, and its fire never abated in him
from college days, down to the last hours while he lay racked with
irremediable anguish.

To a certain extent this was the glorious mark of all the best minds of
the epoch; from Voltaire downwards, they were inflamed by an
inextinguishable and universal curiosity. Voltaire hardly left a single
corner of the field entirely unexplored in science, poetry, history,
philosophy. Rousseau wrote a comic opera and was an ardent botanist.
Diderot wrote, and wrote well and intelligently, _de omni scibili_, and
was the author alike of the Letters on the Blind and Jacques le
Fataliste. No era was ever so little the era of the specialist.

* * * * *

The society of the Sorbonne corresponded exactly to a college at one of
our universities, and will be distinguished by the careful reader from
the faculty of theology in the university, which was usually, but not
always, composed of _docteurs de Sorbonne_. It consisted of a large
number of learned men in the position of fellows, and a smaller number
of younger students, who lived together just as undergraduates do, in
separate apartments, but with common hall, library, and garden. One of
Turgot's masters, Sigorgne, was the first to teach in th