veries, are old
truths, old discoveries remodelled and shifted so as to meet the view
under a different angle; new structures are in no proper sense
creations, but mainly the product of a judicious eclecticism. Sir
William Hamilton was a vast polyhistor long before he could be called a
philosopher, or even thought himself one. Researches the most persistent
in nearly every department of letters were with him the indispensable
prelude to his subsequent triumphs.

But all this is simply conditional. What, then, are the powers which
nature alone can bestow? What must she have done before the highest
results can arise from literary effort, however immense the compass of
our information? There must be powerful analytic and discursive ability,
combined with a commensurate reach of constructive and imaginative
capacity. An intellect thus endowed, approaches the perfection of our
ideal. If one of these elements is deficient, we shall lack either depth
or brilliance, acuteness or fancy; our structures may be massive,
titanic, but hostile to the laws of a refined taste; colossal and
dazzling, but too airy and unsubstantial except for the few who are

'With reason mad, and on phantoms fed.'

Before some such ideal tribunal as this let us summon the aspirants to
the dictatorial honors which seem to have slumbered since the day of Dr.
Johnson, and arbitrate their claims.

Who shall combat the succession of Thomas de Quincey to this vacant
throne? Shall it be Coleridge, 'the noticeable man with large, gray
eyes,' or the stately Macaulay, or Carlyle, with his Moorish dialect and
sardonic glance, or hale old Walter Scott, or Lamb, or Hazlitt, or
Christopher North? The time was when Coleridge's literary fame was
second to that of no other man. But he has suffered a disastrous
eclipse; it has been articulately demonstrated that the vast body of his
most valuable speculations, both in the department of philosophy, and
also in that of poetry and of the fine arts generally, were so
unblushingly pirated from Schelling and other German writers, that all
defence, even that which was merely palliative, has signally failed.
That fact silences absolutely and forever his claim. Nor can the
pretensions of Macaulay or Carlyle be tolerated; in neither of them is
found in any marked degree what has been aptly called 'double-headed'
power--in neither are combined the antagonistic resources of profound
thought and brilliant imagination. Macaulay,