this knows the secret of the arts. No painter, writer,
orator, who had the power and judgment of a thoroughly cultivated
musician, could sin against the broad principles of taste.

More than all other men have authors reason to appreciate the indirect
utilities of knowledge that is apparently irrelevant. Who can tell what
knowledge will be of most use to _them_? Even the very greatest of
authors are indebted to miscellaneous reading, often in several
different languages, for the suggestion of their most original works,
and for the light which has kindled many a shining thought of their own.
And authors who seem to have less need than others of an outward help,
poets whose compositions might appear to be chiefly inventive and
emotional, novelists who are free from the restraints and the
researches of the historian, work up what they know into what they
write; so that if you could remove every line which is based on studies
outside the strict limits of their art, you would blot out half their
compositions. Take the antiquarian element out of Scott, and see how
many of his works could never have been written. Remove from Goldsmith's
brain the recollection of his wayward studies and strange experiences,
and you would remove the rich material of the "Traveller" and the
Essays, and mutilate even the immortal "Vicar of Wakefield." Without a
classical education and foreign travel, Byron would not have composed
"Childe Harold;" without the most catholic interest in the literature of
all the ages, and of many different peoples from the North Sea to the
Mediterranean, our contemporary William Morris would never have
conceived, and could not have executed, that strong work "The Earthly
Paradise." It may not seem necessary to learn Italian, yet Mr. Roscoe's
celebrity as an author was due in the first place to his private
fondness for Italian literature. He did not learn Italian in order that
he might write his biographies, but he wrote about Lorenzo and Leo
because he had mastered Italian, and because the language led him to
take an interest in the greatest house of Florence. The way in which
authors are led by their favorite studies indirectly to the great
performance of their lives has never been more clearly illustrated than
in this instance.

When William Roscoe was a young man he had for his friend Francis
Holden, nephew of Mr. Richard Holden, a schoolmaster in Liverpool.
Francis Holden was a young man of uncommon culture, hav