age of the world.

Humboldt is, in many respects, and perhaps upon the whole, at the head
of the list; and to his profound and varied works we hope to be able to
devote a future paper. He unites, in a degree that perhaps has never
before been witnessed, the most various qualities, and which, from the
opposite characters of mind which they require, are rarely found in
unison. A profound philosopher, an accurate observer of nature, an
unwearied statist, he is at the same time an eloquent writer, an
incomparable describer, and an ardent friend of social improvement.
Science owes to his indefatigable industry many of her most valuable
acquisitions; geography, to his intrepid perseverance, many of its most
important discoveries; the arts, to his poetic eye and fervid eloquence,
many of their brightest pictures. He unites the austere grandeur of the
exact sciences to the bewitching charm of the fine arts. It is this very
combination which prevents his works from being generally popular. The
riches of his knowledge, the magnitude of his contributions to
scientific discovery, the fervour of his descriptions of nature,
alternately awaken our admiration and excite our surprise; but they
oppress the mind. To be rightly apprehended, they require a reader in
some degree familiar with all these subjects; and how many of these are
to be met with? The man who takes an interest in his scientific
observations will seldom be transported by his pictures of scenery; the
social observer, who extracts the rich collection of facts which he has
accumulated regarding the people whom he visited, will be indifferent to
his geographical discoveries. There are few Humboldts either in the
reading or thinking world.

Chateaubriand is a traveller of a wholly different character--he lived
entirely in antiquity. But it is not the antiquity of Greece and Rome
which has alone fixed his regards, as it has done those of Clarke and
Eustace--it is the recollections of chivalry, the devout spirit of the
pilgrim, which chiefly warmed his ardent imagination. He is universally
allowed by Frenchmen of all parties to be their first writer; and it may
be conceived what brilliant works an author of such powers, and
eminently gifted both with the soul of a poet and the eye of a painter,
must have produced in describing the historic scenes to which his
pilgrimages extended. He went to Greece and the Holy Land with a mind
devout rather than enlightened, credulous rather