thers yielded to inertia and dropped away. So, some years later,
when some of us met at his room to consult on a cheap series of
popular theological works, he himself was so rich in his own private
plans that all the rest were impoverished; nothing could be named but
he had been planning just that for years, and should by-and-by get
leisure for it, and there really was not enough left to call out the
energies of any one else. Not from any petty egotism, but simply from
inordinate activity, he stood ready to take all the parts.

In the same way he distanced everybody; every companion-scholar found
soon that it was impossible to keep pace with one who was always
accumulating and losing nothing. Most students find it necessary to be
constantly forgetting some things to make room for later arrivals; but
the peculiarity of his memory was that he let nothing go. I have more
than once heard him give a minute analysis of the contents of some
dull book read twenty years before, and have afterwards found the
statement correct and exhaustive. His great library,--the only private
library I have ever seen which reminded one of the Astor,--although
latterly collected more for public than personal uses, was one which
no other man in the nation, probably, had sufficient bibliographical
knowledge single-handed to select, and we have very few men capable of
fully appreciating its scholarly value, as it stands. It seems as if
its possessor, putting all his practical and popular side into his
eloquence and action, had indemnified himself by investing all his
scholarship in a library of which less than a quarter of the books
were in the English language.

All unusual learning, however, brings with it the suspicion of
superficiality; and in this country, where, as Mr. Parker himself
said, "every one gets a mouthful of education, but scarce one a full
meal,"--where every one who makes a Latin quotation is styled "a ripe
scholar,"--it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the true from the
counterfeit. It is, however, possible to apply some tests. I remember,
for instance, that one of the few undoubted classical scholars, in the
old-fashioned sense, whom New England has seen,--the late John Glen
King of Salem,--while speaking with very limited respect of the
acquirements of Rufus Choate in this direction, and with utter
contempt of those of Daniel Webster, always became enthusiastic on
coming to Theodore Parker. "He is the only man," said Mr.