ot only to respect, but even to admiration. His
mental fertility is remarkable, his memory marvellous, his reading
immense, his mind discursive and agile, his style pellucid as water and
often vigorous, while his _subordinate_ conceptions are always ingenious
and frequently valuable. Besides this, he is a genuine enthusiast,
and sees before him that El Dorado of the understanding where golden
knowledge shall lie yellow on all the hills and yellow under every
footfall,--where the very peasant shall have princely wealth, and no
man shall need say to another, "Give me of thy wisdom." It is this same
element of romantic expectation which stretches a broad and shining
margin about the spacious page of Bacon; it is this which wreathes a new
fascination around the royal brow of Raleigh; it is this, in part, which
makes light the bulky and antiquated tomes of Hakluyt; and the grace
of it is that which we often miss in coming from ancient to modern
literature. Better it is, too, than much erudition and many
"proprieties" of thought; and one may note it as curious, that Mr.
Buckle, seeking to disparage imagination, should have written a book
whose most winning and enduring charm is the appeal to imagination it
makes. Moreover, he is an enthusiast in behalf of just that which is
distinctively modern: he is a white flame of precisely those heats which
smoulder now in the duller breast of the world in general; he worships
at all the pet shrines; he expresses the peculiar loves and hatreds of
the time. Who is so devout a believer in free speech and free trade and
the let-alone policy in government, and the coming of the Millennium by
steam? Who prostrates himself with such unfeigned adoration before the
great god, "State-of-Society," or so mutters, for a mystic _O'm_, the
word "Law"? Then how delightful it is, when he traces the whole ill of
the world to just those things which we now all agree to detest,--to
theological persecution, bigotry, superstition, and infidelity to Isaac
Newton! In fine, the recent lessons of that great schoolboy, the
world, or those over which the said youth now is poring or idling or
blubbering, Mr. Buckle has not only got by heart, not only recites them
capitally, but believes with assurance that they are the sole lessons
worth learning in any time; and all the inevitable partialities of the
text-book, all the errors and _ad captandum_ statements with which its
truth is associated, he takes with such implic