what critic can't point
them out? But for the nonce we are not talking about faults: we want to
say nil nisi bonum. Well--take at hazard any three pages of the "Essays"
or "History;"--and, glimmering below the stream of the narrative, as
it were, you, an average reader, see one, two, three, a half-score of
allusions to other historic facts, characters, literature, poetry,
with which you are acquainted. Why is this epithet used? Whence is that
simile drawn? How does he manage, in two or three words, to paint an
individual, or to indicate a landscape? Your neighbor, who has HIS
reading, and his little stock of literature stowed away in his mind,
shall detect more points, allusions, happy touches, indicating not
only the prodigious memory and vast learning of this master, but the
wonderful industry, the honest, humble previous toil of this great
scholar. He reads twenty books to write a sentence; he travels a hundred
miles to make a line of description.

Many Londoners--not all--have seen the British Museum Library. I speak
a coeur ouvert, and pray the kindly reader to bear with me. I have
seen all sorts of domes of Peters and Pauls, Sophia, Pantheon,--what
not?--and have been struck by none of them so much as by that catholic
dome in Bloomsbury, under which our million volumes are housed. What
peace, what love, what truth, what beauty, what happiness for all, what
generous kindness for you and me, are here spread out! It seems to
me one cannot sit down in that place without a heart full of grateful
reverence. I own to have said my grace at the table, and to have thanked
heaven for this my English birthright, freely to partake of these
bountiful books, and to speak the truth I find there. Under the dome
which held Macaulay's brain, and from which his solemn eyes looked
out on the world but a fortnight since, what a vast, brilliant, and
wonderful store of learning was ranged! what strange lore would he not
fetch for you at your bidding! A volume of law, or history, a book of
poetry familiar or forgotten (except by himself who forgot nothing),
a novel ever so old, and he had it at hand. I spoke to him once about
"Clarissa." "Not read 'Clarissa!'" he cried out. "If you have once
thoroughly entered on 'Clarissa' and are infected by it, you can't leave
it. When I was in India I passed one hot season at the hills, and there
were the Governor-General, and the Secretary of Government, and the
Commander-in-Chief, and their wives. I