letters.

We enjoyed a very ample opportunity of acquainting ourselves with it
in its infancy. More years have passed away than we at present feel
quite inclined to specify, since our attention was attracted at a very
early age to an _Encyclopaedia_, the first we had ever seen, that
formed one work of a dozen or so stored on the upper shelf of a press
to which we were permitted access. It consisted of three quarto
volumes sprinkled over with what seventy years ago must have been
deemed very respectable copperplates, and remarkable, chiefly in the
arrangement of its contents, for the inequality of the portions, if we
may so speak, into which the knowledge it contained was broken up. As
might be anticipated from its comparatively small size, most of the
articles were exceedingly meagre. There were pages after pages in
which some eight or ten lines, sometimes a single line, comprised all
that the writers had deemed it necessary to communicate on the
subjects on which they touched. And yet, set full in the middle of
these brief sentences--these mere skeletons of information--there were
complete and elaborate treatises,--whales among the minnows. Some of
these extended over ten, twenty, thirty, fifty pages of the work. We
remember there was an old-fashioned but not ill-written treatise on
_Chemistry_ among the number, quite bulky enough of itself to fill a
small volume. There was a sensibly written treatise on _Law_, too; a
treatise on _Anatomy_ not quite unworthy of the Edinburgh school; a
treatise on _Botany_, of which at this distance of time we remember
little else than that it rejected the sexual system of Linnaeus, then
newly promulgated; a treatise on _Architecture_, sufficiently
incorrect, as we afterwards found, in some of its minor details, but
which we still remember with the kindly feeling of the pupil for his
first master; a treatise on _Fortification_, that at least taught us
how to make model forts in sand; treatises on _Arithmetic_,
_Astronomy_, _Bookkeeping_, _Grammar_, _Language_, _Theology_,
_Metaphysics_, and a great many other treatises besides. The least
interesting portion of the work was the portion devoted to Natural
History: it named and numbered species and varieties, instead of
describing instincts and habits, and afforded little else to the
reader than lists of hard words, and lines of uninteresting numerals.
But our appetite for books was keen and but ill supplied at the time,
and so we read al