ster even who wrote Wolfe's Ode, or the gentleman who sends us
abstruse verses which we unluckily cannot understand, and then scolds
us in perspicuous prose for not giving them a place in our columns.

Works of genius bear no reference in their bulk and proportions, if we
may so speak, to the period at which they are produced; but it is far
otherwise with works of science and general information: they grow
with the world's growth; the tomes from which the father derived his
acquaintance with facts and principles, prove all inadequate to
satisfy the curiosity of the son: almost every season adds its ring to
the 'tree of knowledge;' and the measuring line which girthed and
registered its bulk in one age, fails to embrace it in the succeeding
one. And hence one element at least in the superiority of this edition
of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ to every other edition, and every
other Encyclopaedia.

It appears at the period of the world's greatest experience. But there
are other very important elements, characteristic, as we have said, of
a peculiarity in the literature of the age, which have tended also to
this result. We have remarked that the first edition appeared in the
days of Hume, Robertson, and Adam Smith. None of these men wrote for
it, however.

In France the first intellects of the country were engaged on their
National Encyclopaedia, and mighty was the mischief which they
accomplished through its means; but works of this character in
Britain were left to authors of a lower standing. Smollett once
conducted a critical review; Gilbert Stuart an Edinburgh magazine;
Dr. Johnson drew up parliamentary debates for two years together;
Edmund Burke toiled at the pages of an Annual Register; and
Goldsmith, early in his career, wrote letters for the newspapers.
But, like the apothecary in Shakespeare, it was their 'poverty, not
their will, that consented;' and when their fortunes brightened,
these walks of obscure laboriousness were left to what were deemed
their legitimate denizens--mere mediocritists and compilers. A
similar feeling seems to have obtained regarding works of an
encyclopaediacal character. The authors of the first edition of the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ were merely respectable compilers,--we know
not that any of their names would now sound familiar to the reader,
with perhaps the exception of that of Smellie, an Edinburgh writer of
the last century, whose philosophical essays one sometimes meets
w