is seeing with the
eyes of others, hearing with their ears, and pinning our faith on their
understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names
and dates, not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing about his
next-door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and castes of
the Hindoos and Calmue Tartars. He can hardly find his way into the
next street, though he is acquainted with the exact dimensions
of Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his oldest
acquaintance is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous
lecture on all the principal characters in history. He cannot tell
whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a
professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He
knows as much of what he talks about as a blind man does of colours. He
cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he
ever in the right in any one of his opinions upon any one matter of
fact that really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an
infallible judge on all these points, of which it is impossible that he
or any other person living should know anything but by conjecture. He is
expert in all the dead and in most of the living languages; but he can
neither speak his own fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of
this class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook to point out
several solecisms in Milton's Latin style; and in his own performance
there is hardly a sentence of common English. Such was Dr. ----. Such
is Dr. ----. Such was not Porson. He was an exception that confirmed
the general rule, a man that, by uniting talents and knowledge with
learning, made the distinction between them more striking and palpable.

A mere scholar, who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of
them. 'Books do not teach the use of books.' How should he know anything
of a work who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is
conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those
again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parroted others.
He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he
knows nothing of the _thing_ which it means in any one of them. He
stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations
quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding,
and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and manners