n in Church and State, when the intellectual impulse from
the invention of printing had scarcely reached its climax, and while the
New World stung the imaginations of men with its immeasurable promise
and its temptations to daring adventure. Facts in themselves are clumsy
and cumbrous--the cowry-currency of isolated and uninventive men;
generalizations, conveying great sums of knowledge in a little space,
mark the epoch of free interchange of ideas, of higher culture, and of
something better than provincial scholarship.

But generalizations, again, though in themselves the work of a happier
moment, of some genetic flash in the brain of man, gone before one can
say it lightens, are the result of ideas slowly gathered and long
steeped and clarified in the mind, each in itself a composite of the
carefully observed relations of separate and seemingly disparate facts.
What is the pedigree of almost all great fortunes? Through vast
combinations of trade, forlorn hopes of speculation, you trace them up
to a clear head and a self-earned sixpence. It is the same with all
large mental accumulations: they begin with a steady brain and the first
solid result of thought, however small--the nucleus of speculation. The
true aim of the scholar is not to crowd his memory, but to classify and
sort it, till what was a heap of chaotic curiosities becomes a museum of
science.

It may well be questioned whether the invention of printing, while it
democratized information, has not also levelled the ancient aristocracy
of thought. By putting a library within the power of every one, it has
taught men to depend on their shelves rather than on their brains; it
has supplanted a strenuous habit of thinking with a loose indolence of
reading which relaxes the muscular fiber of the mind. When men had few
books, they mastered those few; but now the multitude of books lord it
over the man. The costliness of books was a great refiner of literature.
Men disposed of single volumes by will with as many provisions and
precautions as if they had been great landed estates. A mitre would
hardly have overjoyed Petrarch as much as did the finding of a copy of
Virgil. The problem for the scholar was formerly how to acquire books;
for us it is how to get rid of them. Instead of gathering, we must sift.
When Confucius made his collection of Chinese poems, he saved but three
hundred and ten out of more than three thousand, and it has consequently
survived until our