and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course
qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with
Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap
on the shoulder,--the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners,
equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have
a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their
wide-reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. Imitating the
condescension of some contemporary philosophers of the Infinite, he
graciously accepts Christianity and patronizes the idea of Deity, though
he gives you to understand that he could easily pitch a generalization
outside of both. And thus, mistaking his slab-sidedness for
many-sidedness, and forgetting that there is no insight without force
to back it,--bedizened in conceit and magnificent in littleness,--he is
thrown on society, walking in a vain show of knowledge, and doomed to
be upset and trampled on by the first brawny concrete Fact he stumbles
against. A true method of culture makes drudgery beautiful by presenting
a vision of the object to which it leads;--beware of the conceit that
dispenses with it! How much better it is to delve for a little solid
knowledge, and be sure of that, than to be a proper target for such
a sarcasm as a great statesman once shot at a glib advocate, who was
saying nothing with great fluency and at great length! "Who," he asked,
"is this self-sufficient, all-sufficient, insufficient man?"

Idleness and Conceit, however, are not more opposed to that
out-springing, reverential activity which makes the person forget
himself in devotion to his objects, than Fear. A bold heart in a sound
head,--that is the condition of energetic thinking, of the thought that
thinks round things and into things and through things; but fear freezes
activity at its inmost fountains. "There is nothing," says Montaigne,
"that I fear so much as fear." Indeed, an educated man, who creeps