but there is bread, sweet as honey, if we would eat it, in a good
book; and the family must be poor indeed, which, once in their
lives, cannot, for, such multipliable barley-loaves, pay their
baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich nation, and we are filthy
and foolish enough to thumb each other's books out of circulating
libraries!

(II.) I say we have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, "are we
not foremost in all discovery, {13} and is not the whole world giddy
by reason, or unreason, of our inventions?" Yes; but do you suppose
that is national work? That work is all done IN SPITE OF the
nation; by private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough,
indeed, to make our profit of science; we snap up anything in the
way of a scientific bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but if
the scientific man comes for a bone or a crust to US, that is
another story. What have we publicly done for science? We are
obliged to know what o'clock it is, for the safety of our ships, and
therefore we pay for an observatory; and we allow ourselves, in the
person of our Parliament, to be annually tormented into doing
something, in a slovenly way, for the British Museum; sullenly
apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed birds in, to
amuse our children. If anybody will pay for their own telescope,
and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment as if it
were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires suddenly
perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else than a
portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where the
gold is, and where the coals, we understand that there is some use
in that; and very properly knight him: but is the accident of his
having found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to US?
(The negation of such discovery among his brother squires may