applied to Literature and to Science, 39 



professional men to call a man a quacks who confines his prac- 

 tice, or even his investigations, to a single object ; and a senti- 

 ment, so apparently the offspring of an illiberal jealousy, is in 

 fact, not uncommonly, founded on the actual experience of the 

 unavoidable effect of such a division of labour, which is, first, to 

 cause the individual to deceive himself, and then to render him 

 an involuntary agent in deceiving others. If, on the other 

 hand, the profession is such as to require any proceeding of a 

 manual or mechanical nature, there is no doubt that this kind 

 of operative excellence must be most essentially advanced by a 

 considerable limitation of the pursuit, though not by a total 

 and exclusive devotion to one object only. 



Now if learning were mere book making, and were to be 

 acquired by an immeasurable collection of words and autho- 

 rities, that man would indeed be the most learned who looked 

 over the most books, and copied the most words into the 

 margin of his dictionary, or into his common place book ; and 

 then the devotion of a life to a single language, or a single 

 investigation, would far outweigh, in its cultivation, the posses- 

 sion of any superior judgment or discrimination. 



But where evidence is to be compared and appreciated, and 

 where conflicting probabilities are to be balanced against each 

 other, it does appear to me, that a familiarity with some other 

 pursuits, besides those of a mere linguist or historian, becomes 

 of value in making the labourer worthy of his hire ; for without 

 them he may labour a great deal, and may yet do worse than 

 nothing. 



I am far from wishing to insinuate that all of Mr. Cham- 

 pollion's labours are of this kind, or even to assert that any of 

 them are so. But I cannot help thinking it morally impossible 

 that he should not have overrated his own successes ; and I 

 must confess that I have not yet been able to convince myself 

 that he has made out any thing whatever, besides the Greek 

 and Roman proper names, and one or two detached hiero- 

 glyphical characters ; and I doubt whether I shall be able to 

 satisfy myself, for ten or twenty years to come, whether he is 

 right or wrong in any thing further. 



The evidence of what was done in this country is fully 

 before the public, not indeed in a very popular, but iu a suffi- 



