138 Biographical Memoir of 



power of understanding, which extracted something precious out 

 of all that was presented to it. His stores of miscellaneous 

 knowledge were immense, — and yet less astonishing than the 

 command he had at all times over them. It seemed as if every 

 subject that was casually started in conversation with him, had 

 been that which he had been last occupied in studying and ex- 

 hausting ; such was the copiousness, the precision, and the ad- 

 mirable clearness of the information which he poured out upon it 

 without effort or hesitation. Nor was this promptitude and com- 

 pass of knowledge confined in any degree to the studies con- 

 nected with his ordinary pursuits. That he should have been 

 minutely and extensively skilled in chemistry and the arts, and 

 in most of the branches of physical science, might, perhaps, have 

 been conjectured ; but it could not have been inferred from his 

 usual occupations, and probably is not generally known, that he 

 was curiously learned in many branches of antiquity, meta- 

 physics, medicine, and etymology, and perfectly at home in all 

 the details of architecture, music, and law. He was well ac- 

 quainted too with most of the modern languages, and familiar 

 with their most recent literature. Nor was it at all extraor- 

 dinary to hear the great mechanician and engineer detailing and 

 expounding, for hours together, the metaphysical theories of the 

 German logicians, or criticising the measures or the matter of 

 German poetry. 



His astonishing memory was aided, no doubt, in a great 

 measure, by a still higher and rarer faculty — by his power of di- 

 gesting and arranging in its proper place all the information he 

 received, and of casting aside and rejecting, as it were instinc- 

 tively, whatever was worthless or immaterial. Every conception 

 that was suggested to his mind seemed instantly to take its 

 place among its other rich furniture, and to be condensed into 

 the smallest and most convenient form. He never appeared, 

 therefore, to be at all encumbered or perplexed with the verbiage 

 of the dull books he perused, or the idle talk to which he listened ; 

 but to have at once extracted, by a kind of intellectual alchemy, 

 all that was worthy of attention, and to have reduced it for his 

 own use, to its true value and to its simplest form. And thus it 



