x.] POSTSCRIPT ON MR. BUCKLE. 197 



shall never finish my book!" The pathos is not 

 diminished, but perhaps rather deepened, by the 

 reflection that the book possessed no such trans- 

 cendent value as its author ascribed to it, and that 

 in all probability the strange irony of fate, had it 

 granted to Mr. Buckle the long life of a Carlyle or a 

 Humboldt, would only have permitted him to survive 

 his own reputation as a leader in the world of thought. 

 It is seldom that so brilliant a success as Mr. Buckle's 

 has been even temporarily achieved by such super- 

 ficial thinking and such slender scholarship. The 

 immense array of authors cited in his book bears 

 witness to the extent of his reading, but the loose, 

 indiscriminate way in which they are cited shows 

 equally how uncritical and desultory his reading was. 

 One may ascribe this looseness to the native impa- 

 tience of temperament illustrated in his disposing of 

 Gibbon and Hallam in ten days ; but certainly his 

 solitary education and solitary habits of study could 

 do little towards curing the fault. One reason why 

 the scholarship of university-bred men is in the main 

 so far superior to that of men who have been taught 

 at home is that the former are regularly forced, by 

 continual contact and rivalry with fellow-students, 

 into habits of self-restraint and self-criticism in 

 reaching conclusions which only the rarest innate 



