198 Postscript on Mr. Buckle. [x. 



virtues of intellect can enable the latter now and 

 then, in spite of their solitude, to acquire. It is but 

 once or twice in an age that the home-taught student 

 can receive the stimulus to patient sagacity that was 

 afforded in the cases of Grote and Mill. The kind of 

 unceasing criticism which university-life affords the 

 best means of securing, is in most cases indispens- 

 able. Less effective, because less direct and constant, 

 but still very valuable, is the discipline that is gained 

 by early and frequent authorship, where a writer is so 

 constituted as to be able to profit alike by fair and 

 unfair public criticism. That there may be men of 

 genius with such marked native qualities of caution 

 and vigilance as to enable them partially to dispense 

 with such educational aids we do not deny ; but Mr. 

 Buckle was not one of these. He began life with his 

 full share of the " original sin " of hasty generalisa- 

 tion; and nothing in his circumstances tended to 

 check or control this disposition until, at an age when 

 one's mental habits are usually pretty well engrained, 

 he appeared before the world with the first instalment 

 of his able and stimulating but crude and hastily- 

 wrought book. 



Not only did Mr. Buckle's impatient and uncritical 

 habit prevent his vast reading from resulting in 

 sound scholarship, but his lack of subtlety and pre- 



