dinner, and three times I spend from nine to ten in the evening with him, so that I feel I am doing quite right and quite as little as I ought to do in giving up the remaining thirteen hours of the day to study, especially as I gave fourteen to it last winter without injury. The journey we have lately taken was for the express purpose of seeing all the universities or schools of any considerable name in the country. This in a couple of months we easily accomplished, and of course saw professors, directors, and schoolmasters—men of great learning and men of little learning, and men of no learning at all—in shoals. This is from Cogswell again, and is certainly a clarion appeal as to the need of thoroughness in teaching and learning:— GÖTTINGEN, July 13, 1817. I hope that you and every other person interested in the College are reconciled to Mr. Everett’s plan of remaining longer in Europe than was at first intended, as I am sure you would be do you know the use he makes of his time, and the benefit you are all to derive from his learning. Before I came to Göttingen I used to wonder why it was that he wished to remain here so long; I now wonder he can consent to leave so soon. The truth is, you all mistake the cause of your impatience: you believe that it comes from a desire of seeing him at work for and giving celebrity to the College, but it arises from a wish to have him in your society, at your dinner-tables, at your suppers, your clubs, and your ladies, at your tea-parties (you perceive I am aiming at Boston folks): however, all who have formed such expectations must be disappointed; he will find that most of these gratifications must be sacrificed to attain the objects of a scholar’s ambition. What can men think when they say that two years are sufficient to make a Greek scholar? Does not everybody know that it is the labor of half a common life to learn to read the language with tolerable facility? I remember to have heard little Drisen say, a few days after I came here, that he had been spending eighteen years, at least sixteen hours a day, exclusively upon Greek, and that he could not now read a page of the tragedians without a dictionary. When I went home I struck Greek from the list of my studies; I now think no more of attaining it than I do of becoming an astrologer. In fact, the most heart-breaking circumstance attending upon human knowledge is that a man can never go any farther than “to know how little’s to be known”; it fills, then, the mind of scholars with despair to look upon the map of science, as it does that of the traveler to look upon the map of the earth, for both see what a mere speck can be traveled over, and of that speck how imperfect is the knowledge which is acquired. Let any one who