I cogitated, as I stood at the fire, on the subject of the public in general, and found that I could divide it, like man himself, into three parts--into the Buying-public, the Reading-public, and the Art-public, just as speculative persons have assumed that man consists of Body, Soul, and Spirit. The Body, or Buying-public, which consists of scholars by trade, professional teachers, and people engaged in business--that true _corpus callosum_ of the German empire--buys and uses the very biggest and most corpulent books (works of _body_), and deals with them as women do with cookery books, it opens them and consults them in order to be guided by them. In the eyes of this class the world contains two kinds of utter idiots, differing from each other only in the direction taken by their crack-brained fancies, those of the one going too much downward, those of the other too much upward; in a word, philosophers and poets. Naudæus, in his 'Enumeration of the Learned Men who were supposed to be Necromancers in the Middle Ages,' has admirably remarked that this never was the case with jurists or theologians, but always with philosophers. It is the case to this day with the wise of the world, only that, the noble idea of "wizard" and "witchmaster,"--whose _spiritus rector_ and grand master seems to have been the devil himself--having got degraded to a name applied to great and clever men and conjurors, the philosopher must be content to put up with the latter signification of the term. Poets are in a more pitiable case still; the philosopher is a member of the fourth faculty, has recognised official positions--can lecture on his own subjects; but the poet is nothing at all, holds no state appointment--(if he did he would no longer be "born," he would be "made" by the Imperial Chancery), and people who can criticise him and pass their opinions upon him throw it in his teeth without ceremony that he makes plentiful use of expressions which are current neither in commerce, nor in synodal edicts, nor in general regulations, nor in decisions of the high court of justiciary, nor in medical opinions or histories of diseases--and that he visibly walks on stilts, is turgid and bombastic, and never _copious_ enough or _condensed_ enough. At the same time, I at once admit that, in the rank thus assigned to the poet, he is treated very much as the nightingale was by Linnæus, which (as he was not taking its song into account) he, no doubt properly, classed among the funny, jerking water-wagtails. The second part of the public, the Soul, the Reading-public, is composed of girls, lads, and idle persons in general. I shall praise it in the sequel; it reads us all, at any rate, and skips obscure pages, where there's nothing but talk and argument, sticking, like a just and upright judge, or historical inquirer, to matters of pure fact.