he utters himself was determined by his omnivorous appetite for every quaint or significant symbol to be discovered in the whole field of learning. With no prejudices, nothing comes amiss to him; and the signature of some mysterious principle may be found in every object of art or nature. Science in its infancy was still half mystic, and the facts which he gathered were all tinged with the semi-mythical fancies of the earliest explorers of the secrets of nature. In an old relic, recalling 'the drums and tramplings of three conquests,' in a queer annual, or an ancient fragment of history might be the appropriate emblem, or something more than the emblem of a truth equally impressive to the scientific and the poetical imagination. He would have been happy by the midnight lamp in Milton's 'high lonely tower;' but his humour would look at the romances which Milton loved rather with the eyes of Cervantes than of Milton. Their tone of sentiment would be too strained and highflown; and he would prefer to read of the spirits that are found 'In fire, air, flood, or underground,' or to try to penetrate the secret of 'Every star that heaven doth show, And every herb that sips the dew,' by reading all the nonsense that had been written about them in the dawn of inquiry. He should be read in a corresponding spirit. One should often stop to appreciate the full flavour of some quaint allusion, or lay down the book to follow out some diverging line of thought. So read in a retired study, or beneath the dusty shelves of an ancient library, a page of Sir Thomas seems to revive the echoes as of ancient chants in college chapels, strangely blended with the sonorous perorations of professors in the neighbouring schools, so that the interferences sometimes produce a note of gentle mockery and sometimes heighten solemnity by quaintness. That, however, is not the spirit in which books are often read in these days. We have an appetite for useful information, and an appetite for frivolous sentiment or purely poetical musing. We cannot combine the two after the quaint fashion of the old physician. And therefore these charming writings have ceased to suit our modern taste; and Sir Thomas is already passing under that shadow of mortality which obscures all, even the greatest, reputations, and with which no one has dwelt more pathetically or graphically than himself.