"A river cut into many rivulets divides also its strength, and grows contemptible and apt to be forded by a lamb and drunk up by a summer sun; so is the spirit of man busied in variety, and divided in itself; it abates its fervour, cools into indifferency, and becomes trifling by its dispersion and inadvertency. Aquinas was once asked, with what compendium a man might best become learned? He answered, _By reading of one book_; meaning that an understanding entertained with several objects is intent upon neither, and profits not." --_Life of Christ_, part ii. s. xii. 16. He also quotes Ecclus (xi. 10.), St. Gregory, St. Bernard, Seneca, Quintillian, and Juvenal to the same purpose. Southey quotes part of this passage from Bishop Taylor (in the _Doctor_) and adds: "Lord Holland's poet, the prolific Lope de Vega, tells us to the same purport. The _Homo Unius Libri_ is indeed proverbially formidable to all conversational figurantes: like your sharpshooter, he knows his piece, and is sure of his shot." The truth of this dictum of St. Thomas cannot be too much insisted on in this age of many books, which affords such incentives to literary dissipation and consequent shallowness. "An intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him, is one who is full of 'views,' on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day. It is almost thought a disgrace not to have a view at a moment's notice on any question from the Personal Advent to the Cholera or Mesmerism. This is owing in a great measure to the necessities of periodical literature, now so much in request. Every quarter of a year, every month every day, there must be a supply for the gratification of the public, of new and luminous theories on the subjects of religion, foreign politics, home politics, civil economy, finance, trade, agriculture, emigration, and the colonies. Slavery, the gold fields, German philosophy, the French empire, Wellington, Peel, Ireland, must all be practised on, day after day, by what are called original thinkers."--_Dr. Newman's Disc. on Univ. Educ._, p. xxv. (preface). This writer follows up the subject very ably, and his remarks on that spurious philosophism which shows itself in what, for want of a better word, he calls "viewiness," are worth the attention of all _homines unius libri_. P.S.--As I think of it, I shall make a cognate Query. Some facetious opponent of the schoolmen fathered on St. Thomas Aquinas an imaginary work in sundry folio volumes entitled _De Omnibus Rebus_, adding an equally bulky and imaginary supplement--_Et Quibusdam Aliis_. This is as often used to feather a piece of unfledged wit, as the speculation concerning the number of angels that could dance on the point of a needle, and yet I have never been able to trace out the inventor of these visionary tomes. EIRIONNACH. * * * * * THE FORLORN HOPE.