While then we admit the rapid advancement of Knowledge, let us pause a moment and inquire if it is not a proof of the degeneracy of mind and the decay of Wisdom, that, in that which is purely mental or dependent on mind, we have no names of equal note with the names of those who lived before the exclusive adoption of the experimental part of the Baconian philosophy. Where is the name in poetry to set against Shakspere and Milton; in metaphysics to match with Locke, Hobbes, &c.; in deduction from facts and generalization with Bacon, Newton, Halley, &c.; in theology, with the hundreds of names which yet eclipse all modern commentators? It may perhaps be said in reply, if we have not such great minds, we have a larger number of thinkers of lesser magnitude. This is doubtful. Time has obliterated the swarms of lesser fry who, like their congeners of the nineteenth century, lived their day and gained a temporary fame in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But further, it is easy to be a triton among minnows. It is as easy now-a-days to set up for a literary character and “write a book” without an idea, as it is for an insolvent man to pass for a rich one and live sumptuously on borrowed capital and paper money. Our thousands of authors are but the minnows which sport in the shallow brooks and live their little day in glorious self-gratulation on the laudations of their brother minnows; but if they happen to get out into the deep strong waters, and a triton turns his stern eye upon them—pop—they turn their tails round, dive to the bottom and are seen no more. Thus it was with our novelists; they shone and blazed away—happy, glorious book-wrights—till the triton Scott came athwart their path, and straightway they were gone. And surely, surely, we now again want another Scott to demolish the rapidly increasing tribe of cachinnators, who appear to deem that the proper end of light literature is just to raise a temporary laugh and be forgotten. Heaven send us salvation from more Jerrolds, à Beckets and the whole tribe of ephemeral laughing-stocks! It is the same in other and more important departments of literature. Our historians are mere compilers of old letters; we fly to Germany for historical criticism and acute generalizations from facts, contenting ourselves with laboriously picking up a few obscure facts for the use of our more deeply-thinking neighbours; who are treading in the paths which our own sages trod two hundred and fifty years ago, because they have not yet placed the exact sciences at the head of intellectual pursuits, and abandoned thought for mechanisms, generalizations from facts for the barren accumulation of facts.