The complaint of Lord Bacon is truer now than it was in his time: “If a man turn his eyes to libraries, he may perhaps be surprised at the immense variety of books he finds; but upon examining and diligently weighing their matters and contents, he will be struck with amazement on the other side; and after finding no end of repetitions, but that men continually treat and speak the same things over and over again, fall from admiration of the variety into a wonder at the want and scantiness of those things which have hitherto detained and possessed the minds of men.” Unhappily his system, by the universal and indiscriminate adoption of only its lower and material offices to the exclusion of those higher ends which he contemplated from it, and by its being used as a mode of cultivating the mind, as well as a means of discovering the sciences, has rather strengthened than weakened the justice of these censures. Our Augustan age of thought is still that of Elizabeth and James I.; the latter part of the sixteenth, and the early part of the seventeenth centuries still outshine the nineteenth in loftiness of thought and solidity of learning; yet we complacently boast of our progress, because we rattle through the fields of learning at ten times the speed of our ancestors, as we do over our railway-sected country, gleaning about as little information of the one as of the other. We dash through the deep cuttings and dark tunnels of literature at railway speed, taking assertions for facts, and empty declamation and tawdry immorality for sense and religion; and then, like the nervous lady who rides through a railway tunnel without fainting, congratulate ourselves on having accomplished some gigantic feat; though we have learnt just as much about the subject of our studies as she has of the construction of the tunnel; but having, like her, fretted and fumed for a few minutes at some dark difficulty, we unite with her in thinking ourselves very valiant and clever people. We avail ourselves of the roads and paths which others have made, and never stop to examine their solidity or foundations, or the principles on which they are constructed. We lose the habits of deep investigation and close thinking by a long and entire reliance on others, and our minds become dissipated, and a prey to all the silly novelties which spring like ephemera from the almost stagnant pools of modern brains.