Goethe said that "a vast abundance of objects must lie before us ere we can think upon them." Woepke felt the need of this abundance, but he did not go out of his way to find it. The objectionable seeking after knowledge is the seeking after the knowledge which does not belong to us. In vain you urge me to go in quest of sciences for which I have no natural aptitude. Would you have me act like that foolish camel in the Hebrew proverb, which in going to seek horns lost his ears? LETTER II. TO A FRIEND WHO STUDIED MANY THINGS. Men cannot restrict themselves in learning--Description of a Latin scholar of two generations since--What is attempted by a cultivated contemporary--Advantages of a more restricted field--Privilege of instant admission--Many pursuits cannot be kept up simultaneously--The deterioration of knowledge through neglect--What it really is--The only available knowledge that which we habitually use--Difficulty in modern education--That it is inevitably a beginning of many things and no more--The simpler education of an ancient Greek--That of Alcibiades--How the Romans were situated as to this--The privilege of limited studies belongs to the earlier ages--They learned and we attempt to learn. It appears to be henceforth inevitable that men should be unable to restrict themselves to one or two pursuits, and you who are in most respects a very perfect specimen of what the age naturally produces in the way of culture, have studied subjects so many and so various that a mere catalogue of them would astonish your grandfather if his shade could revisit his old home. And yet your grandfather was considered a very highly cultivated gentleman according to the ideas and requirements of his time. He was an elegant scholar, but in Latin chiefly, for he said that he never read Greek easily, and indeed he abandoned that language entirely on leaving the University. But his Latin, from daily use and practice (for he let no day slip by without reading some ancient author) and from the thoroughness and accuracy of his scholarship, was always as ready for service as the saddled steeds of Branksome. I think he got more culture, more of the best effects of good literature, out of that one language than some polyglots get out of a dozen. He knew no modern tongue, he had not even the common pretension to read a little French, and in his day hardly anybody studied German. He had no scientific training of any kind except mathematics, in which I have heard him say that he had never been proficient. Of the fine arts his ignorance was complete, so complete that I doubt if he could have distinguished Rigaud from Reynolds, and he had never played upon any musical instrument. The leisure which he enjoyed during a long and tranquil existence he gave entirely to Latin and English literature, but of the two he enjoyed Latin the more, not with the preference of a pedant, but because it carried him more completely out of the present,