experts in science, literature, and art, who cover a pretty wide range, taking them all together, of human knowledge.  I have not the least doubt that if the great Dr. Samuel Johnson should come in and sit with this company at one of their Saturday dinners, he would be listened to, as he always was, with respect and attention.  But there are subjects upon which the great talker could speak magisterially in his time and at his club, upon which so wise a man would express himself guardedly at the meeting where I have supposed him a guest.  We have a scientific man or two among us, for instance, who would be entitled to smile at the good Doctor’s estimate of their labors, as I give it here: 

“Of those that spin out life in trifles and die without a memorial, many flatter themselves with high opinion of their own importance and imagine that they are every day adding some improvement to human life.”—­“Some turn the wheel of electricity, some suspend rings to a loadstone, and find that what they did yesterday they can do again to-day.  Some register the changes of the wind, and die fully convinced that the wind is changeable.

“There are men yet more profound, who have heard that two colorless liquors may produce a color by union, and that two cold bodies will grow hot if they are mingled; they mingle them, and produce the effect expected, say it is strange, and mingle them again.”

I cannot transcribe this extract without an intense inward delight in its wit and a full recognition of its thorough half-truthfulness.  Yet if while the great moralist is indulging in these vivacities, he can be imagined as receiving a message from Mr. Boswell or Mrs. Thrale flashed through the depths of the ocean, we can suppose he might be tempted to indulge in another oracular utterance, something like this:——­A wise man recognizes the convenience of a general statement, but he bows to the authority of a particular fact.  He who would bound the possibilities of human knowledge by the limitations of present acquirements would take the dimensions of the infant in ordering the habiliments of the adult.  It is the province of knowledge to speak and it is the privilege of wisdom to listen.  Will the Professor have the kindness to inform me by what steps of gradual development the ring and the loadstone, which were but yesterday the toys of children and idlers, have become the means of approximating the intelligences of remote continents, and wafting emotions unchilled through the abysses of the no longer unfathomable deep?

—­This, you understand, Beloved, is only a conventional imitation of the Doctor’s style of talking.  He wrote in grand balanced phrases, but his conversation was good, lusty, off-hand familiar talk.  He used very often to have it all his own way.  If he came back to us we must remember that to treat him fairly we must suppose him on a level with the knowledge of our own time.  But that knowledge is more specialized, a great deal, than