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 themselves to one plot of ground; when they have chosen it, their interest becomes concentrated on it and on those who are doing the same special work, and they soon cease to care much whether they are understood by others.

We gladly recognise that such specialists are doing invaluable service, in their several lines, to the cause of knowledge; but we may also wish that the desire to be scientific was more uniformly tempered by a regard for the nature of the materials with which all scholarship has to deal. Those materials are the creations of the human intellect, whether as seen in the evolution of language, or of literature, or of art. When principles, determined with a scientific precision, have assured the student of language that a kinship is possible between two words, one of the elements in the probability which he may have to consider is the precise usage of these words, as attested by literature; and here it is no longer enough to be logically exact; it is necessary to possess also that delicate instinct for expression which is called the literary sense. The textual critic who is seeking to amend a corrupt passage may have full command of everything that palæography can tell him, and of all the particular facts concerning the MSS. of his author; he may also be a perfect grammarian; but what will these things avail him unless he has also an adequate sympathy with his author's mind, and unless his procedure is controlled by the literary taste which such an insight bestows? We remember the legendary emendation in As You