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Rh thought, and he offers them by the handful, by the shovelful, by the cartful, making them sparkle under the eager eyes of his readers. For him there are no Alps nor Pyrenees, no chains that cannot be broken, no oceans that separate. Every realm pays him tribute, every land offers him its tithe of beauty. He has dug deeply in fields where others have but turned the sod. He has followed close after the pioneers in the exploration of unfamiliar lands. If we in Italy were accustomed to elect princes, Farinelli would certainly be the rightful prince of literary erudition.

Nor does he cast his Titanic learning about in haphazard fragments and fagots, as so many have done, especially in Germany. He can arrange and organize his magnificent material. He can embody it in a continuous discourse which moves on toward a single conclusion, though it may assume at times the color of imagery, or the power of eloquence. Farinelli is not a pure scholar, but a great scholar who makes use of his erudition as an architect makes use of stones and bricks. He has ideas, he has feeling; and he knows the most notable expressions of ideas and of feelings in every clime and every period. His books therefore are not external histories of literary genres, but histories of single passions or of single theories followed through the masterpieces of all literatures.