Page:In the dozy hours, and other papers.djvu/144

 130 mental hydraulic pressure into a single hour's discourse; and, when they escape, they seem vast enough to fill our lives for a week. "When Macaulay talks," complained Lady Ashburton tartly, "I am not only overflowed with learning, but I stand in the slops." We have much the same uncomfortable sensation at an afternoon lecture, when the tide of information, of dry, formidable, relentless facts, rises higher and higher, and our spirits sink lower and lower with every fresh development. "The need of limit, the feasibility of performance," has not yet dawned upon the new educators who have taken the world in hand; and, as a consequence, we, the students, have never learned to survey our own intellectual boundaries. We assume in the first place that we have an intelligent interest in literature, science, and history, art, architecture, and archæology; and, in the second, that it is possible for us to learn a moderate amount about all these things without any unreasonable exertion. This double delusion lures us feebly on until we have listened to so much, and remembered so little, that we are a good deal like the infant Paul Dombey