Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 097.djvu/392

378 Malthus, Allen, Horner, Thomas Brown, Thomas Moore, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Carlyle, Thomas Arnold (the Toms are in great force), Romilly, Payne Knight, Palgrave, George Ellis, Walter Scott, Malcolm Laing, James Mill, Sydney Smith, Jeffrey, Macaulay, Mackintosh, Playfair, Author:Stephen, H. Rogers, et cæteros, ei cæteros. Sir William is as true a son of Anak as any of them. His head is as high, his shoulders are as broad, his port is as manly, as the best of them can affect; and woe to the best of them who should rashly challenge him to a wrestling-bout, or venture to initiate him into a new mystery in the noble art of self-defence. To have a ton of a man "down upon you," with a view to punishment,—a man, too, so versed in the science in all its ramifications, that, like Mrs. Quickly, you know not where to have him,—is no laughing matter. In erudition he is an acknowledged prodigy,— a very Monstrum horrendum,—ingens—but no; that quotation won't do, because of the exquisite inapplicability of the informe and of the cui lumen ademptum. The mediæval scholarship of those omnivorous book-worms whom we regard, after the lapse of centuries, much as we regard certain pre-Adamite mammalia, is revived in this Modern Antique. Whatever is knowable, he seems to know; and most things that are unintelligible, to understand. His learning is literally de omnibue rebus, and, as panting common-place, that toils after him in vain, is driven and goaded (in bull fashion) to add, de quibusdam aliis. The junior soph in the Cambridge stage, who was so harassed and disgusted by being snapped up, every time he cited a line from the classics, by his fellow-traveller Porson, and requested to prove its existence, as per quotation, in the author to whom he had too recklessly attributed it—each author in succession, from Homer and Hesiod down to Plutarch and Lucian being produced, for verification, from Porson's capacious pockets—that junior soph might have enjoyed a sweet revenge, we surmise, could he have booked a third inside place for Sir William, and pitted him against the boozy, musty old classic (honoured be his manes!). Lord Jeffrey, who was not easily frightened within the sphere of belles lettres, avowed himself fairly frightened by the "immensity" of Sir William's erudition: "He is a wonderful fellow," added his lordship, "and I hope may yet be spared to astonish and over-awe us far years to come." He has been compared with Magliabeochi, the Italian librarian, who, as a facetious critic describes his peculiar genius, could (by dint of trotting and cantering over all pages of all books) not only "repeat verbatim et literatim any possible paragraph from any conceivable book, and, letting down his bucket into the dark ages, could fetch up for you any amount of rubbish that you might call for, but could even tell you on which side, dexter or sinister, starboard or larboard, the particular page might stand, in which he had been angling." And in polyglot powers. Sir William has been classed with Cardinal Mezzofante, who is said to have radically mastered, so as to speak familiarly, thirty-four languages. Forty years ago, he was regarded by a distinguished contemporary, akin to himself in breadth and intensity of intellectual character, as possessing a pancylopædic acquaintance with every section of knowledge that could furnish keys for unlocking man's inner nature. "The immensity of Sir William's attainments," testifies his fellow-philosopher and friend, "was best laid open `