But while in the grand topography of thought and in the larger processes of reasoning the failure of Mr. Buckle, according to the judgment here given, is complete, it is freely admitted that as a writer and man of letters he has claims not only to respect, but even to admiration.  His mental fertility is remarkable, his memory marvellous, his reading immense, his mind discursive and agile, his style pellucid as water and often vigorous, while his subordinate conceptions are always ingenious and frequently valuable.  Besides this, he is a genuine enthusiast, and sees before him that El Dorado of the understanding where golden knowledge shall lie yellow on all the hills and yellow under every footfall,—­where the very peasant shall have princely wealth, and no man shall need say to another, “Give me of thy wisdom.”  It is this same element of romantic expectation which stretches a broad and shining margin about the spacious page of Bacon; it is this which wreathes a new fascination around the royal brow of Raleigh; it is this, in part, which makes light the bulky and antiquated tomes of Hakluyt; and the grace of it is that which we often miss in coming from ancient to modern literature.  Better it is, too, than much erudition and many “proprieties” of thought; and one may note it as curious, that Mr. Buckle, seeking to disparage imagination, should have written a book whose most winning and enduring charm is the appeal to imagination it makes.  Moreover, he is an enthusiast in behalf of just that which is distinctively modern:  he is a white flame of precisely those heats which smoulder now in the duller breast of the world in general; he worships at all the pet shrines; he expresses the peculiar loves and hatreds of the time.  Who is so devout a believer in free speech and free trade and the let-alone policy in government, and the coming of the Millennium by steam?  Who prostrates himself with such unfeigned adoration before the great god, “State-of-Society,” or so mutters, for a mystic O’m, the word “Law”?  Then how delightful it is, when he traces the whole ill of the world to just those things which we now all agree to detest,—­to theological persecution, bigotry, superstition, and infidelity to Isaac Newton!  In fine, the recent lessons of that great schoolboy, the world, or those over which the said youth now is poring or idling or blubbering, Mr. Buckle has not only got by heart, not only recites them capitally, but believes with assurance that they are the sole lessons worth learning in any time; and all the inevitable partialities of the text-book, all the errors and ad captandum statements with which its truth is associated, he takes with such implicit faith, and believes in so confidently as part and parcel of our superiority to all other times, that the effect upon most of us cannot be otherwise than delectable.