And what I call a proper stupidity keeps a man from all the defects of this character:  it chains the gifted possessor mainly to his old ideas, it takes him seven weeks to comprehend an atom of a new one; it keeps him from being led away by new theories, for there is nothing which bores him so much; it restrains him within his old pursuits, his well-known habits, his tried expedients, his verified conclusions, his traditional beliefs.  He is not tempted to levity or impatience, for he does not see the joke and is thick-skinned to present evils.  Inconsistency puts him out:  “What I says is this here, as I was a-saying yesterday,” is his notion of historical eloquence and habitual discretion.  He is very slow indeed to be excited,—­his passions, his feelings, and his affections are dull and tardy strong things, falling in a certain known direction, fixed on certain known objects, and for the most part acting in a moderate degree and at a sluggish pace.  You always know where to find his mind.  Now, this is exactly what (in politics at least) you do not know about a Frenchman.

REVIEW WRITING

From ‘The First Edinburgh Reviewers’

Review writing exemplifies the casual character of modern literature:  everything about it is temporary and fragmentary.  Look at a railway stall:  you see books of every color,—­blue, yellow, crimson, “ring-streaked, speckled, and spotted,”—­on every subject, in every style, of every opinion, with every conceivable difference, celestial or sublunary, maleficent, beneficent—­but all small.  People take their literature in morsels, as they take sandwiches on a journey....

And the change in appearance of books has been accompanied—­has been caused—­by a similar change in readers.  What a transition from the student of former ages! from a grave man with grave cheeks and a considerate eye, who spends his life in study, has no interest in the outward world, hears nothing of its din and cares nothing for its honors, who would gladly learn and gladly teach, whose whole soul is taken up with a few books of ’Aristotle and his Philosophy,’—­to the merchant in the railway, with a head full of sums, an idea that tallow is “up,” a conviction that teas are “lively,” and a mind reverting perpetually from the little volume which he reads to these mundane topics, to the railway, to the shares, to the buying and bargaining universe.  We must not wonder that the outside of books is so different, when the inner nature of those for whom they are written is so changed.

In this transition from ancient writing to modern, the review-like essay and the essay-like review fill a large space.  Their small bulk, their slight pretension to systematic completeness,—­their avowal, it might be said, of necessary incompleteness,—­the facility of changing the subject, of selecting points to attack, of exposing only the best corner for defense, are great temptations.  Still greater is the advantage