Matter-of-fact men, or men of knowledge, and men of wit and taste, were long inimical to each other’s pursuits.[B] The Royal Society in its origin could hardly support itself against the ludicrous attacks of literary men,[C] and the Antiquarian Society has afforded them amusement.[D] Such partial views have ceased to contract the understanding.  Science yields a new substance to literature; literature combines new associations for the votaries of knowledge.  There is no subject in nature, and in the history of man, which will not associate with our feelings and our curiosity, whenever genius extends its awakening hand.  The antiquary, the naturalist, the architect, the chemist, and even writers on medical topics, have in our days asserted their claims, and discovered their long-interrupted relationship with the great family of genius and literature.

[Footnote A:  We have a Dictionary of “Ten Thousand living Authors” of our own nation.  The alphabet is fatal by its juxtapositions.  In France, before the Revolution, they counted about twenty thousand writers.  When David would have his people numbered, Joab asked, “Why doth my lord delight in this?” In political economy, the population returns may be useful, provided they be correct; but in the literary republic, its numerical force diminishes the strength of the empire.  “There you are numbered, we had rather you were weighed.”  Put aside the puling infants of literature, of whom such a mortality occurs in its nurseries; such as the writers of the single sermon, the single law-tract, the single medical dissertation, &c.; all writers whose subject is single, without being singular; count for nothing the inefficient mob of mediocrists; and strike out our literary charlatans; and then our alphabet of men of genius will not consist, as it now does, of the four-and-twenty letters.]

[Footnote B:  The cause is developed in the chapter on “Want of Mutual Esteem.”]

[Footnote C:  See BUTLER, in his “Elephant in the Moon.”  SOUTH, in his oration at the opening of the theatre at Oxford, passed this bitter sarcasm on the naturalists,—­“Mirantur nihil nisi pulices, pediculos—­et se ipsos;”—­nothing they admire but fleas, lice, and themselves!  The illustrious SLOANE endured a long persecution from the bantering humour of Dr. KING.  One of the most amusing declaimers against what he calls les Sciences des faux Scavans is Father MALEBRANCHE; he is far more severe than Cornelius Agrippa, and he long preceded ROUSSEAU, so famous for his invective against the sciences.  The seventh chapter of his fourth book is an inimitable satire.  “The principal excuse,” says he, “which engages men in false studies, is, that they have attached the idea of learned where they should not.”  Astronomy, antiquarianism, history, ancient poetry, and natural history, are all mowed down by his metaphysical scythe.  When we become acquainted with the idea Father Malebranche attaches to the term learned, we understand him—­and we smile.]