[Footnote D:  See the chapter on “Puck the Commentator,” in the “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. iii.; also p. 304 of the same volume.]

A new race of jargonists, the barbarous metaphysicians of political economy, have struck at the essential existence of the productions of genius in literature and art; for, appreciating them by their own standard, they have miserably degraded the professors.  Absorbed in the contemplation of material objects, and rejecting whatever does not enter into their own restricted notion of “utility,” these cold arithmetical seers, with nothing but millions in their imagination; and whose choicest works of art are spinning-jennies, have valued the intellectual tasks of the library and the studio by “the demand and the supply.”  They have sunk these pursuits into the class of what they term “unproductive labour;” and by another result of their line and level system, men of letters, with some other important characters, are forced down into the class “of buffoons, singers, opera-dancers, &c.”  In a system of political economy it has been discovered that “that unprosperous race of men, called men of letters, must necessarily occupy their present forlorn state in society much as formerly, when a scholar and a beggar seem to have been terms very nearly synonymous."[A] In their commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing view of human nature, addressing society by its most pressing wants and its coarsest feelings, these theorists limit the moral and physical existence of man by speculative tables of population, planing and levelling society down in their carpentry of human nature.  They would yoke and harness the loftier spirits to one common and vulgar destination.  Man is considered only as he wheels on the wharf, or as he spins in the factory; but man, as a recluse being of meditation, or impelled to action by more generous passions, has been struck out of the system of our political economists.  It is, however, only among their “unproductive labourers” that we shall find those men of leisure, whose habitual pursuits are consumed in the development of thought and the gradual accessions of knowledge; those men of whom the sage of Judea declares, that “It is he who hath little business who shall become wise:  how can he get wisdom that holdeth the plough, and whose talk is of bullocks?  But THEY,”—­the men of leisure and study,—­“WILL MAINTAIN THE STATE OF THE WORLD!” The prosperity and the happiness of a people include something more evident and more permanent than “the Wealth of a Nation."[B]

[Footnote A:  “Wealth of Nations,” i. 182.]