continual pleasure.  Sua vissima vita indies, sentire se fieri meliorem; and this as Bacon has said, and Clarendon repeated, is the benefit that a studious man enjoys in retirement.  To the studies which I have faithfully pursued I am indebted for friends with whom, hereafter, it will be deemed an honour to have lived in friendship; and as for the enemies which they have procured to me in sufficient numbers, happily I am not of the thin-skinned race:  they might as well fire small-shot at a rhinoceros, as direct their attacks upon me.  In omnibus requiem quaesivi, said Thomas a Kempis, sed non inveni nisi in angulis et libellis.  I too have found repose where he did, in books and retirement, but it was there alone I sought it:  to these my nature, under the direction of a merciful Providence, led me betimes, and the world can offer nothing which should tempt me from them.

Sir Thomas More.—­If wisdom were to be found in the multitude of books, what a progress must this nation have made in it since my head was cut off!  A man in my days might offer to dispute de omni scibile, and in accepting the challenge I, as a young man, was not guilty of any extraordinary presumption, for all which books could teach was, at that time, within the compass of a diligent and ardent student.  Even then we had difficulties to contend with which were unknown to the ancients.  The curse of Babel fell lightly upon them.  The Greeks despised other nations too much to think of acquiring their languages for the love of knowledge, and the Romans contented themselves with learning only the Greek.  But tongues which, in my lifetime, were hardly formed, have since been refined and cultivated, and are become fertile in authors; and others, the very names of which were then unknown in Europe, have been discovered and mastered by European scholars, and have been found rich in literature.  The circle of knowledge has thus widened in every generation; and you cannot now touch the circumference of what might formerly have been clasped.

Montesinos.—­We are fortunate, methinks, who live in an age when books are accessible and numerous, and yet not so multiplied, as to render a competent, not to say thorough, acquaintance with any one branch of literature, impossible.  He has it yet in his power to know much, who can be contented to remain in ignorance of more, and to say with Scaliger, non sum ex illis gloriosulis qui nihil ignorant.

Sir Thomas More.—­If one of the most learned men whom the world has ever seen felt it becoming in him to say this two centuries ago, how infinitely smaller in these days must the share of learning which the most indefatigable student can hope to attain, be in proportion to what he must wish to learn!  The sciences are simplified as they are improved; old rubbish and demolished fabrics serve there to make a foundation for new scaffolding, and more enduring superstructures; and every discoverer in physics bequeaths