of learning, and the respect due to it, and its rewards were lowered when it was thrown open to all men; and it was seriously proposed to prohibit the printing of any book that could be afforded for sale below the price of three soldi.  This base and invidious feeling was perhaps never so directly avowed in other countries as in Italy, the land where literature was first restored; and yet in this more liberal island ignorance was for some generations considered to be a mark of distinction, by which a man of gentle birth chose, not unfrequently, to make it apparent that he was no more obliged to live by the toil of his brain, than by the sweat of his brow.  The same changes in society which rendered it no longer possible for this class of men to pass their lives in idleness have completely put an end to this barbarous pride.  It is as obsolete as the fashion of long finger-nails, which in some parts of the East are still the distinctive mark of those who labour not with their hands.  All classes are now brought within the reach of your current literature, that literature which, like a moral atmosphere, is as it were the medium of intellectual life, and on the quality of which, according as it may be salubrious or noxious, the health of the public mind depends.  There is, if not a general desire for knowledge, a general appearance of such a desire.  Authors of all kinds have increased and are increasing among you.  Romancers —

Montesinos.—­Some of whom attempt things which had hitherto been unattempted yet in prose or rhyme, because among all the extravagant intellects with which the world has teemed none were ever before so utterly extravagant as to choose for themselves themes of such revolting monstrosity.

Sir Thomas More.—­Poets —

Montesinos. —

“Tanti Rome non ha preti, o dottori
Bologna.”

Sir Thomas More.—­Critics —

Montesinos.—­More numerous yet; for this is a corps in which many who are destined for better things engage, till they are ashamed of the service; and a much greater number who endeavour to distinguish themselves in higher walks of literature, and fail, take shelter in it; as they cannot attain reputation themselves they endeavour to prevent others from being more successful, and find in the gratification of envy some recompense for disappointed vanity.

Sir Thomas More.—­Philosophers —

Montesinos.—­True and false; the philosophers and the philosophists; some of the former so full, that it would require, as the rabbis say of a certain pedigree in the Book of Chronicles, four hundred camel loads of commentaries to expound the difficulties in their text; others so empty, that nothing can approximate so nearly to the notion of an infinitesimal quantity as their meaning.

Sir Thomas More.—­With this multiplication of books, which in its proportionate increase marvellously exceeds that of your growing population, are you a wiser, a more intellectual, or more imaginative people than when, as in my days, the man of learning, while he sat at his desk, had his whole library within arm’s-length?