Extremes may meet in the intellectual as certainly as in the moral world. I find, in tracing to its first beginnings the slowly accumulated magazine of facts and inferences which forms the stock in trade on which my mind carries on its work of speculation and exchange, that my greatest benefactors have been the philosophic Bacon and an ignorant old woman, who, of all the books ever written, was acquainted with only the Bible. When a little fellow of about ten or twelve years of age, I was much addicted to reading, but found it no easy matter to gratify the propensity; until, having made myself acquainted with some people in the neighbourhood who were possessed of a few volumes, I was permitted to ransack their shelves, to the no small annoyance of the bookworm and the spider. I read incessantly; and as the appetite for reading, like every other kind of appetite, becomes stronger the more it is indulged, I felt, when I had consumed the whole, a still keener craving than before. I was quite in the predicament of the shipwrecked sailor, who expends his last morsel when on the open sea, and, like him too, I set myself to prey on my neighbours. Old greyheaded men, and especially old women, became my books; persons whose minds, not having been preoccupied by that artificial kind of learning which is the result of education, had gradually filled, as they passed through life, with the knowledge of what was occurring around them, and with the information derived from people of a similar cast with themselves, who had been born half an age earlier. And it was not long before I at least thought I discovered that their narratives had only to be translated into the language of books, to render them as interesting as even the better kind of written stories. They abounded with what I deemed as true delineations of character, as pleasing exhibitions of passion, and as striking instances of the vicissitudes of human affairs—with the vagaries of imaginations as vigorous, and the beliefs of superstitions as wild. Alas! the epitaph of the famous American printer may now be written over the greater part of the volumes of this my second library; and so unfavourable is the present age to the production of more, that even that wise provision of nature which implants curiosity in the young, while it renders the old communicative, seems abridged of one-half its usefulness. For though the young must still learn, the old need not teach; the press having proved such a supplanter of the past-world schoolmaster, Tradition, as the spinning-wheel proved in the last age to the distaff and spindle. I cannot look back on much more than twenty years of the past; and yet in that comparatively brief space, I see the stream of tradition rapidly lessening as it flows onward, and displaying, like those rivers of Africa which lose themselves in the burning sands of the desert, a broader and more powerful volume as I trace it towards its source.
