that form of human activity which results from society's speaking its mind and unpacking its, heart on all the subjects that concern it, past, present and future. The ideal student of letters must, therefore, like Lord Bacon, take all knowledge for his province. The sharp division of the fields of knowledge into departments is an arbitrary and artificial arrangement which exists in universities and in library catalogues but not in the head or heart of man. The modern attempt to distinguish between the field of belles-lettres and the other fields of learning by reference either to the form or to the substance of the productions breaks down at every point.
Shall we make verse the test of belles-lettres? In both ancient and modern times history, politics, science, theology, philosophy, and applied arts and sciences have been seriously treated in verse by writers like Empedocles, Hesiod, Lucretius, Lucan, Milton, Dryden, and Tennyson. Shall we make the subject matter the test of what is not belles-lettres? Many historians, a tolerable number of philosophers, and a few men of science have been eminent men of letters, masters of every art of expression—I am thinking of philosophers like Plato and Bacon, historians like Thucydides and Gibbon,
