command ; there are no lieutenants there, more’s the pity. Every general, so to say, has to plan the campaign, do sentry-go, sweep up the guard-room, and fetch the water—none of them will play into another’s hands.
In Germany we have a multitude of scholars able at a moment’s notice to throw themselves, as they say, into any special branch of knowledge. They are secretly astonished at themselves for being so soon able to write upon anything. They become polygraphs before they are aware of it, and get a reputation; yet it is generally ignoramuses and tyros alone who think much of them. The real expert laughs in his sleeve at their work, which does not add a brass farthing to knowledge itself. They are idiotic enough to take the expert’s refusal to praise as a sign of envy. Most of our writers, one may make hold to say, are of this order. They are excellent to talk about—for to excel even among them is an honour, or at least it is so in the country where to be learned in this way is the fashion—but advance knowledge they certainly do not. To write on any branch of knowledge in such a way as not only to make the multitude gape, but also both to win the approbation of the expert and add something to knowledge itself, a man must devote himself solely to the branch in question, nay, at intervals even confine himself strictly to certain of its details. Our scholars are certain to be crowded out by others of their kind ; they will die off in hundreds towards the close of that little day in whose sun they sparkled and
