a knowledge of others, have nevertheless drawn exclusively on themselves, would certainly be very useful. It is from these alone that we learn anything; and as their number is small enough, everyone can easily manage to read them. The rest are copyists, if not in the last resort actually forgers.
There are few scholars who have not at one time or another dreamt of making their fortune by writing. That happiness, however, is reserved to but few. Among all the books that are written few succeed that manage to live, and the majority are still-born.
In Germany unfortunately there is a general conviction—yet, thank God! only among the uninitiated—that what a person has written a great deal about he must understand a great deal about. Just the contrary! The people who never think but write simply for writing’s sake, and to appear in the publishers’ lists, frequently know less of their subject, a fortnight later, than the most contemptible of their readers. Heaven keep us all from this kind of authorship! And yet unhappily it is the commonest.
I suspect that some of the greatest geniuses that ever lived neither read half as much not knew anything like as much as some of our mediocre scholars. What is more, not a few of our mediocre scholars might have become greater men if they had only not read so much.
