The Poet at the Breakfast Table
urious subdivisions; among the rest eschatology, that is to say, the geography, geology, etc., of the "undiscovered country;" in medicine, if the surgeon who deals with dislocations of the right shoulder declines to meddle with a displacement on the other side, we are not surprised, but ring the bell of the practitioner who devotes himself to injuries of the left shoulder.
On the other hand, we have had or have the encyclopaedic
intelligences like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert
Spencer, who take all knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their
province. The author of "Thoughts on the Universe" has something in
common with these, but he appears also to have a good deal about him
of what we call the humorist; that is, an individual with a somewhat
heterogeneous personality, in which various distinctly human elements
are mixed together, so as to form a kind of coherent and sometimes
pleasing whole, which is to a symmetrical character as a breccia is
to a mosaic.
As for the Young As