Job 8:8-9

If we do not take to our aid the foregone studies of men reputed intelligent and learned, we shall be always beginners.

—Burke, Appeal from New to Old Whigs.

What makes the Radical of the street is mostly mother-wit exercising itself upon the facts of the time. His weakness is that he does not know enough of the facts of other times.

—Morley, Studies in Literature, p. 125.

'In his adoration of what he recognized as living,' says Mr. Symonds (Shelley, pp. 40 f.), 'Shelley retained no reverence for the ossified experience of past ages. The principle of evolution, which forms a saving link between the obsolete and the organically vital, had no place in his logic.'

Speaking of Gibbon's first work, an essay in defence of classical literature and history, Mr. Cotter Morison (Gibbon, p. 35) observes that 'this first utterance of his historic genius was prompted by an unconscious but deep reaction against that contempt for the past, which was the greatest blot in the speculative movement of the eighteenth century'.

References.—VIII. 11-13.—Spurgeon, Sermons, vol. xi. No. 651. VIII. 14.—A. Maclaren, Expositions of Holy Scripture—Job, p. 40. IX. 2.—J. Smith (Edinburgh), Christian World Pulpit, 1890, p. 346.