The stroke of its fall sounded on the farthest
shores of Italy. The tap of that hammer was heard in the libraries
of Rome, Milan, and Venice. Boccaccio stirred in his sleep of five
hundred years, and M. Van Praet groped in vain amidst the royal
alcoves in Paris, to detect a copy of the famed Valdarfer Boccaccio.
Another class I distinguish by the term _Vocabularies_. Burton's
"Anatomy of Melancholy" is a book of great learning. To read it is
like reading in a dictionary. 'Tis an inventory to remind us how
many classes and species of facts exist, and, in observing into what
strange and multiplex by-ways learning has strayed, to infer our
opulence. Neither is a dictionary a bad book to read. There is no
cant in it, no excess of explanation, and it is full of suggestion,--
the raw material of possible poems and histories. Nothing is wanting
but a little shuffling, sorting, ligature, and cartilage. Out of a
hundred examples, Cornelius Agrippa "On the Vanity of Arts and
Sciences" is a specimen of that scribatious-ness which grew to be
the habit of the gluttonous readers of his time. Like the modern
Germans, they read a literature, whilst other mortals read a few
books. They read voraciously, and must disburden themselves; so they
take any general topic, as, Melancholy, or Praise of Science, or
Praise of Folly, and write and quote without method or end.
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