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The Intellectual Life

IWP Books: Philip Gilbert Hamerton, 1875, The Intellectual Life (PDF).

About which Jacques Barzun wrote: “There is on my shelves a book of late Victorian aspect which I once picked up at a secondhand shop for a very small sum, and which I occasionally dip into for pleasure and wisdom. It is called The Intellectual Life, and was written by Philip Gilbert Hamerton, around 1875…. The combination of ludicrous primness and outspoken good sense in Hamerton’s pages makes the work an ideal bedside book, but it is for the deliberate treatment of his subject as a whole that I respect and value him. There are no books, or very few, about the intellectual life, with the result that after ten millennia of culture this particular vocation of man remains a vague mystery.”