Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[119] early academic training; I think that it is unsafe to let our criticism stop here. We need the advantage of the background; the flavor of varied cultivation; the depth of soil that comes from much early knowledge of a great many books. This does not involve pedantry, although it is possible to be pedantic even in fiction, as Victor Hugo's endless and tiresome soliloquizers show. The deeper the sub-soil is, the more diligently the farmer must break it up; he must not prefer a shallower loam to save trouble in ploughing. The two things must be combined,—intellectual capital and labor; accumulation and manipulation; background and foreground. Addison's fame rests partly on the three folio volumes of materials which he collected before beginning the Spectator; but it rests also on the lightness of touch that made him Addison.