Has the age of the encyclopedic excellence passed us by, or can (or should) it be revived? The author praises the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Brittanica (1910-11) as “the last great encyclopedia.” From the editorial:

Its greatness derived not alone from its contributors or its organization but from the spirit infusing it. This spirit was one of confidence in progress—material, scientific, artistic, if not religious than spiritual. The society in which the Eleventh was composed and published considered itself, as Denis Boyles notes in “Everything Explained That Is Explainable,” to be “the Rome to the long nineteenth-century’s Greece, an era in which engineers spoke the language of visionaries. And it was English.”