In this seventh volume of his collected essays, Professor Gombrich pays tribute to a variety of illustrious figures to whom we owe the ideas and values which are woven into the fabric of our intellectual life. His bicentennial address on the humanities delivered at the American Academy of Arts and Science is followed by studies of G E Lessing, G F Hegel, Lord Leverhulme, Sigmund Freud, Aby Warburg and Otto Kurz, amongst others. The author explains that he wanted to introduce such a varied selection of scholars and critics to the nonspecialist reader in order to exemplify the nature and value of branches of learning which are in danger of being squeezed out of higher education.