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him a volume of reflections. The time of these two persons in one respect resembles; it has brought them both to Hyde-Park-Corner. In almost every other respect it is dissimilar.

What is it that tends to generate these very opposite habits of mind?

Probably nothing has contributed more than 1 an early taste for reading. Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways. They force us to reflect. They hurry us from point to point. They present direct ideas of various kinds, and they suggest indirect ones. In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions, without attaining some resemblance of them. When I read Thomson, I become Thomson; when I read Milton, I become Milton. I find myself a sort of intellectual camelion, assuming the colour of the substances on which I rest. He that revels in a well-chosen library, has innumerable dishes, and all of admirable flavour. His taste is rendered so acute, as easily to distinguish the nicest shades of difference. His mind becomes ductile, susceptible to every impression, and gaining new refinement from them all. His varieties of thinking baffle calculation, and his powers, whether of reason or fancy, become eminently vigorous.

Much seems to depend in this case upon the period at which the taste for reading has commenced. If it be late, the mind seems frequently to have acquired a previous obstinacy and untractableness. The late reader makes a superficial acquaintance with his author, but is never admitted into the familiarity of a friend. Stiffness and formality are always visible between them. He does not become the creature of his author; neither bends with all his caprices, nor sympathises with all his sensations. This mode of reading, upon which we depend for the consummation of our improvement, can scarcely be acquired, unless we begin to read with pleasure at a period too early for memory to record, lisp the numbers of the poet, and in our unpractised imagination adhere to the letter of the moralising allegorist. In that case we shall soon be induced ourselves to "build" the unpolished "rhyme*,” and shall act over in fond imitation the scenes we have reviewed.

An early taste for reading, though a most promising indication, must not be exclusively depended on. It must be aided by favourable circumstances, or the early reader may degenerate into an unproductive pedant, or a literary idler. It seemed to appear in a preceding essay, that

* Milton.

genius, when ripened to the birth, may yet be extinguished. Much more may the materials of genius suffer an untimely blight and terminate in an abortion. But what is most to be feared, is that some adverse gale should hurry the adventurer a thousand miles athwart into the chaos of laborious slavery, removing him from the genial influence of a tranquil leisure, or transporting him to a dreary climate where the half-formed blossoms of hope shall be irremediably destroyed *. That the mind may expatiate in its true element, it is necessary that it should become neither the victim of labour, nor the slave of terror, discouragement, and disgust. This is the true danger; as to pedantry, it may be questioned whether it is the offspring of early reading, or not rather of a taste for reading taken up at a late and inauspi-. cious period.

ESSAY VI.

OF THE STUDY OF THE CLASSICS.

A QUESTION which has of late given rise to considerable discussion, is, whether the study of the

* The canker galls the infants of the spring, Too oft before their buttons be disclos'd; And in the morn and liquid dew of youth

Contagious blastments are most imminent.-SHAKESPEAR.

classics ought to form a part of the education of youth? In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the very proposal of such a question would have been regarded as a sort of blasphemy; classical learning was regarded as the first of all literary accomplishments. But in the present day inquisitive and active spirits are little inclined to take any thing upon trust; prescription is not admitted as giving any sanction in matters of opinion; no practice, that is not fastened upon us by decrees and penalties, can hope to maintain its full measure of influence in civil society, except so far as it can be supported by irrefragable arguments.

An obvious ground of presumption in favour of classical learning will suggest itself in tracing its history. The study of the Latin and Greek authors will scarcely be thought to deserve this appellation, so long as their language was the vernacular tongue of those who studied them. Classical learning then may be said to have taken its rise in the fifteenth century, at which time the human mind awoke from a slumber that threatened to be little less than eternal. The principal cause of this auspicious event was the study of the classics. Suddenly men were seized with the desire of rescuing them from the oblivion into which they had fallen. It seemed as if this desire had arisen just in time to render its gratification not impracticable. Some of the most valuable remains

of antiquity now in our possession, were upon the point of being utterly lost. Kings and princes considered their recovery as the most important task in which they could be engaged; scholars travelled without intermission, drawn from country to country by the faintest hope of encountering a classical manuscript; and the success of their search afforded a more guiltless, but not a less envied triumph, than the defeat of armies and the plunder of millions. The most honoured task of the literati of that day, was the illustration of an ancient author; commentator rose upon commentator; obscurities were removed; precision acquired; the Greek and Roman writers were understood and relished in a degree scarcely inferior to the improvement and pleasure derived from them by their contemporaries; nor were they only perused with avidity, their purity and their beauties were almost rivalled at the distance of almost fifteen hundred years.

Such is the history of one of the most interesting æras in the annals of mankind. We are indebted to the zeal, perhaps a little extravagant and enthusiastic, of the revivers of letters, for more than we can express. If there be in the present age any wisdom, any powers of reasoning, any acquaintance with the secrets of nature, any refinement of language, any elegance of composition, any love of

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