and cultivated with art and method, it will be at all times of immediate and ready use to himself and others. Thus useful arms in magazines we place, But to be found, when need requires, with ease. You remember the verses, my lord, in our friend's Essay on Criticism, which was the work of his childhood almost; but is such a monument of good sense and poetry as no other, that I know, has raised in his riper years. He who reads without this discernment and choice, and, like Bodin's pupil, resolves to read all, will not have time, no nor capacity neither, to do any thing else. He will not be able to think, without which it is impertinent to read; nor to act, without which it is impertinent to think. He will assemble materials with much pains, and purchase them at much expense, and have neither leisure nor skill to frame them into proper scantlings, or to prepare them for To what purpose should he husband his time, or learn architecture? he has no design to build. But then to what purpose all these quarries of stone, all these mountains of sand and lime, all these forests of oak and deal? "Magno impendio temporum, magna alienarum "aurium molestia, laudatio hæc constat, O use. hominem literatum! Simus hoc titulo rustisciore contenti, O virum bonum!" We may DD 3 add add, and Seneca might have added in his own style, and according to the manners and characters of his own age, another title as rustick, and as little in fashion, “O virum sapientia sua sim plicem, et simplicitate sua sapientem? O virum "utilem sibi, suis, reipublicæ, et humano ge"neri!" I have said perhaps already, but no matter, it cannot be repeated too often, that the drift of all philosophy, and of all political speculations, ought to be the making us better men and better citizens. Those studies, which have no intention toward improving our moral characters, have no pretence to be styled philosophical. Quis est enim," says Tully in his Offices, qui nullis officii præceptis, tradendis, philosophum se audeat dicere?" Whatever political speculations, instead of preparing us to be useful to society, and to promote the happiness of mankind, are only systems for gratifying private ambition, and promoting private interests at the publick expense; all such, I say, deserve to be burnt, and the authors of them to starve, like Machiavel, in a jail. LETTER V. I. The great use of history, properly so called, as distinguished from the writings of mere annalists and antiquaries. II. Greek and Roman historians. III. Some idea of a complete history. IV. Further cautions to be observed in this study, and the regulation of it according to the different professions and situations of men: above all, the use to be made of it (1) by divines, and (2) by those who are called to the service of their country. I Remember my last letter ended abruptly, and a long interval has since passed: so that the thread I had then spun has slipped from me. I will try to recover it, and to pursue the task your lordship has obliged me to continue. Beside the pleasure of obeying your orders, it is likewise of some advantage to myself, to recollect my thoughts, and resume a study in which I was conversant formerly. For nothing can be more true than that saying of Solon reported by Plato, though censured by him, impertinently enough, in one of his wild books of laws." Assidue addi 66 scens, ad senium venio." The truth is, the most knowing man, in the course of the longest life, will have always much to learn, and the wisest and best much to improve. This rule will hold in the knowledge and improvement to be acquired by the study of history and therefore even he who has gone to this school in his youth "I read in should not neglect it in his age. "Livy," says Montagne, "what another man "does not: and Plutarch read there what I do "not." Just so the same man may read at fifty what he did not read in the same book at five and twenty: at least I have found it so, by my own experience, on many occasions. By comparing, in this study, the experience of other men and other ages with our own, we improve both: we analyse, as it were, philosophy. We reduce all the abstract speculations of ethicks, and all the general rules of human policy, to their first principles. With these advantages every man may, though few men do, advance daily toward those ideas, those increated essences a Platonist would say, which no human creature. can reach in practice, but in the nearest approaches to which the perfection of our nature consists; because every approach of this kind renders a man better and wiser, for himself, for his family, for the little community of his own country, and for the great community of the world. Be not surprised, my lord, at the order in which I place, these objects. Whatever order divines and moralists, who contemplate the duties belonging to these objects, may place them in, this is the order they hold in nature: and I have always thought that we might lead ourselves and others. to private virtue, more effectually by a due observation of this order, than by any of those sublime refinements that pervert it. Self Self-love but serves the virtuous mind to wake; Friend, parent, neighbour, first it will embrace, So sings our friend Pope, my lord, and so I believe. So I shall prove too, if I mistake not, in an epistle I am about to write to him, in order to complete a set that were writ some years ago. A man of my age, who returns to the study of history, has no time to lose, because he has little to live: a man of your lordship's age has no time to lose, because he has much to do. For different reasons therefore the same rules will suit us. Neither of us must grope in the dark, neither of us must wander in the light. I have done the first formerly a good deal; " ne verba mihi da"rentur; ne aliquid esse, in hac recondita an tiquitatis scientia, magni ac secreti boni judi"caremus." If you take my word, you will throw none of your time away in the same manner and I shall have the less regret for that which I have mispent, if I persuade you to hasten down from the broken traditions of antiquity to the more entire as well as more authentick histories of ages more modern. In the study of these we shall find many a complete series of events, preceded by a deduction of their immediate and remote causes, related in their full extent, and accompanied with such a detail of circumstances, and characters, as may transport the |