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poets, though we certainly do not mean to extend them to modern pastorals with classic decorations-a fair object of satire, we had almost said of utter detestation.

Learning cannot operate in favour of the few, without redounding to the benefit of the many. All the arts of peace improve beneath its influence. Industry revives and flourishes as it leads the way to new wants. The general mind advances, as the means of enjoyment are thus placed within the reach of all. The convenient succeeds the rude, and men begin to look beyond mere usefulness for the beautiful. The material creation in all its natural and artificial forms, is pervaded with a portion of that spirit, which clothes the ruins of antiquity with magic, even in their sad and mournful decay. The principles of taste are invoked to adorn and refine the architecture and amusements of the nation. The theatre takes the place of the resorts of dissolute riot, and gradually becomes a school where the people may be instructed through the ear, in the harmony and force of their language, and familiarized through the eye with the picturesque and graceful in costume, and the appropriate in decoration. The public mind is occasionally withdrawn from that which in a free government must greatly engross it, the exacerbating collisions of politics, and the angles of the national character are rounded, not by the corroding file of a rival or an enemy, but by the generous appliances derived from the contemplation of the polite arts. A love of those arts, and of the learning which produced and fosters them succeeds, as connected with national grandeur and individual happiness, and their professors and disciples are recognised and honoured as public benefactors, even in the tumult of civil war or foreign invasion.

"The great Emathian conqueror bid spare

The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower
Went to the ground; and the repeated air
Of sad Electra's poet, had the power

To save the Athenian walls from ruin bare."

And finally, the great moral truth to which all modern legislation tends, is impressed upon mankind, that with the progress of knowledge is identified their future security against the efforts of low art or desolating power. This may be called a dream-if it is but a dream, we hold our national existence by a frail and feeble tenure.

The acquisition of ancient learning is an accomplishment, but not an accomplishment merely. The secular records of the old universe are wrapped up in the moods and tenses of those teeming volumes. Not a word, not a letter but is profitable for instruction-not a line but may mark an event. The restoration of a crooked character* almost fixed the birth-place of Homer

*The Æolic Digamma.

the Greek Olympiads saved the chronology of the world. To five verses of a Roman tragedian* we may be indebted for the hemisphere we inhabit-to as many lines of a Roman historian,† we must look for the first notice of the existence of our ancestors. Thither or to kindred sources must be traced all the early annals of those countries, which now fill the world with their names-Germany, Gaul, Spain, and the nations of the east, once the barbarous provinces of that mighty people whose blood runs in the veins of the whole earth, as their language has intermingled its syllables of conquest with the vocabularies of the globe.

We do not apprehend for America what has been, perhaps with some justice, a subject of complaint in England, any evil from overstrained attention to the mere mechanical portions of a classical education. The mischief with us is of a contrary character. School-boys have not enough to do with rudiments to facilitate their subsequent progress. They are expected to feel before they are taught to understand. They are forced round the circle of liberal study within too short a period, and during too tender an age. What should be a taste is a mere task. They thumb the Eneid into dog's-ears, when they should be scratching their Priscian, and their reminiscences of the most delicate, original, and philosophical of the Roman poets, lead them only to the "Horace whom they hated so." Considering the number of students yearly graduated by our fifty colleges, the instances of accurate and comprehensive scholarship, or of learned study performed in after life, are surprisingly few-though the surprise is much qualified when we consider the peculiarity of our institutions, and our defective system of instruction. Books enough are read, if they were properly read, to do all that can be done by boys at a public seminary. We believe that there is not so much difference in the quantity of matter gone over, between the English schools and our own, as is generally supposed.

"venient annis

Secula seris, quibus Oceanus

Vincula rerum laxet, et ingens

Pateat tellus, Tiphysque novos

Detegat orbes: nec sit terris ultima Thule."

Senec. in Medea, Act. I, Vers. 374.

"Ex his omnibus," (says Cæsar, having mentioned the geographical situation of the island, and the divisions of its inhabitants,) "longe sunt humanissimi qui Cantium incolunt: quæ regio est maritima omnis; neque multum a Gallica differunt consuetudine. Interiores plerique frumenta non serunt, sed lacte et carne vivunt; pellibusque sunt vestiti: Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt, quod cæruleum efficit colorem. Atque hoc horridiore sunt in pugna adspectu: Capilloque sunt promisso; atque omni parte corporis rasa præter caput, et labrum superius. Uxores habent deni duodenique inter se communes, et maxime fratres cum fratribus parentesque cum liberis: sed, si qui sunt ex his nati, eorum habentur liberi quo primum virgo quæque deducta est." (De bell. Gall. V. 14.) A picture which, (disgusting as it is both in its moral and physical aspect,) conveys no mean lesson to the curious speculator.

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*

A boy in America is generally placed at college at fourteen, ready, as is presumed, to enter upon the reading of the easier Latin and Greek authors-Livy and Homer, for instance. To these he is supposed to devote one-third of the time appropriated by the college rules to study. The remaining two-thirds are occupied, not in kindred pursuits, but in mathematics, and some third branch, perhaps modern geography. He has no private tutor to direct his studies, but forms one of a class of twenty or thirty, as the case may be, with whom he has no necessary communication, except that they meet for recitation at a stated hour once a day, in each branch of study. The tutor appears, and if the grammatical construction of the author in hand be correct, "verbum verbo reddens," he opens not his mouth. He comes to hear, not to teach, and having dragged round the circle of monotonous voices from A to Z, until he himself becomes as insensible of the beauties of his class-book as his pupils, he gives the signal, and his thirty boys rush to the light of day, wise in the words of Homer or Sallust, but quite ignorant of their spirit and characteristics. † We appeal to those whose experience can prompt them, if this is not a fair representation of the routine of college recitations in the classics. Enough is seldom done, (whether the fault lie with the tutor or the rules under which he acts, it matters little), to aid the intellectual or imaginative part of the exercise. As it is folly, so far as the poetry of the author is concerned, to set a young school boy to translate Virgil, so is it folly, having placed Horace in the hands of a collegian, not to teach him what Horace means. Each recitation should be accompanied with something by way of lecture to open the beauties of the author-to explain points of geography, chronology, and mythology, and particularly to trace the exquisite appositeness of classic customs-the connexion of the real with the ideal, which so entirely distinguished the ancient manners, particularly of the Greeks, from those of the moderns--a branch of learning, by the way, in which all our systems of antiquities are deficient. The pupil stands up with his dry translation, variegated only by his gleanings from the notes, (which themselves sometimes want explanation), " in Usum Delphini." Generally he is satisfied with this skeleton mode of complying with the requisitions of his teachers; but if he is a boy of any fancy, he will sometimes warm up in spite of all disadvantages, and feeling something of the soul of his author, give a free, spirited, and

The study of Roman Antiquities is in some instances pursued only to a very limited extent, and for a very short period.

+ See Alfieri's account of his education in the Academy and University of Turin, for a picture of the effects of this sort of instruction. (Autobiography.)-It is at once lamentable and ridiculous.

We are happy in the sanction of Dr. Ludlow to this opinion.-Address, p. 16. VOL. XVII.-NO. 33. 4

poetic version of a beautiful passage, which is immediately and charitably considered as "cribbed" from a translation, and the offender marked accordingly. We speak with the experience gained from our own Alma Mater, not the least distinguished in America, when we say that few even of the most accurate readers-those who bear off the college honours-get beyond the surface of the classics, or seem at all aware of the mighty ashes over which they so recklessly tread. Nor is it possible that they should be; for aside from the heavy and torpid system of recitation, upon which we have already animadverted, their time is so subdivided by a variety of pursuits, that they can but touch upon any thing. How is it possible for a boy properly to investigate a long exercise in a difficult classic, when his attention has been wearied by an abstruse demonstration, or dazzled by a brilliant experiment, and that too at a period of life when the faculties are immature, and the constitution unformed. Out of a professor's chair there is scarcely a scholar, properly so called, in America; and we very much question, if in that elevated situation there are many persons who have so cultivated the essence and spirit of Greece and Rome, that they could, on any emergency, furnish a copy of Latin verses equal to one of the Oxford prize poems, or the elegant trifles of some of the British magazines, to say nothing of the higher flights of Fracastoro or Johannes Secundus. We know well the demands of parents, and how too many of them judge of education as gluttons do of feasts, not by the capacity to imbibe and digest, but by the number and quantity of dishes to stimulate rather than satisfy the appetite. It would be vastly better for their sons, and certainly less unjust towards their teachers, that they should be taught the elements of their mother tongue and the arts of practical life at home, than thus to run after the shadow of liberal learning. The bowls of the muses (Apuleius said it before Pope) should be drained, or had better not be tasted.

It may be easier to suggest these evils than to remedy them, but we do anew submit, with all proper freedom, that boys should be classified otherwise than chronologically-that some effort should be made to discover latent propensities and peculiar aptitudes, and that when found they should be fostered and encouraged by an appropriate course of instruction and reading. It is the experience of every day, and the testimony of almost every individual, that predispositions and disgusts do exist, and constantly colour and bias the pursuits of life. Without vouching Ovid and Correggio, lest the extreme temperament of a poet and a painter may be held an unfair example, look at Bayle. The most accomplished critic of his time could never demonstrate a proposition of Euclid. He says it himself. Gibbon, whose name is his eulogy as a most comprehensive linguist, absolutely hated

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the exact sciences, and gave them over in despair. So did Fuseli, a man of most original though distorted genius, and so (to swell the list no farther) did Horace Walpole, of whose Nuge we have recently had a new relish, and who, with scarcely an exception, is the most delightful of English letter-writers.* What martyrdom to such minds to be cooped up within a right-angled triangle or an oblate spheroid! Yet such has been the fate, and is at this moment the fate, of many a youth, whose heart is dried up within him amidst pursuits he cannot appreciate or endure. We care not for the source or origin of these tendencies, nor do we wish their variety to be reduced by thrusting the children of the country into huge public seminaries as soon as they can speak, according to a recent scheme. It is sufficient for us that they exist, beneficially as we believe, whether derived from the nursery, the village school, the scenery amidst which we are born, or the peculiar qualities of the parental mind. It is the part of philosophical training to guide and direct; not to chill, obstruct, or neglect them.

The feasibility and propriety of adapting the studies to the individual of cutting the coat to the person instead of stuffing the person into the coat-being granted, we repeat our impressions, that each recitation in the classics should be accompanied by a semi-lecture, explanatory, not of the mere anatomy, but of the spirit of the author; and that works should be read in connexion, illustrative of his aims and systems, as well as of the localities of his scenes, and their true chronology. Boys never will glean this information from the old scholiast, or all the Scaligers and Bentleys who have succeeded him. The Dacier Horace, sneered at, as it is, as the work of a woman, presents that author, particularly the portion at first least appreciated, his Lyrics, to the young student, in new and beautiful attitudes, and excites an affection for the poet commensurate with the pleasure derived from his perusal. No boy should touch the Greek tragedians without reading Schlegel-a writer now easily accessible-who has brought out with the most profound critical philosophy the true principles of their art, and discriminated with surprising grace and power their various characteristics and excellencies. Mitford, with an affected orthography, and even greater defects of a different order, would much enhance the interest and facilitate the acquisition of the Grecian orators and historians, entering as he does into the politics of the communities to which they belonged with

The predilection of D'Alembert, on the other hand, for the exact sciences, was so great, that it overcame all the efforts of his early teachers, and impelled him, even after he commenced the study of a profession, to beg back one by one the mathematical books which he had intrusted to a friend, for the very purpose of placing himself beyond the temptation to use them.

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