ing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations, which are the acts of ripest judgment,* and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing, with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings, like blood out of the nose, or the plucking of untimely fruit; besides the ill habit which they get of wretched barbarising against the Latin and Greek idiom, with their untutored Anglicisms, odious to be read, yet not to be avoided without a well continued and judicious conversing among pure authors digested, which they scarce taste; whereas, if after some preparatory grounds of speech by their certain forms got into memory, they were led to the praxis thereof in some chosen short book lessoned thoroughly to them, they might then forthwith proceed to learn the substance of good things, and arts in due order, which would bring the whole language quickly into their power. This I take to be the most rational and most profitable way of learning languages, and whereby we may best hope to give account to God of our youth spent herein.

And for the usual method of teaching arts, I deem it to be an old error of universities, not yet well recovered from the scholastic grossness of barbarous ages, that instead of beginning with arts most easy (and those be such as are most obvious to the sense), they present their young unmatriculated novices at first coming with the most intellective abstractions of logic and metaphysics, so that they having but newly left those grammatic flats and shallows where they stuck unreasonably to learn a few words with lamentable construction, and now on the sudden transported under another climate to be tossed and turmoiled with their unballasted wits in fathomless and unquiet deeps of controversy, do for the most part grow into hatred and contempt of learning, mocked and deluded all this while with ragged notions and babblements, while they expected worthy and delightful knowledge; till pov

* It is a usual practice (but in my opinion somewhat preposterous) that scholars in the universities are too early entered in logic and rhetoric; arts indeed fitter for graduates than children and novices, the untimely and unripe accession to these arts, hath drawn on, by necessary consequence, a watery and superficiary delivery and handling thereof, as is fitted indeed to the capacities of children.—BACON's Advancement of Learning.

erty or youthful years call them importunately their several ways, and hasten them with the sway of friends, either to an ambitious and mercenary, or ignorantly zealous divinity: some allured to the trade of law, grounding their purposes not on the prudent and heavenly contemplation of justice and equity, which was never taught them; but on the promising and pleasing thoughts of litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees: others betake them to state affairs, with souls so unprincipled in virtue and true generous breeding, that flattery and courtshifts, and tyrannous aphorisms appear to them the highest points of wisdom; instilling their barren hearts with a conscientious slavery; if, as I rather think, it be not feigned. Others, lastly, of a more delicious and airy spirit, retire themselves (knowing no better) to the enjoy ments of ease and luxury, living out their days in feasts and jollity; which indeed is the wisest and the safest course of all these, unless they were with more integrity undertaken. And these are the errors, and these are the fruits of misspending our prime youth at schools and universities as we do, either in learning mere words, or such things chiefly as were better unlearned.

I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct you to a hill side, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming. I doubt not but ye shall have more ado to drive our dullest and laziest youth, our stocks and stubs, from the infinite desire of such a happy nurture, than we have now to hale and drag our choicest and hopefullest wits to that asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles, which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.

I call therefore a complete and generous education, that which fits a man to perform justly, skilfully and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war. And how all this may be done between twelve and one and twenty, less time than is now bestowed in pure trifling at grammar and sophistry, is to be thus ordered, &c. &c.*

* From Milton's Letter to Master Hartlib.

THE CONNECTION BETWEEN ERROR AND TRUTH.

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably: and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.*

* We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, who write what men do, and not what they ought to do; for it is not possible to join serpentine wisdom with columbine innocency, except men knew exactly all the conditions of the serpent; his baseness and going upon his belly: his volubility, and lubricity; his envy and sting.

The connection between truth and error, or rather how error leads to truth, may be seen in tracing the progress of any invention, as the steam engine; or of any science, of astronomy for instance, of which there is, to any person desirous to see how light arises out of darkness, a very interesting delineation in the posthumous works of Adam Smith.

Yet surely to alchemy this right is due, that it may be compared to the husbandman, whereof Æsop makes the fable; that when he died, told his sons, that he had left unto them gold buried under ground in his vineyard; and they digged over all the ground, and gold they found none; but by reason of their stirring and digging the mould about the roots of the vines, they had a great vintage the year following, so assuredly the search and stir to make gold hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions and experiments, as well for the disclosing of nature, as for the use of man's life.-BACON.

A

Good and ill are universally intermingled and confounded;-happiness and misery, wisdom and folly, virtue and vice. Nothing is pure and entirely of a piece. All advantages are attended with disadvantages. universal compensation prevails in all conditions of being and existence. And it is scarce possible for us by our most chimerical wishes, to form the idea of a station or situation altogether desirable. The draughts of life, according to the poet's fiction, are always mixed from vessels on each hand of Jupiter or if any cup be presented altogether pure, it is drawn only, as the same poet tells us, from the left-handed vessel.-HUME.

Truth is often covered with heaps of idle and unprofitable traditions : yet it may be worth our while to seek for a few truths under a whole heap of rubbish.-BISHOP TAYLOR.

Nothing tends so much to the corruption of science as to suffer it to stagnate; these waters must be troubled before they can exert their virtues.—

BURKE.

There are errors which no wise man will treat with rudeness while there

ACTIVE VIRTUE.

I CANNOT praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat. This was the reason why our sage and serious poet, Spenser, describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of Mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know and yet abstain.*

is a probability that they may be the refraction of some great truth as yet below the horizon.-COLERIDGE.

* Pythagoras, being asked by Hiero what he was, answered: If Hiero were ever at the Olympian games, he knew the manner, that some came to try their fortunes for the prizes; some as merchants to utter their commodities; some to make good cheer and be merry, and to meet their friends; and some came to look on; and that he was one of them that came to look on but men should know that, in this theatre of man's life, it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.-LORD BACON.

But according to Swift, even angels are not to be passive: the royal arms of Lilliput are, he says, "An angel lifting a lame beggar from the earth.” Lord Bacon abounds with observations to the same effect: he says,-“ A contemplative life, which does not cast any beam of heat or light upon human society, is not known to divinity: and the necessity of advancing the public good, censures that philosophy which flies perturbations. Philosophy which introduces such a health of mind, as was that of Herodicus in body, who did nothing all his life, but intend his health. Sustine,' and not 'Abstine,' was the commendation of Diogenes."

Philosophy censures the tenderness of some men, who retire too easily from public life, to avoid indignity: but their solution ought not to be so fine, that everything may catch in it and tear it.-LORD BACON.

Are we not all passively kind, that is, do we not all, in a greater or less degree, enjoy the pleasures of kindness; and does not the chief difference consist in active and passive kindness. "The cause which I knew not, I searched out," are the words of Job :-"I was an hungered and ye gave me meat; I was thirsty and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger and ye took me in; naked and ye clothed me; I was sick and ye visited me; I was in prison and ye came unto me," is the language of Christianity.

Yet even this, this cold beneficence

Seizes my praise, when I reflect on those,

The sluggard pity's vision weaving tribe

Who sigh for wretchedness, yet shun the wretched,

LIBERTY.

THIS is not the liberty which we can hope, that no grievance ever should arise in the commonwealth, that let no man in this world

Nursing in some delicious solitude,

Their slothful loves and dainty sympathies.

COLERIDGE.

Of the duty of activity Milton and Bacon are illustrious examples: Milton says, "When that task of answering the king's defence was enjoined me by public authority, being both in an ill state of health, and the sight of one eye almost gone already, the physicians openly predicting the loss of both, if I undertook this labor; yet nothing terrified by their premonition, I did not long balance whether my duty should be preferred to my eyes."

We all remember his noble sonnet, descriptive of this blindness :—
Cyriac, this three years day, these eyes, tho' clear

To outward view of blemish or of spot,

Bereft of sight, their seeing have forgot.
Nor to their idle orbs does day appear,

Or sun, or moon, or star, throughout the year,
Or man or woman. Yet I argue not

Against heaven's hand, or will, nor bate one jot
Of heart or hope; but still bear up, and steer
Right onward. What supports me dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, to have lost them over-ply'd
In liberty's defence, my noble task,

Whereof all Europe rings from side to side.

This thought might lead me thro' this world's vain mask,

Content, tho' blind, had I no other guide.

How deeply Milton felt the sacrifice which he made, may be collected from the following effusion:

With small willingness I endure to interrupt the pursuit of no less hopes than those, and leave a calm and pleasing solitariness, fed with cheerful and confident thoughts, to embark in a troubled sea of noises and hoarse disputes, put from beholding the bright countenance of truth, in the quiet and still air of delightful studies, to come into the dim reflection of hollow antiquities sold by the seeming bulk, and there be fain to club quotations with men whose learning and belief lies in magical stuffings.

So, too, Lord Bacon says, "We judge also that mankind may conceive some hopes from our example, which we offer, not by way of ostentation, but because it may be useful. If any one therefore should despair, let him consider a man as much employed in civil affairs as any other of his age, a man of no great share of health, who must therefore have lost much time, and yet in this undertaking, he is the first that leads the way, unassisted by