petent to make such a change, and till it is made by proper authority, the will of every founder ought to be attended to.

But though I stuck closely to abstract studies, I did not neglect other things. I every week imposed upon myself a task of composing a theme or a declamation in Latin or English. I had great pleasure in lately finding among my papers, two of these declamations, one in English, the other Latin; there is nothing excellent in either of them, yet I cannot help valuing them, as they are not only the first of my compositions of which I have any memorial remaining, but as they show that a long commerce in the public world has only tended to confirm that political bent of my mind in favour of civil liberty, which was formed in it before I knew of what selfish and low-minded materials the public world was made.

The subject of the English declamation is, “Let tribunes be granted to the Roman people," that of the Latin," Sociis Italicis

detur civitas:" both of them were suggested to my mind from the perusal of Vertot's Roman Revolutions, a book which accidentally fell into my hands. hands. Were such kind of books put into the hands of kings during their boyhood, and Tory trash at no age recommended to them, kings in their manhood would scorn to aim at arbitrary power through corrupted parliaments.

I generally studied mathematics in the morning, and classics in the afternoon; and used to get by heart such parts of orations either in Greek or Latin as particularly pleased me. Demosthenes was the orator, Tacitus the historian, and Persius the satirist, whom I most admired.

I have mentioned this mode of study, not as thinking that there was any thing extraordinary in it, since there were many under-graduates then, and have always been many in the University of Cambridge, and for aught I know, in Oxford too, who have taken greater pains. But I mention it, because I feel a complacence in the re

collection of days long since happily spent; hoc est vivere bis vitá posse priore frui, and indulge an hope, that the perusal of what I have written may chance to drive away the spirit of indolence and dissipation from young men; especially from those who enter into the world with as slender a provision as I did. I will mention another circumstance, which happened to me before I took my first degree, that I may put young men upon their guard against self-sufficiency of opinion, and induce them to make, at a more mature age, a cool examination into the origin of their principles and belief.

Our opinions on many important subjects are formed as much on prejudice as on reason; and when an opinion is once taken up, it is seldom changed, especially in matters not admitting any criterion of certainty.

When I went to the University, I was of opinion, as most school-boys are, that the soul was a substance distinct from the body, and that when a man died, he, in classical phrase, breathed out his soul, ani

mam expiravit; that it then went I knew not whither, as it had come into the body, from I knew not where, nor when; and had dwelt in the body during life, but in what part of the body it had dwelt I knew .not. So deep-rooted was this notion of the flight of the soul somewhither after death, as well as of its having existed somewhere before birth, that I perfectly well remember having much puzzled my childish apprehension, before I was twelve years old, with asking myself this question,-Had I not been the son of Mr. and Mrs. Watson, whose son should I have been? The question itself was suggested in consequence of my being out of humour, at some slight correction which I had received from my mother. This notion of the soul was, without doubt, the offspring of prejudice and ignorance, and I must own that my knowledge of the nature of the soul is much the same now that it was then. I have read volumes on the subject, but I have no scruple in saying, that I know nothing about it.

Believing as I do in the truth of the Christian religion, which teaches that men are accountable for their actions, I trouble not myself with dark disquisitions concerning necessity and liberty, matter and spirit; hoping as I do for eternal life through Jesus Christ, I am not disturbed at my inability clearly to convince myself that the soul is, or is not, a substance distinct from the body. The truth of the Christian religion depends upon testimony; now man is competent to judge of the weight of testimony, though he is not able I think fully to investigate the nature of the soul; and I consider the testimony concerning the resurrection of Jesus (and that fact is the corner-stone of the Christian church) to be worthy of entire credit. I probably should never have fallen into this scepticism on so great a point, but should have lived and died with my school-boy's faith, had I not been obliged as an opponent, in the philosophical schools at Cambridge in 1758, to find arguments against the question; Animą est suá naturá immortalis?—in turning