unfit the mind for applying with vigour to rational pursuits, or for acquiescing in sober plans of conduct. From that ideal world in which it allows itself to dwell, it returns to the commerce of men, unbent and relaxed, sickly and tainted, averse to discharging the duties, and sometimes disqualified even for relishing the pleasures of ordinary life.-BLAIR.

LESSON Lİ.

Defence of Literary Studies in Men of Business.

1. AMONG the cautions which prudence and worldly wisdom inculcate on the young, or at least among those sober truths which experience often prêtends to have acquired, is that danger which is said to result from the pursuit of letters and of science, in men destined for the labours of business, or for the active exertions of professional life.

2. The abstraction of learning, the speculations of science, and the visionary excursions of fancy, are fatal, it is said, to the steady pursuit of common objects, to the habits of plodding industry, which ordinary business demands.

3. The fineness of mind, which is created or increased by the study of letters, or the admiration of the arts, is supposed to incapacitate a man for the drudgery by which professional eminence is gained; as a nicely tempered edge, applied to a coarse and rugged material, is unable to perform what a more common instrument would have successfully achieved.

4. A young man destined for law or commerce, is advised to look only into his folio of precedents, or his method of book keeping; and dulness is pointed to his homage, as that benevo lent goddess, under whose protection the honours of station and the blessings of opulence are to be attained; while learning and genius are proscribed, as leading their votaries to barren indigence and merited neglect.

5. In doubting the truth of these assertions, I think I shall not entertain any hurtful degree of skepticism, because the general current of opinion seems, of late years, to have set too strongly in the contrary direction; and one may endeavour to prop the falling cause of literature, without being accused of blameable or dangerous partiality:

6. In the examples which memory and experience produce of idleness, of dissipation, and of poverty, brought on by indul gence of literary or poetical enthusiasm, the evidence must

necessarily be on one side of the question only. Of the few whom learning or genius has led astray, the ill success or the ruin is marked by the celebrity of the sufferer.

7. Of the many who have been as dull as they were profli gate, and as ignorant as they were poor, the fate is unknown, from the insignificance of those by whom it was endured. If we may reason from the cause to the effect on the matter, the chance, I think, should be on the side of literature.

8. In young minds of any vivacity, there is a natural aversion to the drudgery of business, which is seldom overcome till the effervescence of youth is allayed by the progress of time and habit, or till that very warmth is enlisted on the side of their profession, by the opening prospects of ambition or emolument.

9. From this tyranny, as youth conceives it, of attention and of labour, relief is commonly sought from some favourite avocation or amusement, for which a young man either finds or steals a portion of his time, either patiently plods through his task, in expectation of its approach, or anticipates its arrival by deserting his work before the legal period for amusement is arrived.

10. It may fairly be questioned, whether the most innocent of those amusements is either so hon urable or so safe as the avocation of learning or of science. Of minds uninformed and gross, whom youthful spirits agitate, but fancy and feeling have no power to impel, the amusements will generally be either boisterous or effeminate; will either dissipate their attention or weaken their force.

11. The employment of a young man's vacant hours is often too little attended to by those rigid masters who exact the most scrupulous observance of the periods destined for business. The waste of time is undoubtedly a very calculable loss; but the waste or the depravation of mind, is a loss of a much higher denomination.

12. The votary of study, or the enthusiast of fancy, may incur the first; but the latter will be suffered chiefly by him. whom ignorance, or want of imagination, has left to the grossness of mere sensual enjoyments.

13. In this, as in other respects, the love of letters is friendly to sober manners and virtuous conduct, which, in every profession, is the road to success and to respect. Without adopting the common-place reflections against some particular departments, it must be allowed that, in mere men of business, there is a certain professional rule of right which is not always honourable, and, though meant to be selfish, very seldom profits. 14. A superiour education generally corrects this, by open

ing the mind to different motives of action, to the feelings of delicacy, the sense of honour, and a contempt of wealth, when earned by a desertion of those principles.

15. To the improvement of our faculties, as well as of our principles, the love of letters appears to be favourable. Letters require a certain sort of application, though of a kind, perhaps, very different from that which business would recommend.

16. Granting that they are unprofitable in themselves, as that word is used in the language of the world, yet, as developing the powers of thought and reflection, they may be an amusement of some use, as those sports of children in which numbers are used to familiarize them to the elements of arithmetick.

17. They give room for the exercise of that discernment, that comparison of objects, that distinction of causes, which is to increase the skill of the physician, to guide the speculations of the merchant, and to prompt the arguments of the lawyer; and, though some professions employ but very few faculties of the mind, yet there is scarce any branch of business in which a man who can think, will not excel him who can only labour.

18. We shall accordingly find, in many departments where learned information seemed of all qualities the least necessary, that those who possessed it in a degree above their fellows have found, from that very circumstance, the road to eminence and wealth.

19. But I must often repeat, that wealth does not necessarily create happiness, nor confer dignity; a truth which it may be thought declamation to insist on, but which the present time seems particularly to require being told.

20. The love of letters is connected with an independence and delicacy of mind, which is a great preservative against that servile homage which abject men pay to fortune; and there is a certain classical pride, which, from the society of Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Atticus, looks down with an honest disdain on the wealth-blown insects of modern times, neither enlightened by knowledge nor ennobled by virtue.

21. In the possession, indeed, of what he has attained, in that rest and retirement from his labours, with the hopes of which his fatigues were lightened and his cares were smoothed, the mere man of business frequently undergoes suffering, instead of finding enjoyment. To be busy as one ought is an easy art; but to know how to be idle is a very superiour accomplishment.

22. This difficulty is much increased with persons to whom the habit of employment has made some active exertion necesBary; who cannot sleep contented in the torpor of indolence,

or amuse themselves with those lighter trifles in which he, who inherited idleness, as he did fortune, from his ancestors, has been accustomed to find amusement.

23. The miseries and misfortunes of the "retired pleasures" of men of business, have been frequently matter of speculation to the moralist, and of ridicule to the wit. But he who has mixed general knowledge with professional skill, and literary amusement with professional labour, will have some stock wherewith to support him in idleness, some spring for his mind when unbent from business, some employment for those hours which retirement or solitude has left vacant and unoccupied.

24. Independence in the use of one's time is not the least valuable species of freedom. This liberty the man of letters enjoys: while the ignorant and the illiterate often retire from the thraldom of business only to become the slaves of languor, intemperance, or vice.

25. But the situation, in which the advantages of that endowment of mind which letters bestow are chiefly conspicuous, is old age, when a man's society is necessarily circumscribed, and his powers of active enjoyment are unavoidably diminished.

26. Unfit for the bustle of affairs, and the amusements of his youth, an old man, if he has no source of mental exertion or employment, often settles into the gloom of melancholy and peevishness, or petrifies his feelings by habitual intoxication. From an old man, whose gratifications were solely derived from those sensual appetites which time has blunted, or from those trivial amusements of which youth only can share, age has cut off almost every source of enjoyment.

27. But to him who has stored his mind with the information, and can still employ it in the amusement, of letters, this blank of life is admirably filled up. He acts, he thinks, and he feels with that literary world, whose society he can at all times enjoy.

28. There is, perhaps, no state more capable of comfort to ourselves, or more attractive of veneration from others, than that which such an old age affords; it is then the twilight of the passions, when they are mitigated, but not extinguished, and spread their gentle influence over the evening of our day, in alliance with reason, and in amity with virtue.-MACKENZIE

LESSON LII.

Force of Talents.

1. TALENTS, whenever they have had a suitable theatre, have never failed to emerge from obscurity, and assume their proper rank in the estimation of the world. The jealous pride of power may attempt to repress and crush them; the base and malignant rancour of impotent spleen and envy may strive to embarrass and retard their flight: but these efforts, so far from achieving their ignoble purpose; so far from producing a discernible obliquity in the ascent of genuine and vigorous talents, will serve only to increase their momentum, and mark their transit with an additional stream of glory.

2. When the great Earl of Chatham first made his appear ance in the House of Commons, and began to astonish and transport the British Parliament and the British nation, by the boldness, the force, and range of his thoughts, and the celestial fire and pathos of his eloquence, it is well known, that the minister, Walpole, and his brother, Horace, (from motives very easily understood,) exerted all their wit, all their oratory, all their acquirements of every description, sustained and enforced by the unfeeling "insolence of office," to heave a mountain on his gigantick genius, and hide it from the world.

3. Poor and powerless attempt!-The tables were turned. He rose upon them, in the might and irresistible energy of his genius, and in spite of all their convulsions, frantick agonies and spasms, he strangled them and their whole faction, with as much ease as Hercules did the serpent, Python.

4. Who can turn over the debates of the day, and read the account of this conflict between youthful ardour and hoary headed cunning and power, without kindling in the cause of the tyro, and shouting at his victory? That they should have attempted to pass off the grand, yet solid, and judicious operations of a mind like his, as being mere theatrical start and emo tion; the giddy, hair-brained eccentricities of a romantick boy! 5. That they should have had the presumption to suppose themselves capable of chaining down to the floor of the Parliament, a genius so ethereal, towering, and sublime, seems unaccountable! Why did they not, in the next breath, by way of crowning the climax of vanity, bid the magnificent fireball to descend from its exalted and appropriate region, and perform its splendid tour along the surface of the earth?