fit person to address you. Indeed, had any of the great champions of classical learning come forward to repel the attack, of which I am about to expose the feebleness and petulance, I should have been well pleased to be a witness instead of an inflictor of such chastisement. But as the heroes of the fight have declined this service, doubtless considering it unworthy of their names and prowess, it may be permitted to one little practised in the polemic art to essay the adventure, especially (to quit the language of metaphor) as the subject has been forced on my attention in the course of collecting materials for an elementary work on philology, to have written or to read which I must acknowlege to be a waste of time, if I cannot disprove the assertions which I shall now proceed to examine.

They will be found in an article on "The present System of Education," in the seventh number of the Westminster Review. If they are a fair specimen of the contents of that work, we may infer, however it abounds in the inflammable and acid principles of radicalism, that the compound is as weak and harmless as the union of the hydrogen and oxygen of the chemist.

After a proemium, in which the reviewer sets forth his mission "to teach the great mass of the public the vast effort of doubting the wisdom of their ancestors, for this we were ordained," he commences his labors by contrasting the progress that has been made in arts and inventions, as "the cotton-engine, the steam-engine, and the three-decker will testify," wherein, he proceeds, "we have despised our ancestors and proved their wisdom folly, and as (ws, OTI or oσov? philology teaches us to be correct in such winged trifles,) we have despised them, we have risen and florished," with our neglect of that fundamental engine, education, the very machine of all machines with which we must work out these results. We have," he repeats, "wanted courage to disclaim the worn-out machinery of our ancestors, [really it would be wonderful if the fundamental engines of our ancestors had not been worn out, considering the wear and tear they must have hadat Eton and Westminster, where the very machine of all machines is far from being neglected,'] and to invent and apply for ourselves to mind, as we have long done to matter, new powers, new combinations, and new proceedings." P. 148.

If this had been a declamation against flogging, we should have given the right hand of fellowship to the reviewer; for we are so far radicals that we hate the system of giving a dull boy a hundred or more whippings in a half year; and think that if it be not, as the reviewer justly observes, "pernicious, it is useless at least it is purposeless. If it be but purposeless, it has still the evil result of occupying valuable time, of consuming valuable means (for we

do not object to a few effectual floggings in terrorem) to no end.” P. 149.

We beg the reader's pardon for having been a little too fa-cetious; and must now assure him that the above objections are not directed against the system of flogging, but against our whole system of education. "We maintain," says the reviewer, "with all our vigor of argument, and example and anger, the system which cultivates the rough desert of man's mind, as it was cultivated when man was a tyrant or a slave, when he was ignorant of arts and sciences, comfortless, powerless, and debased; which makes monks when there are no longer convents." P. 150.

Now, what are these "new powers, new combinations, and new machinery," which the reviewer would recommend us to adopt? Can we, however far we propose to advance, commence our scientific studies more prudently than by making ourselves masters of arithmetic, Euclid, and algebra, which is the course of discipline every good school actually teaches, and every school pretends to teach? Surely the system need not be altered, whatever the execution of it in individual instances may require! The reviewer does not believe the scientific digestion of the present age to be so much improved, that our children will intellectually swallow a steam-engine or a cotton-engine at one gulp, without some previous acquaintance with definitions, postulates, axioms, problems, theorems, corollaries, &c. Can he then believe, that we may enter on the study of moral philosophy by bolting a treatise of political economy without any previous discipline? If he admit the necessity of such discipline, can he, after a diligent examination, assert that the grammar of Cobbett, the logic of Bentham, and the rhetoric of we know not who, are better engines for teaching these most important preliminary sciences, than the grammars of Scheller and Matthiæ, and the logic and rhetoric of Aristotle? Does he consider the moral and political observations of Thucydides and Aristotle, Tacitus and Cicero, only fitted" to make monks, when there are no longer convents"-"to prepare men for marching under the influence of insanity and a red rag to war against Palestine and pestilence ?" (p. 149.) or "that such studies are as purposeless as if the man who is to live by rope-dancing were to labor for instruction at the anvil," &c.? P. 153.

We also "have been so far TUTT∞ed into a sort of stupid inexplicable respect for antiquity," (p. 161.) that we look with the same admiration on the literary works of the Greeks and Romans, as we do on their works of art. We are so bigoted as to consider Herodotus and Livy the inspirers of a manly patriotism in defence of home and native land-as supplying us with valuable knowlege

of forms of government, which, though long passed away, may well deserve our attention, and the records of them become foundations on which much similar information may be raised-as suggesting many a glowing thought and many a beautiful association to those who can think and feel. We have imagined Thucydides and Tacitus to instruct us in the miseries of popular anarchy on the one hand, and of despotism on the other; and to furnish us with a series of well-authenticated facts and deep political reflections, not surpassed in importance even by the writings of those who have most benefited from the study of those great historians. Of the orators and poets of Greece, it is almost as absurd to speak in praise, as it would be to assert that the Apollo Belvidere or the Venus de Medicis are fine statues, and the Parthenon and Erectheion handsome buildings.

T

Respecting the works of Aristotle, which are ever the butt of their sharpest arrows, it may be safely asserted, that if from the treatises on logic, rhetoric, poetry, and morals, which have been written since the times of the Stagyrite, were subtracted every thing which is better taught or implied in his writings than in those of his followers, the remainder might be summed up in a very few figures. Nor can there be a more instructive or more gratifying exercise, than that of dispersing over the vast framework of Áristotle, (that skeleton of a literary giant!) whatever additions have been made by modern, and whatever illustrations may be derived from ancient writers. But great men have, forsooth, set the example of speaking with contempt of the philosophy of Aristotle ! Will then the philosophers of the present day take as their motto, "addicti jurare in verba magistri," even though that master be Bacon or Locke? Will they not inquire whether these great men derived their opinions of Aristotle from a careful perusal of his writings, or from translators, imitators, and commentators? Would they be content that the merits of Shakspeare be thus estimated? Is it not notorious, that those who are loudest in censuring the philosophy of the Stagyrite have never read his writings? Is it not evident from the way in which they speak of his works, that they are even ignorant that these may be divided into moral and physical treatises; and that, granting the latter to be superseded by the works of later writers, (a fact which no admirer of Aristotle's philosophy dreams of disputing, few indeed could dispute without

1 And let it be remembered, that similar additions and illustrations may be introduced by inferior scholars into the pages of Cicero de Officiis, de Oratore and de Finibus. Writers against a classical education forget that the reading of Aristotle and Cicero, and the non-reading of Butler, Adam Smith, Paley, &c. &c. are not terms simply convertible.

falling into the error of their opponents, by talking of works they had never read,) still, it no more follows from his mistakes in physical science, that the moral writings of Aristotle are deserving of neglect, than it follows that the poetry, oratory, and history of Greece are worthless, because her natural philosophy was empirical; no more, than that the wisest of the moderns was empirical as a natural philosopher, because as a courtier he was "the meanest of mankind."

Nor can there be a more unfounded accusation than that which is ever and anon brought forward in every shape of assertion, assumption, and implication; to wit, that Aristotle opposed inductive reasoning. The well-known fact, that the philosopher employed himself in registering observations respecting the animals sent him from Asia by Alexander, is a practical answer to the calumny. Does he not speak again and again of induction being the foundation of all syllogistic reasoning? Is he not most careful to derive all his knowlege from realities? Can any philosopher keep more clear of the sion and ovoia, the species and essentia in the metaphysical meanings of those words? He may indeed be said xar' oxy to derive his observations from facts and realities-Tale, in the true sense and derivation of that word. It is this which has given to his writings a superiority over every other school of moral speculation. In spite of bad translations and worse comments, false and injudicious friends, and able and bitter enemies, the works of the Stagyrite, as containing almost all the knowlege on moral subjects of a most intellectual people, sifted and refined by a mind of unequalled comprehensiveness and subtlety, and written in a style of admirable precision and force,' will continue to hold the very first place as a means of intellectual discipline in the opinions of those who have sufficient scholarship to study these writings in the original. Even those who have not this means of judging for themselves, may yet have a well-founded suspicion, that the man who was chosen by the wisest king, in the wisest times, among the most intellectual people in the world, from the wisest of their philosophers, to direct the education of a prince who afterwards subdued the world, must have had no ordinary powers. If this argument has almost the pertness of an epigram, the fault is in those who compel us to employ it.

But paulo minora canamus-let us return to our reviewer, whom we left censuring the present worn-out engines of educa

The very error of occasional logomachies, whilst it attaches rather to the times than to the philosopher, supplies very desirable trials of acuteness, precision, and diligence. Are not many of the realities of law and policy, and some of the distinctions which are attempted to be set up in religion, equally laborious triflings?

tion. Now, allowing the historians and philosophers of Greece and Rome to be as deserving of being studied as we believe them to be, the reviewer may yet take the ground, that the attaining to the matter of what they have written is rendered unnecessarily laborious by its being conveyed to us in a foreign language. We will allow the weight of this argument, when we are convinced on the one hand, that hard intellectual labor is not a beneficial discipline, especially to those who in after life will lie but too softly in the lap of ease; and on the other, that a sufficient portion of time may not be spared, from early childhood, to the period when it is expedient to enter on the business of life, for acquiring the wisdom of Greece and Rome, without neglecting any pursuits which are likely to benefit the mind.

Neither in truth are we much moved by the objection that many volumes of our mother tongue might be read in a less period than is occupied in mastering a few crabbed authors of Greece and Rome. When we remember that human nature, at least to a very great extent, is the same in a Greek, a Roman, and an Englishman, we cannot be persuaded, that to make ourselves acquainted with the desires and interests of man in one nation is not, in a great measure, to make ourselves acquainted with his desires and interests in another. We cannot be persuaded, that a more hasty perusal of many histories, treatises, &c. is of the same intellectual value as a leisurely and diligent perusal of a few, when those few are acknowleged to be facile principes. Indeed, were we required to give a single rule to a young man entering on a course of study, we would bid him confine himself to a few great writers, but to meditate on them long and deeply.-Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna. In the words of the author of the Pursuits of Literature, we would exhort him to " dare to be ignorant;" convinced, that to get together a number of names by which we may support our own opinions and invalidate those of others is to reduce the investigation of truth to a question rather of personal authority, than of accurate observation and sound argument.

But granting our machinery,-Greek and Latin, arithmetic, algebra and mathematics,-to be, as the reviewer asserts, worn out, what fundamental engine does he propose to substitute in its place? On this point he leaves us rather in the dark, well knowing that it is more easy to point out diseases than to discover remedies. The change he would propose is however indicated by such sentences as the following:-"The age of Alfred was thus far an enlightened one-the soldier was trained in the exercises appropriate to his business; the churchman was taught Latin, because Latin was the language of his