will make your motives habitually great and honorable, and light up in an instant a thousand noble disdains at the very thought of meanness and of fraud?

Therefore, if any young man have embarked his life in the pursuit of knowledge, let him go on without doubting or fearing the event: let him not be intimidated by the cheerless beginnings of knowledge, by the darkness from which she springs, by the difficulties which hover around her, by the wretched habitations in which she dwells, by the want and sorrow which sometimes journey in her train; but let him ever follow her as the angel that guards him, and as the genius of his life. She will bring him out at last into the light of day, and exhibit him to the world comprehensive in acquirements, fertile in resources, rich in imagination, strong in reasoning, prudent and powerful above his fellows in all the relations and in all the offices of life.

1

WIT AND WISDOM

THERE is an association in men's minds between dullness and wisdom, amusement and folly, which has a very powerful influence in decision upon character, and is not overcome without considerable difficulty. The reason is, that the outward signs of a dull man and a wise man are the same, and so are the outward signs of a frivolous man and a witty man; and we are not to expect that the majority will be disposed to look to much more than the outward sign. I believe the fact to be, that wit is very seldom the only eminent quality which resides in the mind of any man; it is commonly accompanied by many other talents of every description, and ought to be considered as a strong evidence of a fertile and superior understanding. Almost all the great poets, orators, and statesmen of all times have been witty.

1 good spirit

The meaning of an extraordinary man is, that he is eight men, not one man; that he has as much wit as if he had no sense, and as much sense as if he had no wit; that his conduct is as judicious as if he were the dullest of human beings, and his imagination as brilliant as if he were irretrievably ruined. But when wit is combined with sense and information; when it is softened by benevolence, and restrained by strong principle; when it is in the hands of a man who can use it and despise it, who can be witty, and something much better than witty, who loves honor, justice, decency, good-nature, morality, and religion, ten thousand times better than wit; wit is then a beautiful and delightful part of our nature. There is no more interesting spectacle than to see the effects of wit upon the different characters of men; than to observe it expanding caution, relaxing dignity, unfreezing coldness, teaching age and care and pain to smile, extorting reluctant gleams of pleasure from melancholy, and charming even the pangs of grief. It is pleasant to observe how it penetrates through the coldness and awkwardness of society, gradually bringing men nearer together, and, like the combined force of wine and oil, giving every man a glad heart and a shining countenance. Genuine and innocent wit like this is surely the flavor of the mind! Man could direct his ways by plain reason, and support his life by tasteless food; but God has given us wit and flavor, and laughter and perfumes, to enliven the days of man's pilgrimage, and to “charm his painful steps over the burning marl."

THE SCIENCE OF GOVERNMENT

It would seem that the science of government is an unappropriated region in the universe of knowledge. Those sciences with which the passions can never interfere are considered to be attainable only by study and by reflection; while there are not many young men who doubt of their ability to make a constitution or to govern a kingdom, at the same time there can not,

perhaps, be a more decided proof of a superficial understanding than the depreciation of those difficulties which are inseparable from the science of government. To know well the local and the natural man; to track the silent march of human affairs; to seize, with happy intuition, on those great laws which regulate the prosperity of empires; to reconcile principles to circumstances, and be no wiser than the times will permit; to anticipate the effects of every speculation1 upon the entangled relations and awkward complexity of real life; and to follow out the theorems 2 of the senate to the daily comforts of the cottage, is a task which they will fear most who know it best, a task in which the great and the good have often failed, and which it is not only wise, but pious and just, in common men to avoid.

GREAT men hallow a whole people, and lift up all who live in their time. What Irishman does not feel proud that he has lived in the days of Grattan? Who has not turned to him for comfort, from the false friends and open enemies of Ireland? No government ever dismayed him, the world could not bribe him, he thought only of Ireland, lived for no other object, dedicated to her his beautiful fancy, his elegant wit, his manly courage, and all the splendor of his astonishing eloquence. He was so born and so gifted that poetry, forensic skill, elegant literature, and all the highest attainments of human genius were within his reach; but he thought the noblest occupation of a man was to make other men happy and free; and in that straight line he went on for fifty years, without one side-look, without one yielding thought, without one motive in his heart which he might not have laid open to the view of God and man.

1 Meaning?

From the "Edinburgh Review," 1820.

2 established principles

COLERIDGE

1772-1834

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE was born at Ottery St. Mary, Devonshire, where his father was vicar, in 1772, and died in 1834. He spent two years at Cambridge, but did not complete his course. A little later, being in London without resources or employment, he enlisted in a dragoon regiment. One day he wrote a Latin verse on the stable-wall, which fact coming to

the knowledge of his captain, the latter procured his release from the ser vice. Entering on a literary and political career, Coleridge published his first work, "The Fall of Robespierre: An Historical Drama," in 1794, and soon after several pamphlets, in which he advocated democratic and Unitarian doctrines. With Southey and Lovell he projected a Pantisocracy, or communistic republic, to be established in Pennsylvania; but the scheme came to naught, and Coleridge settled down as a writer on the Morning Post, in support of the Government. In 1798 he visited Germany, and studied there diligently. In 1812 his series of Essays called "The Friend"

was published, and in 1816 “Christabel." He had acquired the habit of opium-eating, which obtained the mastery over him and reduced him to a condition of unproductive indolence. He passed the last eighteen years of his life in retirement. So able a judge as De Quincey has said that Coleridge's was "the largest and most spacious intellect, the subtlest and most comprehensive, that has yet existed among men."

"Of Coleridge's poetry, in its most matured form and in its best specimens, the most distinguishing characteristics are vividness of imagination and subtlety of thought, combined with unrivalled beauty and expressiveness of diction, and the most exquisite melody of verse. With the ex ception of a vein of melancholy and meditative tenderness, flowing rather from a contemplative survey of the mystery, the strangely mingled good and evil, — of all things human, than connected with any individual interests, there is not in general much of passion in his compositions, and he is not well fitted, therefore, to become a very popular poet, or a favorite with the multitude. There is nothing in his poetry of the pulse of fire that throbs in that of Burns; neither has he much of the homely every-day truth, the proverbial and universally applicable wisdom of Wordsworth. Coleridge was, far more than either of these poets, 'of imagination all compact.' But rarely, on the other hand, has there existed an imagination in which so much originality and daring were associated and harmonized with so gentle and tremblingly delicate a sense of beauty."-G. L. CRAIK.

THE IMPORTANCE OF METHOD

66

WHAT is that which first strikes us, and strikes us at once, in a man of education, and which, among educated men, so instantly distinguishes the man of superior mind, that (as was observed with eminent propriety of the late Edmund Burke) we cannot stand under the same archway during a shower of rain, without finding him out"? Not the weight or novelty of his remarks; not any unusual interest of facts communicated by him: for we may suppose both the one and the other precluded by the shortness of our intercourse, and the triviality of the subjects. The difference will be impressed and felt, though the conversation should be confined to the state of the weather or the pavement. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity in his words and phrases. Unless where new things necessitate new terms, he will avoid an unusual word as a rock. It must have been among