tion which illiterate and vulgar fanatics, of all names and nations, have waged against the highest graces and embellishments of society. It is owing to precisely such notions as these, that the verses of Menander and Alcæus were effaced in the dark age, to make way for monkish legends and barbarous homilies; and, that in later times and under a change of opinions, the venerable monuments of Gothic architecture and the gorgeous ornaments of the cathedral and the monastery provoked the gloomy and unsparing rage of the Covenanters. Their full force was seen

in the destruction of the Alexandrian library, because, said the Caliph, its numerous volumes have been superseded or condemned by the Koran,-and in the conduct of those frantic ribbalds who disgraced the character and impeded the early progress of the Reformation by their crimes and their follies, and who, in setting up their kingdom of the New Jerusalem, under Bernard Knipperdolling and Gerard Kippenbroch, began by burning all the books they could find except the Bible.*

L'avarice, says La Rochefoucault, est plus opposée à l'économie que la libéralité. We have the same answer to make to those, who, in the matter of education would sacrifice what is really useful to their own narrow or perverse theory of utility, and out of sheer abhorrence of the luxuries and prodigality of learning, would indulge the neophyte in a very scanty allowance of its bare necessaries. They who apply to literature this radical, levelling, degrading cui bono test-who estimate genius and taste by their value in exchange and weigh the results of science in the scales of the money-changer, may be wiser in their generation than the disinterested votaries of knowledge-but they have, assuredly, made no provision in their system for the noblest purposes of our being. The same thing may be said of those, who, like Mr. Grimké, are for sacrificing what are rather ambiguously called the ornamental to what are just as absurdly considered as par excellence the useful parts of education. According to this theory a boy should be taught mathematics, chemistry, mineralogy, metaphysics, and the metaphysical part of moral philosophy, and be allowed from his most tender years, we suppose, to dabble ad libitum in politics, speculative and practical-in other words, he is to be brought up in studies, which although they lead to far more important results, are, as a mere discipline for youth with a view to future usefulness in life, we really think, not a great deal better than the dry and thorny

* See Jortin's Erasmus, v. i. p. 328. This account of the Anabaptists is taken from Perizonius' Hist. sec. xvi. p. 194.

+ Romani pueri longis rationibus assem,

Discunt in partes centum diducere, &c.-Hor. Ars Poet. 325.

dialectics of the Schoolmen, while no object should be suffered to approach him that may speak to his taste, his imagination or his heart. Our youth are to be trained up as if they were all destined to be druggists and apothecaries, or navigators and mechanists or, if it sounds better, they are to be deeply versed in the œconomy of the universe, and the most recondite and shadowy subtleties of transcendental geometry, or transcendent psycology-but what, after all, ought to be the capital object of education, to form the moral character, not by teaching what to think but persuading to act well; not by loading the memory with cold and barren precepts, but forming the sensibility by the habitual, fervid and rapturous contemplation of high and heroical models of excellence; not by definitions of virtue and speculations about the principle of obligation, but by making us love the one and feel the sacredness of the other-would, in such a system of discipline, be sadly neglected. This is a radical and an incurable defect in the cui bono theory. If we compare different æras of history with each other, and inquire what it is that distinguishes the flourishing and pure from the degenerate and declining state of commonwealths, we shall seldom find that it is any falling off in mere speculative knowledge, or even in the mass of talent and ability displayed at any one time.The softest Sybarites of Juvenal's day provoked his indignant satire by talking of morality with the sternness of Cato-courage was, no doubt, as well understood and defined by the Sophists who lectured to the slavish and cowardly successors of the Scipios, as it had been in the wars against Pyrrhus and Hannibal and legislation became more ingenious just in proportion as it was less efficacious, according to the pointed saying of the great historian-corruptissima republicâ plurimæ leges. But what a difference was there, and how essential is that difference in the of posterity, between the age of Cicero and that of Domitian (to go no further) in genius, in taste and in moral cha

eyes

racter!

Now if Mr. Grimké seriously means to associate himself with these Levellers and Fifth Monarchy Men of the Commonwealth of Letters of whom we have been speaking, we are afraid that we must fairly give up the controversy, and with it, all hope of ever reclaiming him from the error of his ways. We really cannot, with a clear conscience, undertake to promise, that Greek and Latin will make better artisans and manufacturers, thrifty œconomists; or, in short, more useful and skilful men in ordinary routine of life, or its mere mechanical offices

or more

* Tacit. Ann. 1. iij.

and avocations. We should still refer a young student of law, aspiring to an insight into the mere craft and mystery of special pleading, to Saunders' Reports rather than to Cicero's Topics; the itinerant field preacher would doubtless find abundantly greater edification, and for his purposes, more profitable doctrine, in ho est John Bunyan, than in all the speculations of the Lyceum and the Academics; and we do conscientiously believe, that not a single case, more or less, of yellow fever, would be cured by the faculty in this city, for all that Hippocrates and Celsus have said, or that has been ever said (or sung) of Chiron and Æsculapius. It is true, their peculiar studies would not be hurt, and might, occasionally, even be very much helped and facilitated by a familiar acquaintance with these languages; and what would they not gain as enlightened and accomplished men! But it is not fair to consider the subject in that light only. It is from this false state of the controversy that the argument of Mr. Grimké derives all its plausibility. We, on the contrary, take it for granted in our reasonings, that the American people are to aim at doing something more than "to draw existence, propagate and rot." We suppose it to be our common ambition to become a cultivated and a literary nation. Upon this assumption, what we contend for, is, that the study of the classics is and ought to be an essential part of a liberal education—that education of which the object is to make accomplished, elegant and learned men-to chasten and to discipline genius, to refine the taste, to quicken the perceptions of decorum and propriety,* to purify and exalt the moral sentiments, to fill the soul with a deep love of the beautiful both in moral and material nature, to lift up the aspirations of man to objects that are worthy of his noble faculties and his immortal destiny-in a word, to raise him as far as possible above those selfish and sensual propensities, and those grovelling pursuits and that mental blindness and coarseness and apathy, which degrade the savage and the boor to a condition but a little higher than that of the brutes that perish. We refer to that education and to those improvements, which draw the broad line between civilized and barbarous nations, which have crowned some chosen spots with glory and immortality, and covered them all over with a magnificence, that, even in its mutilated and mouldering remains, draws together pilgrims of every tongue and of every clime, and which have caused their names to fall like a 'breathed spell' upon the ear of the generations that come into existence, long after the tides of conquest and violence have swept over them, and left them

* Nihil est difficilius quam quid deceat videre.-Cic.

desolate and fallen. It is such studies we mean, as make that vast difference in the eyes of a scholar between Athens, their seat and shrine, and even Sparta with all her civil wisdom and military renown, and have (hitherto at least) fixed the gaze and the thoughts of all men with curiosity and wonder, upon the barren little peninsula between Mount Citharon and Cape Sunium, and the islands and the shores around it, as they stand out in lonely brightness and dazzling relief amidst the barbarism of the west on the one hand, and the dark and silent and lifeless wastes of oriental despotism on the other. Certainly we do not mean to say, that in any system of intellectual discipline, poetry ought to be preferred to the severe sciences. On the contrary, we consider every scheme of merely elementary education as defective, unless it develope and bring out all the faculties of the mind, as far as possible, into equal and harmonious action. But, surely, we may be allowed to argue from the analogy of things, and the goodness that has clothed all nature in beauty, and filled it with music and with fragrance, and that has at the same time bestowed upon us such vast and refined capacities of enjoyment, that nothing can be more extravagant than this notion of a day of philosophical illumination and didactic soberness being at hand, when men shall be thoroughly disabused of their silly love for poetry and the arts. Indeed we know nothing that at all comes up to this idea, but a tirade of one of Molière's comic heroes (Sganarelle we believe) against the pernicious charms of women-who, however, winds up his invectives, as might have been expected, by the bitter avowal

Cependant on fait tout pour ces animaux là.

So it is, has been, and ever will be (it is more than probable) as long as man is constituted as he is. And the same thing may be said of poetry and the arts, which are only another form of it. For what is poetry? It is but an abridged name for the sublime and beautiful, and for high wrought pathos. It is, as Coleridge quaintly, yet, we think, felicitously expresses it, "the blossom and the fragrance of all human knowledge." It appears not only in those combinations of creative genius of which the beau idéal is the professed object, but in others that might seem at first sight but little allied to it. It is spread over the whole face of nature it is in the glories of the heavens and in the wonders of the great deep, in the voice of the cataracts and of the coming storm, in Alpine precipices and solitudes, in the balmy gales and sweet bloom and freshness of spring. It is in every heroic achievement, in every lofty sentiment, in every deep passion, in every bright vision of fancy, in every vehement affection of glad

ness or of grief, of pleasure or pain. It is, in short, the feelingthe deep, the strictly moral feeling, which, when it is affected by chance or change in human life, as at, a tragedy, we call sympathy-but as it appears in the still more mysterious connexion between the heart of man and the forms and beauties of inanimate nature, as if they were instinct with a soul and a sensibility like our own, has no appropriate appellation in our language, but is not the less real or the less familiar to our experience on that account. It is these feelings, whether utterance be given to them, or they be only nursed in the smitten bosom-whether they be couched in metre, or poured out with wild disorder and irrepressible rapture, that constitute the true spirit and essence of poetry, which is, therefore, necessarily connected with the grandest conceptions and the most touching and intense emotions, with the fondest aspirations and the most awful concerns of mankind. For instance, religion has been in all ages and countries the great fountain of poetical inspiration, and no harps have been more musical than those of the Prophets. What would Mr. Grimké say of him whose lips were touched by one of the Seraphim with a live coal from off the altar; or does he expect the day to come when "the wide spread influence of moral wisdom and instructed common sense" shall assign to the Psalms or the Book of Job, in the library of a cultivated mind, a lower place than to Robertson and Hume? Milton pronounces our sage and serious poet Spenser," a better teacher than Scotus and Aquinas*-and in another place, has expressed himself to the same effect so admirably; and, for our present purpose, so appositely, that we cannot refrain from citing the whole passage: "To which (viz. logic) poetry should be made subsequent-or, indeed, rather precedent, as being less subtile and fine, and more simple, sensuous and passionate. I mean not here the prosody of a verse, which they could not but have hit on before, among the rudiments of grammar, but that sublime art which in Aristotle's Poetics, in Horace, and the Italian commentaries of Castlevetro, Tasso, Mazzoni, and others, teaches what the laws are of a true Epic Poem, what of a dramatic, what of a lyric, what decorum is, which is the great masterpiece to observe. This would make them soon perceive what despicable creatures our common rhymers and play writers be, and shew them what religious, what glorious and magnificent use might be made of poetry both in divine and human things." (Tract: on Education.*)

66

Areopagitica-So Hor. Epist. i. 2, says of Homer,

-quid sit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quid non Pleniùs ac meliùs Chrysippo et Crantore dicit.