American colleges, he said, "As we are, so we asscciate. The good, by affinity, seek the good; the vile, by affinity, seek the vile. Thus of their own volition, souls proceed into heaven-into hell." The merest tyro in the writings of Swendenborg knows that the work entitled "Heaven and Hell" was written by the Swedish seer to promulgate this doctrine. The plagiarism is of no moment, save to show a strange incongruity in our author. We have, in the instance cited, one of the most important of Swedenborg's doctrines re-presented and endorsed by Emerson, who further shows his admiration of, and indebtedness to, the founder of the "New Church," by frequent quotations from his numerous and voluminous works; and in his "English Traits" he tells us that the writings of Wilkinson--the biographer and editor of Swedenborg, and certainly one of his most industrious and enlightened disciplesare a redeeming feature in the modern materialism of English literature. And yet, we repeat, with strange incongruity he thus speaks of the writings of Swedenborg-"An ardent and contemplative young man," he writes, "at eighteen or twenty years might read once these books ** and then throw them aside for ever." If they are good to be read once, and that at so plastic an age, we would ask, in all earnestness, why may they not be read in more advanced life with equal pleasure and more profit?

The last of Emerson's books, “English Traits," has attained in both hemispheres a wide popularity and an unprecedented sale. There is one noteworthy feature about the book which is worthy of mention and imitation, namely, the unwillingness of the author to make crude and ill-considered statements, as evinced in the fact that nine years have elapsed since the visit was made which it describes. The exceeding terseness and compression which characterise every expression, are the result of this com

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mendable delay. Emerson's facts do not vary materially from the statements of any other wellinformed traveller, but they are presented with unique force not characteristic of any other writer. Incidents of travel written in this fashion would not so soon come into the hands of the waste paper dealer. To criticise, or extract from, a book which is in everybody's hands, would afford little satisfaction; we cannot, however, refrain from giving one or two boldly conceived and happily expressed thoughts. Writing on the subject of race and birth, he says, Nature loves inoculation. A child blends in his face the faces of both parents, and some feature from every ancestor whose face hangs on the wall." "The Celts or Sidonites are an old family, They planted Britain, and gave to the seas and mountains names which are poems, and imitate the pure voice of nature." Recall the names of stream and hill familiar to your childhood and manhood, and memory will supply a discourse on this truthful and poetic text. Emerson would appear to be convinced of the following assertion, seeing that he has repeated it in almost the same words on pages 46 and 47; "The English are impious in their scepticism of a theory, but kiss the dust before a fact." He is sometimes severe, but there is generally a qualification. "The Englishman believes that if he do not make trade everything, it will make him nothing; and acts on his belief." "Their law is a network of fictions." Our modesty prevents the quotation of any of the flattering things he says of the English.

"short

Some of Emerson's sentences are the very hand of speech", and you can no more remove or change a word without doing damage than with a line of Shakspere's. For instance, of the institution of the family or household, one of the many good things for which we are indebted to the Romans, he says, "Domesticity is the taproot which enables the nation to branch wide and high." An Englishman

he calls "a king in a plain coat." The ruined baronial halls of Old England are painted in two words, "beautiful desolations." For heraldry he has a contempt, and wittily says, "The lawyer, the farmer, the silk mercer lies perdu under the coronet, and winks to the antiquary to say nothing." Here are mottoes for those who would be "self-raised men “The road that grandeur levels for his coach, toil can travel in his cart." Again, "English history, wisely read, is the vindication of the brain of the people. Who now will work and dare shall win." Those who would become masters of a pure English style of language we recommend to read and imitate the chapter on "Literature." He describes our Shakspere as the "perfect example" of the union of "Saxon precision and oriental soaring": and of the great master minds of Shakspere's age he says that "their dynamic brains hurled off their words, as the revolving stone hurls off scraps of grit." Emerson loves the writers of the Elizabethan age:— "A man must think that age well taught and thoughtful, by which masques and poems, like those of Ben Jonson, [elsewhere he instances Milton's "Comus "] full of heroic sentiment in a manly style, were received with favour. The unique fact in literary history, the unsurprised reception of Shakspere,— the reception proved by his making his fortune, and the apathy proved by the absence of all contemporary panegyric,—seems to demonstrate an elevation in the mind of the people."

It has been observed that everywhere in this book -"English Traits"—there are vigour, vivacity, acuteness; nowhere languor and obscurity. The reader who is sick of conventional phrases and commonplace views of things, will, in reading these pages, experience much the same feelings as if he were transported from a dead level to hilly pastures and wooded ridges, where the air is sharp and bracing, and the turf elastic.

Upon whatever subject we find Emerson commenting, we shall discover his object throughout to be the elevation of man; to make him in love, not with profession only, but anxious to lay hold of the substance: to be, not to seem. He ever cries, "Be this, and thou shalt live; do that, and thou shalt die." Is the question still asked, "What is the tendency of his writings?" I answer, to lift man from everything low, base, and grovelling, and to place him in his right element in the pure world of thought; to induce him, in his walk through life, to strip society of its forms, sects of their creeds and dogmas, in pursuit of truth; and especially, in doing this, never to let go that singleness of soul, which is the essential requisite for divining beauty, and without which, nature in her fairest aspect fails to impart fresh life and new feeling. In one word, he implores all to "buy the truth, and sell it not; to "prove all things, and hold fast that which is good."

MUTUAL IMPROVEMENT

SOCIETIES.

WHAT ARE THEIR LEGITIMATE OBJECTS?

BY MR. HARRY RAWSON.

[Read at the Inauguration of the Manchester Mechanics' Institution Mutual Improvement Society, July, 1856.]

SECOND only to having a good object, is that of seeking to attain it in a right way: and for this it is all-important to form a just and accurate conception of what it really is. It is astonishing to see the mistakes which men commit from a failing in this particular. Hence, chiefly is it that the shores of society are strewed with the shattered wrecks of personal miscalculation and false estimate-with defeated aims, and aspirations doomed from their birth to remain unsatisfied. That we may avoid any flagrant error of this kind, I propose to ask your consideration of a few suggestions as to the precise end we seek, in re-establishing here a Mutual Improvement Society: and I shall endeavour to draw, as sharply as may be, the lines which define and circumscribe the objects which, by its instrumentality, we should strive to make our own.