stracts, and arrangements of dates. The shorter these notes, and the more they can be looked through at a glance, the better. The only limit in this respect, is that they should be so constructed, that if I do not look at them again till after an interval of seven years, I should understand them. Learn to read slow-if you keep to your point, and do not suffer your thoughts, according to an old phrase, to go a wool-gathering, you will be in little danger of excess in this direction. * * Skinner Street, March 19, 1818. MY DEAR SIR,-Whatever was left imperfect in your second letter, as to my Paper of advice, is fully made up in your last, and I am more than satisfied. The question you ask, why am I silent in this paper on the subject of politics? is a very natural one, and I will give you an ingenuous answer. The person who asked my advice as to the course of his studies, I naturally concluded had some respect for my literary character; and I therefore thought it superfluous (as far as it could be avoided) to repeat any thing I had said in my public writings, or to refer directly or indirectly to any thing therein treated. Even the person, who without ever having known me, should have sufficient respect for my advice to make it in any degree his compass to steer by, would hardly, I thought, be so indolent or indifferent, as not to inquire what I had myself written for the amusement, improvement, and instruction of my species generally. The species of composition denominated novel, a sort of proseepic, and in my opinion a memorable addition to the stock of human literature, which with a few exceptions, did not assume its present consummate form till the age of Fielding and Richardson: but I am a writer of novels; and for that reason principally I was silent under that head. I have also written on the science of politics; and though my work is twenty five years old, I am sorry to say, I am grown very little wiser under that article: if I had to write my work over again, I could correct many errors, but scarcely any thing that strikes my mind as fundamental. In my inquiry concerning Political Justice, I have not only laid down, as well as I was able, the principles of moral and political truth, but have also made a point of commemorating, and delivering a candid and sincere judgment respecting almost every considerable political writer that fell in my way. What therefore could I have added in my Letter of advice, to what in that work I have delivered? I inclose you a copy of my letter, printed on a sheet of paper, which I caused to be so printed, merely because it has happened to me very many times to have the same request made to me by young men, which from you, occasioned the writing these pages; and I thought it might save some trouble, and be the means of some good, to have the paper always at hand, to give away to any person to whom I judged it might be desirable. This copy is sent merely to gratify your private curiosity: as I would not be the means, or appear to be the means, of checking any additional sale which the insertion of my letter might bring to Mr. Constable's magazine. No. III. Skinner Street, April 27, 1818. You say that since the arrival of my paper, you have been sedulously engaged in the study of the old English authors, and of the classics.' I am not sure that this is right as to the first. I had some doubts on this point when I penned my advice; that is, I doubted whether it was right for readers in general, though I was sure that what I put down was reasonable for you. For I was obliged to consider in writing, though I did not name the consideration, that part of your object was to collect books, and that you could not suddenly add old and scarce books to your collection when you were once fixed in I cannot better express the ground of my doubt above conveyed, than by a quotation from Ben Jonson's Discoveries. He says, 'Therefore youth ought to be instructed betimes, and in the best things; for we hold those longest we take soonest. And as it is fit to read the best authors to youth first, so let them be clearest; as, Livy before Sallust, Sidney before Donne. And beware of letting them taste Gower and Chaucer at first, lest falling too much in love with antiquity, and not apprehending the weight, they grow rough and barren in language only.' Now if there is any thing in this caution of Ben Jonson, he and his contemporaries are now somewhat obsolete to us, as Chaucer was to him. The best model perhaps for a modern English style, would be a due mixture and medium of Burke and Hume, adding, when you have gained this substratum, as much wealth from the elder writers, as may be consistent with this platform and system in building. Again, as to what you say of the classics, I have some doubt about the indiscriminate use of your pen in making translations. I know it is good in part, for this is the sure way of discovering whether we perfectly understand our author. But, I know also, that we ought frequently, while we read books in another tongue, to forget for the time that there is any other language than that we are reading. It is thus we shall come to relish their idiom; while on the other hand, if we are continually seeking for equivalent phrases in English, we shall go on much as children do in beginning to talk or write French, whose phrases and construction are English, and the words only borrowed from our neighbour tongue. I am also inclined to disapprove the very limited list of classics you now set down. Latin and Greek are not to be laid aside, as we lay aside our old clothes. My own method through the greater part of my life has been, to devote at least one hour of every day to the classics, and by this means I found the book-shelves of my brain enlarging, till at last the classics made an appearance not alto gether despicable. I hope you do not mean to shut out the poets. You say, Is there a condition of life more replete with enjoyment, than that of a young man, with moderately independent circumstances, &c. &c. &c.?' I say, in reply, 'Is there a condition of life more full of the noblest promise of honour and usefulness, and therefore more replete with enjoyment, than that of a young man, with certain qualities of the head and heart, who no revenue has but his good spirits and inborn energies to feed and clothe him?” I have tried the one; you are about to try the other. Both have their disadvantages and their temptations. But yours, I am afraid, is the most dangerous. Man is a creature of so frail and feeble a texture, that we want all appliance and means to boot, and even in some degree the stimulus of stern necessity, in addition to our own original good dispositions, to make us do our duty fully, and not sometimes be found like a faithless centinel, sleeping upon our post. See what you can do to counteract this evil! May your slumbers be short, conducing only to the infusion of new vigour, and not partaking of that lethargy, in which our powers, our honour, and ourselves, are momentarily in danger of being lost without remedy. You will think it strange in me, if I mention a new book, and by an Aikin. The book is miss Aikin's Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth. It is a book of no great strength and still less depth. But it contains a vast deal of interesting, and some curious information, that is brought together in no other book. * No. IV. Skinner Street, June 29, 1818. I congratulate you upon your good fortune, in being in the British Islands at the time of a general election. This is an instructive, and, in some respects, an animating spectacle. Perhaps I have not fully considered all the advantages and disadvantages of the two modes: but I dislike the French scheme of the people electing an elective body, and then these electors electing the legislature, and that other scheme of some of our reformers, that the members of a county shall be elected by a ballot to take place in every little district and market-town on the same day. I am pleased with the open avowal our electors make of their sentiments. I am pleased with the sympathy excited in their breasts by their general congregating to the place of election, thus reviving (though alas! but once in seven years) the practical and healthful feeling, that they are freemen. I am pleased with the scene of an election protracted for four or five days, and thus nourishing the love of what is right, by some degree of uncertainty and suspense respecting the event. I am an enemy to mobs; but this sort of mob, or confluence of mankind, expressly directed by the law, and terminating in a specific act, seems to me to be deprived of the sting, the terror, and the hot-blooded, savage, and dangerous feeling, attendant on bodies of men, called together at their own pleasure, and chusing for themselves the sort of exertion to which their power shall be directed. No. V. Skinner Street, July 24, 1818. You ask me my sentiments respecting the writers generally called the English classics. Let us see who they are. I suspect that at the head of them are Pope, Swift, and Addison. These were all admirable writers, though greatly inferior to the great writers of the age of Elizabeth. They are, however, worth studying, and are even in some respects entitled to a priority, as being to a great degree standards of the language now in use. It is perhaps impossible to excel Pope in his kind, that is, as a man delivering in metre the dictates of good sense, and a certain obvious species of observation on life and manners, seasoned and rendered acute by all the poignancy of an elegant sort of wit and sarcasm. Addison wants strength; but his deficiency in that respect is compensated, in a great degree, by his delicacy and refinement. His humour, wherever displayed, and most of all in his character of sir Roger de Coverly, is inimitable. The third of these men, Swift, is vastly the greatest. The depth of his observation, a quality very scarce in that age, is astonishing, and is most of all displayed in his Gulliver's Travels. There is not a page of that book, that you may not read six times, before you see all that is in it. And this is rendered more surprising by the unaffected simplicity and plainness with which he delivers himself there, and in all his writings. Congreve, the contemporary of Pope, Swift, and Addison, is also worth your attention. Dr. Conyers Middleton, though something later, is fully entitled to class with these, whom he exceedingly surpasses in copiousness and energy. These are the genuine standards of English style. You may study the writers since that age, as you may study the writers before, as enlarging the stores of our tongue, but they are to be viewed with a certain caution. They are not our standards. Hume is in a high degree subtle and elegant. Burke is a profound thinker, and a powerful declaimer; but his declamation is over-ornamented and over-done. Johnson is the worst of this trio. We may read him however, sometimes for admiration, still oftener as a melancholy example of something, not to be imitated. Rousseau is very nearly the best writer of the middle part of the last century; the writer from whose works we may derive the greatest degree of profit. Montesquieu was a man of great talents. His best work is his Persian Letters, written in his youth. His Spirit of Laws is overrun with affectation. Every sentence is an epigram. And of him we say more truly, what Johnson says of Shakspeare's punning; 'An epigram is the Cleopatra for which he loses the world, and is content to lose it.' I have answered your letter. I am at this moment incessantly occupied in my answer to Matthews on Population, which, I be lieve, I mentioned to you before you left London. . I think I ought to have named Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury with the authors of the age of Addison, though greatly inferior as standards to those already mentioned. Bolingbroke is manly, but the garden of his language has never felt the pruning hook: the branches of his eloquence choke each other like the branches of a forest. Shaftesbury is a most elegant and amiable thinker, but with perpetual affectation. He dances so much, that he is not able to walk. No. VI. Skinner Street, September 11, 18'8. I have looked three times through the Letter of Advice, to endeavour to discover where I have said, Read the great English poets; but do not neglect any of the rest.' But as Shylock says, I cannot find it; it is not in the bond.' If your quotation had stood,' Do not neglect the rest,' I should have said, "I did not write it, but it is my sentiment.' But do not neglect any of the rest,' is certainly too much for me. With respect to your choice of them, if you are guarded by common fame, you will not materially err; and it will be good that you should somewhat use your own independent judgment, in saying, This has been praised too much; and this not enough.' You will have much aid in your decision, if you make Shakspeare, and Milton, and Chaucer, and Spenser your standards. The old poets I should recommend for their language, their depth of thinking, and their strength of phrase. I have given you a tolerable list of dramatic poets; and if you grow fond of them, you will feel prompted to read their poetical compositions, not in the dramatic form, and those of the men they tell you they loved. You will hardly miss Dryden and Pope, or even the melancholy Cowley. Remember what I have said, that I have always found one writer in his occasional remembrances and references leading to another,' and trust yourself to that. The living poets I would wish to have some of your attention, but I would have a young person to be very moderate in his attention to new books.' That is the vice of your country. You ask me for a summary view of the distinguished characteristics of the ages of Elizabeth, Anne, and George III. both for poetry and prose.' That is a large question; and I beg to postpone it. I have furnished some hints towards an answer in former letters. I recommended the other day in a letter to a young author, whose talents I respect, to undertake a book, to be called the Lives of the Commonwealth Men. My list extended to ten names; Milton, Algernon Sidney, Martin, Vane, president Bradshaw, president Scott, his successor in office, Ludlow, Henry Nevil, Henry Ireton, Robert Blake. This would be a choice book for an American to read, though no American could write it as it ought to be written. England in all her annals has produced no men, às public characters, worthy to be ranked with these not even an eleventh to be added to these ten. They were all to their last breath |