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has ever been the object of his life to assist every intellectual gift of nature, however munificent, and however splendid, with every resource that art could suggest, and every attention diligence could bestow.

If we are to read, it is a very important rule in the conduct of the understanding that we should accustom the mind to keep the best company, by introducing it only to the best books. But there is a sort of vanity some men have, of talking of, and reading, obscure halfforgotten authors, because it passes as a matter of course, that he who quotes authors which are so little read, must be completely and thoroughly acquainted with those authors which are in every man's mouth. For instance, it is very common to quote Shakspeare; but it makes a sort of stare to quote Massinger. I have very little credit for being well acquainted with Virgil; but if I quote Silius Italicus, I may stand some chance of being reckoned a great scholar. In short, whoever wishes to strike out of the great road, and to make a short cut to fame, let him neglect Homer, and Virgil, and Horace, and Ariosto, and Milton, and, instead of these, read and talk of Fracastorius, Sannazarius, Lorenzini, Pastorini, and the thirty-six primary sonneteers of Bettinelli; let him neglect every thing which the suffrage of ages has made venerable and grand, and dig out of their graves a set of decayed scribblers, whom the silent verdict of the public has fairly condemned to everlasting oblivion. If he complain of the injustice with which they have been treated, and call for a new trial with loud and importunate clamour, though I am afraid he will not make much progress in the estimation of men of sense, he will be sure to make some noise in the crowd, and to be dubbed a man of very curious and extraordinary erudition.

Then there is another piece of foppery which is to be cautiously guarded against the foppery of universality,

- of knowing all sciences and excelling in all arts,-chemistry, mathematics, algebra, dancing, history, reasoning, riding, fencing, Low Dutch, High Dutch, natural philosophy, and enough Spanish to talk about Lope de Vega: in short, the modern precept of education very often is, "Take the Admirable Crichton for your model; I would have you ignorant of nothing!" Now my advice, on the contrary, is, to have the courage to be ignorant of a great number of things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of every thing. I would exact of a young man a pledge that he would never read Lope de Vega; he should pawn to me his honour to abstain from Bettinelli, and his thirty-five original sonneteers; and I would exact from him the most rigid securities that I was never to hear anything about that race of penny poets who lived in the reigns of Cosmo and Lorenzo di Medici.

I know a gentleman of the law who has a thorough knowledge of fortifications, and whose acquaintance with bastions, and counterscarps, and parallels, is perfectly astonishing. How impossible it is for any man not professionally engaged in such pursuits to evince a thorough acquaintance with them without lowering himself in the estimation of every man of undertanding who hears him! How thoroughly aware must all such men be, that the time dedicated to such idle knowledge has been lost to the perfection of those mental habits any one of which is better than the most enormous load of ill-arranged facts!

It is not only necessary that a man should choose the best books, to whatever department of knowledge he chooses to dedicate himself, but it is expedient he should aim at the highest departments of knowledge, that he should not content himself, as some men are apt to do, throughout the whole of his life, with his school habits of acquiring languages and cultivating imagination, but that he should attend to the principles of civil policy, —

the practices by which nations become rich, the rules by which their relations with other countries should be arranged; the intellectual nature of man, of what his understanding consists, and what are the great facts observable of his active and moral powers. powers. I venerate the ancient languages, and our English universities where they are preserved, as much as any man can do; but I really do not see why at least a co-ordinate importance might not be given to subjects of such value as those of which I have been speaking.

In looking to the effects of education upon after-life (which is the only mode of determining whether education is good or bad), I do allow it to be of great consequence that a young man should be a good scholar; but I also beg leave humbly to contend, that it is not without its beneficial consequences that the minds of our young men be early awakened to such subjects as the philosophy of law, the philosophy of commerce, the philosophy of the human mind, and the philosophy of political government. If an equal chance be given to these subjects and to the classics, if they are all equally honoured and rewarded, the original diversities and caprices of nature will determine a sufficient number of minds to each channel: on the contrary, if a young man, from his earliest days, hears nothing held in honour and estimation but classical reading,-if he have no other idea of ignorance than false quantities, and no other idea of excellence than mellifluous longs, and shorts, the bias of his mind is fixt,—his line of distinction is taken; he either despises these sciences because he knows them not, or, if he has the ability to discover his deficiencies, and the candour to own them, he feels the want of that early determination, that instinctive zeal, which no circumstance in after-life can ever divert or extinguish.

We do not want readers, for the number of readers

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seems to be very much upon the increase, and mere readers are very often the most idle of human beings. There is a sort of feeling of getting through a book, of getting enough out of it, perhaps, for the purpose of conversation, which is the great cause of this imperfect reading, and the forgetfulness which is the consequence of it: whereas the ambition of a man of parts should be, not to know books, but things; not to show other men that he has read Locke, and Montesquieu, and Beccaria, and Dumont, but to show them that he knows the subjects on which Locke and Beccaria and Dumont have written. It is no more necessary that a man should remember the different dinners and suppers which have made him healthy, than the different books which have made him wise. Let us see the result of good food in a strong body, and the result of great reading in a full and powerful mind.

If you measure the value of study by the insight you get into subjects, not by the power of saying you have read many books, you will soon perceive that no time is so badly saved, as that which is saved by getting through a book in a hurry. For if, to the time you have given, you had added a little more, the subject would have been fixt on your mind, and the whole time profitably employed; whereas, upon your present arrangement, because you would not give a little more, you have lost all. Besides, this is overlooked by rapid and superficial readers, that the best way of reading books with rapidity is, to acquire that habit of severe attention to what they contain, that perpetually confines the mind to the single object it has in view. When you have read enough to have acquired the habit of reading without suffering your mind to wander, and when you can bring to bear upon your subject a great share of previous knowledge, you may then read with rapidity: before that, as you have taken the wrong road, the faster you proceed the more you will be sure to err.

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Upon this subject of the wandering of the mind, I shall read a passage from Mr. Locke. "That there is constant succession and flux of ideas in our minds, I "have observed in the former part of this Essay, and every one may take notice of it himself. This, I suppose, may deserve some part of our care, in the con"duct of our understandings; and I think it may be of great advantage, if we can, by use, get that power over "our minds as to be able to direct that train of ideas, "that so, since there will no new ones perpetually come "into our thoughts by a constant succession, we may "be able, by choice, so to direct them, that none may "come in view but such as are pertinent to our present "inquiry, and in such order as may be most useful to "the discovery we are upon; or, at least, if some foreign "and unsought ideas will offer themselves, that yet we "might be able to reject them, and keep them from แ taking off our minds from its present pursuit, and "hinder them from running away with our thoughts quite from the subject in hand."*

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A sincere attachment to truth, moral and scientific, is a habit which cures a thousand little infirmities of mind, and is as honourable to a man who possesses it, in point of character, as it is profitable in point of improvement. There is nothing more beautiful in science than to hear any man candidly owning his ignorance. It is so little the habit of men who cultivate knowledge to do so,—they so often have recourse to subterfuge, nonsense, or hypothesis, rather than to a plain manly declaration, either that they themselves do not understand the subject, or that the subject is not understood, -that it is really quite refreshing to witness such instances of philosophical candour, and it creates an immediate prepossession in favour of the person in whom it is observed.

* Vol. iii. p. 410.

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