possessor only more odious and insufferable for its manifestation.

But with these necessary prerequisites, what an exuberant supply does the English language afford of the materials of literary and scientific cultivation! the best books that can be written on every subject which can delight, enlighten, and discipline the mind, in an abundance almost equal to that of the bountiful productions of nature. Like a wealthy heir, born to a large estate, we are insensible to the inestimable treasure we inherit from our fatherland. We scarcely reflect that it was possible that we might not have inherited the vast literary riches, which have been accumulated for centuries by the sages of England. For our benefit have her philosophers investigated, her metaphysicians speculated, her poets sung. For us have her historians unrolled the faded volume of the past, and extracted from it whatever can be profitable to us, her translators have made our own, whatever of the productions of ancient genius bore the impress of immortality, whatever of contemporary literature and science, foreign nations are, from time to time, contributing to the common stock of human knowledge. Her navigators and travellers stand ready to convey us to any quarter of the globe, and exhibit to us man as he there exists, with all

that is peculiar in his manners, habits, and institutions. Homer sings to us in the scarcely less sublime and fiery muse of Pope. The pastoral numbers of Virgil flow almost as smoothly in the verse of Dryden; and Tasso and Ariosto, the lights of another age, present to us as bright an image of their genius and their times in the classic page of Hoole.-On casting our eyes towards England, they are absolutely bewildered with the constellations of genius which cluster over that little isle. They seem like a whole firmament of stars, and might entirely confound us, did not one fix our gaze, by its peculiar and overpowering brilliancy-the star of Shakspeare.

Such, then, is the rich inheritance of all who speak the English tongue; and to him who is entering upon the great work of self-improvement, the difficulty is not the want of aids and materials, but of choice among their boundless exuberance. The cheapness with which they are now produced, has brought them within the means of all, and no member of our community has any other plea than indolence or indisposition, if he fail to become intellectually accomplished.

I shall speak, in the first place, of pure literature as a means of mental culture. By pure literature I mean poetry, prose fiction, and criticism. The legitimate object of this is immediate pleasure, improvement of the taste, culti

vation of the imagination, refinement of the feelings and manners, and enlargement of the powers and satisfactions of social intercourse. And are not these objects worthy of the pursuit of every virtuous and liberal mind? It is thus that high genius is one of the most precious gifts of God to the world, the most powerful means of refining and civilizing mankind.

Poetry has ever been the first step, the entering wedge of all intellectual improvement. It is the first thing, of a gentle and soothing nature, which can gain a hearing amid the din of arms and the tumults of the passions. It is the natural music of humanity, the holiday dress of the world. It gives utterance to the finest feelings, the loftiest sentiments of the human heart, and awakens them by sympathy in those whom it addresses. It rescues the common objects of daily life from the tarnish of familiarity, and the soil of low associations, and sheds over them the freshness and dew of morning. It teaches us to deem more highly of ourselves, and to act in the character with which it invests us. The highest pleasure is thus united with the greatest advantage. One new source of happiness is opened to us above the gratification of the senses, and a new and innocent employment discovered of those vacant hours, when the frame is too exhausted for toil, and the mind too worn for business. What

measure of cultivation, what peculiarity of taste may not find its congenial gratification in the rich variety of the English poets? Shakspeare, Milton, Byron, Burns, Pope, Dryden, Cowper, Moore, Scott, and time would fail me to enumerate a tythe of their number, constitute a library of themselves, and alone might employ the leisure moments of the longest life. They are a garden of nectared sweets, whose beauties and whose odors actually bewilder and overwhelm the senses.

In the department of prose fiction, English literature is still more exuberant. But here I am compelled to speak with more discrimination. Poetry is in a measure a divine gift, a sacred office which none but the truly anointed can fill. The profane pretender can not invade it with impunity. But every man thinks that he can write a novel. The consequence is, that the world is absolutely deluged with trash. The true idea of a novel is to present a chapter of human life as it is, or with those who have a purpose of benefiting mankind, with a slight variation towards what it ought to be. In the hands of true genius, it is made the instrument of infinite pleasure and improvement. It presents us a living, moving picture of the actual, the distant, or the past. By calling into life beings whom we have never seen, or who have long been dead, our sympathies and ima

ginations are carried into scenes of which we otherwise could form but a dim and languid idea. We thus become in turn the denizens of any nation or any age of the world; we see the world as they saw it, and enter into the opinions, the feelings, the prejudices of the time. In order to heighten the interest of these productions, it has hitherto been thought necessary to interweave with the narrative a history of that master passion, which God intended to spring up between the sexes, and at length unite them in the sacred tie of marriage. In the tender distresses and perplexities of this absorbing passion, the elements of which are planted in all hearts, the novelist hopes to secure a deep and lively interest, and he generally succeeds. The old and the young, therefore, are soon buried in the pages of a novel, when nothing else would have had the power to fix the attention. It is thus that Scott and Edgeworth, and some few others, have delighted, instructed, and I believe improved the world. But then these great writers have produced a host of imitators, of whom very little good can be said, men who strive to supply by extravagance what they want in genius, who have all the contortions of the sybil without uttering any of her oracles. In a perpetual struggle to be original, they become sophistical, and in striving to be striking they become false. Many of them are as hollow