TO ALL PROFESSIONAL MEN:

351

lawyers whose whole reading is confined to the points, cases, and practice of law. But error has her gray hairs as well as truth. The real inference is, that he who professes to know nothing but his own scheme of divinity, or the existing system of medicine, or the mere technicalities of law, is not a sound theologian, or able physician, or profound lawyer, because it displays either dulness or idleness, or both, for one to pass through life without acquiring general information. Indeed, idleness long continued produces nearly the same effects as dulness, by blunting the powers of genius itself; since man holds all his natural faculties, physical, intellectual, and moral, only upon this conditional tenure, that by exercise they are all strengthened and enlarged, by disuse all weakened and diminished.

Were Luther, and Calvin, and Horseley, less profoundly skilled in their own peculiar systems of theology than the most ignorant clergymen of their respec tive sects, because they were also learned in all the learning of their times? Were Friend, and Boerhaave, and Haller, and Heberden, less expert in the healing art than the most ignorant, impudent, and murderous empiric, because they were eminently distinguished as general scholars, in addition to being most accomplished physicians? Were Bacon, and Hale, and Mansfield, and Jones, less able, and less profound, as jurists, than the most illiterate, narrow-minded, pettifogging attorney, because they had assiduously strengthened and adorned the stupendous power of their original genius by a vast and varied acquaintance with the recondite depths of science, the exquisite refinements of art, and the dazzling splendours of erudition? It were indeed a consummation devoutly to be wished, that our Amerirican students, following the foot-tracks of these illustrious examples, would prefer to herding in the dark and dismal abodes of the antagonists of learning, to whatever profession they may belong, the directing of their devoted, though distant, gaze and admiration towards the regions of the sun, where shine in unborrowed

lustre the great poets, historians, orators, statesmen, and philosophers of the world:

In every profession various kinds of learning are eminently useful, although to common, slow understandings they do not appear to bear any very close relation to their particular calling; and various general information always tends to quicken the power of penetration, and strengthen the judgment. A mind, liberally cultivated, has an extensive intellectual grasp, which seizes at once, as by intuition, every argument that bears fairly on the question, and thus ensures accuracy and stability to all its serious deliberations and mature conclusions. But a narrow understanding (and all ignorance in its very nature, and ex vi termini, implies narrowness of the understanding,) being unacquainted with elemen◄ tary principles and general truths, is confused and perplexed by every ordinary occurrence, and is busied only in managing little points, and raising quibbling objections that cannot stand a moment against the direct attillery of that able, well-applied, comprehensive reasoning, which is ever the legitimate result and sure reward of time diligently employed in laying the broad basis of a liberal education.

Ignorance is the greatest of all evils, because it tends to augment and perpetuate every other evil, by precluding the possible entrance of all good. Its fatal influence not only indisposes the mind to exertions for its own deliverance, but also excites a malignant opposition to every effort to enlighten mankind. Men love this darkness rather than light, because it conceals the dimensions of danger, favours the slumber of indolence, and soothes the dreams of folly. And so completely does long-continued ignorance tend to disqualify the mind for improvement, that it is only in the earlier stages of life that it is capable of being trained by the patient

CORRUPTION OF PROSODY IN THE UNITED STATES. 353

process of education, to habits of intelligence. It is vain to endeavour to operate any great moral change, or intellectual improvement, on the full-grown population of any community. Their characters are fixed; their faculties have ceased to be progressive; the range of their ideas has already taken the form and pressure, the hue, and colouring, and direction, of their previous education; and cannot tolerate any innovation upon their long cherished prejudices and circumscribed customs. It is with youth, nay, with childhood, the labours of the preceptor must begin; for to them, in a great measure, is the successful prosecution of intellectual and moral culture confined. "He (observes Dr. Johnson) who voluntarily continues in ignorance, when he may be instructed, is guilty of all the crimes and follies which ignorance produces; as to him who extinguishes the night fires of a beacon, are justly to be imputed all the calamities of the shipwreck occasioned by the darkness." It is by the diffusion of general information alone that the understanding can be improved in all its faculties; that the thoughts, which now only occasionally appear to the secluded speculations of a few solitary thinkers, can be communicated from intellect to intellect, concentrated in strength, and brightened in reflected splendour; so that an uninterrupted chain of progressive improvement may unite together all the intelligent minds of an enlightened community.

The rythm of the Latin language is entirely disregarded; and in this free country we murder prosody ad libitum. Our gravest divines, most learned physicians, profound lawyers, and celebrated professors, talk familiarly of " Aristides," of "Herodotus," of suing "in formá pauperis," of the writ "facias habere possessionem," and so forth. The excuse for this systematic rebellion against all metre was for a long time found in the fact that our Scottish teachers neglected all prosody: this apology must cease now, because some years since the proper metrical pronunciation of the classics was introduced, as part of its system of education, into the high school at Edinburgh; and that celebrated seminary

A a

now produces prize poems in Latin Hexameters. Mr.Burke might have thundered his "magnum vectigal est parsimonia" into the ears of an American administration, without offending their nicer classical organs, or hearing both from the treasury and the opposition benches, the portentous sound of "tigal, tigal," echoing through all the house, until his premeditated speech was prematurely brought to a close.

It would be considered a sure token of a low and vulgar education, if an American were to mis-pronounce every English word he uttered, and make all the long syllables short, and all the short syllables long; and it is not less offensive to hear the Latin and Greek languages treated in the same barbarous manner; to observe the quantity of every word in Homer and Virgil, in Demosthenes and Cicero, regularly assassinated by men. who call themselves scholars. To confess the truth, however, our free-born citizens are apt to take as much liberty with the rythm of their mother tongue as with that of the dead languages; and we daily hear, from the pulpit, in the senate, and at the bar, of "peremptory," "territory," "dormitory," "legislature," "genuine," "sanguine," &c.* The late Mr. Gouverneur Morris, one of the ablest and most eloquent men whom the world has produced, in an inaugural discourse to the New-York Historical Society, condescended to use some splendid sophistry, in order to prove that poetry and rythm are unworthy the attention of America, because steam-boats are useful to the community. The language of the orator is lofty, but we might ask whether or not his judgment would have been as sound, and his imagination as well disciplined, if he himself had been a classical scholar; and whether or not England

*Note, that this page, instancing the neglect of prosody, was handed to me without a single mark to denote the quantity of the syllables which our American scholars so regularly mis-pronounce. Upon inquiring the cause, I was informed, that they had no such marks, and the press was stopped till the type-founder could cast them. And this printing-office is one of the first and most respectable in the United States.

UNITED STATES WRITERS.

355

is inferior to other nations in the inventions of art, and the discoveries of science, because she excels them all in literature?

The United States have produced scarcely a single learned writer, in the strict acceptation of that term; indeed, I do not know one American work on classical literature, or that betrays any intimate acquaintance with the classics. And, excepting Cicero's works, printed accurately and well by Wells and Lilley, at Boston, the only classical productions of the American press are the republication of a few common schoolbooks. Nor, I believe, have the United States produced any elementary work on ethics, or political economy, or metaphysics. The great mass of our native publications consists of newspaper essays, and party pamphlets. There are several respectable state and local histories, as those of New-York and New-Jersey, by Smith, Trumbull's History of Connecticut, Ramsay's History of SouthCarolina, to which add his Account of the United States, and Holmes's Annals, M'Call's Georgia, Darby's Louisiana, and Stoddart's Account of that State, Jefferson's Notes on Virginia, Borman's Maryland, Prud's Pennsylvania, Williams's Vermont, Belknap's New-Hampshire, Hutchinson's Massachusetts, Sullivan's Maine, Minot's History of Shay's Rebellion, and Drake's History of Cincinnati, in Ohio; together with divers accounts of the late war, mostly written in that crusading style which revolutionary France has rendered current throughout the world.

Of native novels we have no great stock, and none good; our democratic institutions placing all the people on a dead level of political equality; and the pretty equal diffusion of property throughout the country affords but little room for varieties, and contrasts of character; nor is there much scope for fiction, as the country is quite new, and all that has happened from its first settlement to the present hour, respecting it, is known to every one. There is, to be sure, some traditionary romance about the Indians; but a novel describing these miserable barbarians, their squaws, and