powers of criticism, have also been advantageous to the taste for poetry. -Every body has now a general acquaintance with our best poets. The demand for this species of literature has rendered it common and in some degree cheap.-Quotations which were formerly new and elegant, have now been so much hacknied that they are no longer used by persons of taste. It is presumed that every body is equally well acquainted with certain popular lines and passages, and it therefore implies want of good breeding as well as of good taste to quote them at insulting and tedious full length-Allusion has happily taken place of quotation, and it is found more agreeable, and thought more becoming to suggest, than to detail the beauties of our poets.-This change

in the fashion of conversation should be marked by mothers, who are forming their daughters to embellish society, and permanently to please and attach in domestic life. They will perceive that now it is not enough or rather it is too much to store and load the memory with poetry learned by rote.

Dr. Johnson, who was privileged to speak truths rudely, ridiculed the practice of calling upon babes and sucklings to repeat

"Angels and ministers of grace defend us !" Since his time parents have been more discreet and merciful to their acquaintance, and have not wearied them by insisting on their attention to the poetical repetitions of children.-But still an unconscionable quantity of what we may be per

mitted to call common place poetry, is by many parents forced upon the youthful memory.-To what purpose? -It can be no distinction to Miss or Master any-one to have learnt what is known by Miss and Master every-body. This is quickly seen and felt-The little more and the little more is crammed into the head, in vain-when the force of cramming can no farther go, the preceptor or the parent in vain has recourse to any literary conjuror who teaches or promises to teach new arts of memory.

Arts by which the intellectual juggler undertakes in the presence of the spectators to swallow and reproduce at pleasure at pleasure tremendous lengths of prose or poetry!-Granting that by these new or these old arts the promised wonders can be atchieved

granting that two hundred or two thousand times as many words as ever before were learned by rote can now be stowed into the human head-granting that the magician can fulfil his boast, and call up without fear of their not coming when he does call, all the thats and whiches in Gray's "Elegy in a country church yard," still a sober minded person might repeatTo what purpose is all this? Putting out of the question the idle exhibition of the marvellous, and seriously -supposing that all "Enfield's Speaker" Icould be in one week or one month committed to memory-What avails it?-If it be merely lodged in the memory for safe custody would it not be full as safe and full as useful in any printed volume, on any shelf in a library ?—For the purpose of shining

or of pleasing in conversation, all this, as we have endeavoured to shew, is absolutely useless, and what to many will sound worse, absolutely unfashionable. Persons must now depend for success in conversation more on their own powers and exertions, and less on their borrowed literature or stores of learning. It is by reasoning, or by wit or fancy, in other words, by skill in forming new combinations of ideas, by promptitude in producing their knowledge at the moment it is wanted, by address and judgement in marshalling, and managing, and bringing into action their intellectual forces, that success must now be won. The heavy baggage, and the ivory chariots, and the treasures, are of little avail in the field, and those who put their trust in them in