our virtue at home or respectability abroad. Most striking individual instances might be given of this but for the fear of introducing personal or partisan reflections. Some general instances may be hinted at. To charge a member of the government with peculation, and be unable to prove the charge, would, in England, cause the accuser to be hooted at by all the respectable men of his own party; here it is passed by as only an ordinary incident of political warfare—a bold speculation, which unfortunately did not succeed. To misquote a literary opponent is disgraceful to a European controversialist; it was one of the things that contributed to the downfall of the Puseyite influence in England, being considered and denounced as conduct unworthy of scholars and gentlemen; here it is apologized for as a slip of the pen or the printer, and the apology is by many deemed sufficient. Nay, I am not sure but the great indulgence afforded to commercial failures, an indulgence often overstepping the bounds of charity, may properly come under this head. The fundamental error is the same in the three cases; too much leniency shown to gross carelessness.

An education which teaches men to read, think, and learn slowly, carefully, and deliberately, and which practically convinces them at every step of their fallibility and proneness to be mistaken, is the best calculated to correct this national inaccuracy, mental and moral.

The other great national defect of our national popular literature and oratory, and intellectual public displays generally, is bad taste, manifesting itself in a more than Hibernian

tawdriness of style, a violence and exaggeration of language, a forced accumulation of ornament, not growing naturally out of the subject, but stuck violently on for the sake of having it there; and also in a long-winded diffuseness and inane repetition of common-places. Here I can fancy some one starting up and saying-the tu quoque is so favorite a form of argument with a certain class, and, without doubt, has a great ad captandum effect-"The author has the driest and most unadorned style himself; how can he appreciate an elegant and florid one?" Now there are few persons who enjoy a good ornate style more than myself; I read Macaulay over and over, and have almost some of his essays by heart; the gorgeous word-painting of Ruskin has an exceeding charm for me; but compared with the sentences of such men, richly colored by the allusions of learning, and sedulously polished by critical accuracy, the bulk of what our periodical censors agree to call "fine writing" seems to me like stage tinsel and paste to real jewelry, or a bouquet of artificial flowers to a posy of natural ones, imitating the original to a cursory inspection, but a worthless sham when you come to look into it. Should any one still join issue on the fact and maintain that our popular style is not a vicious one, it would, I confess, not be very easy to convince him; a question of taste cannot be made matter of demonstration. If I were to cite forty instances of false metaphor, turgidity, bombast, and bathos, he might still consider those very examples as specimens of beautiful writing. But one thing can hardly be denied by anybody-that our writers and speakers

are terribly deficient in the faculty of selection; that (with some eminent exceptions) they never know when they have said enough; that a great majority of our sermons, lectures, forensic arguments, anniversary addresses, &c., and our public documents and congregational speeches almost without exception, are a great deal longer than they ought to be.

The remark has been made to me more than once in conversation, that the displays of vulgarity, prolixity, bombast, &c., which deform our popular literature, are chiefly to be set down to the discredit of uneducated southern and western

men, who could not be in the most indirect way affected by any condition of or change in our collegiate system. To this it may be replied, first, that the monopoly of bad taste is not confined to the south and west. There is a great deal of the article in New England. True, there is also much pure and refined taste. There are New Englanders whose works have become acknowledged classics of the English language, acknowledged not only by England but by Europe. There are New Englanders whose speeches will endure as models of oratory while the language endures. But there are also a great many New Englanders who are continually talking and writing all over the country anything but the choicest English. Next, supposing the position admitted to its fullest extent, there are two ways of treating such wild men of the woods, which have very different effects, and are directly dependent on the collegiate system adopted. If you take the ability to make a speech as a sign of education, you put yourself and the uneducated man on something like a foot

ing; for he, knowing only how to read and write perhaps, but having plenty of impudence and self-possession, and acquiring a stock of party common-places from the newspapers or some equally accessible source, can make as fluent and long a speech as you-not as good, no doubt, but he will think it as good, and feel himself your equal. Make classical knowledge a standard of the educated man, and you put such a person on his level at once. There is a gulf between you and him that no amount of noisy haranguing can get

over.

The critical habits induced by classical study, teaching condensation of thought by rejection of superfluities, purity of style and clearness rather than magniloquence of expression, are the best protection against the inroads of bad taste. Abolish the study of Greek and Latin entirely, and we should be delivered over to the Vandals of literature, the heroes of the stump and the penny paper.

Lecturers and writers on the subject of education are in the habit of crying out continually for more of it. I, on the contrary, would like to call attention to the desirableness of having a higher order of it—an education for men of refinement. I think our country has reached that point in national progress when she can afford to attend to refinement. Our common school education is probably much better and more generally diffused than that of any other country; our liberal education is certainly behind that of several countries. Ought we not to take most pains for the improvement of that in which we are most deficient? I put this as a practical ques

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tion for every man to ask himself who has money to give or leave, or influence to exert or time to spend in the cause of education.

"You want an education for rich men," interposes some patent friend of the people, who disguises his envy of all those that are better off in this world's goods than himself, by a professed sympathy for those who are worse off. Well, I do want an education for rich men. Do they not stand in special need of it? such an education, too, as will give them other sources of pleasure besides the material ones derived from wealth? But perhaps the objector means that I want an education in the advantages of which none but rich men can participate-an assertion disproved at once by the fact that numbers of poor men in England, France, Germany, and other European countries, are enjoying such an education. “Oh, but you want an education for gentlemen." Exactly-I do; and the gentlemen whom I want to train up should require just wealth enough to enable them to wear clean. shirts, and be just aristocrats " enough to prefer the company of persons with clean shirts and clean habits to that of persons with dirty ones.

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