was diftinct in his mind. How could it be otherwife? he had never fpared time to think, all was employed in reading. His reafon had not the merit of common mechanifm. When you prefs a watch or pull a clock, they answer your question with precifion; for they repeat exactly the hour of the day, and tell you neither more nor less than you defire to know. But when you afked this man a question, he overwhelmed you by pouring forth all that the feveral terms or words of your queftion recalled to his memory and if he omitted any thing, it was that very thing to which the fenfe of the whole question fhould have led him and confined him. To afk him a question, was to wind up a fpring in his memory, that rattled on with vaft rapidity and confused noise, till the force of it was spent: and you went away with all the noise in your ears, stunned and uninformed. I never left him, that I was not ready to fay to him, “ Dieu vous faffe la grace de devenir "moins favant!" a wifh that La Mothe le Vayer mentions upon fome occafion or other, and that he would have done well to have applied to himfelf upon many.

He who reads with difcernment and choice, will acquire lefs learning, but more knowledge; and as this knowledge is collected with defign, and cultivated with art and method, it will be at all times of immediate and ready use to himfelf and others:

Thus ufeful arms in magazines we place,

All rang'd in order, and difpos'd with grace:

Nor

Nor thus alone the curious eye to please;

But to be found, when need requires, with ease. You remember the verses, my Lord, in our friend's Effay on Criticism, which was the work of his childhood almoft; but is fuch a monument of good sense and poetry, as no other that I know has raised in his riper years.

He who reads without this difcernment and choice; and, like Bodin's pupil, refolves to read all; will not have time, no, nor capacity neither, to do any thing elfe. He will not be able to think, without which it is impertinent to read; nor to act, without which it is impertinent to think. He will affemble materials with much pains, and purchase them at much expence; and have neither leifure nor fkill to frame them into proper fcantlings, or to prepare them for ufe. To what purpose fhould he hufband his time, or learn architecture? he has no defign to build. But then to what purpose all these quarries of ftone, all these mountains of fand and lime, all thefe forefts of oak and deal?" Magno impen"dio temporum, magna alienarum aurium mo“leftia, laudatio hæc conftat, O hominem li"teratum! Simus hoc titulo rufticiore conten

cr

ti, O virum bonum!" We may add, and Seneca might have added in his own style, and according to the manners and characters of his own age, another title as ruftic, and as little in fafhion: "O virum fapientia fua fimplicem, et fimplicitate fua fapientem! O virum utilem fibi, fuis, reipublicæ, et humano generi!" I have faid perhaps already, but no matter, it

'

cannot

cannot be repeated too often, that the drift of all philofophy, and of all political speculations, ought to be the making us better men and better citizens. Thofe ftudies, which have no intention towards improving our moral characters, have no pretence to be styled philofophical. "Quis eft enim," fays Fully in his Offices, qui nullis officii præceptis tradendis, philofo

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phum fe audeat dicere?" Whatever political fpeculations, instead of preparing us to be ufeful to fociety and to promote the happiness of mankind, are only fyftems for gratifying private ambition, and promoting private interefts, at the public expence; all fuch, I fay, deserve to be burnt, and the authors of them to ftarve, like Machiavel, in a jail.

LETTER V.

I. The great ufe of Hiftory, properly fo called, as diftinguished from the writings of mere annalists and antiquaries,

II. Greek and Roman historians.

III. Some idea of a Complete History.

IV. Further cautions to be observed in this ftudy, and the regulation of it according to the different profeffions and fituations of men: above all, the ufe to be made of it, (1) by divines, and (2) by those who are called to the fervice of their country.

I

REMEMBER my last letter ended abruptly,

and

and a long interval has fince paffed: fo that the
thread I had then fpun has flipt from me. I
will try to recover it, and to pursue the task your
Lordship has obliged me to continue. Befides
the pleasure of obeying your orders, it is like-
wife of fome advantage to myself, to recollect
my thoughts, and refume a ftudy in which I
was converfant formerly. For nothing can be
more true than that faying of Solon reported by
Plato, though cenfured by him, impertinently
enough, in one of his wild books of laws---" Af-
"fidue addifcens, ad fenium venio." The
truth is, the most knowing man in the courfe
of the longest life will have always much to
learn, and the wifest and best much to improve.
This rule will hold in the knowledge and im-
provement to be acquired by the ftudy of hi-
ftory: and, therefore, even he who has gone to
this school in his youth, fhould not neglect it in
his age.
"I read in Livy," fays Montagne,
"what another man does not; and Plutarch
"read there what I do not." Juft fo, the fame
man may read at fifty, what he did not read, in
the fame book, at five-and-twenty: at least I have
found it fo, by my own experience, on many
occafions.

By comparing, in this ftudy, the experience of other men and other ages with our own, we improve both: we analyfe, as it were, philofophy. We reduce all the abstract fpeculations of ethics, and all the general rules of human policy, to their first principles. With thefe advantages, every man may, though few men do,

advance

1

vance daily towards thofe ideas, thofe increated effences a Platonift would fay, which no human creature can reach in practice, but in the neareft approaches to which the perfection of our nature confifts; because every approach of this kind renders a man better, and wifer for himfelf, for his family, for the little community of his own country, and for the great community of the world. Be not furprised, my Lord, at the order in which I place these objects. Whatever order divines and moralifts, who contemplate the duties belonging to these objects, may place them in, this is the order they hold in nature: and I have always thought that we might lead ourselves and others to private virtue, more effectually by a due obfervation of this order, than by any of those fublime refinements that pervert it.

Self-love but ferves the virtuous mind to wake;
As the small pebble ftirs the peaceful lake.
The centre mov'd, a circle ftrait fucceeds;
Another ftill, and still another spreads:
Friend, parent, neighbour, firft it will embrace,
His country next, and next all human race.

So fings our friend Pope, my Lord; and fo I believe. So I fhall prove too, if I mistake not, in an epistle I am about to write to him, in order to complete a fet that were writ fome years ago.

A man of my age, who returns to the ftudy of history, has no time to lofe, because he has little to live: a man of your Lordship's age has no time to lofe, because he has much to do. For different reafons, therefore, the fame rules will

fuit