troublesome questions. Take him to public games, and with his very countenance he will be an obstacle to the pleasure of the people; let him enter a room, and there is suddenly 'lupus in fabula.' You would say, in brief, that he is not a man."

"Still of their learned stuff; they care for nothing

But how to know; as negligent of their bodies

In diet, or else, especially in their clothes,
As if they had no change."

Who can deny that there is much justice in these accusations? Who can doubt but that they are directed against an evil which needs to be diminished, not augmented? The tendency of many systems of education is to withdraw too much talent from actual and practical life, and direct it to speculative and purely intellectual pursuits. The result of such exaggeration is a wearisome and monotonous state of things,-from which, more or less, either directly or indirectly, almost every one suffers. "Social life in Weimar," says a correspondent of Richter, "is as if a wicked enchantment had dissolved every thing. Love, friendship, veneration, the enjoyment of art, even society, is here only a sound, a shadow. A leaden night settles on all heads, all hearts, in apparently equal uniformity." Then, too, the absence of kindness, and even good manners, must be remarked as a frequent result of being distinguished in this way from those whose instruction is of a common order. There is often occasion to use the words of our old play in reference to them, and say,

"Go, go! turn over all thy books once more,

And learn to thrive in modesty; for impudence
Does least become a scholar."

It is not perhaps wholly irrelevant to remark, that he who advocated the common mind, and exposed the disadvantages that often attend what is extraordinary, evinced, in the work from which we have lately quoted, the greatest consideration for others in his satirical picture, and attacked no one individual by name. What a contrast, as he himself points out, in this respect is presented in the writings of the learned! How many are personally and by name insulted by Aristotle, Plato, and

VOL. II.

Demosthenes, by Sallust and Seneca, not to speak of the moderns, including the Reviewers, who are to judge forsooth for the people, while spitefully disparaging, or with more subtlety absolutely ignoring every publication that supports views different from their own, or rather from those of the men who pay them best. Then for quarrels, what madness is there! “ Quamquam," adds Erasmus, "id vocabuli rectius in pios competit quam in vulgus, mea quidem sententia. Look at the style of learned men, at least some twenty years ago, and you will feel like Sogliardo, saying, in Every Man out of his Humour,

"An he be a scholar, you know, I cannot
Abide him; I had as lieve see a cockatrice.
O, 'tis an open-throated, black-mouth'd cur,
That bites at all, but eats on those that feed him,—
A slave, that to your face will, serpent-like,
Creep on the ground, as he would eat the dust,

And to your back will turn the tail, and sting
More deadly than a scorpion."

We know how many men of genius, like poet Keats, have been
fatally assailed by the vituperative criticism of the learned, to
whose pens we might apply the words of Hermia to Deme-
trius,

Could not a worm, an adder, do so much?

An adder did it; for with doubler tongue

Than thine, thou serpent, never adder stung.”

From an eminent man of this kind, sitting, like an Olympian Jupiter, to rule things in the universe of letters by his brows, all lovers at least will fly with no less horror than from a scorpion. In fact, as an ancient witty author says, “they will exclude him from their company, and admit any animal sooner into it;" they will dote on his very absence. And how can it be otherwise, even when he is not ready to snarl and bite? What ominous face, and dismal countenance, marked for disasters, hated of all the heavens, is this that follows you? Perhaps he is not mischievous. Well, so much the better for himself; but then with stars and obelisks, with gods and goddesses, and such strange people, he deals. You say he is learned and

profound. "But why," those who are seated here answer, "should he not be familiar, and talk, as other Christians do, of hearty matters sometimes?" Philosophers will tell you in rejoinder, that "fixed seriousness in meditation hinders the works of nature in its lower and animal functions ;" and these men, studious of pre-eminence, will confess as much of themselves, saying, with Charles in the Elder Brother,

"I have forgot to eat and sleep with reading,
And all my faculties turn into study:

'Tis meat and sleep! What need I outward garments,
When I can clothe myself with understanding?
Why should we care for any thing but knowledge,
Or look upon the world, but to contemn it?

Marry! thou sayest to me, brother!
Marry thyself to understanding, Andrew ;

These women are errata in all authors!

They're fair to see too, and bound up in vellum,

Smooth, white, and clean; but their contents are monstrous."

Such might be the confession of many learned men; though, in order to obtain some still higher intellectual fame, they may, perhaps, seek to disguise their sentiments, and affect the exact contrary, approaching even to this very Seat, where, however, are eyes that cannot be deceived for all their gammon, as some will wittily term it. "As women," says one who knew him, "we may be permitted to protest against Richter in connexion with our sex. It is true that he has written beautifully and eloquently of women, and has, perhaps, done much to elevate and spiritualize their views and affections; but in actual life he was not wholly sincere with the beings he professed to reverence. He does not appear to have felt the truth and tenderness of an equal love. In his connexion with those whom he prudently retreated from, he appropriated their unselfish affections, their disinterested devotion, to purposes of an artistic creation; he made them the models for the female characters in his works, and they lived to see the warm pulses of their hearts registered in the usual acceptation of the word. He was not an enemy to women, but his devotion to them was not a genuine devotion to them as women; he did not love them for themselves; he loved them artistically, and so he made use of

the power his genius gave him over the minds of women, to draw out the sweet affections, the hidden depths of the heart, revealed only to love, to increase his psychological knowledge for the public." We read of another learned genius, that "he would fall passionately in love with three women on the same evening, and go home alone, thinking of none of the three, but leaving each convinced that she had been the one who had exclusively charmed him." Would it not be better to be a common lad, of common training, of common habits, manners, and thoughts, than a deep-read scholar, who has passed all the best years of his life in striving to arrive at pre-eminence, attended with such results? The word "erudition," that I may show my own learning a little, means, you must know, a being taken from the rude, from the common and popular. Methinks, after what we have heard, it will be thought at the Lover's Seat that it would have been well for some of the distinguished if they had not been thus drawn from among persons of the common sort; that is, supposing that they were not by nature, and a singular organization disqualified for such company.

"Some men," says a

But we must conclude this chapter. great author, "are discouraged from proposing to themselves self-culture, by the false notion, that the study of books, which their situation denies them, is the only sufficient means. Let such consider, that the grand volumes, of which all our books are transcripts-I mean nature, revelation, the human soul, and human life—are freely unfolded to every eye. The great sources of wisdom are experience and observation, and these are denied to no one. When books absorb men, as they sometimes do, and turn them from observation of nature and life, they generate a learned folly, for which the plain sense of the people could not be exchanged but at a great loss

1

In finishing these observations respecting the excellence of what is common in regard to literature, and those who are occupied with it, we may remark, that the conclusions we have come to, which might have been expected at first to favour only the commonalty, as conducing to their instruction, turn

* Channing.

out to be not wanting in importance, even for the learned themselves. The view of the subject obtained from the Lover's Seat seems to interest them more than we had reason to expect from the suspicious nature of the proposition that was to be maintained in it, suggesting possibly the idea of its being directed with a kind of hostile feeling on our part. The result, after all, does not argue such an impression; for surely there is no malice implied in the belief that it is of importance to the learned themselves to know what others think of them, and what some of their most eminent representatives have freely acknowledged. It is at all events fulfilling our object, to show that, whether in regard to the value of their acquisitions, the conduct of their studies and of their lives, the formation of their own character, and their attainment of happiness as members of the human family, they cannot with impunity, any more than the simplest of us, neglect what is common, or refuse to view things from this Seat.

CHAPTER XVIII.

COME, we had a good dose of the last subject. It had an odour about it of vellum and Russian leather, that agreed marvellously ill with these wild flowers at our feet,-to say nothing of these flounces. Do, pray, move your foot farther off. Our line of reading, mate, does not flow at present like the brook that the poet sings of,-making it say of itself,

"I steal by lawns and grassy plots,

I slide by hazel covers,

I move the sweet forget-me-nots,
That grow for happy lovers *."

Well, I fear it is too true; perhaps it is all my fault. I wish we could often skip a little here and there, and go on to something pleasanter than our enterprise demands. Sweet companion, my taste is not so different from yours as you might fancy; but we must both have patience, and console ourselves by thinking

Tennyson.