The firmest works of man, too, are gradually giving way, the ivy clings to the mouldering tower, the brier hangs out from the shattered window, and the wallflower springs from the disjointed stones. The founders of these perishable works have shared the same fate long ago. If we look back to the days of our ancestors, to the men as well as to the dwellings of former times, they become immediately associated in our imaginations, and only make the feeling of instability stronger and deeper than before. In the spacious domes, which once held our fathers, the serpent hisses, and the wild bird screams. The halls, which once were crowded with all that taste, and science, and labour could procure, which resounded with melody, and were lighted up with beauty, are buried by their own ruins, mocked by their own desolation. The voice of merriment, and of wailing, the steps of the busy and the idle have ceased in the deserted courts, and the weeds choke the entrances, and the long grass waves upon the hearth-stone. The works of art, the forming hand, the tombs, the very ashes they contained, are all gone.

While we thus walk among the ruins of the past, a sad feeling of insecurity comes over us; and that feeling is by no means diminished when we arrive at home. If we turn to our friends, we can hardly speak to them before they bid us farewell. We see them for a few moments, and in a few moments more their countenances are changed, and they are sent away. It matters not how near and dear they are. The ties which bind us together are never too close to be parted, or too strong to be broken. Tears were never known to move the king of terrours, neither is it enough that we are compelled to surrender one, or two, or many of those we love; for though the price is so great, we buy no favour with it, and our hold on those who remain is as

slight as ever. The shadows all elude our grasp, and follow one another down the valley. We gain no confidence, then, no feeling of security, by turning to our contemporaries and kindred. We know that the forms, which are breathing around us, are as shortlived and

fleeting as those were, which have been dust for centuries. The sensation of vanity, uncertainty, and ruin, is equally strong, whether we muse on what has long been prostrate, or gaze on what is falling now, or will fall so soon.

If every thing which comes under our notice has endured for so short a time, and in so short a time will be no more, we cannot say that we receive the least assurance by thinking on ourselves. When they, on whose fate we have been meditating, were engaged in the active scenes of life, as full of health and hope as we are now, what were we ? We had no knowledge, no consciousness, no being; there was not a single thing in the wide universe which knew us. And after the same interval shall have elapsed, which now divides their days from ours, what shall we be? What they are now. When a few more friends have left, a few more hopes deceived, and a few more changes mocked us, we shall be brought to the grave, and shall remain in the tomb the clods of the valley shall be sweet unto us, and every man shall follow us, as there are innumerable before us." All power will have forsaken the strongest, and the loftiest will be laid low, and every eye will be closed, and every voice hushed, and every heart will have ceased its beating. And when we have gone ourselves, even our memories will not stay behind us long. A few of the near and dear will bear our likeness in their bosoms, till they too have arrived at the end of their journey, and entered the dark dwelling of unconsciousness, In the thoughts of others we shall live only till the last sound of the bell, which informs them of our departure, has ceased to vibrate in their cars. A stone, perhaps, may tell some wanderer where we lie, when we came here, and when we went away; but even that will soon refuse to bear us record: "time's effacing fingers" will be busy on its surface, and at length will wear it smooth; and then the stone itself will sink, or crumble, and the wanderer of another age will pass, without a single call upon his sympathy, over our unheeded graves,- Greenwood

EXERCISE 4 Argumentative writing.

DEFENCE OF LITERARY STUDIES IN MEN OF BUSINESS.

Among the cautions which prudence and worldly wisdom inculcate on the young, or at least among those sober truths which experience often pretends to have acquired, is that danger which is said to result from the pursuit of letters and of science, in men destined for the labours of business, for the active exertions of professional life. The abstraction of learning, the speculations of science, and the visionary excursions of fancy, are fatal, it is said, to the steady pursuit of common objects, to the habits of plodding industry, which ordinary business demands. The fineness of mind which is created or increased by the study of letters, or the admiration of the arts, is supposed to incapacitate a man for the drudgery by which professional eminence is gained; as a nicely tempered edge applied to a coarse and rugged material is unable to perform what a more common instrument would have successfully achieved. Ayoung man destined for law or commerce is advised to look only into his folio of precedents, or his method of book-keeping; and dulness is pointed to his homage, as that benevolent goddess, under whose protection the honours of station and the blessings of opulence are to be attained; while learning and genius are proscribed, as leading their votaries to barren indigence and merited neglect.

In doubting the truth of these assertions, I think I shall not entertain any hurtful degree of scepticism, because the general current of opinion seems of late years to have set too strongly in the contrary direction; and one may endeavour to prop the falling cause of literature, without being accused of blameable or dangerous partiality.

In the examples which memory and experience produce of idleness, of dissipation, and of poverty, brought on by indulgence of literary or poetical enthusiasm,the evidence must necessarily be on one side of the question only. Of the few whom learning or genius has led astray, the ill success or the ruin is marked by the celebrity of the sufferer. Of the many who have been as dull as they

were profligate, and as ignorant as they were poor, the fate is unknown, from the insignificance of those by whom it was endured. If we may reason a priori on the matter, the chance, I think, should be on the side of literature.

In young minds of any vivacity, there is a natural aversion to the drudgery of business, which is seldom overcome, till the effervescence of youth is allayed by the progress of time and habit, or till that very warmth is enlisted on the side of their profession, by the opening prospects of ambition or emolument. From this tyranny, as youth conceives it, of attention and of labour, relief is commonly sought from some favorite avocation or amusement, for which a young man either finds or steals a portion of his time, either patiently plods through his task, in expectation of its approach, or anticipates its arrival by deserting his work before the legal period for amusement is arrived. It may fairly be questioned, whether the most innocent of those amusements,is either so honourable or so safe as the avocation of learning or of science. Of minds uninformed and gross,whom youthful spirits agitate, but fancy and feeling have no power to impel, the amusements will generally be either boisterous or effeminate, will either dissipate their attention or weaken their force. The employment of a young man's vacant hours is often too little attended to by those rigid masters who exact the most scrupulous observance of the periods destined for business. The waste of time is undoubtedly a very calculable loss; but the waste or the depravation of mind is a loss of a much higher denomination. The votary of study, or the enthusiast of fancy, may incur the first; but the latter will be suffered chiefly by him whom ignorance or want of imagination has left to the grossness of mere sensual enjoyments.

In this, as in other respects,the love of letters is friendly to sober manners and virtuous conduct, which in every profession is the road to success and to respect. Without adopting the common-place reflections against some particular departments, it must be allowed, that in mere men of business there is a certain professional rule of

right, which is not always honourable, and though meant to be selfish, very seldom profits. A superior education generally corrects this, by opening the mind to different motives of action, to the feelings of delicacy, the sense of honour, and a contempt of wealth, when earned by a desertion of those principles.

To the improvement of our faculties as well as of our principles, the love of letters appears to be favourable, Letters require a certain sort of application, though of a kind perhaps very different from that which business would recommend. Granting that they are unprofitable in themselves, as that word is used in the language of the yorld, yet, as developing the powers of thought and reflection, they may be an amusement of some use, as those sports of children in which numbers are used to familiarise them to the elements of arithmetick. They give room for the exercise of that discernment, that comparison of objects, that distinction of causes, which is to increase the skill of the physician,to guide the speculations of the merchant, and to prompt the arguments of the lawyer; and though some professions employ but very few faculties of the mind, yet there is scarce any branch of business in which a man who can think will not excel him who can only labour. We shall accordingly find, in many departments where learned information seemed of all qualities the least necessary, that those who possessed it in a degree above their fellows, have found, from that very circumstance, the road to eminence and wealth.

But I must often repeat, that wealth does not necessarily create happiness, nor confer dignity; a truth which it may be thought declamation to insist on, but which the present time seems particularly to require being told.

The love of letters is connected with an independence and delicacy of mind, which is a great preservative against that servile homage which abject men pay to for tune; and there is a certain classical pride, which from the society of Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Atticus, looks down with an honest disdain on the wealth-blown insects of modern times, neither enlightened by knowl edge nor ennobled by virtue,