listening to poor performers, who, after all, fill up most of the time at the theatre. Recitation, sufficiently varied so as to include pieces of chaste wit as well as of pathos, beauty, and sublimity, is adapted to our present intellectual progress, as much as the drama falls below it. Should this exhibition be introduced among us successfully, the result would be, that the power of recitation would be extensively called forth, and this would be added to our social and domestic pleasures. "I have spoken in this discourse of intellectual culture, as a defence against intemperance, by giving force and elevation to the mind. It also does great good as a source of amusement; and on this ground should be spread through the community. A cultivated mind may be said to have infinite stores of innocent gratification. Every thing may be made interesting to it, by becoming a subject of thought or inquiry. Books, regarded merely as a gratification, are worth more than all the luxuries on earth. A taste for literature secures cheerful occupation for the unemployed and languid hours of life; and how many persons, in these hours, for want of innocent resources, are now impelled to coarse and brutal pleaHow many young men can be found in this city, who, unaccustomed to find a companion in a book, and strangers to intellectual activity, are almost driven, in the long dull evenings in winter, to haunts of intemperance and depraving society. It is one of the good signs of the times, that lectures on literature and science are taking their places among other public amusements, and attract even more than theatres. This is one of the first fruits of our present intellectual culture. What a harvest may we hope for from its wider diffusion? "In these remarks I have insisted on the importance of increasing innocent gratifications in a community. Let us become a more cheerful, and we shall become a more temperate people."

sure.

The Life of Oliver Goldsmith, M. B. from a variety of original sources; by James Prior. Philadelphia. E. L. Carey and A. Hart, 1837.

THIS book is interesting, because it treats of Oliver Goldsmith, not because the author has shown any remarkable ability in the management of his subject, or made any important additions to what was previously known of him. Mr. Prior is evidently a man of great worth and much good sense, and deserves high commendation for the diligence with which he has collected his materials (for literary industry should never go unpraised;) but he is not an original thinker or a vigorous writer, and occasionally indulges himself in what an ill-natured critic would call twaddle, for which we know of no better definition than is contained in two lines of our friend Holmes's inimitable verses "To an Insect,"

"Thou sayest an undisputed thing

In such a solemn way."

He dwells too long upon trifles, and devotes many paragraphs to the settling of some controverted point not worth a button, after all. We seek in vain for that acuteness of observation, and vein of philosophical criticism which our times exact from literary biographers. Still, it is a book which will have a permanent value, as containing every fact, which the most devoted diligence could collect, in the life of Oliver Goldsmith,‚—a name, in English literature, which has hardly yet received its due honour. Little or nothing has been left to be gleaned by the industry of future collectors. The bills of his tailor and landlady, his receipts for money, his contracts with his booksellers, are all spread before us; and we learn from an investigation of Mr. Filby's books, the very day on which he wore, for the first time, the "bloom-coloured coat," immortalized by Boswell.

It is a book which cannot be read without sadness. It is the record of the life

of a man of fine genius, free from any taint of selfishness, of the warmest affec tions and most generous impulses; yet, from the want of a strong moral sense and manly energy of will, perpetually steeped in perplexities and embarrassments; and not only that, but thereby prevented from doing justice to his own powers, except in a most limited and imperfect degree. His life was spent in haggling with booksellers and scribbling for his daily bread; and he who in his golden moments could create the "Traveller" and the "Vicar of Wakefield," was, by his dissipated habits and want of thrift, doomed to devote his days and nights to the drudgery of a Grub-street garretteer. Mr. Prior has given us, with a painful degree of minuteness, the details of his anxious and uncertain life, alternating between the exhausting toil of mechanical composition and the unsatisfactory relaxations of the tavern and the club. When we consider the amount of his labours, and the depressing circumstances under which they were performed, we cannot but admire his industry, a quality for which he has hardly had his due share of credit; and no one can help lamenting that untoward circumstances and his own imprudences kept him ever so far from that pecuniary independence which is so essential to happiness and to the full development of genius.

We are disposed to agree fully with Mr. Prior in his estimate of Goldsmith's genius. He was an admirable writer in prose and verse; and for ease, grace, and simplicity has never been surpassed. His Vicar of Wakefield has never been equalled, and is a work of transcendant merit. Let it be remembered that he died at the age of forty-five, and that the greater part of his short life was consumed in scribbling for his daily bread. What a different reputation would his illustrious contemporary, Dr. Johnson, have had, had he died at forty-five, he, whose Lives of the Poets," (his best work,) were not written till he was over sixty, and not till after he had long basked in the beams of royal favour, in the shape of a comfortable pension, which exempted him from those ills, (to which his poor friend was always exposed,) which he has so vividly described in his pregnant line

"Toil, envy, want, the patron and the jail.”

For a Philadelphia book, this reprint is quite respectable in its appearance; but the errors of the press are inexcusably frequent, and can arise only from a pitiful meanness which refuses a just compensation to a competent proof-reader, or from an eager haste to get out the book before other rivals, which leaves no time for correction.

MONTHLY COMMENTARY.

PHILADELPHIA.-The Panic-the Pressure-or whatever we may choose to call the convulsion now shaking the whole body politic throughout the countryhas not been so dreadful in its effects in Philadelphia as in some of our less happy cities. The failures here have not yet exceeded twelve or fourteen in number, and our business men indulge a hope of weathering the storm without further loss.

SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT

OF THE

AMERICAN LYCEUM. MAY 5th, 1837.

THE American Lyceum, at their Sixth Annual Meeting, adopted a resolution to celebrate the seventh anniversary in the city of Philadelphia; and authorized their executive committee to appoint a committee of arrangements to carry that resolution into effect. Such steps have been taken, that the Society now assembles for the first time in this city, so distinguished for the number, ability, and zeal of the friends of knowledge whom it counts among its citizens, as well as for the institutions and associations which they have founded, cherished, and sustained.

When the proposition was made so to alter the Constitution of the American Lyceum as to permit the annual meetings to be held out of New-York, to which city the public operations of the Society had been confined during the five years of its existence, the members and officers were struck with the propriety of thus acquainting their intelligent countrymen in other places with their objects, plans, and operations; not doubting that they should obtain the efficient co-operation, as well as the hearty approbation, of those who might thus have an opportunity to become acquainted with them; and the executive committee look with peculiar interest and lively hope to the results of this the first experiment made by the Lyceum to solicit, in person, that general support which alone can bring its plan to the proper test.

The American Lyceum was formed in New-York in May, 1831, by delegates appointed by several state and local societies, and friends of education, at the invitation of the Lyceum of that state; and is designed to perform, on a large scale, for the country, what a local lyceum performs for the city, village, or neighbourhood in which it is established. That this may be the better apprehended by those not familiar with associations of the kind, or who may not understand the application of the term, Lyceum, which, indeed, is used in a broad sense, it may be proper to remark, that a local lyceum is a voluntary association for intellectual improvement. A voluntary association for mutual intellectual improvement is a definition which would describe more minutely a large proportion of the societies which bear the name; but there are some whose plans embrace a wide sphere of operation, and aim at the benefit of individuals or classes not comprised in their number. When we use the term lyceum, therefore, we may speak of a literary club of almost any description, a literary association, or a society for debate or lectures; and to these objects may be added literary contributors or corespondents, exertions for the popular diffusion of the arts or sciences, the improvement of taste by the embellishment of village scenery, rural architecture, or the promotion of education in schools. A great variety of plans and objects is rendered necessary by the variety of circumstances in different places and classes of persons; and it is very evident, that in our country every friend of popular improvement should be at liberty to select such means as may be most easily and cheaply applied with the best prospects of extensive and permanent benefit.

In our country we enjoy peculiar advantages for the diffusion of knowledge; and the indispensable importance of general instruction to our highest national interests, is admitted by so many of our best citizens, that nothing but good plans of operation seem wanting, in order to procure an extensive and powerful exer

tion in its favour, and the accomplishment of much of the good which is so ardently to be desired. Many enlightened and philanthropic men have submitted projects of improvement to their fellow-citizens of the states and the Union; and in some parts of the country, liberal appropriations have been made for the support of schools, academies, and colleges: but there appears to be a want of assistants of one class, which as yet exists only on a small and inadequate scale—a class of ardent, persevering, and gratuitous superintendents of education, in districts around them, where they can apply such time as they have at their disposal to the greatest advantage. Such labourers we see engaged in other philanthropic enterprizes with energy and success; and nothing, probably, is necessary to obtain an army of volunteers enlisted for the improvement of schools, and the promotion and support of lyceums, but the force of example and the repeated representation of their usefulness and feasibility.

In evidence of this, we may invite some of the members of this audience to reflect upon their own experience, and inquire of them, whether there was not a time when they entertained doubts of the possibility of effecting what they now perceive to be easily practicable, and whether they were not once too diffident to attempt what they are now engaged in accomplishing with gratifying success. The managers and members of the Pennsylvania Lyceum particularly, and other lyceums in this city, may be appealed to with confidence to give an affirmative answer to these questions. The audience are referred to the reports of those societies for some of the details of their operations; and other concurrent evidence of a similar nature will be presented, in the form of reports, of more distant associations. It is to be feared, however, that many such reports, which we had reason to expect would be laid before the present meeting, may not be transmitted, or may not arrive in time. The peculiar state of the country may partly account for the silence of some of our auxiliaries; but it is to be hoped that some of their reports may be received in season to be published by the executive committee.

It has ever been a source of satisfaction to know, even when the smallest number of lyceums responded to our calls for information, and when the reports from individuals engaged in the promotion of intellectual improvements were the most few and limited, that much had actually been done and was still doing. It is to be feared that it will be long before all, or even the greater part, of those intellectual enterprizes which are going on in our country will be regularly and fully reported at the annual meetings of the Society. This, indeed, the Lyceum desires to accomplish; this was from the first proposed as one of the objects in the constitution; and this it is certainly very proper to keep continually in view; but we cannot expect to see it entirely compassed until a material improvement shall have taken place in the views of our countrymen. Such an end, however, is doubtless highly desirable; and towards its attainment our society has done something, and labours to do much more.

It is to be borne in mind that great and serious obstacles oppose the attainment of some of the objects of the American Lyceum; and we may pause a moment to notice the difficulties which we have had to encounter in our endeavours to establish that extensive system of co-operation at our annual meetings which is contemplated by the constitution. We should naturally desire to see present on these anniversaries the most interested, intelligent, and active members of local lyceums, the directors of literary institutions, the editors of our publications on education, and those statesmen who have most influence in devising or executing laws for its promotion. But these individuals are generally found to have appropriated all their spare time, and often all the means they are able to spare, to commence or to carry on some enterprize in their own towns, counties, or states. From correspondence and personal acquaintance, we know

that such is in many instances the fact. While, therefore, we have annually to lament the absence of many of those best qualified to instruct us by their experience, animate us by their zeal, and aid us by their counsels; we still find at these regular meetings of our Society, much to console us in the reflection, that although absent, they are labouring with us in those departments so necessary, so indispensable; and laying the foundations of a solid, extensive, and permanent interest in the mind and its great interests.

Another fact is to be taken in the account. Notwithstanding the great advantages which usually flow from associations for intellectual improvement, it is commonly a serious task to form them. When formed, they are in some instances easily restrained. Generally the principal difficulty lies at the outset, and this prevents the founding of many lyceums in places where the want of them is acknowledged, and by persons who might be looked to as their patrons. Similar difficulties stand in the way of every successive step in this system of combination and co-operation. Even after lyceums have been formed and conducted with success in a district or county, it requires active and persevering labour on the part of some one or more individuals to effect an occasional union of powers, or even to secure for a length of time a correspondence. It might be presumed, that persons who had become personally acquainted with the advantages of co-operation, would be prepared to extend their sphere, and eagerly grasp at those still in prospect.

But this, unfortunately, is not very often the fact; and we have not found that promptitude which could be desired, among local lyceums, to unite and form county lyceums; or among the latter, to form state lyceums; or among those of all classes, to send their delegates and reports to other annual meetings of the American Lyceum. Nor have they been very ready to forward approved essays, the fruits of their labours, for extensive and gratuitous publication, which is one of the projects formerly presented; or to send collections of minerals, plants, &c., to exchange for mutual benefit; or to co-operate with all desirable zeal and constancy for the further extension of those benefits which they have secured within their own particular spheres.

It can hardly be doubted, however, that whenever the general society shall send out well qualified agents to visit different parts of the country, explain our objects, and make known the ways in which local lyceums can enter into cooperation with us, these difficulties will begin to give way. The presence of such an agent would doubtless redouble the zeal, awaken the hopes, and facilitate as well as direct the exertions of our friends in all places which he should visit. He would bear to them the living evidence, to every co-operator in such a cause so gratifying, that the number of their fellow-labourers for the intellectual and moral improvement of their country is far greater than they had known it to be; that the objects they have undertaken to promote are approved by others; that many, in different parts of our land, have put their most open and decided seal of approbation on such designs and labours, such disinterestedness and perseverance, by devoting themselves to similar enterprizes. At the same time they would derive from the agents the instructive result of experience, and be taught how to apply their powers and resources in new forms, and with new hopes.

There is every reason to believe that such an agent, proceeding from this society, would receive a hearty welcome in every part of the country. Experiments gratuitously made, though on a limited scale and in an imperfect manner, by some of the members of the executive committee at different periods, have shown that much might be expected from a regular and systematic plan of operations. However slow many, even of the most energetic and successful promoters of local lyceums may be to appreciate the advantages or probable