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N° XXII.

On Books.

ARE books, in truth, a dead letter? To those who have no bright mirror in their own bosoms to reflect their images, they are! but the lively and active scenes, which they call forth in well-framed minds, exceed the liveliness of reality. Heads and hearts of a coarser grain require the substance of material objects to put them in motion.

Books instruct us calmly, and without intermingling with their instruction any of those painful impressions of superiority, which we must necessarily feel from a living instructor. They wait the pace of each man's capacity; stay for his want of perception, without reproach; go backward and forward with him at his wish; and furnish inexhaustible repetitions.

How is it possible to express what we owe, as intellectual beings, to the art of printing? When a man sits in a well furnished library, surrounded by the collected wisdom of thousands of the best endowed minds, of various ages and countries,

what an amazing extent of mental range does he command!

Every age, and every language, has some advantages, some excellencies peculiar to itself. I am not sure, that skill in a variety of tongues is always wisdom; but an acquaintance with various forms of expression, and the operations and results of minds at various times, and under various circumstances of climate manners and government, must neces sarily enrich and strengthen our opinions.

A person, who is only conversant with the literature of his own country, and that during only the last ten or twenty years, contracts so narrow a taste, that every other form of phrase, or mode of composition, every other fashion of sentiment, or intellectual process, appears to him repulsive, dull and worthless. He reads Spenser, and Milton, if he reads them at all, only as a task; and he turns with disgust from the eloquence of Sydney, Hooker, and Jeremy Taylor. The black-letter, and coarse. and dingy paper, are forbidding; and he flies from the amusing detail, and interesting naivetè of Lord Berners, and the copious particulars of Holinshead, to the vapid translations of Voltaire, and the more light and airy pages of Hume.

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The weakly appetites of these literary flies excite contempt. The sterling sense of our ances

tors is reviving; Elizabethan libraries are forming; old books are rescued from the stalls, and the pastry-cooks, to be preserved for the inspection of a liberal curiosity; and the booksellers have with praise-worthy enterprize begun to reprint Holinshead, and others of our ancient historians. Mr. Walter Scott, by a singularly happy talent of extracting lively and entertaining matter even from the dullest volumes, has materially contributed to this growing fashion.

They, whose reading has been confined to the productions of their own day, consider the language of Lord Clarendon, with his "periods of a mile," to eclipse the excellence of his matter; they cannot seek information through so disagreeable and tedious a medium. To those whose acquaintance with books is more extensive, his style is as familiar as that of Robertson, Gibbon, or even Hume; and of infinitely more interest and eloquence, than any of those historians ever reached.

y Among the first of these is Mr. Heber of Hodnet in Shropshire, and Marton Hall in Yorkshire, a man of ancient family and large fortune, whose spirit and industry in collecting deserves national praise; and whose truly brilliant talents and incredible extent of knowledge, which enable him to penetrate and devour the books which he collects, must necessarily extort the unbounded admiration of every one who has the opportunity of conversing with him.

Perhaps the best prose writer in the English tongue lived in the reigns of Charles I. and Charles II. This was Cowley, the poet. And I am inclined to place another poet next to him; the immortal Dryden! I would give the third place to Addison; and the fourth to Burke; whose similarity, in some points, to Dryden, has been well remarked by Malone. z

Were it not for the opposition of lights drawn from different ages, the human mind would yield itself to temporary errors of the most alarming nature. Absurdities would be repeated through folly or interest, till, if nothing stood upon record to detect them, they would be believed; and the deviation from sound taste and sound sense, not only in language but opinion, would be infinite.

Above all, there is this value in books, that they enable us to converse with the dead. There is something in this beyond the mere intrinsic worth of what they have left us. When a person's body is mouldering, cold and insensible, in the grave, we feel a sacred sentiment of veneration for the living memorials of his mind.

z Scotland must forgive me for agreeing with Cowper, and Sir William Jones, about Robertson. The prose of Burns is often excellent.

Jan. 22, 1808.

No XXIII.

On Mrs. Carter's Letters.

THE collections of letters of eminent literary characters, which have been given to the public within the last ten years, have added materially to the stock of innocent and instructive amusement. An accession to this stock has just been announced, by a notice of the publicationa of Select Parts of the Correspondence of Mrs. Elizabeth Carter. The world, if I mistake not, will be as much delighted by her eloquence and beauty of language, as by her strength of mind and fervour of piety; while those who admire a more playful manner, joined to an equal warmth of religion and purity of conduct, will perhaps be still more pleased with those of her correspondent, Mrs. Katherine Talbot, which will appear with them. In the latter years of Mrs. Carter's life, the colour of her pen became still more uniformly serious, as is proved by her letters to Mrs. Vesey. I could not refrain from soliciting the permission, which a spare hour would allow me to embrace, of making the following extracts from the MSS. in the hands of my dear friend the

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They have since been published; and I will maintain that they fully justify this character.

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