corpse of her husband, upward to his and her Redeemer, the God of the living and not of the dead-and then the remorseless Brahmin goading on the disconsolate victim to the flames of her husband's funeral pile, abandoned by, and abandoning, the helpless pledges of their loveand who yet dare ask, "which is the more humane and philosophic creed of the two?" No! no! when such opinions are in question, I neither am, nor will be, nor wish to be regarded as, tolerant.

CHARLES LAMB.

CHARLES LAMB, one of the minor poets of what was called the Lake School, owes his increasing popularity to the quaintness and delicacy of his style in the inimitable Essays of Elia. He was born A.D. 1775, and died in 1834.

IMPERFECT SYMPATHIES.

I HAVE been trying all my life to like Scotchmen, and am obliged to desist from the experiment in despair. They cannot like me, and in truth, I never knew one of that nation who attempted to do so. There is an order of imperfect intellects, under which mine must be content to rank, which in its constitution is essentially antiCaledonian. The brain of a true Caledonian is

quite different. His Minerva is born in panoply. You are never permitted to see his ideas in their growth-if, indeed, they do grow, and are not rather put together upon principles of clock-work. You never catch his mind in undress. He never hints or suggests anything, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completeness. He brings his total wealth into company and gravely unpacks it.

He never stoops to catch a glittering something in your presence, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not. You cannot cry "halves" to anything that he finds; for he does not find, but bring. You

never witness his first apprehension of a thing. His understanding is always at its meridian; you never see the first dawn, the early streaks. He has no falterings of self-suspicion; surmises, guesses, misgivings, halfintuitions, semi-consciousnesses, dim instincts, embryo conceptions have no place in his brain or his vocabulary. The twilight of dubiety never falls on him. If he is orthodox, he has no doubts; if he is an infidel, he has none either. Between the affirmative and the negative there is no border-land with him. You cannot hover with him on the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of a probable argument. He always keeps the path.

His taste never fluctuates; his morality never abates; he cannot compromise, or, indeed, understand, middle actions there can be but a right and a wrong. His conversation is as a book; his affirmations have the sanctity of an oath. You must speak upon the square with him. He stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy's country. "A healthy book," said one of his countrymen to me, who had ventured to give that appellation to John Buncle, "Did you say healthy? I have heard of a man being in health and of a healthy state of body, but I do not see how that epithet can be applied to a book."

Persons of this nation are particularly fond of affirming a truth-which nobody doubts. They do indeed appear to have such a love of truth, that all truth becomes equally valuable, whether the proposition that contains it be new or old, disputed, or such as cannot become subject of disputation. I was present, not long since, at a party of North Britons, where a son of Burns was expected, and I happened to drop a silly expression in my SouthBritish way, that I wished it were the father instead of the son, when four of them started up at once to inform me that that was impossible, because he was dead. An impracticable wish, it seems, was more than they could conceive.

I have in the abstract no disrespect for Jews. They are a piece of stubborn antiquity, compared with which

Stonehenge is in its nonage. They date beyond the pyramids. But I should not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with them. I confess I have not the nerves to enter their synagogues. Centuries of injury, contempt, and hate on one side, of cloaked revenge, dissimulation, and hate on the other, between our and their fathers, must and ought to affect the blood of the children. I cannot believe it can run clear and kindly yet; or that a few fine words, such as candour, liberality, the light of the nineteenth century, can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion.

A Hebrew is nowhere congenial to me, but is least distasteful on 'Change, for the mercantile spirit levels all distinctions, as all are beauties in the dark. I boldly confess I do not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian, which has become so fashionable. I do not like to see the church and the synagogue kissing and congeing in awkward postures of affected civility. If they are converted, why do they not come over to us altogether? Why keep up a form of separation when the life is fled? I do not understand these convertiles; Jews Christianizing, Christians Judaizing, puzzle me. I like fish or flesh. A moderate Jew is a more confounding piece of anomaly than a wet Quaker.

In the negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness toward some of these faces-or rather masks-that have looked kindly upon one in casual encounters in the streets and highways. I love what Fuller calls these "images of God cut in ebony." But I should not like to share my meals and my good-nights with them, because they are black.

I love Quaker ways and Quaker worship. I venerate the Quaker principles. It does me good for the rest of the day when I meet any of these people in my path. When I am ruffled or disturbed by any occurrence, the sight or the quiet voice of a Quaker acts upon me as a ventilator, lightening the air, and taking a load off my bosom. But I cannot like the Quakers, as Desdemona

would say, "to live with them." I must have books, pictures, theatres, chit-chat, scandal, jokes, and a thousand whim-whams, which their simpler taste can do without. I should starve at their primitive banquet. My appetites are too high for the salads which (according to Evelyn) Eve dressed for the angel; my gusto is too excited, “to sit a guest with Daniel at his pulse."

THOMAS ARNOLD

THOMAS ARNOLD (born A.D. 1795, died 1842), Master of Rugby, and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford, is the author of a History of Rome to the end of the Second Punic War, Lectures on Modern History, and several volumes of sermons, etc.

CLASSICAL EDUCATION,

A READER unacquainted with the real nature of a classical education will be in danger of undervaluing it, when he sees that so large a portion of time, at so important a period of life, is devoted to the study of a few ancient writers, whose works seem to have no direct bearing on the studies and duties of our own generation. For instance, although some provision undoubtedly is made at Rugby for acquiring a knowledge of modern history, yet the history of Greece and Rome is more studied than that of France and England; and Homer and Virgil are much more attended to than Shakspeare and Milton. This appears to many persons a great absurdity; while others, who are so far swayed by authority as to believe the system to be right, are yet unable to understand how it can be so.

It may be freely confessed that the first origin of classical education affords in itself no reasons for its being continued now. When Latin and Greek were almost the only written languages of civilized man, it is manifest they must have furnished the subjects of all liberal education. The question, therefore, is changed since the growth

of a complete literature in other languages; since France, Italy, Germany, England, etc., have each produced their philosophers, their poets, and their historians, worthy to be placed on the same level with those of Greece and Rome.

But although there is not the same reason now which existed three or four centuries ago for the study of Greek and Roman literature, yet there is another no less substantial. Expel Greek and Latin from your schools, and you confine the views of the existing generation to themselves and their immediate predecessors; you will cut off so many centuries of the world's experience, and place us as if the human race had come into existence in the year 1500. For it is nothing to say that a few learned individuals might still study classical literature; the effect produced on the public mind would be no greater than that which has resulted from the labours of our Oriental scholars; it would not spread beyond themselves, and men in general, after a few generations, would know as little of Greece and Rome as they do of China and Hindostan.

But such an ignorance would be incalculably more to be regretted. With the Asiatic mind we have no nearer connection and sympathy than is derived from our common humanity. But the mind of the Greek and of the Roman is in all the essential points of its constitution our own; and not only so, but it is our mind developed to an extraordinary degree of perfection. Wide as is the difference between us with respect to those physical instruments which minister to our uses or our pleasures; although the Greeks and Romans had no steam engines, no printing presses, no mariner's compass, no telescopes, no microscopes, no gunpowder, yet in our moral and political views, in those matters which most determine human character, there is a perfect resemblance in these respects. Aristotle, Plato, and Thucydides, Cicero, and Tacitus are most untruly called ancient writers; they are virtually our own countrymen and contemporaries, but have the advantage which is enjoyed by intelligent travellers, that their observation has been exercised in a