No XXV.

VOL. V.

VITHOUT a strong spirit of nationaly no people could build up any thing ke a national literature. Every relecting mind, therefore, must be disposed not to pardon only, but to approve all manifestations of it that betoken a sense of dignity, and challenge an appeal to reason and to truth. The pride of intellect, so offensive in an individual, it is delightful to see exhibited by a whole people-and that People does well to think loftily of itself which has good works to shew,nor need Nations fear to proclaim their faith in their own exaltation. If there be certain virtues and faculties which have been, in a more especial manner, brought into action through the course of their history, they are entitled to appropriate them as national characteristics, nor would that people be worthy of their own ancestral glories, who did not boldly avow their pride in the moral or intellectual powers by which those glories were won, and without the continued possession of which they could serve only to darken the melancholy gloom of present degradation.

We are disposed to think that, upon the whole, the national pride of Scotsmen is manly and enlightened. Within the last hundred years Scotland has produced more men of genius than during all her previous history and she who was so long the barbarian sister of civilized England has shewn herself but little inferior to her friendly rival either in stateliness or beauty. But we are greatly mistaken, if along with a proper pride in the achieve ments of our own genius, Scotsmen

do not too generally entertain an unreasonable impatience of the ascendancy of the genius of England, and, since we must say so, a very unjust and illiberal determination to undervalue certain excellencies to which they themselves have never yet been able to attain.

There is little or no erudition in Scotland, and yet instead of acknowledging and deploring our ignorance, and setting ourselves strenuously to the reformation of our exceedingly defective system of public education, we turn about on our English neighbours with an air of most ludicrous and provoking self-assurance, and laugh at them for possessing that knowledge of which we are so disgracefully destitute. With us the epithet of Scholar is an epithet of contempt-and men of the very shallowest pretensionswith but small acuteness and no reading-are daily heard talking with levity and scorn of the best scholars of England. In this way, we have reached to an undisturbed contentment with our ignorance and having discovered that book-learning is suitable to pedants only, we have become, by the mere force of theorizing, a nation of philosophers.

The effects of all this are most lamentable. While every little townevery village in England contains its accomplished scholars, Scotland is contented with her men of common sense, who take the liberty of thinking for themselves. A coarseness-a hardness-and a nakedness of mind universally prevails. Men of rich and various lore are nowhere to be found