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Main Elements of a Scholar's Life.

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with ideas that the old heathen never dreamed of. Nay, more: every dwelling house, with its comfortable and modest adjustments, every rail-road, every commonest and most practical arrangement of social life, bespeak the presence and activity of spiritual principles, such as the ancients never knew. What then are the anticipations, sentiments, speculations, faith, all that goes to make up the intellectual life of the modern? Are they not modified by the religious element of the times? And can literature, which is one expression of these sentiments, be truly interpreted, can there be a profound and philosophical criticism, without a mind in harmony with this all-pervading, plastic power? Even more certain, without such a mind, will be the impossibility of forming a just estimate of the great historical periods, or of seeing anything but a loose and purposeless flux and reflux in the strange currents of human affairs. The progress of the race will become an impracticable, but not harmless dream, or be resolved into a fixed cycle, where the magnus saeculorum ordo shall bring round again, after a while, the same series of madness, and follies, and crimes. The mind which rests its hope, not in a fluctuating present, nor in a visionary future, but in the expressed purpose of Providence, will alone have security against disappointment. We cannot fully understand the parts without knowing something of the whole. Had the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, to his gigantic learning but added a devout spirit, what an insight would it not have given him into the philosophy of his grand and melancholy theme! How it would have checked his sneering scepticism and rendered his work a more sublime monument to his genius, as well as more wholesome and safe. Had the moral tone of the historian of England but equalled the intellectual acuteness, how much broader, fairer, and profounder would have been both the investigations and the conclusions of his work; how much stronger his sympathy with moral and religious heroism, of which there were within his scope examples so abundant; how much more genial and earnest his care for human welfare; how much nobler his sentiments! With all the acuteness of that subtle genius, there was wanting the moral sympathies absolutely essential for estimating fairly a nation like the English, as truly as for judging wisely of the progress and the hopes of humanity.

We have thus endeavored to detail some of the elements of a scholar's life, mainly as springing from his most prominent relations,-his relations to truth, to his fellow men, to his country, and to God, in order to fix a little more definitely than may be usual, the spirit which we should bring to study, or, as scholars, carry into the business of life; the spirit with which every professional man, and every lover of learn

ing should pursue his course, in order to leave the best impress upon his age, since it cannot but be of consequence to any people to secure a right aim and temper to its learned men. For the proper training of educated men, we must look mainly to our colleges and universities. We cannot create a literature by a wish or a word, or by long discourses. This is not the place to discuss the importance or the responsibilities of our highest institutions of education, yet from them have descended the strongest and best influences upon learning, and it is no mean element in our prosperity that they be liberally sustained and wisely guided. So far as these elements of a scholar's life are violated, or become depressed and despised and neglected, will his prevailing tendencies bear evidence of it. The best days of literature have been those in which were cherished sentiments most elevated, pure, patriotic, religious, and in proportion as these have failed, intellectual strength has fallen too. Sentiments which one age would have been ashamed to utter, have become the common possession of the next, but the loss of virtue has ever been the loss of life and energy.

Unfortunate for our institutions, and the best interests of sound learning will be the day when educated men neglect the high aims which, in all circumstances, even in those most adverse to letters, they are bound faithfully to cherish, or at least to remember and revere; the spirit of one familiar with great thoughts, refined, elevated, gentle, earnest, devout; the spirit which attended on Dante as he wandered, an exile, from the door of one reluctant patron to another; which went with Spenser to wild, distracted Ireland; and solaced Raleigh in prison. No learning, no skill, no measure of talent can afford the least substitute for this. There is nothing truly great in letters to be hoped for without it. Nay, without it, we almost shrink from learning itself, as from the earthy touch of Caliban, or the deadly evil of Iago.

Indeed it is no mean, no common thing to be a scholar. He may receive little public favor, the outward incidents of his life may be the briefest and least note-worthy, yet he may have fixed the laws of the world's thought for ages. Because of him, empires may flourish or go to premature decay, and, century after city and tower have sunk to their primitive dust, his name may hallow the very ground on which they stood. The ruined Parthenon has a beauty quite distinct from its exquisite symmetry, when we call to mind Aeschylus and Sophocles; we walk along the sands of the Troad with a fresher step when we know that once Homer passed along there. We stand upon the pyramid with a more thoughtful and solemn spirit, when we remember that perhaps the foot of Plato once pressed the same summit, and his eye looked off to Memphis and old Thebes.

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Great Scholars speak to all Times.

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A scholar's life is inward and spiritual, but not therefore ineffective. It is invisible, and its power may not be at once detected. Thoughts and feelings, sufferings and enjoyments, these records of the mind and heart, we are not anxious to protrude to the common gaze. They are the sacred treasure of the man, and when messengers from foreign kings come to him he is not, like the Hebrew monarch, so vain as to carry them through the secret chambers of his glory and power. How little do we know of the inner life of him who, when he was a young man, went from his native Stratford, lived carelessly with his fellowplayers, wrote his thirty-seven dramas, then went quietly back again to the banks of the beautiful Avon, and spent serenely the remainder of his days; or of that other bard sublime who, blind and deserted, solaced the sad evening of his hopes with visions of immortality. In the common affairs which men call great, they had little share, and those faculties by which they wrought their work upon earth, were as much a mystery to themselves as to others; but in what civilized land, in whatever so remote age, will their power be unacknowledged? Great scholars speak to all time. What is earthly in them goes down to the common grave of mortality; their better part lives forever. Plato, in the Critias, still argues of obedience to the law; in the Phaedo, of immortality. Cicero discourses on old age, on friendship, on oratory. Kepler and Newton will hold their schools down to the end of time; Bacon, always propound his aphorisms; Butler, to the latest age, discourse on the Analogy. Fit audience shall they all find, speaking ever to the choicest minds. Those kings and priests of learning, we may follow, afar off indeed, but with true loyalty and faith. The aims of every true-hearted scholar of even the humblest pretensions, are the same with theirs. To be of large mind, of broad sympathies, to comprehend, if possible, art, science, practice, life itself; to bring a unity into the various branches of knowledge, to raise the public tastes, direct the public thought, conserve the public welfare,-these are the purposes, this the spirit of both.

In a country like ours, whose activities are so various and so intense, where public virtue is so universal that you cannot find a man afraid or unwilling to assume any responsibility, ne quid detrimenti respublica caperet, it is the more important as it may be more difficult, to see to it that learning loses none of its honor, and in order that it should not, that scholars should cultivate the best spirit, should never forget that their mission is to be sacredly joined to every other. Learning has been often opposed and its institutions suffered to languish in want, or actually to die from inanition, on account of low prejudices against knowledge, or a blind fear that it would oppose some vulgar VOL. VI. No. 21.

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interest. These prejudices and fears may be, in part at least, allayed, if the life and temper of learned men be as they should be. A serious, solid, intellectual training is necessary to form a man. From the sacred fountains of wisdom shall exhale blessings to descend upon every occupation of life when least regarded, fructifying as the genial dews from heaven. What can be more beautiful, more ennobling, than thus to study with patience, with modesty, reverence, striving, with highest purpose, to realize the fable of Isis and Osiris, which Milton puts into language which no one should be foolhardy enough to mar by alteration, "to bring together every joint and member of truth, and mould them into an immortal figure of loveliness and perfection," bringing the fruits of his toil and laying them, with a filial spirit, at the feet of that Alma Mater, his country, which has produced and cherished him, and above all mindful of his highest relations, taking for his motto that on the seal of our oldest university, Christo et ecclesiae, and ever remembering, in the noble language of the poet we have just referred to, that "THE END OF LEARNING IS TO REPAIR THE RUINS OF OUR FIRST PARENTS, BY REGAINING TO KNOW GOD ARIGHT, AND out of THAT KNOWLEDGE TO LOVE HIM, TO IMITATE HIM, TO BE LIKE HIM, AS WE MAY THE NEAREST BY POSSESSING OUR SOULS OF TRUE VIRTUE, WHICH, BEING UNITED TO THE HEAVENLY GRACE OF FAITH, MAKES UP THE HIGHEST PERFECTION."

ARTICLE VII.

ENGLISH PURITANISM IN THE TIMES OF THE COMMONWEALTH.

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An Abstract of " Anglia Rediviva, or England's Recovery, by Joshua Sprigge, pp. 335. London, 1647."

Prepared by Edward D. Neill, Home Missionary in North Western Illinois.

THE life of Cromwell, and the history of England during the interval between the reigns of Charles the father and Charles the son, are two books yet to be written. The literary world, tired of the numberless tirades that have appeared from the defenders of the Puritan as well as of the Cavalier, is longing for some Niebuhr to arise and sift out the truth from the chaff of falsehood, and give to them a sober, truthful, readable history of that remarkable period.

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Value of Puritan Literature.

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Thomas Carlyle has done a great work for the future historian, in collecting and editing the speeches of the "Great Puritan ;" but he is such a passionate admirer of the man that, at times, his comments degenerate into pure rodomantade, reminding one of the almost semideification that John Wesley sometimes receives from our Methodist Itinerants in the valley of the Upper Mississippi. There is some truth in a remark made by a reviewer of Carlyle's work, in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine for April, 1847: "It is worthy of note that however Mr. Carlyle extols his heroic ones' in a body, Cromwell is the only individual that finds a good word, throughout the work."

A perusal of the work whose title we have placed at the head of this Article, imparts a truthfulness and reality to those times, which we never experienced while turning over the pages of Guizot or Carlyle.

It is doubly valuable to those who glory in being descended from the English Puritans, from the fact that it was written by a nonconformist minister and published in London, before the elder Charles lost his head, and before the breach between the Presbyterian and Independent party was widened. The author, Joshua Sprigge, was chaplain in the new model army, at the same time as valiant Hugh Peters of New England memory, and pious Richard Baxter. Sprigge acted as chaplain to Sir Thomas Fairfax; Peters, to the train that was commanded by Lieut. Gen. Hammond; and Baxter, to the regiment of Col. Whalley. The book is divided into four parts, and gives a minute and circumstantial account of the daily operations of the Parliament army from April, 1645, to December, 1646. The account of Naseby Battle, in the "Historical Collections" of Rushworth, is abridged from "Anglia Rediviva," as we learn from Carlyle, whose opinion of the book is in these words: "a rather ornate work; gives florid but authentic and sufficient account of this new model army, in all its features and operations, by which England' had come alive again.' A little sparing in dates, but correct where they are given. None of the old books is better worth reprinting."

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These old Puritan books can never cease to be sacred to the descendants of Adams, Henry, and Jefferson, for to their pages they of ten turned while struggling for the independence of this land. When the news of the Boston Port-Bill arrived at Williamsburgh, at that time the capital of the Virginia colony, a resolution was introduced and adopted by the House of Burgesses, then in session, fixing the 1st of June as a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer. Thomas Jefferson remarks: "No example of such a solemnity had existed since the days of our distresses in the war of '55, since which a new gene