ground where few of the company have anything to say-the commerce of thought languishes; and the consciousness that it is languishing about a narrow cirole, "unde pedem proferre pudor vetat," operates for the general refrigeration of the company. Now, the ancient Greeks had an officer appointed over every convivial meeting, whose functions applied to all cases of doubt or interruption that could threaten the genial harmony of the company. We also have such officers-presidents, vice-presidents, &c.; and we need only to extend their powers, so that they may exercise over the movement of the conversation the beneficial influence of the Athenian symposiarch. At present the evil is, that conversation has no authorized originator; it is servile to the accidents of the moment; and generally these accidents are merely verbal. Some word or some name is dropped casually in the course of an illustration; and that is allowed to suggest a topic, though neither interesting to the majority of the persons present, nor leading naturally into other collateral topics that are more so. Now, in such cases it will be the business of the symposiarch to restore the interest of the conversation, and to rekindle its animation, by recalling it from any tracks of dullness or sterility into which it may have rambled. The natural excursiveness of colloquial intercourse, its tendency to advance by subtle links of association, is one of its advantages; but mere vagrancy from passive acquiescence in the direction given to it by chance or by any verbal accident, is amongst its worst diseases. The business of the symposiarch will be, to watch these morbid tendencies, which are not the deviations of graceful freedom, but the distortions of imbecility and collapse. His business it will also be to derive occasions of discussion bearing a general and permanent interest from the fleeting events of the casual disputes of the day. His business again it will be to bring back a subject that has been imperfectly discussed, and has yielded but half of the interest which it promises, under the interruption of any accident which may have carried the thoughts of the party into less attractive channels. Lastly, it should be an express office of education to form a particular style, cleansed from verbiage, from elaborate parenthesis, and from circumlocution, as the only style fitted for a purpose which is one of pure enjoyment.

Many other suggestions for the improvement of conversation might be brought forward with ampler limits; and especially for that class of conversation which moves by discussion, a whole code of regulations might be proposed, that would equally promote the interests of the individual speakers and the puplic interests of the truth involved in the question discussed. Meantime nobody is more aware than we are, that no style of conversation is more essentially vulgar than that which moves by disputation. This is the vice of the young and the inexperienced, but especially of those amongst them who are fresh from academic life. But discussion is not necessarily disputation; and the two orders of conversation-that, on the one hand, which contemplates an interest of knowledge, and of the self-developing intellect; that, on the other hand, which forms one and the widest amongst the gay embellishments of life-will always advance together. Whatever may remain of illiberal in the first, will correct itself, or will tend to correct itself, by the model held up in the second; and thus the great organ of social intercourse, by means of speech, which hitherto has done little for man, except through the channel of its ministrations to the direct business of daily necessities, will at length rise into a rivalship with books, and become fixed amongst the alliances of intellectual progress, not less than amongst the ornamental accomplishments of convivial life.

EDUCATION, STUDIES, AND CONDUCT.

SUGGESTIONS AND ENCOURAGEMENTS FOR SELF-EDUCATION.

LETTERS OF THOMAS DE QUINCEY TO A YOUNG MAN WHOSE EDUCATION HAD BEEN NEGLECTED.

THE following suggestions are taken from a series of Letters addressed by the author to a young man, whose early education had been neglected, but who, coming to the possession of abundant means, and to the consciousness of his own intellectual deficiencies, applied to Mr. De Quincey for a plan of study and reading by which he might supply them. The entire series, if completed, we have not seen in print, and must confine our extracts to the preliminary suggestions, leaving out much which is valuable:

MY DEAR SIR,

Your cousin L- has explained to me all that your own letter had left imperfect; in particular, how it was that you came to be defrauded of the edu cation to which even your earliest and humblest prospects had entitled you; by what heroic efforts, but how vainly, you labored to repair that greatest of losses; what remarkable events concurred to raise you to your present state of prosperity; and all other circumstances which appeared necessary to put me fully in possession of your present wishes and intentions.

The two questions which you addressed to me through him I have answered below these were questions which I could answer easily and without meditation; but for the main subject of our future correspondence, it is so weighty, and demands such close attention (as even I find, who have revolved the principal points almost daily for many years), that I would willingly keep it wholly distinct from the hasty letter which I am now obliged to write; on which account it is that I shall forbear to enter at present upon the series of letters which I have promised, even if I should find that my time were not exhausted by the answers to your two questions below. . .

...

To your first question,-whether to you, with your purposes and at your age of thirty-two, a residence at either of our English universities, or at any foreign university, can be of much service?-my answer is, firmly and unhesitatingly, no. The majority of the undergraduates of your own standing, in an academic sense, will be your juniors by twelve or fourteen years; a disparity of age which could not but make your society mutually burthensomc. What, then, is it that you would seek in a university? Lectures? These, whether public or private, are surely the very worst modes of acquiring any sort of accurate knowledge; and are just as much inferior to a good book on the same subject, as that book, hastily read aloud and then immediately withdrawn, would be inferior to the same book, left in your possession, and open at any hour, to be consulted, retraced, collated, and, in the fullest sense, studied. But, besides this, university lectures are naturally adapted, not so much to the general purpose of communicating knowledge, as to the specific

purpose of meeting a particular form of examination for degrees, and a particular profession to which the whole course of the education is known to be directed. The two single advantages which lectures can ever acquire, to balance those which they forego, are either, first, the obvious one of a better apparatus for displaying illustrative experiments than most students can command; and the cases where this becomes of importance it cannot be necessary to mention; second, the advantage of a rhetorical delivery, when that is of any use (as in lectures on poetry, etc.). These, however, are advantages more easily commanded in a great capital than in the most splendid university. What, then, remains to a university, except its libraries? And, with regard to those, the answer is short: to the greatest of them undergraduates have not free access; to the inferior ones (of their own college, etc.) the libraries of the great capitals are often equal or superior: and, for mere purposes of study, your own private library is far preferable to the Bodleian or the Vatican. To you, therefore, a university can offer no attraction, except on the assumption that you see cause to adopt a profession; and, as a degree from some university would, in that case, be useful (and indispensable, except for the bar), your determination on this first question must still be dependent on that which you form upon the second.

In this second question you call for my opinion upon the eleventh chapter of Mr. Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, as applied to the circumstances in which you yourself are placed. This chapter, to express its substance in the most general terms, is a dissuasion from what Herder, in a passage there quoted, calls "Die Authorschaft;" or, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, "the trade of authorship;" and the amount of the advice is,-that, for the sake of his own happiness and respectability, every man should adopt some trade or profession, and should make literature a subordinate pursuit. On this advice, I understand you to ask, first, whether it is naturally to be interpreted as extending to cases such as yours; and, second, if so, what is my judgment on such advice so extended? As to my judgment upon this advice, supposing it addressed to men of your age and situation, you will easily collect, from all which I shall say, that I think it as bad as can well be given.

What Mr. Coleridge really has in his view are two most different objections to literature, as the principal pursuit of life; which, as I have said, continually alternate with each other as the objects of his arguments, and sometimes become perplexed together, though incapable of blending into any real coalition. The objections urged are: First. To literature considered as a means of livelihood,- -as any part of the resources which a man should allow himself to rely on for his current income, or worldly credit and respectability; here the evils anticipated by Mr. Coleridge are of a high and positive character, and such as tend directly to degrade the character, and indirectly to aggravate some heavy domestic evils. Second. To literature considered as the means of sufficiently occupying the intellect. Here the evil apprehended is an evil of defect; it is alleged that literature is not adequate to the main end of giving due and regular excitement to the mind and the spirits, unless com. bined with some other summons to mental exercise of periodical recurrence, -determined by an overruling cause, acting from without,-and not dependent, therefore, on the accidents of individual will, or the caprices of momentary feeling springing out of temper or bodily health. Upon the last objection, as by far the most important in any case, and the only one at all applicable to yours, I would wish to say a word; because my thoughts on that matter are from the abundance of my heart, and drawn up from the very depths of my own experience. If there has ever lived a man who might claim the privilege of speaking with emphasis and authority on this great question,-By what

means shall a man best support the activity of his own mind in solitude ?—I, probably, am that man; and upon this ground, that I have passed more of my life in absolute and unmitigated solitude, voluntarily, and for intellectual purposes, than any person of my age whom I have ever met with, heard of, or read of. With such pretensions, what is it that I offer as the result of my experience, and how far does it coincide with the doctrine of Mr. Coleridge? Briefly this: I wholly agree with him that literature, in the proper acceptation of the term, as denoting what is otherwise called Belles Lettres, etc.,—that is, the most eminent of the fine arts, and so understood, therefore, as to exclude all science whatsoever, is not, to use a Greek word, ávтağкns, — not self-sufficing; no, not even when the mind is so far advanced that it can bring what have hitherto passed for merely literary or cesthetic questions, under the light of philosophic principles; when problems of "taste" have expanded to problems of human nature. And why? Simply for this reason,—that our power to exercise the faculties on such subjects is not, as it is on others, in defiance of our own spirits; the difficulties and resistances to our progress in these investigations are not susceptible of minute and equable partition (as in mathematics); and, therefore, the movements of the mind cannot be continuous, but are either, of necessity, tumultuary and per saltum, or none at all. When, on the contrary, the difficulty is pretty equally dispersed and broken up into a series of steps, no one of which demands any exertion sensibly more intense than the rest, nothing is required of the student beyond that sort of application and coherent attention which, in a sincere student of any standing, may be presumed as a habit already and inveterately established. The dilemma, therefore, to which a student of pure literature is continually reduced-such a student, suppose, as the Schlegels, or any other man who has cultivated no acquaintance with the severer sciences-is this: either he studies literature as a mere man of taste, and, perhaps, also as a philologer, and, in that case, his understanding must find a daily want of some masculine exercise to call it out and give it play,- -or (which is the rarest thing in the world), having begun to study literature as a philosopher, he seeks to renew that elevated walk of study at all opportunities; but this is often as hopeless an effort as to a great poet it would be to sit down upon any predetermination to compose in his character of poet. Hence, therefore,-if (as too often it happens) he has not cultivated those studies (mathematics, e. g.) which present such difficulties as will bend to a resolute effort of the mind, and which have the additional recommendation that they are apt to stimulate and irritate the mind to make that effort,-he is often thrown, by the very cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, and not by passion or inclination, upon some vulgar excitement of business or pleasure, which becomes constantly more necessary.

GENERAL MEANS OF STUDY.

According to my view, they are three,-first, Logic; secondly, Languages; thirdly, Arts of Memory. With respect to these, it is not necessary that any special end should be previously given. Be his end what it may, every student must have thoughts to arrange, knowledge to transplant, and facts to record. Means which are thus universally requisite may safely have precedency of the end; and it will not be a preposterous order if I dedicate my first three letters to the several subjects of Logic, Languages, and Arts of Memory, which will compose one half of my scheme, leaving to the other half the task of unfolding the course of study for which these instruments will be available. Having thus settled the arrangement, and implicitly, therefore, settled in part the idea or ratio of my scheme, I shall go on to add what may be necessary to confine your expectations to the right track, and prevent

them from going above or below the true character of the mark I aim at. I profess, then, to attempt something much higher than merely directions for a course of reading. Not that such a work might not be of eminent service; and in particular at this time, and with a constant adaptation to the case of rich men, not literary, I am of opinion that no more useful book could be executed than a series of letters (addressed, for example, to country gentlemen, merchants, etc.) on the formation of a library. The uses of such a treatise, however, are not those which I contemplate; for, either it would presume and refer to a plan of study already settled,-and in that light it is a mere complement of the plan I propose to execute,-c -or else it would attempt to involve a plan of study in the course of reading suggested; and that would be neither more nor less than to do in concreto, what it is far more convenient, as well as more philosophical, to do (as I am now going to do) directly and in abstracto. A mere course of reading, therefore, is much below what I propose; on the other hand, an organon of the human understanding is as much above it. Such a work is a labor for a life; that is to say, though it may take up but a small part of every day, yet could it in no other way accumulate its materials than by keeping the mind everlastingly on the watch to seize upon such notices as may arise daily throughout a life under the favor of accident or occasion. Forty years are not too large a period for such a work; and my present work, however maturely meditated, must be executed with rapidity. Here, in fact, I do but sketch or trace in outline (úc ¿v Tun❤ Tεidaßer) what there it would become my duty to develop, to fill up in detail, to apply, and to illustrate on the most extensive scale.

After having attempted, in my first part, to put you in possession of the best method for acquiring the instruments of study; and, with respect to logic in particular, having directed a philosophic light upon its true meaning and purpose, with the hope of extinguishing that anarchy of errors which have possessed this ground from the time of Lord Bacon to the moment at which I write; I then, in the second division, address myself to the question of ends. Upon which word let me distinguish: upon ends, in an absolute sense, as ultimate ends, it is presumption in any man to offer counsel to another of mature age. Advice of that sort, given under whatever hollow pretences of kindness, is to be looked upon as arrogance in the most repulsive shape; and to be rejected with that sort of summary disdain, which any man not of servile nature would testify towards him who should attempt to influence his choice of a wife. A student of mature age must be presumed to be best acquainted with his own talents and his own intellectual infirmities, with his "forte" and his "foible," with his own former experience of failure or success, and with the direction in which his inclinations point. Far be it from me to violate, by the spirit of my counsels, a pride so reasonable, which, in truth, I hold sacred. My scheme takes an humbler ground. Ends, indeed, in a secondary sense, the latter half professes to deal with; but such ends as, though bearing that character in relation to what is purely and merely instrumental, yet again become means in relation to ends absolutely so called. The final application of your powers and knowledge, it is for yourself only to determine; my pretensions, in regard to that election, are limited to this,that I profess to place you on a vantage ground from which you may determine more wisely, by determining from a higher point of survey. My purpose is not to map the whole course of your journey, but to serve as your guide to that station at which you may be able to lay down your future route for yourself. The former half of my work I have already described to you; the latter half endeavors to construct such a system of study as shall combine these two advantages: 1. Systematic unity; that is, such a principle