is long, toilsome, and rugged; but it leads to honours solid and lasting, to independence, without which no blessings of fortune however profuse, no distinctions of station however splendid, can afford a liberal mind true satisfaction-to power for which no task can be too hard, no labours too trying." Mr. Canning admits that at this time (the eighteenth year of his age) he was shamefully ignorant of French; and though he had fifty times formed the intention of learning it, he never brought his intentions to the maturity of practical application. He was fully sensible, however, of the importance and necessity of an acquaintance with the French language to complete the education of a gentleman, and he gives the following outline of a plan for acquiring a competent and useful knowledge of it. This plan he subsequently carried into effect; and in subjoining it, we strongly recommend its adoption to those who may wish to pursue the best-indeed, almost the only effective mode of making a creditable proficiency in the French language.

"By this time twelvemonth (Mr. Canning writes, in the letter above cited) I intend to procure a smattering, sufficient to call a coach or swear at a waiter; and then to put into execution a plan formed long ago, in happier days, of going abroad with my three fellow scribes, the Microcosmopolitans.* Our idea is not that of scampering through France and ranting in Paris; but a sober sort of thing-to go and settle for two months in some provincial town, remarkable for the salubrity of its climate, the respectability of its inhabitants, and the purity of its language; there to improve our constitutions by the first, to extend our acquaintance with men and manners in the second, and to qualify ourselves for a farther extension of it in the third."

From the speeches we make one extract from the many beautiful passages with which they abound. It is an eloquent vindication of his own policy, as well as a just and ingenious argument, to show that whilst Mr. Canning improves upon the policy and principles of Pitt, he does not deviate from them.

"Sir, I deny that we have departed from the general principles of Mr. Pitt. It is true, indeed, that no man who has observed the signs of the times, can have failed to discover in the arguments of our opponents, upon this occasion, a secret wish to renew the Bank restriction; and it is upon that point, and with respect to measures leading, in our apprehension, to that point, that we are accused, and not unjustly, with differing from those who accuse us. We are charged with a deviation from the principles of Mr. Pitt, because we declared our determination not to renew an expedient, which, though it was forced upon Mr. Pitt by the particular circumstances of the times, is one that ought not to be dragged into a precedent. It never surely can be quoted as a spontaneous act of deliberate policy; and it was an act, be it remembered, of which Mr. Pitt did not live to witness those consequences which effectually deter his successors from the repetition of it. But it is singular to remark how ready some people are to admire in a great man, the exception rather than the rule of his conduct. Such perverse worship is like the idolatry of barbarous nations, who can see the noon-day splendour of the sun without emotion, but who, when he is in eclipse, come forward with hymns and cymbals to adore him. Thus there are those who venerate Mr. Pitt less in the brightness of his meridian glory than under his partial obscurations, and who gaze on him with the fondest admiration when he has accidentally ceased to shine.

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"My admiration on this side only of idolatry' of that great man is called forth by the glorious course which he ran, and for the illumination which he shed over his country. But I do not think it the duty of a most zealous worshipper to adopt even the accidental faults of the illustrious model whom we vainly endeavour to imitate. I do not think it part of fealty to him to adopt, without necessity, measures which necessity alone forced upon him. Treading with unequal pace in his steps, I do not think it our duty to select by preference those footmarks in which, from the slipperiness of the times, he may have trodden awry.

"If, Sir, I have said enough to satisfy the House, that with my whole soul I adopt, with my whole strength I will endeavour to maintain the measures of my Right Honourable friend (Mr. Huskisson), I have said enough, and I will not detain them by going into the details of a question of which he is himself a perfect master, and of which he has made the House equally master with himself. But I should

* Mr. Robert Smith, Mr. Frere, and Mr. George Ellis.

have been ashamed to let this debate go by without declaring that I will readily take my share of responsibility for his measure, leaving to my Right Honourable friend the undivided glory."

The speeches of Mr. Canning abound in passages of splendour and great power. The living graces of his oratory have perished with him, or survive only in the remembrance of those who had the delight to hear him; its intellectual character, however, will be faithfully transmitted to posterity in these volumes, which deserve to be regarded as authentic memorials of his eloquence.

A FIRST LESSON IN READING.

"Oh reader, if that thou canst read!"

IF that thou canst read! what a question for the nineteenth century; and amidst the boasted march of intellect, and the unremitting labours of tract societies, of every form and calibre! Have we not Bell schools, and Lancaster schools, and charter schools, and parochial schools, schools with note and comment, and schools without note and comment, infant schools, and schools for grown gentlemen? Have not polemics become the handmaids of literature? and do not all manner of persons suck in the elements of learning with the milk of sectarian hatred? Is not every body permitted, nay forced to read, "whether his mammy will or no?" All this is very true: there is no denying it. Reading and writing are, indeed, no longer aristocratic distinctions (thank Heaven for it); but still I reiterate the question standing at the head of my paper; and I very much doubt whether some of you, gentlest of the gentle, can give a satisfactory answer to the interrogatory. What! Sirs, do you flatter yourselves that you have no longer need of a literary go-cart, because you have overcome the difficulties of b-a, ba, and c-a, ca; or because, perchance, you exceed in skill the Welsh curate, who avoided the cramped polysyllabic proper names of the Old Testament, by always reading that "hard name went unto hard place!" Lay not that flattering unction to your souls, I beseech you. The art of reading is no such mechanical process. Think upon what Montaigne says, "J'ay leu en Tite Live cent choses, que tel n'y a pas leu. Plutarque y a leu cent, outre ce que j'y ay sceu lire; et à l'adventure, ce que l'autheur y avoit mis." Trust me, there is many a D.D. who has gone through half the Bodleian without having read the contents of a single volume, not to speak of “ ce que l'autheur y avoit mis;" and as for the mass of readers, they are scarcely ten paces in advance of that worthy person, who, having diligently perused the entire volume of Euclid, declared that it was a very amusing book, but that he could make nothing of the pictures (so he called the diagrams).

It was a wise ordination of Providence that men should, in the course of nature, buy books first, and set about reading them afterwards. What between the books which are above ordinary comprehensions, and those which are too easily understood, and speak too plainly the truths opposed to popular prejudices and private interests, nothing good would be vendible, if the public were purchasers with notice; and the matter would be worse with respect to the great mass of publications which have positively no meaning at all; " for true no meaning puzzles more than wit." What then would become of those who

live by their pen? The thought puts one into a cold perspiration! Nature, however, has been kind, and bibliopoly thrives. It is, therefore, no more than common charity, that the purchaser should be assisted in reading: and this, I take it, has been the "moving why" that has tempted our great booksellers to dabble so much in reviews, a class of publications especially dedicated to the service of those who cannot read for themselves. A review is to the intellect what a pair of spectacles is to the eyes; and without its assistance, printing might as well be confined to advertizing macassar oil, and giving fresh lustre to Warren's blacking. Between the ignorance, the wilfulness, and the preoccupation of the public-(I beg pardon for these hard words; but the present company is always excepted)—a book may be thumbed till its pages are dog's ears, without the reader being "any the wiser," if the way to the interior and mystic sense of the author be not macadamized by the lucubrations of a professed critic. I pass over the common place of Machiavel's Prince, of which Edipus himself could make no more than a spaniel can of an hedgehog,-so closely has the author wrapped himself up in himself; but I must notice the Divina Commedia, which all the statesmen, philosophers, and scholars of Europe have spelled, from the hour it was written, without suspecting it to be a political satire, till Signior Rossetti made the discovery the other day;-a sure proof, by the by, that there was no Attorney-General or Constitutional Society at Florence in those times. The ancients were much more modest and self-knowing than we are, in this particular of reading. Pliny tells us, that Appian the grammarian went to the devil to learn to read, evoking the infernal spirits with the herb Cynocephale (I wish some of our greater WE's knew where that same herb was to be found) to assist him in his critical studies; but that having, by the assistance of the father of lies, got at the truth, he was afraid of a state prosecution, and kept "the ghost's word" to himself. The works of Homer, we are told, contain "all the principles of all the sciences,' ,"* if a body were but conjuror enough to find them out: but, not to dwell on such abstruse writers, who is there so unsuspecting and simple as to imagine he can read all that is omitted in a King's speech, or can comprehend the elaborate cryptology of a ministerial harangue on the state of the nation? Who, unpossessed of second sight, would pretend to read with effect my Lord Lauderdale's pamphlets, or Sir Thomas Lethbridge's speeches on the Corn Laws, or to discover a meaning in any one article of a Tory newspaper? There is no more gross and absurd mistake than the imagining that reviews are written with any view to enlightening writers. The vituperation in which these publications indulge, has no other motive than that of instructing the reading public, of teaching folks how to read, and leading them (by the nose) to those conclusions, to which, if left to themselves, they would never arrive. This is one of those verités veritables of which Napoleon spoke, and of which there are so few in the world. It is the difficulty of reading-the inability of penetrating the mystery of things, and discovering on which side one's bread is buttered, that has thrown governments on the necessity of hiring sense-keepers for

Blackwell's Life of Homer.

nations at such exorbitant prices. The actual Government of France (the most paternal of all crasies within the pigeon-holes of all the cabinets of all the Abbé Sieyes's in the world,) employs a countless host of Jesuits, as an intellectual gendarmerie for cutting down passages above the level of public comprehension, as if ideas were only French citizens; and for bayonetting, in the true Manchester fashion, all sentences which " riotously and routously" assemble against the peace and dignity of St. Loyola and St. Villele, to puzzle the simplicity of the good citizens of Paris. Let the French Liberals complain as they may of this regime,-experience has abundantly proved that there is no mode of teaching the people to read more successful. There are no people on the face of the earth who are more awakened than the French, nor more skilled to read even the blanks which are left by the censors. In the art of reading, we English are sadly behindhand; either for want of a censorship on the press, (which is by no means impossible with a military minister,) or, perhaps, because we are a nation of shopkeepers, and have no time for study. Ledgers must be posted; and we are glad to find ready-made interpreters, upon whose fidelity we may pin our faith, while we pay an uninterrupted worship at the shrine of Mammon. Something also must be attributed to the ignorance of our teachers. There is no agreement, no system among them. They are in a state of perpetual flat contradiction. If conspiracy come, as a learned barrister once asserted, from "con" to breathe, and "spiro" together, they must be acquitted of the charge. A consultation of physicians could not ex luce dare fumum" more pertinaciously. But to whatever causes the national deficiency is attributable, the "effect defective" is most deplorable. We are the dupes of whoever thinks it worth his while to mystify us. What other people would take Mr. Goulburn for a political genius, or Mr. W. Horton for a Moses to guide them into the deserts? What other nation would swallow the bubble of a sinking fund, or throw up their caps for Don Miguel, or listen to the ravings of "The Post" and "The Standard" on the battle of Navarino, or believe in St. Wolf?

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In putting forth these opinions upon scholarship, let me not be understood as pronouncing sentence in the great pending cause between the Biblicals and the High Churchmen. I leave it to the expert to decide whether the holy book be most degraded by the licence of Fifth Monarchy men and Southcotians, or by the arrogant intolerance of infallible authority. I have, I confess, my own leanings; but still am for letting the milkmaid kiss her cow, if she does not prefer the salute of "heavy Ralph" the ploughman, or other more convenient biped. If there be those who think they can read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest" the book of the law without note or comment, they have my free permission to indulge in the conceit, provided they do not erect the permission into a precedent, or pretend to more knowledge than they possess of lay literature. Thus much, however, let me add, in defence of my own private opinion, (which, once more, I do not desire to impose with fire and faggot upon any recalcitrant subscriber to the New Monthly.) If every man is by instinct a reader as soon as he has mastered his "Reading made easy," and if Dogberry be right, why then church establishments must be very expensive superfluities, "which is absurd." My notions on the subject of reading have there, April.-VOL. XXII. NO. LXXXVIII.

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at least, the merit of orthodoxy, and coincide with that interpretation of the right of private judgment, in which all good Protestants rejoice, and which construes it to mean and intend a right of free navigation within the tropics of the thirty-nine articles, and no farther. Having thus slightly glanced at that very ticklish subject, modern polemics, I will just state the law of the case, in order to explain that there is nothing hostile in that admirably sapient maxim of British jurisprudence," Ignorantialegis non excusat,"-a maxim which can have no reference to the difficulties of reading, because the longest nonprofessional life would not suffice for the mere manual operation of perusing the statutes, not to speak of reading them to any purpose. Besides, the whole unwritten law, constituting a floating capital of pains and penalties too subtle to be permanently funded in black and white, has nothing to do whatever with reading, and can only be known by intuition. The meaning of this maxim evidently is, that Divine Providence having amply provided society with attorneys and "counsel learned in the law," a man may, at the small charge of 21. 2s. and the attorney's expenses, be duly advised, as long as he may choose to exercise his free will by putting his foot beyond the castle walls of his own house; and that to be ignorant of the law, with such facilities of information, is wholly inexcusable. The law is indeed the perfection of human reason, and nothing can be more reasonable than this decision.

The purposes for which books are consulted are various, and the art of reading them varies accordingly. Some persons read only to propitiate sleep; and with such the whole art lies in the choice of books, a circumstance that may be safely trusted to instinct. The Book of the Church (no matter of what church), or Baker's Chronicles, will answer as well as the best. Then, again, for those readers who, in Hamlet's phrase, see nothing in books but "words, words, words,"and never arrive at the idea of a complete sentence, I have only to inform them that there is, or was, a very pretty book written for their exclusive use, and called "The British Review," which will never startle them into intelligence. There are, however, readers who at least think they think, who have a propensity to look into millstones, and who will be content with nothing less than the essence of things. To such men reading is a very serious concern; and if they mean to win the race, I would advise them not to bolt at the starting-place. Let such be duly penetrated with this conviction, that the value of any book rests upon the intelligence of the reader; and that unless an author's ideas are already implicitly in the reader's mind, he will not be read with effect. "Ce qui fait," says Champfort, "le succès de quantité d'ouvrages, est le rapport qui se trouve entre la médiocrité des idées de l'auteur, et la médiocrité des idées du public." Such works find an echo in every bosom. The reader feels himself in his own element. He does not find a mystery in every sentence, and a conundrum in every paragraph; he is not obliged at every page to "give it up," and run to a Billy Block of commentator for an explanation. The neglect of this verity leads to much unprofitable reading; witness the case of that mathematician who threw aside the "Paradise Lost" after perusal, because, as he justly remarked, it "proves nothing." The great art of reading consists, then, in eschewing all works that are above one's calibre. Let not the honest. Whig