SELECTIONS.

UNIVERSITIES.

As water, whether it be the dew of heaven or the springs of the earth, doth scatter and lose itself in the ground, except it be collected into some receptacle, where it may by union comfort and sustain itself; and, for that cause, the industry of man hath framed and made spring-heads, conduits, cisterns and pools; which men have accustomed likewise to beautify and adorn with accomplishments of magnificence and state, as well as of use and necessity. So knowledge, whether it descend from divine inspiration or spring from human sense, would soon perish and vanish to oblivion, if it were not preserved in books, traditions, conferences and places appointed, as universities, colleges, and schools for the receipt and comforting the same.

LIBRARIES.*

LIBRARIES are as the shrines where all the

Heinsius, the keeper of the library at Leyden, after

relics of the ancient saints, full of true virtue, and that without delusion or imposture, are preserved and reposed.

PATENT AND LATENT VICE.

In the law of the leprosy it is said, “If the whiteness overspread the flesh, the patient may pass abroad for clean: but if there be any whole flesh remaining, he is to be shut up for unclean." One of the rabbins noteth a principle of moral philosophy, that men abandoned to vice do not so much corrupt manners as those that are half good and half evil.*

being mewed up in it the whole of one year, said, "I no sooner come into the library but I bolt the door after me, excluding lust, ambition, avarice, and all such vices, whose nurse is idleness, the mother of ignorance and melancholy herself; and in the very lap of eternity, amidst so many divine souls, I take my seat with so lofty a spirit and such sweet content, that I pity all the great and rich who know not this happiness."

*Coleridge in his Aids to Reflection, says, "Where virtue is, sensibility is the ornament and becoming attire of virtue. On certain occasions it may almost be said to become virtue. But sensibility and all the amiable qualities may likewise become, and too often have become, the panders of vice and the instruments of seduction.

PHILOSOPHISING AND THEORISING.

THE wit and mind of man, if it work upon matter which is the contemplation of the crea

So must it needs be with all qualities that have their rise only in parts and fragments of our nature. A man of warm passions may sacrifice half his estate to rescue a friend from prison; for he is naturally sympathetic, and the more social part of his nature happened to be uppermost. The same man shall afterwards exhibit the same disregard of money in an attempt to seduce that friend's wife or daughter.

All the evil achieved by Hobbs and the whole school of materialists will appear inconsiderable if it be compared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental philosophy of Sterne and his numerous imitators. The vilest appetites and the most remorseless inconstancy towards their object, acquired the titles of the heart, the irresistible feelings, the too tender sensibility; and if the frosts of prudence, the icy chains of human law, thawed and vanished at the genial warmth of human nature, who could help it? It was an amiable weakness!

About this time too the profanation of the word love rose to its height. The French naturalists, Buffon and others, borrowed it from the sentimental novellists: the Swedish and English philosophers took the contagion: and the Muse of science condescended to seek admission into the saloons of fashion and frivolity, rouged like an harlot, and with the harlot's wanton leer. I know not how the annals of

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tures of God, worketh according to the stuff, and is limited thereby; but if it work upon itself, as the spider worketh his web, then it is endless

guilt could be better forced into the service of virtue, than by such a comment on the present paragraph, as would be afforded by a selection from the sentimental correspondence produced in courts of justice within the last thirty years, fairly translated into the true meaning of the words, and the actual object and purpose of the infamous writers. Do you in good earnest aim at dignity of character? By all the treasures of a peaceful mind, by all the charms of an open countenance, I conjure you, O youth! turn away from those who live in the twilight between vice and virtue. Are not reason, discrimination, law, and deliberate choice, the distinguishing characters of humanity? can aught then worthy of a human being proceed from a habit of soul, which would exclude all these and (to borrow a metaphor from Paganism) prefer the den of Trophonius to the temple and oracles of the God of light? can any thing manly, I say, proceed from those, who for law and light would substitute shapeless feelings, sentiments, impulses, which as far as they differ from the vital workings in the brute animals own the difference of their former connection with the proper virtues of humanity; as Dendrites derive the outlines, that constitute their value above other clay-stones, from the casual neighbourhood and pressure of the plants, the names of which they assume; Remember, that love itself in its highest earthly bearing, as the ground of the marriage union, becomes love by an inward fiat of the will, by a completing