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=_Hugh S. Legare, 1797-1843._= (Manual, p. 487.)

From his “Collected Writings.”

=_193._= THE STUDY OF THE ANCIENT CLASSICS.

Not to have the curiosity to study the learned languages is not to have any vocation at all for literature:  it is to be destitute of liberal curiosity and of enthusiasm; to mistake a self-sufficient and superficial dogmatism for philosophy, and that complacent indolence which is the bane of all improvement, for a proof of the highest degree of it....

All that we ask, then, is, that a boy should be thoroughly taught the ancient languages from his eighth to his sixteenth year, or thereabouts, in which time he will have his taste formed, his love of letters completely, perhaps enthusiastically, awakened, his knowledge of the principles of universal grammar perfected, his memory stored with the history, the geography, and the chronology of all antiquity, and with a vast fund of miscellaneous literature besides, and his imagination kindled with the most beautiful and glowing passages of Greek and Roman poetry and eloquence; all the rules of criticism familiar to him—­the sayings of sages and the achievements of heroes indelibly impressed upon his heart.  He will have his curiosity fired for further acquisition, and find himself in possession of the golden keys which open all the recesses where the stores of knowledge have ever been laid up by civilized man.  The consciousness of strength will give him confidence, and he will go to the rich treasures themselves, and take what he wants, instead of picking up eleemosynary scraps from those whom, in spite of himself, he will regard as his betters in literature.  He will be let into that great communion of scholars throughout all ages and all nations,—­like that more awful communion of saints in the holy church universal,—­and feel a sympathy with departed genius, and with the enlightened and the gifted minds of other countries, as they appear before him, in the transports of a sort of vision beatific, bowing down at the same shrines, and flowing with the same holy love of whatever is most pure, and fair, and exalted, and divine in human nature.

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From a Review of Kent’s Commentaries.

=_194._= DISADVANTAGES OF COLONIAL LIFE.

It is our misfortune, in one sense, to have succeeded, at the very outset of our career, to an over-grown inheritance in the literature of the mother country, and to have stood for a century in that political and social relation towards her, which was of all others most unfavorable to any originality in genius and opinions.  Our good fathers piously spoke of England as their home.  The inferiority—­the discouraging and degrading inferiority—­implied in a state of colonial dependence, chilled the enthusiasm of talent, and repressed the aspirations of ambition.  Our youth were trained in English schools to classical