of great name are now, like authors and booksellers, induced to employ themselves for this lower and wider sphere of purchasers.  In all this I see the cause as well as the effect of a progressive refinement, which must be beneficial in many ways.  This very diffusion of cheap books and cheap prints may, in its natural consequences, operate rather to diminish than to increase the number of adventurers in literature and in the arts.  For though at first it will create employment for greater numbers, yet in another generation imitative talent will become so common, that neither parents nor possessors will mistake it for an indication of extraordinary genius, and many will thus be saved from a ruinous delusion.  More pictures will be painted but fewer exhibited, more poetry written but less published, and in both arts talents which might else have been carried to an overstocked and unprofitable market, will be cultivated for their own sakes, and for the gratification of private circles, becoming thus a source of sure enjoyment and indirectly of moral good.  Scientific pursuits will, in like manner, be extended, and pursuits which partake of science, and afford pleasures within the reach of humble life.

Here, then, is good in progress which will hold on its course, and the growth of which will only be suspended, not destroyed, during any of those political convulsions which may too probably be apprehended—­too probably, I say, because when you call upon me to consider the sinfulness of this nation, my heart fails.  There can be no health, no soundness in the state, till government shall regard the moral improvement of the people as its first great duty.  The same remedy is required for the rich and for the poor.  Religion ought to be so blended with the whole course of instruction, that its doctrines and precepts should indeed “drop as the rain, and distil as the dew, as the small rain upon the tender herb, and as the showers upon the grass”—­the young plants would then imbibe it, and the heart and intellect assimilate it with their growth.  We are, in a great degree, what our institutions make us.  Gracious God were those institutions adapted to Thy will and word—­were we but broken in from childhood to Thy easy yoke—­were we but carefully instructed to believe and obey—­in that obedience and belief we should surely find our temporal welfare and our eternal happiness!

Here, indeed, I tremble at the prospect!  Could I look beyond the clouds and the darkness which close upon it, I should then think that there may come a time when that scheme for a perpetual peace among the states of Christendom which Henri IV. formed, and which has been so ably digested by the Abbe St. Pierre, will no longer be regarded as the speculation of a visionary.  The Holy Alliance, imperfect and unstable as it is, is in itself a recognition of the principle.  At this day it would be practicable, if one part of Europe were as well prepared for it as the other; but this cannot be, till good shall have triumphed over evil in the struggles which are brooding, or shall have obtained such a predominance as to allay the conflict of opinions before it breaks into open war.