coup d'œils, journals, and reviews, with a thousand other short-roads, by-cuts, and smooth-paths, all of of them aided, moreover, by cylinder and steam presses, by rough types, coarse paper and wood cuts-we fear that, whilst our so called learning becomes dog cheap, we shall find a proportionate diminution of true and 'ripe scholars; and that such of our young misses as graduate, and can construe their Novum Testamentum, and talk flippantly out of Mrs. Marcet's 'Conversations on Chemistry'--on 'Natural Philosophy'--and on 'Political Economy'-will shrink from the more elaborate works of Mrs. Somerville, and of Adam Smith! And it may be equally feared, that our young men may ultimately be brought to know little more of the classics, than what are to be found in the 'Graca Majora,' and in the Latin, 'Excerpta or more of Plato, of Aristotle, of Descartes, &c. than what may be gleaned from Watts' Logic, or from some of the chapters of Locke; and, perhaps, little more of physics, &c. than are condensely displayed in Jamieson's 'Universal Science,' or in that marvellous book, 'Sir Richard Phillips' Million of Facts,' each in one small volume!

In the approaching sunny days, that I anticipate, days of almost universal and co-equal knowledge, we may find our statesmen and politicians looking down, with felicitous contempt, on the folly of past times, and of German lore, and of German drudges! And, should there then be a few that still hang on the skirts of a Grotius, a Puffendorf,

a Domat, or a Coke, they will be regarded as so inveterately book-mad, as to be more worthy inmates of some hotel des invalides, than of a university; and as to the theologians, so far from their seeking occasionally for light, among even the best of the schoolmen, or even from the fathers of the church, they will have their essentials in translated excerpts or possibly, in those laboursaving machines, the 'Penny Encyclopedias,' the 'Saturday Magazines,' and similar works!

How strange is it that the world cannot avoid extremes! and passing strange, that the republic of letters must degenerate into a vile democracy, and, possibly, into a still more ignoble mobocracy of letters! How admirable is the juste milieu in every thing! Extremes, though in very opposite directions, seem ever pregnant with like results. The learned jargon of the schoolmen withdrew from the cognizance of the vulgar many, the wholesome truths of knowledge-poisoned its fountains-and degraded it with many silly refinements, clothed in a most barbarous language; all of which, even among the élite and studious, greatly retarded the progress of genuine philosophy, and of sound morals. And so it may easily fall out with the utilitarians of our day, would they vainly attempt to reduce all knowledge to such primary elements that, by a species of moral homopathic reduction and administration of the most recondite sciences and arts, all men are to become scholars, statesmen, philosophers, and what not!—and this, too, by receiving infinitesimal portions of knowledge,

(possibly even by smelling at them,) somewhat after the fashion of those charlatans, who would cure all diseases by a materia medica, so reduced to its ultimate elements, as to come within the cubic volume of a few inches, and through invisible portions taken into the system even by the olfactories! I confess myself a sceptic in all such extremes; and am as little inclined towards this hoped-for ubiquity, and co-equality of knowledge, as I should be to the restoration of those palmy days of the schoolmen, when a few exclusives were so idolized by the mass, as to think themselves allied aut Deum aut Diabolum !

It was this adulation of the supposed learning of the times, that rendered the schoolmen so very mystical. The classical purity of the Greek and Roman writers, ill-suited the rough materials which often composed their works; their authority was mainly derived from not being understood-and also from the necessary aristocracy of learning, when books were rare, and war was the vocation of the many.

Ignorance and superstition are natural allies; so that the scholars of those days, exercised a prodigious influence over all men and things around them; for we find that Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Hales, Bonaventura, and others, were regarded with such an eye of respect, and even of awe, as can scarce be comprehended, at the present time. Pelligrino Antonio Orlandi, in his Notizie degli Scrittori Bollognesi, says of Achellini, one of these popular scholastics, 'Fu accutissimo argy

mentore, onde ne circoli dove argumentava e non era conosciuto, passo in proverbio, qu'll aut Diabolus, aut Achellinus.'

The whole fraternity of these Quodlibetarians, (so called from the quodlibetical propositions of St. Thomas Aquinas,) plunged the human mind into such a state of learned ignorance, that the Alchemists and, even the Astrologers, found it no difficult task to palm their nonsense on the world, for several centuries; and, even when the schoolmen in a great degree had passed off, and when classical learning had revived, and pure letters and sound philosophy had gained some ascendency, these students of the metals, and of the starry influences, were found lingering on, almost down to our own day, leaving a mental diathesis very favourable to the reception of animal magnetism, and other similar opprobria of learning!—all of which, it must be admitted, flow from the absence of a general and popular, though superficial, enlighten

ment.

The true doctrine, then, of the whole matter would seem to be this-learning, when confined to a very few, degenerates into mysticism, into charlatanry, and into oppression of the people; the effects of which are further inflamed by the people's superstitions: learning, on the other hand, when attempted to be extended equally to all, degenerates into a contemptible superficialness, full of vanity and presumption in the many, and of hostility, on their part, against the few, who,

in spite of the times, become really learned. The true medium, then, is to aim at nothing ultra-at no universal philosophising of the mass; but so to enlighten them, as to protect them from the artifices of unprincipled scholars; whilst, in turn, the mass shall recognize the rights and legiti mate powers of the learned; so that neither may encroach, or be inclined so to do, on the province of the other.

Sad, indeed, is the state of things, when the people are so ignorant that their scholars shall dare to teach them, for example, that all the mysteries of the Holy Trinity, and of the Incarnation, are to be found in the pages of Aristotle !-that the soul is certainly a musical pipe! these, and the like, being found in some of the scholia on Aristotle! But, unfortunately for the argument in relation to the soul, it was founded on a typo. graphical error in the text, that had escaped the overlearned scholiast, in which dvλòs, a flute, was used instead of the adjective äüλos, immaterial! A like pedantry and wasteful display of curious knowledge, but in far more recent times, is seen in the too-learned German, who published a very elaborate essay to account, on physical principles, for a golden tooth, fabled to have made its appearance in the maxilary of a peasant boy! which proved, however, to be a hoax, only after the luckless author's labours of the pen had issued from the press! And I may also allude to the thrice too-learned archeologists, who recently gave to the world their essays to prove that certain