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death. These may befall us every moment; the most unexpected casualty, as daily experience proves, may injure our feeble frame, and prove fatal to our existence; some slight indisposition may soon terminate in a mortal disease; and death may seize us unawares in the full enjoyment of health and sprightliness.

"We are also subject," continues our author, "to the greatest calamities and misfortunes." These words, though synonimous, are very different in their application, and therefore they are both very properly employed. A calamity, derived from calamus, a stalk of corn, denotes whatever injury is suffered from the elements, as stalks of corn are beaten down by a tempest. Hence boisterous winds or deluges of rain which destroy the crops, and thereby affect the whole community, are the causes of a public calamity. Misfortunes, on the other hand, affect only the interests of an individual; so that whatever a person suffers by loss of fortune, or loss of health, is termed a misfortune. Since man, then, may at any time be exposed to these evils, which often deprive him of all his comforts, it may well be said that he is subject every moment to the greatest calamities and misfortunes." He is beset," continues our author, "with dangers on all sides." The participle beset signifies hemmed in or surrounded; words which express, in the most lively manner, the real condition of human life. For every man is surrounded by objects, animate and inanimate, which may prove dangerous to his fortune, his health, his tranquillity, or his virtue. The noun danger conveys a more correct idea of the author's meaning than the synonimous words peril or hazard could have done. Peril, derived from pereo, to go through in search of something, signifies an evil which a person suffers by going out of the ordinary course of human life; as an adventurer who visits a foreign country is exposed to the perils of his journey thither, or the perils arising from the climate and other incidents which he may meet with in it. Hazard denotes some fortuitous evil, to which a man exposes himself by engaging in enterprizes attended with danger; as a merchant engages in some uncertain speculation at the hazard of his fortune, or a General risks an engagement with a superior enemy at the hazard of his life. Danger, however, is an evil to which we are exposed at all times and in every condition, as we may be in danger of losing our property from the inclemency of the seasons, our wealth by the carelessness or fraud of others, and our lives by accidents, indiscretion, or disease; so that this word is the most correct one that could have been employed, as it may justly be said that man is beset with danger on all sides.'

Thus does the author examine analytically the remaining members of his quotation. His distinctions, however, are sometimes frivolously drawn; as between the words 'peril' and danger.' In his rules for purity of expression, we were surprized to find such words as concernment,' 'habitude,' &c. &c. proscribed as barbarisms! Is Mr. Smith aware that REV. MAY, 1825.

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he is legislating against the authority of our best writers; Milton, Clarendon, Tillotson, Burke, &c.? He also takes upon himself to denounce the use of the word 'conscience' for consciousness; not aware that the former is, in reality, the genuine word, for which consciousness (the abstract quality of being conscious) is usually substituted. Conscientia facti is the consciousness, or, as our elder writers would have written, the conscience of the deed. So Milton, in his sonnet upon his blindness, exclaims, alluding to the loss of his eyes,

"What supports me, dost thou ask?

The conscience, friend, t' have lost them overplied
In liberty's defence, my noble task," &c.

We have expressed in just terms of commendation our opinion of the industry and judgment with which Mr. Smith's entertaining and instructive work is executed: but there are many of his rules to which we cannot subscribe; because we think an adherence to them would fetter the freedom and lower the spirit of our national language. He is evidently a purist in letters, one of a sect, which wages unsparing warfare upon the native idiom, the careless elegance, the unrestrained luxuriance of our tongue. This severe spirit of regulation is adverse to the natural genius of true and undefiled English. It sets up arbitrary and conventional laws to model it into tameness and to affright it into uniformity. It would do that for the language of England which her academies, her Boileaus, her Richelieus, have done for that of France. The fundamental maxim of this class of critics is an error. They set out with demanding the sacrifice of every expression, which is in colloquial use, as if written composition should uniformly erect itself into a haughty, stiff stateliness, above the common speech. The result of this would be an inflexible, monotonous, measured diction, wellbred, cold, and polite; in which no other excellence could be obtained but the frigid and formal absence of those faults which are only to be avoided at the expense of every beauty. Are our best writers to be tried as offenders by these martinets in verbal discipline, as many of Mr. Smith's examples of faulty composition are taken from Addison, Swift, Sherlock, and Tillotson?

"Committit vates et comparat, inde Maronem,
Atque aliâ parte in trutiná suspendit Homerum."

Sir Walter Raleigh, in his History of the World, thus describes the mode in which the Deity manifests his existence

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by the works of nature: "God, whom the wisest men acknowledge to be a power ineffable and virtue infinite, a light by abundant charity invisible, was and is pleased to make himself known by the work of the world." 'Every one must perceive,' observes Mr. Smith, that the low and vulgar expressions employed in this extract are a violation of all classical taste;' and he proposes to rectify it thus: God, who, according to the conceptions of the wisest men, is a being of almighty power and infinite greatness, whom no man has seen or can see, was and is pleased to manifest his eternal power and godhead by the creation of the world.' By what hallucination has Mr. S. taught himself to imagine the tame and common-place sentence which he proposes to substitute for the glowing language of Raleigh an improvement? To our ears, and to our understandings, neither the expression nor the sense is improved by it. In one respect, the meaning of that admirable and eloquent writer is quite destroyed. When Raleigh speaks of "a light by abundant charity invisible," he extols the Divine benevolence in not dazzling us with excess of light by nearer approaches to our senses. is "invisible or dimly seen;" and therein he manifests his charity or good will to his creatures. In Mr. Smith's bed of torture, a limb has been lopped off from a beautiful sentence; and yet we are to be told that the new-modelled passage is an improvement ! We protest against such improvements; and ask, in the name of just criticism, where are the low and vulgar expressions so hypercritically denounced?

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We were pleased to observe among the examples of violations of simplicity, elegance, and sublimity, a passage from Mr. Irving's Orations handled with just severity. Nothing can convey a more useful negative instruction to the young student of composition than an exhibition of the deformities and extravagances of bad writers. The Spartans to dissuade their youth from drunkenness exhibited before them slaves in that disgraceful condition. The disgusting intoxication of the following sentences may operate also as a salutary admonition:

"Here, then, is hell enough out of the natural workings of such a population, without one interference of Almighty God. With what full swing power will rage and havoc ! with what fell swoop the arm of revenge will bring its bloody stroke! Hosts encountering hosts in dubious battle, wounds, and bloodshed, and agony, and no relief in death! Hitherto I have supposed things no otherwise conditioned than they are on earth. But their (the wicked's) torture is the absence of the ministry of God. God comes not to their quarters, and therefore their quarters are so hot;

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for where God is, there is a peace and love, and where he is not, there is confusion and every evil work. The murderous devil is their master, his emanations inspire them, his powers of darkness rule them. They aye toil like Vulcan and his slaves, manufacturing thunderbolts for this their cruel Jove, to overwhelm themselves withal; and these wretched men will aye conceive, within their souls, malicious fiendish imaginations and purposes, which, being brought forth, will destroy all the good which else might flourish in their clime.-Oh! when I think how near every man verges upon the confines of madness and misery, and how the least shift in the fabric of our minds would send heavenly reason into howling madness, I see, I fancy a thousand powers resident in God, by the smallest expense of means, to make a hell such as no earthly science or earthly language is able to represent. Bring me all the classes of men upon the earth, and let me have the sorting and the placing of them upon this earth, and I shall make hells for each one of them without farther ado. I would send the poets to bear burdens, and the porters to indite tuneful songs. The musicians I would appoint over the kennels, and the roving libertines I would station over the watch and ward of streets. I would banish the sentimentalists to the fens, and send the rustic labourers to seek their food among the mountains; each wily politician I would transplant into a colony of honest men, and your stupid clown I would set at the helm of state. Sure I am, I could set society into such a hot warfare and confusion, as should in one day make half the world slay themselves, or slay each other, and the other half run up and down in wild distraction." (Irving's Orations.)'

The perusal of such nonsense from the pen of a popular writer makes us disposed to quarrel with the folly and fashion, the caprice and ignorance, which have invested him with popularity.

We earnestly recommend every literary student to pay assiduous attention to the practical logic with which Mr. S. closes his work. It is judiciously abridged from the best writers, Locke, Campbell, Stewart, &c., and being wholly divested of scholastic jargon, contains all that is useful in this branch of education.

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We cannot take leave of Mr. Smith without offering him, in the names of the parents and instructors of youth, our heartiest thanks, for the time and labor expended upon his valuable treatise. Where we have differed from him we have candidly expressed our dissent: but our exceptions are few, and do not lower our estimate of the general merits of his compilation.

ART.

ART. IX. Inaugural Discourse of Henry Brougham, Esq. M.P., on being installed Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow, Wednesday, April 6. 1825. 8vo. pp. 51. Constable and Co., Edinburgh; and Longman and Co., London.

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Ew distinctions to which a gentleman may be ambitious to elevate himself are more intrinsically noble than being made choice of to preside over a civil and religious community, so eminent in itself as that comprehended in a University: but when this high dignity is obtained by superior culture of the mental powers, and strict perseverance in a straightforward moral path, the investment is doubly honorable.

The useful theories with which early education stored the mind of Mr. Brougham he must be allowed to have succeeded in carrying very far into practice: every lesson from an authority so competent will, therefore, no doubt, be regarded with attention. A knowlege of words, without an adequate knowlege of things, is of very little value to the world; and the richest treasures of learning, wherever they may happen to be deposited, are only to be estimated in proportion as they are thrown into general circulation for the universal good. These seem to be the leading principles on which Mr. B. founds his opinion on the subject of education, and as they perfectly accord with our own sentiments, we put them categorically, embracing, at the same time, an early opportunity of giving a short account of his inaugural precepts and observations, with such remarks as may be educed by particular parts of the address.

Passing by those salutations which his advancement to the high office of their Lord Rector made a first duty towards those learned friends by whose suffrages he had been elected, the subject of the discourse commences with an earnest exbortation to students to pursue with eager and indefatigable assiduity the many important branches of knowlege which their academic period affords them an opportunity of acquir ing. Many reasons are advanced to shew that no subsequent years can be so well adapted for making efficient progress in the various studies requisite for such as desire to rise to any eminent degree of ascendancy in society, as those passed in the University. The great moral end of all learning is then pointed out; and two special subjects are proposed to which it is meant to confine the remaining part of the discourse, namely, the means of acquiring the art of rhetoric; and, secondly, the purposes to which that art should be made

subservient.

In discussing the former of his two subjects, Mr. B. endeavors to shew the fallacy under which those judge who ima

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