THE people with the fewest ideas of all others are mere authors and readers. It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else. A person who is ordinarily seen with a book in his hand, is (we may be tolerably sure) equally without the power, or unwilling to be at the trouble, of attending to what passes around him, or in his own mind. Such a one may be said to carry his understanding about with him in his pocket, or to leave it at home on the shelves of his library. He is afraid of venturing on any train

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of reasoning, or of striking out any observation that is not mechanically suggested to him by passing his eyes over certain legible characters; shrinks from the fatigue of thought, which, for want of practice, becomes insupportable to him; and sits down contented with an endless wearisome succession of words and half-formed images, which fill the void of the mind, and continually efface one another. Learning is, for the most part, but a foil to common sense; a substitute for true knowledge. Books are less often made use of as spectacles" to look at nature with, than as blinds to keep out its strong light and shifting scenery from weak eyes and indolent understandings. The bookworm wraps himself up in his web of verbal generalities, and sees only the glimmering shadows of things reflected from the minds of others. Nature puts him out. The impressions of real objects, stripped of the disguises of words and voluminous round-about descriptions, are blows that stagger him; their variety distracts, their rapidity exhausts him; and he turns and whirling motion of the world afrom the bustle, the noise, and glare, round him, (which he has not an eye to follow in its fantastic changes, nor an understanding to reduce to fixed principles,) to the quiet monotony of the dead languages, and the less startling and more intelligible combinations of the letters of the alphabet. It is well, it is perfectly well. me to my repose," is the motto of the sleeping and the dead. You might as well ask the paralytic to leap from his chair and throw away his crutch, or, without a miracle, to "take up his bed and walk," as expect the learned reader to throw down his book and think for himself. He clings to it for his intellectual existence; and his dread of being left to himself is like the horror of a vacuum. He can only breathe a learned atmosphere, as other men breathe common air. He is a borrower of sense. He has no ideas of his own, and must live on those of other people. The habit of supplying our ideas from foreign sources "enfeebles all internal strength of thought," as a course of dram-drinking destroys the tone of the stomach. The faculties of the mind, when not exerted, or when cramped by custom and authority, be

Leave

Learning is the knowledge of that which is not generally known to others, and which we can only derive at second-hand from books or other artificial sources. The knowledge of that which is before us, or about us, which appeals to our experience, passions, and pursuits, to the bosoms and businesses of men, is not learning. Learning is the knowledge of that which none but the learned know. He is the most learned man who knows the most of what is farthest removed from common life and actual observation, that is of the least practical utility, and least liable to be brought to the test of experience, and that, being handed down through the greatest number of intermediate stages, is the most full of uncertainty, difficulties, and contradictions. It is seeing with the eyes of others, hearing with their cars, and pinning our faith on their understandings. The learned man prides himself in the knowledge of names, dates, and places, not of men or things. He thinks and cares nothing about his next door neighbours, but he is deeply read in the tribes and casts of the Hindoos and Calmuc Tartars. He can hardly find his way into the next street, though he is acquainted with the exact dimensions of Constantinople and Pekin. He does not know whether his dearest friend is a knave or a fool, but he can pronounce a pompous lecture on all the principal characters in history. He cannot tell whether an object is black or white, round or square, and yet he is a professed master of the laws of optics and the rules of perspective. He knows as much of what he talks about, as a blind man does of colours. He cannot give a satisfactory answer to the plainest question, nor is he ever in the right in any one of his opinions, upon any one matter of fact that really comes before him, and yet he gives himself out for an infallible judge on all those points, of which it is impossible that he or any other person living should know any thing but by conjecture. He is expert in all the dead and in most of the living languages; but he can neither speak his own fluently, nor write it correctly. A person of this class, the second Greek scholar of his day, undertook to point out solecisms in Milton's Latin style; and in his own preface

VOL. III.

there is hardly a sentence of common English.

Such was Dr ****** Such is Dr****. Such was not Porson. He was an exception that confirmed the general rule,-a man that, by uniting talents and knowledge with learning, made the distinction between them more striking and palpable.

A mere scholar who knows nothing but books, must be ignorant even of them. "Books do not teach the use of books." How should he know any thing of a work, who knows nothing of the subject of it? The learned pedant is conversant with books only as they are made of other books, and those again of others, without end. He parrots those who have parrotted others. He can translate the same word into ten different languages, but he knows nothing of the thing which it means in any one of them. He stuffs his head with authorities built on authorities, with quotations quoted from quotations, while he locks up his senses, his understanding, and his heart. He is unacquainted with the maxims and manners of the world; he is to seek in the characters of individuals. He sees no beauty in the face of nature or of art. To him "the mighty world of eye and ear" is hid; and "knowledge," except at one entrance, "quite shut out." His pride takes part with his ignorance; and his self-importance rises with the number of things of which he does not know the value, and which he therefore despises as unworthy of his notice. He knows nothing of pictures;-of the colouring of Titian, the grace of Raphael, the purity of Domenichino, the cor regiescity of Correggio, the learning of Poussin, the airs of Guido, the taste of the Caraccis, or the grand contour of Michael Angelo," of all those glories of the Italian and miracles of the Flemish school, which have filled the eyes of mankind with delight, and to the study and imitation of which thousands have in vain devoted their lives. These are to him as if they had never been, a mere dead letter, a byeword; and no wonder; for he neither sees nor understands their prototypes in nature. A print of Rubens's Watering-place, or Claude's Enchanted Castle, inay be hanging on the walls of his room for months without his once noticing them; and if you point ther

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out to him, he will turn away from them. The language of nature, or of art, that is another nature, is one that he does not understand. He repeats indeed the names of Appelles and Phidias, because they are to be found in classic authors, and boasts of their works as prodigies, because they no longer exist; or when he sees the finest remains of Grecian art actually before him in the Elgin marbles, takes no other interest in them than as they lead to a learned dispute, and (which is the same thing) a quarrel about the meaning of a Greek particle. He is equally ignorant of music; he "knows no touch of it," from the strains of the all-accomplished Mozart to the shepherd's pipe upon the mountain. His ears are nailed to his books; and bermetically sealed with the sound of the Greek and Latin tongues, and the din and smithery of school-learning. Does he know any thing more of poetry? He knows the number of feet in a verse, and of acts in a play; but of the soul or spirit he knows nothing. He can turn a Greek ode into English, or a Latin epigram into Greek verse, but whether either is worth the trouble, he leaves to the critics. Does he understand "the act and practique part of life" better than "the theorique?" No. He knows no liberal or mechanic art; no trade or occupation; no game of skill or chance. Learning" has no skill in surgery," in agriculture, in building, in working in wood or in iron; it cannot make any instrument of la

This general indifference in literary bigots to works of art, sometimes takes a more offensive shape; and joined with a little knowledge, and inordinate vanity, breaks out into a jealous impatience of all competition in the career of excellence. "My G-d," said a celebrated author of the present day, when introduced to a cellection of books of prints and antiques, "what a quantity of things you have here; and then there are those devils in the corner," pointing to a group of Cupid and Psyche in the room. One might have thought that the beauty and sweetness of these two figures might have disarmed even the monstrous ostracism of this person's vanity, and reconciled him to the intoler able idea that there was a sense of beauty and power in the world before he ever wrote a line, and that a taste for elegance could not be quite banished from it, though he should write on for ever. There is only e person in the three kingdoms of whom this story is credible.

bour, or use it when made; it cannot handle the plough or the spade, or the chisel or the hammer; it knows nothing of hunting or hawking, fishing or shooting, of horses or dogs, of fencing or dancing, or cudgel playing, or bowls, or cards, or tennis, or any thing else. The learned professor of all arts and sciences cannot reduce any one of them to practice, though he may contribute an account of them to an encyclopædia. He has not the use of his hands or of his feet; he can neither run, nor walk, nor swim; and he considers all those who actually understand and can exercise any of these arts of body or mind, as vulgar and mechanical men;-though to know almost any one of them in perfection requires long time and practice, with powers originally fitted, and a turn of mind particularly devoted to them. It does not require more to enable the learned candidate to arrive, by painful study, at a doctor's degree and a fellowship, and to eat, drink, and sleep, the rest of his life!

The thing is plain. All that men really understand, is confined to a very small compass; to their daily business and experience; to what they have an opportunity to know, and motives to study or practise. The rest is affectation and imposture. The common people have the use of their limbs; for they live by their labour or skill. They understand their own business, and the characters of those they have to deal with; for it is necessary that they should. They have eloquence to ex press their passions, and wit at will to express their contempt and laughter. Their natural use of speech is not imprisoned in solemn mockery, in an obsolete language; nor is their sense of what is ludicrous, or readiness at finding out allusions to express it, buried in collections of Anas. You will hear more good things on the outside of a stage coach from London to Oxford, than if you were to pass a twelvemonth with the under graduates, or heads of colleges, of that famous university; and more home truths are to be learnt from listening to a noisy debate in an alehouse, than from attending to a formal one in the House of Commons. An elderly country gentlewoman will often know more of character, and be able to illustrate it by more amusing anecdotes taken from

the history of what has been said, done, and happened in a country town for the last fifty years, than the best blue-stocking of the age will be able to glean from that sort of learning which consists in an acquaintance with all the novels and satirical poems published in the same period. People in towns, indeed, are woefully deficient in a knowledge of character, which they see only in the bust, not as a whole length. People in the country not only know all that has happened to a man, but trace his virtues or vices, as they do his features, in their descent through several generations, and solve some contradiction in his behaviour by a cross in the breed, half a century ago. The learned know nothing of the matter, either in town or country. Above all, the mass of the people have common sense, which the learned in all ages want. The vulgar are in the right when they judge for themselves; they are wrong when they trust to their blind guides. The celebrated nonconformist divine, Baxter, was almost stoned to death by the good women of Kidderminster, for asserting from the pulpit that "hell was paved with infants' skulls;" but, by the force of argument, and of learned quotations from the Fathers, the reverend preacher at length prevailed over the scruples of his congregation.

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Such is the use which has been made of human learning. The labourers in this vineyard seem as if it was their object to confound all common sense, and the distinctions of good and evil, by means of traditional systems and preconceived notions, taken upon trust, and increasing in absurdity, with increase of age. They pile hypothesis on hypothesis, mountain high, till it is impossible to come at the plain truth on any question. They see things, not as they are, but as they find them in books; and "wink and shut their apprehensions up," in order that they may discover nothing to interfere with their prejudices, or convince them of their absurdity. It might be supposed, that the height of human wisdom consisted in maintaining contradictions, and rendering nonsense sacred. There is

See Bickerstaff's account of his own pedigree in the Tatler.

no dogma, however fierce or foolish, to which these persons have not set their seals, and tried to impose on the understandings of their followers, as the will of Heaven, clothed with all the terrors and sanctions of religion. How little has the human understanding been directed to find out the true and useful! How much ingenuity has been thrown away in the defence of creeds and systems! How much time and talents have been wasted in theological controversy, in law, in politics, in verbal criticism, in judicial astrology, and in finding out the philosopher's stone! What benefit do we reap from the writings of a Butler or a Berkeley, or of Bishop Bull or Bishop Waterland, or Prideaux' Connections, or Beausobre, or Calmet, or St Augustine, or Puffendorf, or Grotius, or from the more profane, but equally learned and unprofitable labours of Scaliger, Cardan, and Scioppius? How many grains of sense are there in their thousand folio or quarto volumes? What would the world lose if they were committed to the flames to-morrow? Yet all these were oracles in their time, and would have scoffed at you or me, at common sense and human nature, for differing with them. It is our turn to laugh now.

To conclude this subject. The most sensible people to be met with in society, are artists and men of business. The first are obliged to form pretty accurate notions of things be fore they can represent them to the life; the last are taught to make their calculations right, by feeling the consequences to themselves if they do not. Women in general have more of what is called good sense, than men. They have fewer pretensions; are less implicated in theories; and judge of things more from their immediate and involuntary impression on the mind, and, therefore, more truly and

*And all things weighed in custom's falsest scale;

Opinion an omnipotence, whose veil Mantles the earth with darkness until right

And wrong are accidents, and men grow pale,

Lest their own judgments should become too bright,

And their free thoughts be crimes, and earth have too much light." CHILDE HAROLD