as they were poor, the fate is unknown, from the insignificance of those by whom it was endured. If we may reason a a priori on the matter, the chance, I think, should be on the side of literature.

In young minds of any vivacity, there is a natural aversion to the drudgery of business, which is seldom overcome, till the effervescence of youth is allayed by the progress of time and habit, or till that very warmth is enlisted on the side of their profession, by the opening prospects of ambition or emolument. From this tyranny, as youth. conceives it, of attention and of labor, relief is commonly sought from some favorite avocation or amusement, for which a young man either finds or steals a portion of his time, either patiently plods through his task, in expectation of its approach, or anticipates its arrival by deserting his work before the legal period for amusement is arrived. It may fairly be questioned whether the most innocent of those amusements, is either so honorable or so safe as the avocation of learning or of science. Of minds uninformed and gross, whom youthful spirits agitate, but fancy and feeling have no power to impel, the amusement will generally be either boisterous or effeminate, will either dissipate their attention or weaken their force. The employment of a young man's vacant hours is often too little attended to by those rigid masters who exact the most scrupulous observance of the periods destined for business. The waste of time is undoubtedly a very calculable loss of much higher denomination. The votary of study or the enthusiast of fancy, may incur the first, but the latter will be suffered chiefly by him whom ignorance or want of imagination has left to the grossness of mere sensual enjoy

ments.

In this, as in other respects, the love of letters is friendly to sober manners and virtuous conduct, which in every profession is the road to success, and to respect, without adopting the common place reflections against some particular departments, it must be allowed that in mere men of business there is a certain professional rule of right, which is not always honorable, and though meant to be selfish, very seldom profits. A superior education generally corrects this, by opening the mind to different motives of action, to the feelings of delicacy, the sense

of honor, and a contempt of wealth, when earned by a desertion of those principles.

To the improvement of our faculties as well as of our principles, the love of letters appears to be favorable. Letters require a certain sort of application, though of a kind very different from that which business would recommend. Granting that they are unprofitable in themselves, as that word is used in the language of the world, yet, as developing the powers of thought and reflection, they may be an amusement of some use, as those sports of children in which numbers are used to familiarize them to the elements of arithmetic. They give room for the exercise of that discernment, that comparison of objects, that distinction of causes which is to increase the skill of the physician, to guide the speculations of the merchant, and to prompt the arguments of the lawyer; and though some professions employ but very few faculties of the mind, yet there is scarce any branch of business in which a man who can think will not excel him who can only labor. We shall accordingly find, in many departments where learned information seemed of all qualities the least necessary, that those who possessed it in a degree above their fellows, have found, from that very circumstance, the road to eminence and wealth.

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But I must often repeat, that wealth does not necessarily create happiness, nor confer dignity; a truth which it may be thought declamation to insist on, which the present time seems particularly to require being told.

The love of letters is connected with an independence and delicacy of mind, which is a great preservative against that servile homage which abject men pay to fortune; and there is a certain classical pride, which from the society of Socrates and Plato, Cicero and Atticus, looks down with an honest disdain on the wealth-blown insects of modern times, neither enlightened by knowledge nor ennobled by virtue.

In the possession, indeed, of what he has attained in that rest and retirement from his labors, with the hopes of which his fatigues were lightened and his cares were smoothed, the mere man of business frequently undergoes suffering instead of finding enjoyment. To be busy as one ought is an easy art; but to know how to be idle is a very superior accomplishment. This diffi

culty is much increased with persons to whom the habit of employment has m de some active exertion necessary; who cannot sleep contented in the torpor of indolence, or amuse themselves with those lighter trifles in which he, who inherited idleness as he did fortune from his ancestors, has been accustomed to find amusement. The miseries and misfortunes of the "retired pleasures " of men of business have been frequently matters of speculation to the moralist, and of ridicule to the wit. But he who has mixed general knowledge with professional skill, and literary amusements with professional labor, will have some stock wherewith to support him in idleness, some spring for his mind when unbent from business, some employment for those hours which retirement and solitude has left vacant and unoccupied. Independence in the use of one's time is not the least valuable species of freedom. This liberty the man of letters enjoys; while the ignorant and the illiterate often retire from the thraldom of business only to become the slaves of languor, intemperance, or vice.

But the situation in which the advantages of that endowment of mind, which letters bestow, are chiefly conspicuous, is old age, when a man's society is necessarily circumscribed, and his powers of active enjoyment are unavoidably diminished. Unfit for the bustle of affairs, and the amusements of his youth, an old man, if he has no source of mental exertion or employment, often settles into the gloom of melancholy and peevishness, or petrifies his feelings by habitual intoxication. From an old man whose gratifications were solely derived from those sensual appetites which time has blunted, or from those trivial amusements of which youth only can share, age has cut off almost every source of enjoyment. But to him who has stored his mind with the information, and can still employ it in the amusement of letters, this blank of life is admirably filled up. He acts, he thinks, he feels with that literary world whose society he can at all times enjoy. There is perhaps no state more capable of comfort to ourselves, or more attractive of veneration from others, than that which such an old age affords; it is then the twilight of the passions, when they are mitigated but not extinguished, and spread their gentle influence over the evening of our day, in alliance with reason and in amity with virtue. MACKENZIE.

PSALM CXXXVII.

(SCOTCH VERSION,) AS READ BY EDWARD IRVING.

By Babel's streams we sat and wept | when Zion we thought

on;

In midst thereof we hang'd our harps | the willow trees upon. For there a song required they, | who did us captive bring: Our spoilers call'd for mirth and said, | a song of Zion sing.

O how the Lord's song shall we sing | within a foreign land? If thee, Jerusalem, I forget, | skill part from my right hand. My tongue to my mouth's roof let cleave, | if I do thee forget, Jerusalem, and thee above | my chief joy do not set.

Remember Edom's children, Lord, | who in Jerus'lem's days,
Ev'n unto its foundation, | Raze, raze it quite, did say.
O daughter thou of Babylon, | near to destruction;

Bless'd shall be he that thee rewards, | as thou to us hast done.

Yea, happy surely shall he be-thy tender little ones Who shall lay hold upon, and them | shall dash against the stones.

SLAIN AT SADOWs.—Bloomfield Jackson.

The cannon were belching their last

O'er the fields where the routed were flying,

And shouting pursuers strode fast

Through the heaps of the dead and the dying.

War's rage was beginning to wane;

The fierce cared no longer to strike;
And the good stooped to soften the pain
Of victors and vanquished alike.

A yellow-haired Austrian lad

Lay at length on a shot-furrowed bank;

He was comely and daintily clad

In the glittering dress of his rank.

Not so white, though, his coat as his cheek, Nor so red the sash, crossing his chest, As the horrible crimson streak

Of blood that had welled from his breast!

His foes approached where he was laid,
To bear him in reach of their skill;
But he murmured, "Give others your aid;
By our Fatherland! let me lie still."

At dawn they came searching again,

To winnow the quick from the dead; The boy was set free from his pain,

And his faithful young spirit had fled.

As they lifted his limbs from the ground,
To hide them away out of sight,

Lo! under his bosom they found

The flag he had borne through the fight.

He had folded the silk he loved well,

Lest a thread should be seen at his side:

To wave it in triumph he fell;

To save it from capture he died.

The head of the sternest was bared
As they gazed on the shot-riven rag,
And the hand of the hardiest spared

To make prey of that Austrian flag.

O'er the tomb of their brother they bowed,
With a prayer for a spirit as brave;
And they gave him the flag for a shroud

In his narrow and nameless grave.