subject,

none which is more likely to bear, remotely or immediately, on your own future pursuits and professions, than this of Authors; and in tracing out some of their relations to life, I think I can inflict less tediousness upon you than if I had selected some topic with a more resounding name, and admitting of more ambitious disquisition. My object will be to set forth their moral and intellectual influence, the physical necessities which have modified the direction of their powers, and the discrepancies observable between their internal and external existence. This will involve a consideration of their relations to their age, to booksellers, and to domestic and social life. You must pardon the remediless superficiality of my view, as each division might well exhaust a volume.

And first, let us refer to the influence of authors, and the position they have occupied in the world.

Without taking into view the lives and thoughts of authors, history becomes an enigma, or a many-volumed lie. We read of wars, crusades, persecutions, ameliorations, of mighty and convulsive changes in opinions and manners, without obtaining any clue to the real causes of events, any insight into the laws of God's providence. Without inweaving literary into civil history, we gain no knowledge of the annals of human nature. We have the body of history without the soul, -events without

ideas,-effects without causes, the very atheism of narrative. The abridgments we study at schools are commonly made up of incidents jumbled together like beads, and unconnected by any thread of reason and reality. It is hardly possible for a boy, studying these works, to grasp any other idea of man than the idea of a being with legs, arms, and appetites.

Now it is a fact that Thought, true or false, beneficial or pernicious, has borne the sceptre of influence in this world's affairs. Impulse, whim and chance, have not been the blind guides of the generations of men. Above all the fret and tumult of active existence, above the decrees of earth's nominal sovereigns, above all the violence and evil which render what is called history so black a record of folly and crime-above all these, there have ever been certain luminous ideas, pillars of fire in the night of time, which have guided and guarded the great army of humanity, in its slow and hesitating, but still onward, progress in knowledge and freedom. It is not the ruler that makes the most noise in the world, that most shapes the world's fortunes. Ten rockets, sent violently into the air, by their blaze and impotent fury, attract all eyes, and seem much finer and grander than the eternal stars; but after their short and rushing life has burnt out, and they have noised themselves into nothingness, the stars still shine serenely on, and seem

almost to look down with contempt on the crowd who have been fooled into fear or admiration. Thus is it in history. The being to whose commands is given a brief omnipotence, whose single word moves myriads of men, on whom power and glory are lavished without measure, is often but the mere instrument of some idea or principle, mightier than he; and to find his master and king, we must travel back years, and perhaps ages, and seek him in the lonely cell of some poor and despised student, whose busy brain is shaping in silence those immaterial substances, destined to shake the world; to fall like fire upon the hearts of men, and kindle in them new life and energy; to overthrow and to rebuild thrones; to be the roots of new moral and intellectual dynasties; and, keeping their way through generation after generation, to come out in the end gloriously or infamously, according as they are founded in justice and truth, or falsehood and wrong. Thus the thinker ever precedes the actor. Thoughts ever have to battle themselves into institutions. The passage of a paradox into a truism is attended with numberless commotions. With these commotions, rather than with the ideas and feelings whence they spring, history has chiefly chosen to deal; and it rarely notices the ten thousand agencies operating on a nation's mind, until revolutions have passed from thoughts into facts, and made themselves

known on fields of stricken battle. Every great originating mind produces in some way a change in society; every great originating mind whose exercise is controlled by duty, effects a beneficial change. This effect may be immediate, may be remote. A nation may be in a tumult to-day, for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago. Thought may be first written in an unintelligible jargon, in Benthamese or Kantese, for instance; but every Bentham finds his Dumont, and every Kant his Cousin. An author may affect his race through conductors. He may be mysterious; others will translate him to the people. He may be a coward; others will do the fighting. He may be a wretch, studious of infamy; Humanity takes the thought, and spurns the man. Many poets who have led lives of luxury and effeminacy, and sat honored guests at the tables of tyrants, have still exalted our conceptions of intellectual excellence, refined our manners, extended the range of our sympathies. They have modified the institutions of society by modifying the mental character of society, of which institutions are the outward expression. A change in thought or prejudice works out, in the end, a change in governments and laws. 66 Beware," says a brilliant essayist, "when the great God lets loose a thinker on this planet. Then all things are at risk."

Authors are thus entitled to a prominent rank

among the producing classes, and their lives deserve a more intelligent scrutiny from the practical men who stigmatize them as dreamers. Their importance has rarely been correctly estimated, either in summing up a nation's wealth or a nation's dangers. Society has played with them its most capricious game of coquetry. The same generation which neglects or tortures a man of letters, will often supply a whole army of admiring commentators to distort his works.

"Ten ancient towns contend for Homer dead,

Through which the living Homer begged his bread."

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person ;" and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, sadden all intellectual history. Is it not strange that the biography of authors should be so steeped in misery, -- that while exercising the most despotic dominion that man can wield over the fortunes of his race, their own lives should so often present a melancholy