Finally in all you do, whether relating to the management of your school, or to the regulation of your private studies, ACT UPON A PLAN. Sketch out, every morning, the business of the day, and then pursue the appointed duty with freshness of spirit, with interest, and with hope. You may find it difficult, perhaps impossible, to plan for any extended period, but plan you must. Without pre-considered and definite arrangements, you will never be able to conduct satisfactorily the complicated business of a school, or to pursue with advantage any course of private study.

Much more might be added. A thousand suggestions crowd upon my mind, for which I can find no place; suggestions relating to the general discipline of the mind; to the improvement of the faculties; to the attainment of selfknowledge; to the repression of pride, selfishness, and envy; to the cultivation of devout affections; the quickening of conscience; the cherishing of purity, honor, punctuality, and prudence; the regulation of general reading and conversation; the schooling of the heart; and the absolute necessity of constant dependence on that divine and blessed Spirit, without whose aid even the renewed soul cannot lift its affections heavenward. All this, and much more, should come under notice, were I not checked by the thought, that this species of advice, which would of itself make a volume, has already been offered by others, in every way better qualified than myself to impart such instruction. One word only would I add :-Let no day pass without spending some portion of your time alone with God. "An hour of solitude, passed in sincere and earnest prayer, or, in conflict with, and conquest over a single passion, or subtle bosom sin,' will teach more of thought, will more effectually awaken the faculty, and form the habit of reflection, than a year's study in the schools without them."*

6

ART. IV.-USES OF LABOR.

For all men doubtless obstructions abound; spiritual growth must be hampered and stunted, and has to struggle through with

* Coleridge.

difficulty, if it do not wholly stop. We may grant too that, for a mediocre character, the continual training and tutoring, from language-masters, dancing-masters, posture-masters of all sorts, hired and volunteer, which a high rank in any time or country assures, there will be produced a certain superiority, or at worst, air of superiority, over the corresponding mediocre character of low rank thus we perceive the vulgar Do-nothing, as contrasted with the vulgar Drudge, is in general a much prettier man; with a wider perhaps clearer outlook into the distance; in innumerable superficial matters, however it may be when we go deeper, he has a manifest advantage. But with the man of uncommon character, again, in whom a germ of irrepressible Force has been implanted, and will unfold itself into some sort of freedom, altogether the reverse may hold. For such germs, too, there is, undoubtedly enough, a proper soil where they will grow best, and an improper one where they will grow worst. True also, where there is a will, there is a way; where a genius has been given, a possibility, a certainty of its growing is also given. Yet often it seems as if the injudicious gardening and manuring were worse than none at all; and killed what the inclemencies of blind chance would have spared. We find accordingly that few Frederics or Napoleons, indeed none since the great Alexander, who unfortunately drank himself to death too soon for proving what lay in him, were nursed up with an eye to their vocation: mostly with an eye quite the other way, in the midst of isolation and pain, destitution and contradiction. Nay, in our own times, have we not seen two men of genius, a Byron and a Burns; they both, by mandate of Nature, struggle and must struggle towards clear Manhood, stormfully enough, for the space of six-and-thirty years; yet only the gifted Ploughman can partially prevail therein the gifted Peer must toil and strive, and shoot out in wild efforts, yet die at last in Boyhood, with the promise of his Manhood still but announcing itself in the distance. Truly, as was once written, it is only the artichoke that will not grow except in gardens; the acorn is cast carelessly abroad into the wilderness, yet on the wild soil it nourishes itself, and rises to be an oak.' All woodmen, moreover, will tell you that fat manure is the ruin of your oak; likewise that the thinner and wilder your soil, the tougher, more iron-texture is your timber, though, unhappily, also the smaller. So too with the spirits of men: they become pure from their errors, by suffering for them; he who has battled, were it only with Poverty and hard toil, will be found stronger, more expert, than he who could stay at home from the battle, concealed among the Provision-wagons, or even not unwatchfully abiding by the stuff.' In which sense, an observer, not without experience of our time,

has said: 'Had I a man of clearly developed character (clear, within its limits,) of insight, courage, and real applicable force of head and of heart, to search for; and not a man of luxuriously distorted character, with haughtiness for courage, and for insight and applicable force, speculation and plausible show of force, it were rather among the lower than among the higher classes that I should look for him.'

A hard saying, indeed, seems this same: that he, whose other wants were all beforehand supplied; to whose capabilities no problem was presented except even this, How to cultivate them to best advantage, should attain less real culture than he whose first grand problem and obligation was nowise spiritual culture, but hard labor for his daily bread! Sad enough must the perversion be where preparations of such magnitude issue in abortion; and a so sumptuous Art with all its appliances can accomplish nothing, not so much as necessitous Nature would of herself have supplied! Nevertheless, so pregnant is Life with evil as with good; to such height in an age rich, plethorically overgrown with means, can means be accumulated in the wrong place, and immeasurably aggravate wrong tendencies, instead of righting them, this sad and strange result may actually turn out to be realized.

But what, after all, is meant by uneducated, in a time when Books have come into the world; come to be household furniture in every habitation of the civilized world? In the poorest cottage are Books; is one Book, wherein for several thousands of years the spirit of man has found light, and nourishment, and an interpreting response to whatever is Deepest in him; wherein still, to this day, for the eye that will look well, the Mystery of Existence reflects itself, if not resolved, yet revealed, and prophetically emblemed: if not to the satisfying of the outward sense, yet to the opening of the inward sense, which is the far grander result. 'In Books lie the creative Phoenix-ashes of the Past. All that men have devised, discovered, done, felt, or imagined, lies recorded in Books; wherein whoso has learned the mystery of spelling printed letters, may find it, and appropriate it.

Nay, what indeed is all this? As if it were by universities and libraries and lecture rooms, that man's Education, what we can call Education, were accomplished; solely, or mainly, by instilling the dead letter and record of other men's Force, that the living Force of a new man were to be awakened, enkindled, and purified into victorious clearness! Foolish Pedant, that sittest there compassionately descanting on the Learning of Shakspeare! Shakspeare had penetrated into innumerable things; far into Nature with her divine Splendors and infernal Terrors, her Ariel Melodies, and mystic mandragora Moans;

far into man's workings with Nature, into man's Art and Artifice; Shakspeare knew (kenned, which in those days still partially meant can-ned) innumerable things; what men are, and what the world is, and how and what men aim at there, from the Dame Quickly of modern Eastcheap, to the Cæsar of ancient Rome, over many countries, over many centuries: of all this he had the clearest understanding and constructive comprehension; all this was his Learning and Insight; what now is thine? Insight into none of those things; perhaps, strictly considered, into no thing whatever solely into thy own sheepskin diplomas, fat academic honors, into vocables and alphabetic letters, and but a little way into these!-The grand result of schooling is a mind with just vision to discern, with free force to do: the grand schoolmaster is Practice.

And now, when kenning and can-ning have become two altogether different words; and this, the first principle of human culture, the foundation-stone of all but false imaginary culture, that men must, before every other thing, be trained to do somewhat, has been, for some generations, laid quietly on the shelf, with such result as we see,-consider what advantage those same uneducated Working classes have over the educated Unworking classes, in one particular; herein, namely that they must work. To work! What incalculable sources of cultivation lie in that process, in that attempt; how it lays hold of the whole man, not of a small theoretical calculating fraction of him, but of the whole practical, doing and daring and enduring man; thereby to awaken dormant faculties, root out old errors, at every step! He that has done nothing has known nothing. Vain is it to sit scheming and plausibly discoursing: up and be doing! If thy knowledge be real, put it forth from thee: grapple with real Nature; try thy theories there, and see how they hold out. Do one thing, for the first time in thy life do a thing; a new light will rise to thee on the doing of all things whatsoever. Truly, a boundless significance lies in work whereby the humblest craftsman comes to attain much, which is of indispensable use, but which he who is of no craft, were he never so high, runs the risk of missing. Once turn to Practice, Error and Truth will no longer consort together the result of Error involves you in the square-root of a negative quantity; try to extract it, or any earthly substance or sustenance from it, if you will! The honorable Member can discover that there is a re-action,' and believe it, and wearisomely reason on it, in spite of all men, while he so pleases, for still his wine and his oil will not fail him but the sooty Brazier, who discovered that brass was green-cheese, has to act on his discov. ery; finds therefore, that, singular as it may seem, brass cannot

be masticated for dinner, green-cheese will not beat into fireproof dishes that such discovery, therefore, has no legs to stand on, and must even be let fall. Now, take this principle of difference through the entire lives of two men, and calculate what it will amount to! Necessity, moreover, which we here see the mother of Accuracy, is well known as the mother of Invention. He who wants every thing, must know many things, do many things, to procure even a few different enough with him, whose indispensable knowledge is this only, that a finger will pull the bell!

For the Annals of Education.

ART. V.-ANTHON'S GREEK GRAMMAR.

A GRAMMAR OF THE GREEK LANGUAGE, for the use of Schools and Colleges. By Charles Authon, LL. D., Jay Professor of the Greek and Latin Languages in Columbia College, New York, and Rector of the Grammar School. New York: Harper & Brothers, 82 Cliff Street, 1838.

THIS volume is one of a series of College and School Classics now in course of publication by Professor Anthon. The series thus far. consists of Horace, Cæsar's Commentaries, Select Orations of Cicero, Sallust, a Greek Grammar, Greek First Lessons, and Latin First Lessons. These editions are marked by great excellencies and defects, exhibiting extensive learning, some ostentation of it, and in some respects a singular want of judicious adaptation to the classes of students into whose hands they are likely to fall. We hope to be able to present to our readers, before long, a more complete criticism of these works.

The Greek Grammar which belongs to the series, has been in our hands a twelvemonth, more or less. We gave it a rather careful examination some time ago, and finding it to be crude and imperfect, laid it aside, not as worthless, but as being by no means what a Greek Grammar for our days ought to be. Our attention has been called to this book again, by reading commendatory notices of it, in works which ought to speak deliberately as they speak with authority,* in which it is affirmed to be not only in advance of any other

See the New York Review, Knickerbocker, Democratic Magazine, &e