What can some branches of literature effect towards the refinements of social life-writers on law, for example? They may enable the lawyer to improve his practice, and arrive at the end for which he labourshis private profit: for, in spite of cant, this is the sole object of the profession. For this, the members drudge and dispute on both sides of a question, or on either side, just as they are hired, and their efforts, in plain fact, are alone directed to their individual advantage. There is no enthusiasm in the pursuit beyond what springs from the love of gain, and, inasmuch as it is for the public good, that intricate and contradictory laws should be made clear, when they can be made so at all, writers on law may be merely styled useful, and nothing more. A pure legislation must depend on civilization; but this is not the lawyer's, but the statesman's calling, and emanates from public opinion, expressed by its representatives, and its spirit must be governed by the variations of time and circumstances. Writers on grammar, medicine, and technical and limited arts, contribute, indirectly and remotely, to refinement. The Bentleys of their age, who devote volumes to the correction of a comma, or the supposed use of an obsolete letter, are but abstractedly beneficial, inasmuch as they smooth the way to learning for the great spirits that are destined to operate good through the medium of the passions. Those writers who appeal to reason, make very slow progress in imposing conviction, compared with those who operate the other way. By the alchemy of association, and the power to appeal to the heart through its vivid pictures, more impression age. He contemplated them as not of his own time, and with the impartiality of a future and wiser generation. Vulgar minds cannot comprehend the ideas of men of genius; they think them audacities, or chimerical innovations; but they who contribute to the improvement of mankind, belong but a small part of them to the present time,—they are the heritage of unborn ages. Honest and good men may labour in their world of realities in a circle of minute duration, be useful, industrious, and virtuous followers in a beaten track, content with what they see, and thinking the world precisely as it should be in every respect. They, however, are but the wheels of society, not the moving causes. Sir Thomas More is a remarkable instance among imaginative writers, and seems at first to constitute an exception to the foresight, if it may be demonstrated, of that class. But he was bred a lawyer, and suffered the pernicious leaven of the profession to neutralize the effect of the divine spirit with which he wrote. More condemned persecution in his works as not fit for his Utopian state of society; but he practised it, from his inveterate obedience to custom, when he should have nobly resisted it from principle. Writers of imagination, by what is wrongly called deception, more properly fiction, send us in search of better things than we already possess. Present and limited use is not so much their object as to delight and allure. From the spirit of correction and improvement, which originates in the desire of possessing better things than we see around us, old and bad laws are repeated, the legislative body bows to public opi as the individuals whom chance, interest, or caprice, may have elevated to carry on affairs of state for the monarch, where talent and intellect should have constituted the qualification-talent that, discarding prejudice, would have assimilated things to the light of the age-is one great cause of the present feverish feeling of some European nations. In Russia, for instance, where the court is among a dark people, it is still the centre of the intellectual refinement of the empire. Writers of imagination, born with more vivid conceptions than other men, have lived in an ideal world, which the nature of human desires led them to pourtray more perfect and noble than the world of reality. This gave them more independent spirits, more lofty and romantic ideas, and also enabled them to reason; for Locke allows, that it is not necessary for men to devote their lives in the study of logic, to reason well. Pure thoughts and lofty principles, influenced by genius, that do not suffer common prejudices to affect them, will weigh things with the greatest impartiality, and come to the most rational conclusions. In past, and even in the present days, how much that the world sanctions, appears absurd and barbarous in the eye of genius. The judges would have burnt all the old women in England without compunction, if evidence had been tendered that they were witches, in the days of John Milton, and even for fifty years afterwards; the poet, we may answer for it, would not have condemned one. Dante would never have made a hell for many great men of his time, deemed by the multitude among the mighty and noble, had he looked upon them with the eyes of his own age. He contemplated them as not of his own time, and with the impartiality of a future and wiser generation. Vulgar minds cannot comprehend the ideas of men of genius; they think them audacities, or chimerical innovations; but they who contribute to the improvement of mankind, belong but a small part of them to the present time,-they are the heritage of unborn ages. Honest and good men may labour in their world of realities in a circle of minute duration, be useful, industrious, and virtuous followers in a beaten track, content with what they see, and thinking the world precisely as it should be in every respect. They, however, are but the wheels of society, not the moving causes. Sir Thomas More is a remarkable instance among imaginative writers, and seems at first to constitute an exception to the foresight, if it may be demonstrated, of that class. But he was bred a lawyer, and suffered the pernicious leaven of the profession to neutralize the effect of the divine spirit with which he wrote. More condemned persecution in his works as not fit for his Utopian state of society; but he practised it, from his inveterate obedience to custom, when he should have nobly resisted it from principle. Writers of imagination, by what is wrongly called deception, more properly fiction, send us in search of better things than we already possess. Present and limited use is not so much their object as to delight and allure. From the spirit of correction and improvement, which originates in the desire of possessing better things than we see around us, old and bad laws are repeated, the legislative body bows to public opi how they sparkled with native radiance! What a contrast they formed to the bigotry, prejudice, and ignorance of ecclesiastical writers, and the plodders after the dogmas of blind scholastics! Before philosophy glimmered, and Galileo was incarcerated by churchmen for promulgating sublime truths, too vast for the understandings of Monks and Cardinals, writers of imagination had forced their way for ages, and satirised the crimes of consistories, and the knavery of the Apostolic Church,-thus insensibly undermining the Vatican Fiction, triumphed in the cause of truth, and, opening the eyes of mankind, innovated on established order, preparing Europe for the reformation. Boccaccio, by exposing the licentiousness of the Clergy in his Decameron, contributed to this good end nearly two hundred years before Luther appeared. There seemed to be such an innate love in remote times, for writers of imagination, that they flourished in spite of secular and ecclesiastical opposition, secretly applauded by the.enlightened among the great, at a time when works of science, that interfered with superstition, would have been strangled in their birth, and their authors burned at the stake by a council of churchmen from pure l'amour de Dieu. Poetry being the first step among barbarous nations towards refinement, made way for civilization; while in latter times, princes and courts loved and encouraged poets, and writers of romance were deemed almost divine. But the regard for literature is now more strong among the people. Modern princes have not kept pace with the advancement of their people, because taste and knowledge cannot increase heredi |