independence of man in education, for this lofty liberty. The dangers are not to be looked for so much from the stern and forbidding frown, from the repulsive and persecuting spirit; the associates of slavery in our times, use the seductions and allurements of vanity, the incense steaming and reeking round the altars of that cruel goddess, Respectability, or Fashion, or by what other name she may be called; and to him who simply casts away from him conscience, opinion, inquiry, and quietly yields himself to the stream; she says, as her great prototype said, "All these will I give thee if thou wilt fall down and worship me." Credit at the bank, plate in the escrutoire, silks, carpets, broadcloth, mansions, parks-nothing is too vast; your pay shall be proportioned to your prostration- your chains to your slavery. Young friend, determine on the Life of Freedom, and say with brave Sir Henry Wotton

"How happy is he born and taught,

Who serveth not another's will,
Whose armour is his honest thought,
And simple truth his only skill!
This man is saved from servile bands
Of hope to rise, or fear to fall,—
Lord of himself, though not of lands,

And having nothing, yet hath all."

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CHAPTER X.

INTELLECTUAL DANDYISM.

Ar the outset of the Intellectual Life, perhaps it may be as well to guard the young aspirant to the portals of Knowledge against a very common deformity beheld there -the Intellectual Dandy; the spirit of the Fop is not confined to clothes and fashions; there are the Beau Brummels of the Literary Institute, as well as of the tailor's shop. The Literary Fop is, indeed, but a very small affair; as innocent and tame an animal, my friend, as you could well meet. The danger, therefore, is not in anything he can do to you, but in the contamination, and in the possibility that you may become one like him; for this Fop is " a very attractive and agreeable young man,', or, rather, to adopt the patois which such persons use, "a vewy atwactive, agweeable yonng man." It is one of the characteristics of this class of characters that they mutilate the English language most barbarously. Very few words are pronounced with any degree of correctness; their information is supposed to be most extensive, since, travelling from street to street, they have picked up a vast hodgepodge, a kind of "Omnium gatherum," without any reference to quality, but with great reference to quantity,

and there is no book, no science, no paper, no person, upon which or whom they are not prepared to pronounce dogmatic strictures. They are a kind of gad-fly dancing about in all the pools, and over all the fields of life; their shirtfronts presenting a perfect white table-land, and ties of most startling projection; vests after the most approved stair-carpet fashion, and trowsers to match,-being rather more gaudy. Everything of body and mind is arranged to strike with surprise; those books, therefore, are read, which all people are talking about. Their heads are vacant, usually, of any information, though ready enough to follow in the wake of the clap-trap orator of Mechanics' Institutes or Literary Societies. It may safely be questioned whether any of the Motley group ever read a really serious book, or a book that had a serious purpose. The life of these young men is an everlasting offering upon the altar of Sensuality and Selfishness; everything in the world is made to reflect the character of self; they truly deserve the character of the Poet: they are, wherever found,

"A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,

An intellectual all-in-all."

These characters are not rare. They are the Commons of the Senate of which Chesterfield was a Peer. In some instances, they possess a larger average of intelligence than in the above lines we give them credit for; but the real substratum of the character is vanity. In this age the propensity of the village clown to decorate his person, and to appear occasionally to the best advantage, is not sufficient for those who occupy the same position in their sphere

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which the clown occupies in his; they are desirous of ranging above him. Read, therefore, they must; but their reading is confined to the pages of Dickens, or Thackeray, or the Shilling Novel Library; and, as books like these are very generally read, and they have read them with the same avidity as other persons, their criticisms are very cheaply won, and very well received. They belong in this age, precisely to the class of persons to which, in the days of the Vicar of Wakefield," Georgiana Carolina Wilhelmina Amelia Skeggs" belonged; they have learned the name of Shakspeare, whom they always call "the gifted, the universal, and the immortal;" and they are qualified to talk upon the merits and the meaning of Shakspeare with Miss Skeggs. Their scorn of mediocrity is a good joke; they have confidence in their own powers; they have picked up the slang of charlatans and mountebanks, and of course can talk about "the spirit of the age;" about "the mighty thoughts heaving in the breast of the future;' about "the scintillations, hallucinations, &c., &c., brightening in the eye of Humanity." Nothing is more sickly than the Euphonistic verbiage of this disgusting and meaningless common-place in their minds and on their tongues. Poor things! it means nothing! it is innocent! For it is lifeless, words are used which, to their minds, never had a meaning; and thus their characters present an everlasting lie. For here lies, indeed, the sadness of all this hollowness. Who that has thought at all does not know the danger of moral sentiment, unaccompanied by active virtue ? The remarks of the Rev. Archibald Alison are

worthy of some pondering, when he insists that the faithful parent, or the wise instructor, will ever endeavour assiduously to accommodate the ideas of excellence to the actual circumstances, and the probable scenes, in which their future years are to be engaged. If the life is not thus prepared, what a melancholy failure does it usually exhibit. 'It is the fine drawn scenes of visionary distress to which they have been accustomed, not the plain circumstances of common wretchedness; it is the momentary exertions of generosity or greatness which have elevated their fancy, not the long and patient struggle of pious duty; it is before an admiring world that they have hitherto conceived themselves to act-not in solitude and obscurity, amid the wants of poverty, the exigencies of disease, or the deep silence of domestic sorrow. Is it wonderful that characters of this enfeebled kind should recoil from the duties to which they are called, and which appear to them in colours so unexpected?-that they should consider the world as a gross and a vulgar scene, unworthy of their interest, and its common obligations as something beneath them to perform; and that with an affectation of proud superiority, they should wish to retire from a field in which they have the presumption to think it is only fit for vulgar minds to combat?

"From hence come many classes of character with which the world presents us, in what we call its higher scenes, and which it is impossible to behold without a sentiment of pity as well as of indignation. In some, the perpetual affectation of sentiment, and the per