"No, not quite enough; but he cuts a figure, though, now, mind, I tell ye." N. He does indeed, particularly as Secretary. One of his late State-papers is almost as full of figures as the Census." C. So I said, when I read it. The world rubs its eyes, I guess, when he writes, don't it now?" N. Oh, certainly, and would be glad to close them again. But his figures, though very bold and strong-far too strong, indeed, for the facts, were very dark-negro figures, altogether." C. Wall, now, I did notice that his figures was a little niggerfied; but any how, as you say, they're very strong indeed." N. "Well, don't you think Crittenden, Rives, Preston, and Buchanan are strong men?" C. "I guess they are! Ain't it fun to hear them great speakers?" N. "Oh, capital! There's Colonel Benton, too, a great man, and a great egotist." C. Yes, sir; he's great any how." N. "He's the great author of the Gold Humbug.'" C. "So he is a great author, very great, indeed." N. "But there's another Colonel, who has run for Lieutenant-General in the Loco army, but who is willing to serve as kettle-drum Major, or even to march in the rank and file.' He is a great man; and, like a true soldier, has shown a deep attachment to the colors." C. "Yes, he likes the colors, I tell ye, and he'll die by 'em." N. "But don't you think Wright, and Van Buren, and Tyler, and Polk are great men!" C. Yes, sir, all of 'em; very great men." N. "The first, is the Great Magician; the second, the Little Magician; the third, the Great Traitor; the fourth, the Great Unknown." C. "Jest what I've often said, sir." N. "It seems to me, that we have more great men than we need. Isn't it a pity some three or four of them-for instance, Calhoun, Benton, and Van Buren-had not been born in other countries, to diffuse the blessings of progressive democracy?" C. "I think it is now, a very great pity, very great, indeed. We could supply the world with Presidents, not to mention Vice-Presidents and Governors." N. "Yes, indeed. What a pity, too, that here and there one of our great men indulges too freely in unnatural excitements, instead of remaining strictly aquæ potator!' You underOh, yes," said he, with great gravity, but eyeing us very closely, Oh, certingly. Though I can't say I like to see men such very queer potatoes.' The greatest men, though, are always a leetle queer. But, queer or not, the men stand me?" ་ 66 C. we've named ain't small potatoes, are they?" N. "No, sir, I consider them all to be large ones." C. "That they are, the thumpin'est kind of big ones, or else I don't know nothing about it." After a pause of about a minute, with a violent, but invisible and noiseless inward cachination, we said, "From your very remarkable taste and knowledge, I should hope you are a Loco-that is--a DemoC. crat." I ain't nothin' else, I guess." N. "That shows your judgment. All great men are Locos, except six.'" So I think. I s'pose you're a Loco, of course?" N. " I'm almost afraid to say, for fear you'd tell on me, if we should be beaten." C. Indeed, I wouldn't, friend. I'm dark as a wolf's mouth.” N. Well, now, don't mention it. I'm a WHIG, sir-a Whig now and always, here and everywhere." C. "The d―l, you are! Now, who'd have thought it? Wall, many men of many minds.' I'm not a very strong Democrat, myself. Henry Clay's a great man, very great, very great, indeed." N. "Yes, sir, too great for us to criticise, or for his country to appreciate. Good day, sir." 66 C. Why, now you ain't a-going a'ready? Take another cigar." N. "I thank you sir. I have had sufficient enjoyment in smoking' the biped." And thus we parted,-he apparently pondering over the occult meaning of our last remark; and we thoroughly diverted at the ex cathedrâ decisions of the fellow, who found his bliss not in his real ignorance, but in the dubious conceit that he was wise. And oftimes since that comical display of stolid presumption--while sitting in our studio, absorbed by grave books, or sorrowful reflections; or when in the deep midnight, we have gazed through the wavering light on the face of the carved angel, and counted the footsteps of the minutes by the tickings of the ancient clock, wondering whether they have any mode of computing the golden years of Heaven, and if the faces of the angels, that see GoD alway,' have not some faint antetype in the loveliest imaginings of earth-the twinkling eyes and vapid face of the pseudocritic have inexplicably risen up before us, awaking uncalled for laughter-yetonly to carry us still farther back to the sad fair girl-how fair! how mournful!who passed into the earth-nay, not there, but into Heaven-so early-because, Whom the gods love, die young.' NOSMETIPSI. HOW SHALL LIFE BE MADE THE MOST OF? IN our country, individual success and eminence, and social improvement, have been to an indefinite degree retarded by two bad habits prevalent in all classes of society. One is the habit of entering upon an avocation or profession without a competent preliminary education; the other, that of changing professions at pleasure, so that a man of seventy years of age will often have pursued from two to five or six different callings at different periods of his life. To these wasteful habits, there is a tendency to add a third, derived from the earliest and most barbarous ages, that of combining several professions in the same person at the same time. Believing that these habits, and the notions on which they are based, are false in theory, and radically bad in practice, we design, in the present article, to maintain in opposition to them the following propositions:-1. Every man ought to be thoroughly educated for his profession or calling, whatever it be. 2. A man ought to continue through life in the same profession. 3. No man should statedly exercise more than one calling at a time. These propositions may seem obvious; yet our readers will see, we think, in the sequel, that they need reiteration and enforcement. I. Every man ought to be thoroughly educated for his profession or calling, whatever it be. We might make a general division of the different callings exercised in a community into mechanical and liberal, or those which are exercised chiefly by hand-labor, and those which are exercised mainly by mental labor, the results of which are made available by the voice and the pen-both classes equally necessary and honorable, both equally needing and rewarding mental energy and attainments, but differing from each other in their processes. For these callings there is, or ought to be, a preliminary education both general and particular; and both are with sad frequency neglect ed or slighted. For professions exercised by handlabor, the general education is furnished by our common schools; and they are very far from furnishing the kind of education which the farmer or mechanic needs. The common system of education is worthy of the schoolmen of the Middle Ages, who deemed words, not ideas or facts, the prime objects of knowledge. A great part of the time spent at school is spent in the acquisition by rote of words without meaning,-a process, in which no faculty of mind, except the memory, is exercised. For years, often, the scholar is made to recite daily from the Dictionary a series of definitions, frequently less intelligible than the words defined, not unfrequently wholly void of meaning to the pupil, while he well knows the signification of the words defined. For instance, every child knows the meaning of the word network; but not one gray-haired man in a hundred could deduce any possible signification from Johnson's accurate definition of it: "Anything reticulated or decussated at equal distances, with intercesses between the intersections." This example will show how much connection there is between the studying of definitions (so called) and learning the meaning of words. Another inordinate and unjustifiable waste of time in common schools, results from what is called the study of Grammar, which a boy, six years old, is often obliged to commence, in which he has a weary exercise every subsequent day of his school life, and at length leaves school with no more idea of the purpose, for which his Grammar was written, than if it had been in Chinese or Sanscrit. The exercise is, at first, the committing to memory of a technical jargon, entirely beyond his power of comprehension; and, afterwards, the mechanical repetition of certain stereotyped formulas, concerning the separate words in Young's Night Thoughts, or Pope's Essay on Man, (commonly called parsing,) whereas a fourth part of the time spent in conversation with his teacher, or in reading, or trying to write good English, would give him ten times the knowledge of his mother tongue, which he thus attains. Practical grammar is best acquired by the eye and ear-may be imbibed, without express study, by familiarity with good speakers and writers, and fixed in the mind without pain or weariness; but the theory of grammar cannot be attained by him who is conversant with one language only. Grammar is, no less than physiology, a comparative science, and the principles and laws of one's own language can be understood and accounted for only by him who has studied other languages in connection with it, and has thus formed an idea of what is essential to all languages and what is peculiar to his own. For this acquisition of hard, and to him unmeaning words, let us now see what the future farmer or mechanic foregoes. In the first place, he is generally taught nothing of natural history, or science. He is to earn his livelihood by directing the vital energies, or the mechanical or chemical forces of nature. Soils, earths, metals, woods, alkalies, acids- these are the materials on which, or with which, or to produce which, the labors of his future life are to be spent. Yet, in most cases, he is suffered to leave school, with out having been put in possession of a single fact or principle in geology, chemistry, or natural philosophy; without any knowledge of the structure of his own planet, or of any of its component elements; without the slightest comprehension of any of the laws or processes which nature lends to art, and by which alone the soil can be made productive, or handicraft successful. No wonder that our farmers so often dress and sow their land at haphazard, change crops at a venture, and transmit effete and sterile acres to their posterity. No wonder that, in American manufactures, colors so often fade, and cements part, and fabrics shrink. No wonder that the ill-made bears so alarming a proportion to the well-made, and that the honesty and good faith of the manufacturer are often no guarantee for the excellence of his wares. Another necessary element of education for the future farmer or mechanic is almost excluded from our common schools, namely geometry, the science of measure and proportion, essential to educate the eye, to guide the labors of the hand, and to give symmetry, tastefulness and elegance to the planning and finishing of innumerable products of industry, essential also, in many departments of labor, to a contractor's preliminary calculations, that he may defraud neither himself nor his employer. In the Prussian Common School system, both the departments of knowledge now named, are deemed no less indispensable, than reading and writing; and we trust that the time will soon arrive, when no District School in our own country will graduate its pupils without them. Another enormous deficiency in most of our common schools is, that they make no provision for instructing and exercis ing their pupils in English composition. This is indeed unnecessary for one who is willing to be a mere drudge of the farm or the workshop. But no young man should regard this as his destiny. Every one should expect to rise, by degrees, into the higher walks of his profession, to conduct its more extended operations, and to take his well-earned place among citizens of merit, standing and influence. But every man, who occupies such a position as this, must write, he must write business letters, if nothing else; and, if incapable of making a respectable appearance on paper, he may meet with countless drawbacks and embarrassments, may lose opportunities for improving his condition, and may be permanently kept back in the rear ranks of his calling or profession. But a well-indited letter is always a letter of recommendation for the writer, and has, in many instances, been the proximate cause of eminent success and good fortune. While, in these and other respects, those who are to exercise agricultural and mechanical callings ought to be well educated, let them also regard a prolonged and thorough apprenticeship to the future business of life as essential to ultimate success and respectability. In some of the countries of Europe, no man can establish himself in his trade, without having gone through a prescribed period and mode of apprenticeship; and, in Germany and Belgium, it was formerly the universal custom, (and it is still frequently done,) for a young man, when he has learned his trade so far as his master could teach it, to visit the several places where his trade is best understood, and to work as a journeyman for a few weeks or months at each, so as to get an insight into whatever might facilitate the processes, or improve the manufactures, in which he was engaged. With us, on the other hand, the old rules and habits of apprenticeship are almost broken up. The seven years' novitiate has dwindled into four, three, and two. Nay, we sometimes hear of a young man's learning as much of a trade as he can in a still less period, and then establishing himself in business, with this fragmentary stock of knowledge and skill. Now there is no doubt, that the principal operations of every trade may be learned in a few months, and that, after a very short apprenticeship, one may seem to work suffi ciently well to be his own master. But there are a thousand little things, such as care in the choice and seasoning of materials, slight touches, delicate finishings, which can be learned only by one's laboring long under the eye of a man of experience and skill. They are things, which a master could not call to mind, so as to tell or show them to those under his instruction at any particular time, but into the knowledge of which the apprentice would grow gradually and almost imperceptibly. And these little things often constitute nearly half the value of a well-made article. To take the item of cabinet furniture for an illustration, the actual value, as determined by their durability, of equally well looking articles, is nearly or quite doubled by the application of care and skill to minute details, which would be thought of only by a thoroughly trained workman. Every gentleman knows too, that a coat, made by a tailor who thoroughly understands his business, will wear and look well nearly twice as long, as one made by an awkward and inexperienced tailor. It is chiefly on account of difference in the thoroughness of previous training, that some mechanics are crowded with work, while others can get very little to do. These last have been found out. They are never employed a second time by the same person, whereas, two or three years more of boyhood devoted to the acquisition of their trades, would have made them prosperous for life. In agriculture, the sons of farmers commonly learn, during their minority, as much as their fathers can teach them; but the general establishment of agricultural schools, with competent professors of natural science and its various practical applications, with model fields and experimental gardens, would be of inestimable value in raising the profession, both in an economical and intellectual point of view. It is no doubt known to many of our readers, that the most munificent provision has been made for the establishment of an agricultural school, on the plan of the celebrated Fellenberg Institution, in Switzerland, under the auspices of Harvard University, by the will of the late Benjamin Bussey, of Roxbury, Massachusetts. We are fully authorized by the statistics of English agriculture in saying, that, by the application of scientific principles and the use of improved modes of tillage, the cultivated lands of our Atlantic states, might, on an average, at less than twice the present annual out lay, be made to yield ten times their present annual revenue. We have thus spoken of the least education, which a farmer or mechanic ought to have. Let it not be supposed, however, that we regard the highest possible intellectual culture as misplaced, sunk or wasted in these professions. A thorough classical or literary education might not indeed enable one to increase his crops or to manufacture a better style of goods; but it would contribute vastly to his personal happiness, to his social influence, and to the intelligent discharge of the various duties and trusts that devolve on him as a parent, friend, neighbor and citizen. We heartily wish that many of the graduates of our colleges, instead of swelling the already crowded ranks of the (so called) liberal professions, would turn their attention to the class of professions now under consideration, and do everything possible to exhibit sound and various learning as the accomplishment of the individual man, and not simply as a prescribed routine of preparation for a particular walk in life. Should such instances hereafter become frequent, they would have a direct and irresistible influence in eradicating the absurd and antirepublican idea, imported from the artificial state of society in the old world, that a man's respectability depends in anywise on what he does, and not on what he is. We pass now to the education of candidates for what are called the learned professions, which number, no doubt, as many ignorant and unqualified pretenders, as they do fit and worthy members, For these we would place the standard of general education very high; and, as we must make a selection from among the many topics that present themselves, we propose to speak particularly of the importance of a thorough classical education to the members of these professions. We choose this topic the rather, because we apprehend that the current of general feeling is setting strongly against classical studies. As an index of this, we might adduce the fact, that the oldest and best endowed literary institution in the county now suffers its pupils to suspend Latin and Greek, if they choose, after a single year's study. Our age is utilitarian in the most grovelling sense of the word; and the community at large can see no use in the consumption of months and years of study upon dead languages, and the literature of nations long since extinct. Let us then see what these languages and their literature can do for the clergyman and the lawyer. They are to be both writers and speakers, and as such, should be accomplished in the arts of persuasion. To this end, they must be well acquainted with the structure, powers and resources of their native tongue, which no man can be, who is not conversant with other languages than his own, and, especially, who is not conversant with those classic tongues, whence the English has derived so many of its words and idioms. These languages, too, though doubtless, no less than our own, derived from various and unlike sources, were fused by glowing ages of eloquence and song, into entire congruity of form and feature; and, by being, in the popular phrase, dead languages, are endowed with an unchanging life, and therefore are more capable of rigorous analysis, and afford better illustrations of the laws of universal grammar, than the modern tongues, which still bear conspicuous marks of their miscellaneous origin, and which are varying their rules and idioms from year to year. Then, too, the public speaker needs a diction, at once concise and flexible, full of vigor, nerve and point, and at the same time adapting itself with ease to every class of subjects, occasions or audiences; and how can he better acquire such a diction than by familiarity with those noble ancient tongues -the one bearing in every word the signature of a severe, majestic simplicity the other, many voiced, yet never losing its identity, shaping its elastic idioms to every conceivable mode of grandeur and beauty? Then again, as to rules and models in oratory, we know not how one who would rise above mediocrity, can dispense with the study of those old orators, who could hold in check, and sway, at will, the fierce, multitudinous democracies of Greece and Rome; nor can the public speaker find, anywhere among modern writers, the minute, exhausting analysis of the kinds, modes, instruments, sources and topics of argument and appeal, which Cicero and Quintilian furnish, so that it is hardly too much to term their rhetorical works essential parts of the training of those, who, by speech or writing, are to mould the decisions, sentiments and characters of the few or the many. Again: Man should be the constant study both of the lawyer and the preacher. They both need a familiar acquaintance with the human condition and character, with the existing elements of civilization and progress, with the springs of public and individual sentiment and action. The preacher must know men as they are, to give aim to his endeavors to make them what they should be; while it is only by the same kind of knowledge, that the lawyer can adapt his style and topics of illustration and argument to the stupidity which he must penetrate, the prejudices which he must remove, or the sound sense and wakeful intellect which he must convince or persuade. Now, as each individual is the aggregate or result of all that he has been, so does the whole past enter into the present condition of the race. Nothing is so truly living as the past. It gives shape, and hue and breath to the present. Thought, once uttered, written or acted, never dies. The past, which is finished, interprets the present, which is unfinished. The present exhibits phenomena, the past shows whence they come and why they are. He then, who omits from his familiar knowledge, any extensive or emphatic chapter of the past, fails to comprehend the present. But the history and culture of Greece and Rome, next to those of Judea, do form the most extensive and emphatic chapters of the whole past. The Greek, the Roman mind, each has left traces of itself, too deeply engraven for time or change to obliterate them. We must study their records, that we may identify in our own age, their ideas and sentiments, the effects of their institutions, the fruits of their culture. There are peculiar reasons, why the teacher of religion should be a classical scholar. He is the interpreter of God to man; and all God's Scriptures should be his familiar study. God writes all history. Every chapter, every phasis of human condition, every political revolution, every form of culture, bears not only the impress of human wisdom or folly, virtue or guilt, but also the venerable handwriting of Divine Providence. In the condition and destinies of nations and of races there is as clear and full a revelation of the attributes of the Almighty, as there is in the vast and glorious works of nature. Thus, for religious teaching, the past holds to the present a torch kindled by the same breath that inspired prophets and apostles. Viewed in this aspect, the finished records of Greek and Roman civilization, arts, science, domestic and social life, spanning as they do the most brilliant and eventful centuries of the world's history, furnish an exhaustless repertory of religious counsel and wisdom-an expanded commentary upon Divine revelation—a vast, |
