has so long fostered me, as I should have owed to her if she had born me. Sheffield has not been a step-mother to me in the invidious sense of the term, and having now been for upwards of thirty years a member of her numerous family, I can this day remember nothing but kindness received from herself and her children; and if ever, in times past, I have experienced any thing else, may I as utterly forget as I freely forgive it! I am, therefore, not an intruder in this meeting, nor have I acted presumptuously in accepting the honour which the Committee for managing the preparatory business conferred upon me-to propose to my fellow-townsmen and neighbours the establishment of a Literary and Philosophical Society, to be begun this day, but to be perpetuated, I trust, while the mountains shall endure, and the rivers continue to flow through the valleys of this beautiful and populous district. I feel it indeed an honour which I may not have deserved, but which I will diligently endeavour not to disgrace, thus, as it were, to lay the foundation-stone of a school of literature and science, in which ingenious youth now living among us, and generations yet unborn, may receive (if not the first impulse to awaken their talents) such nurture and instruction in elegant knowledge, with such facilities for improvement, and opportunities for exercising their minds, as their fathers, through a hundred successions of ages, never enjoyed before them, nor could have anticipated in this place before the present era, when useful education is extended to all classes of our community. It is at that decisive period of life especially, when, having finished his school studies, and entered upon business or a profession, the new member of active society (who thenceforward becomes his own teacher, or ceases to be taught at all,) has need of every liberal encouragement and every effective auxiliary, to enable him happily to develop those powers above the brute, of which he feels himself possessed, yet knows not how to use with advantage, 'not having proved them.' The generous youth, thus struggling by the native energy of his mind, to shape himself into the future man, and rise to the elevation for which he was born, may be compared to the incipient nautilus, at the bottom of the sea, swathed in the rudiments of a shell, which, by the motions and growth of its elastic substance, it gradually moulds into form, till both animal and vessel being perfected, in some moment of ecstatic instinct, it weighs itself up from the womb of the deep, and in the sunshine and air of heaven, sails gallantly along the expanse of waters.

"Mr. Chairman,-You have alluded to an epithet, sarcastically attached, by the greatest poet of the age, to this town. It was in connexion with myself that 'classic Sheffield' was noticed by Lord Byron.* Her name and mine have received a passport to immortality, by being thus imbedded together in the imperishable amber of his verse. If Sheffield be not ashamed of the conjunction, I shall never be so. The passage indeed does little honour to either of us, but it does less to the poet,—the praise which he condescends to bestow upon my genius,' (to avail myself of his own word, not used ironically,) being inconsistent with the sneer at my lost works,' over which, with sardonic pathos, he exhorts 'classic Sheffield' to 'weep.'

Now, Mr. Chairman, I will take up this term of contempt, and I will venture much further than you have done in the use which you have made of it, This may appear impertinently egotistical in me, but it is not so; for Lord Byron's scornful allusion to Sheffield bears directly on the question of this day, namely, the capability of Sheffield to establish and maintain, with credit to herself, and advantage to her population, a Literary and Philosophical Society. The term classic operates like a spell upon our imagination: without affixing to it any definite meaning, we associate with it all that is great and splendid, beautiful and excellent, in the surviving pages of ancient authors, as well as all that is venerable, sublime, and almost super-human, in the relics of Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture and sculpture, the severest and the most enduring of manual labours. In these, for the present at least, let the writers and builders

*The noble author of "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in allusion to the treatment of the author of "The Wanderer of Switzerland," &c. by the Edinburgh Reviewers, says—

"With broken lyre, and cheek serenely pale,

Lo, sad Alcæus wanders down the vale!

Though fair they rose, and might have bloom'd at last,
His hopes have perish'd by the northern blast;

Nipt in the bud by Caledonian gales,

His blossoms wither as the blast prevails:

O'er his lost works let classic Sheffield weep;
May no rude hand disturb their early sleep!
Yet say, why should the bard at once resign

His claim to favour from the sacred nine?" &c. &c.

To these lines is appended the following note:-"Poor Montgomery, though praised by every English Review, has been bitterly reviled by the Edinburgh. After all, the bard of Sheffield is a man of considerable genius, and his 'Wanderer of Switzerland' is worth a thousand Lyrical Ballads,' and at least fifty' Degraded Epics.'"

stand alone and unrivalled. They were the few; but what was the condition of the many, in the renowned regions whence we have derived those treasures of literature, and in which we inherit (as common property to all who have minds to inherit them,) the wreck of those stupendous structures of human art? So far as the epithet classic is an accommodated word, employed by a kind of literary courtesy to designate superiority of intellect and knowledge, I am bold to affirm that Sheffield is as classic as Egypt was in the age of Sesostris, as Greece was in the days of Homer, and as Rome was at any period between her foundation and the close of the third Punic war. I speak of the relative intelligence of the whole body of the people in each of those countries, compared with the actual measure of information diffused among our own local population within the bounda ries of Hallamshire, the manufacturing district of which Sheffield is the capital.

"In all the classic regions of antiquity, whether monarchies or republics, knowledge was a species of free-masonry; none but the initiated were the depositaries of its secrets, and these privileged persons were almost universally princes, nobles, priests, or men of high degree, including those who, from bent of genius, or other auspicious circumstances, were devoted by choice, or compelled by office, to the cultivation of letters and philosophy. The vulgar, the profane vulgar, the multitude, the million, were jealously and cruelly excluded from the benefits of learning, except in so far as these were necessarily and benignly reflected upon them in the kinder conduct and more affable manners of their masters and superiors; for long before Bacon uttered the immortal oracle, knowledge is power,' the ancients were aware of that mystery, unsuspected by the ignorant, whom they ruled by that very power, the power of knowledge, both in spiritual and temporal dominion, as their subjects and their slaves. Now and then, indeed, an Æsop, a Terence, or an Epictetus, by the irrepressible buoyancy of native genius, rose from the dust of servile degradation, to vindicate the honour of outraged humanity, and teach both kings and sages, that in the thickest shell of a slave there is the kernel of a man, which only grows not because it is not planted; or when planted, only flourishes not, because it is unworthily beaten down and trampled under foot by those who ought to have cherished, and pruned, and reared it to fertility. Oh! what a waste of mind and worth, what havock of talent and capacity, of every degree and of every kind, is

implied in that perpetuated thraldom of ignorance, wherein the bulk of mankind, through every age and nation under heaven, have been held, by tyrants as brutish as themselves, who knew nothing about knowledge, except that they feared it; or by the more flagrant injustice of those who possessed, but durst not, or would not, communicate it to the multitude! The aristocracy of learning has been the veriest despotism that was ever exercised on earth; for it was bondage both to soul and body in those who were its victims. Thousands and thousands of spirits, immortal spirits, have dwelt in human bodies, almost unconscious of their own existence, and utterly ignorant of their unawakened powers, which, had instruction been always as universal as it is at this day, and as it is in this town, might with Newton have unfolded the laws of the universe-with Bacon have detected the arcana of nature, by the talisman of experimentor with Locke, have taught the mind, with introverted eye, to look at itself, and range at home through all the invisible world of thought. Had this been the case three thousand years ago, the abstrusest branches of natural philosophy, and metaphysics themselves, might now have been as intelligible, and as certain in their data and conclusions, as the mathematics and mechanics, or the abstract principles of jurisprudence.

"To return to the comparison which I have dared to challenge between our contemporaries in Hallamshire, and the majority of those who constituted the wisest, most refined, and greatest nations of antiquity,-I may ask, what were the people of Egypt, at the time when the learning of the Egyptians was the envy and wonder of the world, when even wise men from Greece resorted thither to accomplish their studies, and qualify themselves to be teachers at home? Methinks it is sufficiently evident, from the uniform character of immensity, stampt upon all the ruins of temples, palaces, and cities, as well as from the more perfect specimens of pyramids, obelisks, and statues, yet extant in the land of Nile, that a number comparatively small, of masterminds, supplied the ideas, which myriads of labourers were perpetually employed to imbody; and that the learning of Egypt was nearly, if not wholly, confined to the priesthood and the superior classes. Moses indeed was instructed in it, not because he was the son of a slave, but because he was the adopted son of Pharaoh's daughter. We have scripture authority, too, for the fact, that long before the Israelites became bondmen to the Egyptians, the Egyptians

had sold themselves and their lands to their king, for bread, during a seven years' famine. However intellectual then the rulers and hierarchy may have been, who planned those amazing monuments of ambition,-monuments too of the folly of ambition, the names of the founders, and the very purposes for which some of them were built, having perished from record, the hands that executed such works must have been the hands of slaves. Men free and enlightened could never have been made what it is plain that these were-live tools, to hew rocks into squares and curves, and pile the masses one upon another by unimaginable dint of strength, and the consentaneous efforts of multitudes, whose bones and sinews, whose limbs and lives, were always in requisition to do or to suffer what their hierophants and their sovereigns projected. The marvellous relics of Memphian grandeur, of which new discoveries are made by every successive traveller into the desert or up the river, are melancholy proofs that the vaunted learning of Egypt, when it existed, was as much locked from the comprehension of the vulgar, as it is at this day from the curiosity of the learned, in those undecipherable hieroglyphics, wherein it may be said to be embalmed. Had instruction been as general there as it is here, the key to those hieroglyphics could hardly have been lost to posterity.

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And what were the people of Greece in the age of Homer? Nay, we must first determine in what age Homer lived; whether he lived at all, and whether he was the author of his own poems. What, then, were the Athenians under the tyrant Pisastratus, who is said to have first collected the scattered songs of Homer, and united the loose links into that perfect and inimitable chain, in which they have been delivered to us? most resembling, it may be said, the 'golden everlasting chain,' celebrated in the Iliad, wherewith the Father of the gods bound the earth to his throne; for in like manner hath this Father of poets, from his highest heaven of invention' indissolubly bound the world to the sovereignty of his genius?-That the body of the Athenians then, and down even to the days of Pericles, (another tyrant and munificent patron of the fine arts,) were little skilled in reading and writing, is the almost inevitable conclusion to be drawn from the state of literature in reference to the means of diffusing it, in ancient times. Before the invention of printing, the slow production, the consequent scarcity, and the enormous value of books, when all were manuscripts, placed the possession of them beyond