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of my power to make the best of my proceedings effectual to what I intended them; at a distance I am likeliest to learn your mind, for you have not a very obliging way of delivering itt by word of mouth, if, therefore, you will let me know the particulars in which I may be usefull to you, I will shew my readiness as to my own part, and if I fail of the success I wish, it shall not be the fault of,-your humble servant, ROCHESTER.

I intend to be at Adderbury sometime next week.

You have ordered the matter soe well, that you must of necessity bee att the place you intend before I can give you an answer to your letter, yet meethinks you ought rather to have resolved in the negative, since it was what I desired of you before; but the happy conjunction of my mother and you can produce nothing but extreme good usage to mee as it has formerly done. You shew yourself very discreet and kind in this and in other matters. I wish you very well, and my mother, but assure you I will bee very backwards in giving you the trouble of your humble servant,

ROCHESTER.

I have, my dear wife, sent you some lamb, about an ounce. I have sent to my mother one Westphalia ham, one joule of sturgeon, and on Christmas day I will send her a very fatt doe. I feare I must see London shortly, and begin to repent I did not bring you with me, for since these rake-hells are not here to disturb us, you myght have past your devotions this holy sea

son as well in this place as att Adderbury, but, dear wife, one of my coachmares is dying, or I had sent my coach instead of my compliment.

We find these two little notes addressed to his son.

I hope, Charles, when you receive this, and know that I have sent this gentleman to be your tutour, you will be very gladde to see I take such care of you, and be very gratefull, which is best shown in being obedient and dilligent. You are now grown big enough to bee a man, and you can be wise enough; for the way to be truely wise is to serve God, learne your book, and observe the instructions of your pa rents first, and next your tutour, to whom I have entirely resigned you for this seven yeare, and according as you imploy that time, you are to bee happy or unhappy for ever; but I have so good an opinion of you, that I am glad to thinke you will never deceive me; dear child, learn your booke and be obedient, and you shall see what a father I will be to you. You shall want no pleasure while you are good, and that you may be soe are my constant prayers. ROCHESTER.

Charles, I take itt very kindly that you write mee (though seldom), and wish heartily you would behave yourself soe as that I myght show how much I love you without being ashamed. Obedience to your grandmother, and those who instruct you in good things, the way to make you happy here and for ever, avoyde idleness, scorne lying, and God will bless you. ROCHESTER.

ON THE MEANS OF EDUCATION, AND THE STATE OF LEARNING, IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

NOTWITHSTANDING the great number of books on America, little is known of the means of education, or of the state of learning in that country. These subjects must certainly be interesting to Englishmen, from their connexion with the spreading of the language, and from the influence the people of America must have in preserving it in its purity, or in filling it with corruptions. But they derive a higher and more general importance from another consideration-the nation is rapidly in

creasing in physical strength; and mere power, unaccompanied by intellectual refinement, never failed of being a scourge, whether possessed by a despot or a republic. Learning and science do not always check the ambition of nations, but they moderate and soften its success; without them, the march of dominion is wasting, and cruel, and brutal. There already exists in America a sufficient difference in this respect, to prove the truth of the principle; in those parts of it where learn

ing is cultivated, it has smoothed off the roughnesses and subdued the passions, which deform the rude state of social life; and in those where it is neglected, man is still a wild and ferocious animal, and consequently dangerous in proportion to the number of the herd. We cannot reason from history in regard to these people; the experiment, now performing in some parts of the new world, is the first, which ever exhibited man under precisely similar circumstances-intellectually and morally savage, and at the same time powerful as a perfect knowledge of all the artificial means of increasing physical strength can make him. This would be a curious subject of speculation, but our present one directs us another way.

In the sketch we are about to give of the state of education in this country, the schools of the higher orders will be principally considered; for the literary character of a nation depends upon the degree of knowledge among the few, not upon the universal diffusion of it among the many; and our enquiry now is, if the Americans have learning, and not if they can read and write. It is proper however to remark, that the latter kind of knowledge is as generally diffused, as it well could be among so scattered a population. In New England, and in the other early settled and wellpeopled parts of the country, schools for instruction in reading, writing, and arithmetic, are established by law in all towns and villages; and it is rare, that a child destined to live by the labours of his hands, cannot find the means of acquiring quite as much book learning, as will be useful to him in his business, and often a great deal too much to allow him to remain contented with his lot and place in life.

We begin then with that class of schools, in which the foundation is laid for a liberal education, there commonly called academies; for the Americans take a strange delight in high sounding names, and often satisfy themselves for the want of the thing, by the assumption of the name. These academies are not always exclusively classical schools; some are partly appropriated to education for the counter and the counting-room; and as far as this object goes, there is no striking defect in them; it not being a very difficult matter to teach a lad to count his fingers and take care of his dollars.

But in all that relates to classic learning, they are totally deficient; there is not one, from Maine to Georgia, which has yet sent forth a single first rate scholar; no, not one since the settlement of the country, equal even to the most ordinary of the thirty or forty, which come out every year from Schule Pforta, and Meissen. It would not be unreasonable to say, that a boy in America, who is put to learn the ancient languages, loses his whole time, from the first moment he begins the Latin Accidence, till he takes his bachelor's degree-a period of eight or nine years, and those the most precious years of life. They are not merely lostthey do positive injury to the youth; those delectable studies, whose power it is, when properly felt, to form a pure and elegant taste, and polished mind, are looked upon as tasks, loathed, and at length laid aside for ever. Thus the voice of inspiration is heard, and awakens not, and the most powerful means of intellectual regeneration, which learning can employ, leave the mind in a state of hopeless insensi bility. This arises from bad masters, and a bad method of study. It is impossible for a man to teach what he does not understand himself, or to excite in others a taste, which he has never acquired. The remark may be applied to most of the instructors of the classic schools in America; they are mere language masters, not scholars; miners, who know the art of getting at the ore, but not of using it. But they are not without excuse; it cannot be expected that the masters should be good, as long as the system of education, which they are required to follow, is wholly defective. The object of learning is misunderstood in America, or rather, it is valued only as far as it is practically useful. That this is their view of it, is shewn by every literary institution of the country, in which all kinds of knowledge, that are not to be turned to immediate account, are either totally neglected, or very imperfectly cultivated. We shall see, that the bad method of study adopted in the schools, arises from this opinion, and afterwards trace its influence through all the stages of education. When a boy begins his Latin, he is told, that the object of studying it is, to prepare him for college; and, accordingly, he does study just as much of it, as he is required to know upon

examination; he never discovers that there is an absolute good to be derived from this exercise of the mind-that it can give expansion to his intellectual faculties, and acuteness to his perceptions. The business of preparation is all that he regards, and this consists in being able to construe, however slovenly, the passages assigned him for the task, and apply to them the rules of grammatical construction. The amount gone over being made of more importance than the manner of doing it, encouragement is given to resort to translations for assistance; hence, Virgil and Cicero are read in the miserable paraphrases of Davidson and Duncan. In this way the preparatory books are run through; nothing is read but what is necessary for matriculation, and that so superficially as to be of no use; while metre, quantity, and all the nice marks of a scholar, are neglected. The effect of this loose mode of study is as injurious to a boy's habits, as to his taste. He believes that what is to be learned but imperfectly, may be learned without labour; and hence, the power of close, undivided, fixed application is never acquired. This neglect to discipline the mind, at the only period when it is capable of being disciplined, produces a love of ease and of idleness, which extends through life.

Another great defect in the system is the practice of leaving boys too much to themselves. They live separate from their masters, who know nothing of the use, which they make of their time, except when they are collected in the school-room; and that being but about seven hours of the day, the residue of it is, of course, spent in idleness. Thus, early education is, in every respect, badly managed, and a loss of time occasioned by it, which no after diligence can ever fully repair. It cannot be, that the Americans are ignorant of the cause of the evil, which exists among them; they have examples enough of what is done, when a system different from their own is pursued. In the south part of the country, particularly in Carolina, it used to be the custom to send children across the Atlantic to be educated; the city of Charleston is still illuminated by a constellation of these European formed scholars; and every one knows what an influence they have had upon the society of that place what an elegance, and grace,

and polish, they have given to its manners, and what a charm there is about themselves: they are men, who would have been the companions of Atticus, had they lived at Rome in the Augustan age.

It will readily be concluded that, where the discipline and instruction of the schools are defective, similar defects will be found in the higher institutions, which is the case in the country, of which we are now speaking. Indeed, so long as the former remain in their present state, it will be quite useless to attempt any thorough reform in the latter. If young men come to the universities without preparation, they must leave them without improvement; they are not the places, where one should begin to learn, in any country, and least of all in America, where they are upon so bad a system. The inhabitants of the colonies, from their first settlement, down to the period of their separation from the mother country, always cherished such a praiseworthy pious reverence for her, that they never thought of taking any other models than such as she furnished, for any institution they found necessary to establish. Hence, without regard to the changes in human opinions, or to the different situations of the two countries, the old monastic Institutions of England were the models for all the colleges, which were founded in the new world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. And now copies of Oxford and Cambridge are seen in every part of the country-copies upon a reduced scale indeed, it must be said, and about as much like the originals, as the little sixpenny plaster casts of Antinous and the Belvidere Apollo, which are carried upon the heads of the street hawkers in every town of Italy, are like those exquisite works of the chisel, which they profess to be copied after. God forbid that we should speak disrespectfully of these two ancient seats of learning; he that could contemplate them without reverence, could stand upon the plain of Marathon without emotion. Like the constitution with which they are connected, they have their imperfections, but those imperfections are a mark of their antiquity, and it is better, in both cases, to bear those, than to impair the veneration, which that inspires. This reason, however, did not exist for admitting them into the new es

tablishments of America, nor has it yet acquired force enough to make their continuance justifiable. Beside, the defects in the English universities are more than counterbalanced by their peculiar excellences, but those of the transatlantic ones have nothing whatever to redeem them. They are a kind of mongrel institution between a school and a college, mixing up the modes of instruction and discipline proper to each; and an unlucky mistake was made in forming the compound, the bad parts of both being taken instead of the good. To give a more distinct idea of them, we may liken them to a single college of either of the English universities. They have a principal, provost or president, professors, and public, instead of private, tutors, and if the inquiry is pursued no farther, it is difficult to see why they do not answer the purpose of similar institutions in Europe; but a single glance upon their internal administration will explain the cause. First, the system of government is bad; it is felt just enough to be irksome, and, at the same time, it is too weak to operate as an effectual restraint. The docility of an American youth, it must be remembered, is not increased by the early and often wild notions of liberty he acquires, and the period of entering college is looked forward to by most of them, as the time when the shackles of a master's and parent's authority are to be thrown off, and that of freedom to commence. It is here that the evil and danger lie; the youth is given up to himself before he is old enough to be safe in his own hands, and for the completion of his ruin, the power of his governors is manifest ed in inflicting punishment more than in applying checks; in other words, it is pretended to exercise discipline, which is ineffectual from its very nature. It is the same with the system of instruction; tasks are imposed, and the boy's time left to his own disposal; the task, it is true, is required of him, but being a task, it is performed as such, and the excitement, which pride would furnish if the labour were voluntary, is wholly lost by its being forced. Most of the instruction is in this way; all the under graduates being called together in classes, two or three times a-day, either by a professor or tutor, to be examined in the exercise assigned. Very few lectures

are given, and those at such long intervals, that they are next to useless. Thus the colleges are in fact schools, and, for the reasons already given, bad schools; they knock off the fetters, but still keep the ring of slavery upon the leg. They are also schools in another respect; whatever is taught in them is required to be learned by all. The four faculties, if they can be said to have four faculties, when some of them have not four professors, must be attended by every stu dent; but it must not be supposed, that the knowledge acquired is in proportion to that demanded. A boy of twelve years of age, who has been two years at Schnepfenthal, or in any other good school in Germany, might scorn a comparison between his learning, and that of most young men, when they leave an American university. What a lamentable waste of time! twenty is the average age of leaving the university, and they have not then acquired, what might have been acquired at twelve. Four years residence is required for the bachelor's degree, but residence is all, there is no examination for it, and it is scarcely possible for any academic honour to be of less value; it has certainly been conferred upon some, who could neither write, read, nor speak their mother tongue with propriety, and upon many, who could not translate the bad Latin of their diplomas. To finish the picture of the seminaries of learning of the first rank in America, we must give a little sketch of the student's manner of life. The time not spent at the classes, is divided between eating and drinking, smoking, and sleeping. Approach the door of one of their apartments at any hour of the day, you will be driven back from it, as you would from the cabin of a Dutch smack, by the thick volumes of stinking tobacco smoke, which it sends forth; should you dare enter, you would find half a dozen loungers in a state of oriental lethargy, each stretched out upon two or three chairs, with scarce any other indication of life in them than the feeble effort they make to keep up the fire of their ciggarrs. We know that there are other countries besides America, in which the habit of smoking prevails, but there are surely no other Christian ones, in which it is an employment, and a substitute for all occupa

tions, as it is there. In Holland and in Germany students smoke full as much, but then they study at the same time. In the American colleges, it is the source of an hundred evils, of waste of time, of drinking, of ill health, of clownish manners, and, above all, of a habitual stupor of mind, that gradually destroys its faculties. It is difficult to understand why an economical people like the Americans waste so much time and money, in giving their children an education, which is certainly of no use to them; or rather, why so sensible a people do not give them a much better one, as might be done, in a very few months, and comparatively for a very little money, without exposing them to the dangers, which now bring ruin upon so many.

It appears to be the object to make up in number for the defect in the quality of these institutions. There are now not less than twenty-four or twenty-five in all the States; but fortunately the number of students bears no proportion to the number of colleges; including under-graduates only, it does not amount to three thousand, and probably to not much above two in the whole. The principal are, Harvard College, at Cambridge, New England-Yale, at New Haven in Connecticut-and Princeton in New Jersey. Of these the first is the most ancient, best endowed, and in many respects entitled to the highest rank. It has a president and twenty professors. Its present head is a gentleman of great talent, an elegant moral writer, and a learned divine; and among its professors, there are many men of profound science. Two of the number have been studying and travelling in Europe for the last four years, one of whom is, at this moment, on a pilgrimage to the holy land of the scholar. We could wish no greater good to their country, than that they should be received, on their return, as Plato was at Athens, when he had finished his travels, and began to impart the fruits of them to his countrymen in the groves of the academy. So much is doing towards improving this institution, that it encourages a hope of soon seeing in America an university in fact as well as in name. But it cannot have full success until the classic schools are reformed; to effect which, considerable

time, and great change in the common opinion about the value of classical learning, will be necessary.

As soon as the bachelor's degree is taken, all connexion with the university ceases; no terms are required to be kept for that of master of arts, which is conferred upon all bachelors of three years' standing, who ask it. The origin of this seems to be, that as three years are required to be spent in the study of any of the learned professions, residence is dispensed with, and the time thus occupied, or supposed to be occupied, allowed as terms kept. There would be some reason in this, if the degree was never granted, except upon proof of having been so engaged in the study of a profession, or of general literature; but when it is made to depend solely upon the intervening of a certain space of time, it becomes highly ridiculous, especially as it very of ten happens, that the man of letters, in the interim, is transformed into a coachman or an innkeeper.

An American may truly be said to have finished his liberal education when he leaves college; for although he then enters upon the study of a learned profession, he does it so much more, as if it were an art or a trade, than a science, that the literæ humaniores ought not to be disgraced by being supposed to have any connexion with it. But it is necessary for the completion of this part of our inquiry, to shew how the professions are studied, which we now proceed to do, beginning with the

Medical.-Students in medicine enjoy greater advantages, than any other class of students in America. The medical schools are by far the best institutions of the country; and some of them are equal to those of the first rank in Europe. They are often nominally connected with the colleges, but in reality they are distinct from them, being governed by totally different regulations; and the colleges, properly speaking, have no reference whatever to professional education. The first and most respectable is that at Philadelphia, which is commonly attended by a class as large, as attend the most popular schools in this country. Rush, Wistar, and Barton, are all names well known here; they first gave it its celebrity, which has been fully maintained by the talents and ex

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