EXERCISE XXIX. 1. PLA'-TO, a most illustrious philosopher of ancient Greece, was born about the year B. C. 429, and died B. C. 347. 2. TUL-LY, that is, Marcus Tullius Cicero, the chief of Roman orators. He was born at Arpinum, a small town south-east of Rome, B. C. 106, and died, through the instigation of Mark Antony, by the hand of a man whom he had once, it is said, successfully defended in a trial for some serious offense. 3. ROCHE-FOU-CAULT, a celebrated wit and nobleman of the reign of Louis XIV., was born in the year 1613. He died in 1680. He is chiefly famous for his work entitled "Reflections and Maxims." DIGNITY OF HUMAN NATURE. ADDISON. 1. I must confess, there is nothing that more pleases me, in all that I read in books, or see among mankind, than such passages as represent human nature in its proper dignity. As man is a creature made up of different extremes, he has something in him very great and very mean. A skillful artist may draw an excellent picture of him in either of these views. 2. The finest authors of antiquity have taken him on the more advantageous side. They cultivate the natural grandeur of the soul, raise in her a generous ambition, feed her with hopes of immortality and perfection, and do all they can to widen the partition between the virtuous and the vicious, by making the difference betwixt them as great as between gods and brutes. In short, it is impossible to read a page in Plato,' Tully,' and a thousand other ancient moralists, without being a greater and a better man for it. 3. On the contrary, I could never read any of our modish French authors, or those of our own country, who are the imitators and admirers of that trifling nation, without being for some time out of humor with myself, and at every thing about me. Their business is to depreciate human nature, and consider it under its worst appearances. They give mean interpretations and base motives to the worthiest actions; they resolve virtue and vice into constitution. In short, they endeavor to make no distinction between man and man, or between the species of men and that of brutes. As an instance of this kind of authors, among many others, let any one examine the celebrated Rochefoucault,' who is the great philosopher for administering of consolation to the idle, the envious, and worthless part of mankind. 4. I remember a young gentleman of moderate understanding, but great vivacity, who, by dipping into many authors of this nature, had got a little smattering of knowledge, just enough to make an atheist or free-thinker, but not a philosopher or a man of sense. With these accomplishments, he went to visit his father in the country, who was a plain, rough, honest man, and wise, though not learned. The son, who took all opportunities to show his learning, began to establish a new religion in the family, and to enlarge the narrowness of their country notions, in which he succeeded so well, that he had seduced the butler by his table talk, and staggered his eldest sister. 5. The old gentleman began to be alarmed at the schisms that arose among his children, but did not yet believe his son's doctrine to be so pernicious as it really was, until one day, talking of his setter-dog, the son said, "he did not question but Tray was as immortal as any one of the family;" and in the heat of the argument told his father," that, for his own part, he expected to die like a dog." Upon which, the old man, starting up in a very great passion, cried out; "Then, sir, you shall live like one;" and, taking his cane in his hand, cudgeled him out of his system. This had so good an effect upon him, that he took up from that day, fell to read. ing good books, and is now a bencher of the Middle Temple. EXERCISE XXX. PRIDE OF ANCESTRY. DANIEL WEBSTER. 1. It is a noble faculty of our nature which enables us to connect our thoughts, our sympathies, and our happiness with what is distant in place or time; and, looking before and after, to hold communion at once with our ancestors and our posterity. Human and mortal although we are, we are nevertheless not mere insulated beings, without relation to the past or the future. Neither the point of time nor the spot of earth in which we physically live, bounds our rational and intellectual enjoyments. अ. 2. We live in the past by a knowledge of its history, and in the future by hope and anticipation. By ascending to an association with our ancestors; by contemplating their example and studying their character; by partaking their sentiments and imbibing their spirit; by accompanying them in their toils; by sympathizing in their sufferings, and rejoicing in their successes and their triumphs,—we mingle our own existence with theirs, and seem to belong to their age. 3. We become their contemporaries, live the lives which they lived, endure what they endured, and partake in the rewards which they enjoyed. And in like manner, by running along the line of future time, by contemplating the probable fortunes of those who are coming after us; by attempting something which may promote their happiness, and leave some not dishonorable memorial of ourselves for their regard, when we shall sleep with the fathers, we protract our own earthly being, and seem to crowd whatever is future, as wel as all that is past, into the narrow compass of our earthly existence. 4. As it is not a vain and false, but an exalted and religious imagination, which leads us to raise our thoughts from the orb which, amidst this universe of worlds, the Creator has given us to inhabit, and to send them with something of the feeling which nature prompts, and teaches to be proper among children of the same Eternal Parent, to the contemplation of the myriads of fellow-beings with which his goodness has peopled the infinite of space, so neither is it false or vain to consider ourselves as interested or connected with our whole race through all time; allied to our ancestors; allied to our pos terity; closely compacted on all sides with others; ourselves being but links in the great chain of being, which begins with the origin of our race, runs onward through its successive generations, binding together the past, the present, and the future, and terminating at last with the consummation of all things earthly, at the throne of God. 5. There may be, and there often is, indeed, a regard for ancestry, which nourishes only a weak pride; as there is also a care for posterity, which only disguises an habitual avarice, or hides the workings of a low and groveling vanity. But there is also a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which elevates the character and improves the heart. 6. Next to the sense of religious duty and moral feeling, I hardly know what should bear with stronger obligation on a liberal and enlightened mind, than a consciousness of alliance with excellence which is departed; and a consciousness, too, that in its acts and conduct, and even in its sentiments, it may be actively operating on the happiness of those who come after it. Poetry is found to have few stronger conceptions, by which it would affect or overwhelm the mind, than those in which it presents the moving and speaking image of the departed dead to the senses of the living. This belongs to poetry, only because it is congenial to our nature. 7. Poetry is, in this respect, but the handmaid of true philosophy and morality. It deals with us as human beings, naturally reverencing those whose visible connection with this state of being is severed, and who may yet exercise we know not what sympathy with ourselves;-and when it carries us forward, alsó, and shows us the long-continued result of all the good we do in the prosperity of those who follow us, till it bears us from ourselves, and absorbs us in an intense interest for what shall happen to the generations after us, it speaks only in the language of our nature, and affects us with sentiments which belong to us as human beings. EXERCISE XXXI. NATURE'S NOBILITY. REV. GEORGE ASPINWALL. 1. Room for a nobleman to pass ! 2. His crest, a soul in virtue strong, The patent of his courtly race,- |