knew, to sublimate any good use out of such an invention. Yet this only is what I request to gain from this reason, that it may be held a dangerous and suspicious fruit, as certainly it deserves, for the tree that bore it, until I can dissect one by one the properties it has. But I have first to finish, as was propounded, what is to be thought in general of reading books, whatever sort they be, and whether be more the benefit or the harm that thence proceeds.

Not to insist upon the examples of Moses, Daniel, and Paul, who were skilful in all the learning of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, and Greeks, which could not probably be without reading their books of all sorts, in Paul especially, who thought it no defilement to insert into holy scripture the sentences of three Greek poets,* and one of them a tragedian; the question was notwithstanding sometimes controverted among the primitive doctors, but with great odds on that side which affirmed it both lawful and profitable, as was then evidently perceived, when Julian the Apostate, and subtlest enemy to our faith, made a decree forbidding Christians the study of heathen learning;† for, said he, they wound

* The three Greek poets quoted by St. Paul, are, 1. the Cretan Epimenides, Epist. to Titus, i. 12; 2. Aratus, Acts, xvii. 28; and 3, Euripides, or, according to others, Menander, 1 Corinth. xv. 33.-Ed.

"The edict itself," observes Gibbon, "which is still extant among the epistles of Julian, (xlii.) may be compared with the loose invectives of Gregory, (Orat. iii. p. 96.) Tillemont (Mem. Eccles. t. vii. p. 1291) has collected the seeming differences of ancients and moderns. They may be easily reconciled. The Christians were directly forbid to teach, they were indirectly forbid to learn; since they would not frequent the schools of the Pagans.' Of the Apostate's prohibiting the Christians from teaching, he gives the following account: "A just and severe censure has been inflicted on the law which prohibited the Christians from teaching the arts of grammar and rhetoric. The motives alleged by the emperor to justify this partial and oppressive measure might command, during his lifetime, the silence of slaves, and the applause of flatterers. Julian abuses the ambiguous meaning of a word which might be indifferently applied to the language and the religion of the Greeks: he contemptuously observes, that the men who exalt the merit of implicit faith are unfit to claim or to enjoy the advantages of science; and he vainly contends, that if they refuse to adore the gods of Homer and Demosthenes, they ought to content themselves with expounding Luke and Matthew in the churches of the Galilæans. In all the cities of the Roman world, the education of the youth was entrusted to masters of grammar and rhetoric; who were elected by the magistrates, maintained at the public expense, and distinguished by many lucrative and honourable privileges. The edict of Julian appears to have included the physicians, and

us with our own weapons, and with our own arts and sciences they overcome us. And indeed the Christians were put so to theirs hifts by this crafty means, and so much in danger to decline into all ignorance, that the two Appollinarii were fain, as a man may say, to coin all the seven liberal sciences out of the Bible, reducing it into divers forms of orations, poems, dialogues, even to the calculating of a new Christian grammar.

But, saith the historian, Socrates, the providence of God provided better than the industry of Appollinarius and his son, by taking away that illiterate law with the life of him who devised it. So great an injury they then held it to be deprived of Hellenic learning; and thought it a persecution more undermining, and secretly decaying the church, than the open cruelty of Decius or Diocletian. And perhaps it was with the same politic drift that the devil whipped St. Jerome in a lenten dream, for reading Cicero; or else it was a phantasm, bred by the fever which had then seized him.* For had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much on Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading, not the vanity, it had been plainly partial, first, to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurril Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies, without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of Margites, a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?

professors of all the liberal arts; and the emperor, who reserved to himself the approbation of the candidates, was authorized by the laws to corrupt, or to punish, the religious constancy of the most learned of the Christians." -(Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, iv. 111, 112, and note.)—ED.

*St. Jerome and the devil. St. Jerome is quite positive, however, it was not a dream: "Nec vero sopor ille fuerat, aut vana somnia, quibus sæpe deludimur;" and his reason is, that, on issuing from the vision, he found himself beaten black and blue, which had never happened, he says, in any former dream. It never occurred to him that in rolling about on his couch he might have bruised himself in several places, without the aid of a spirit, good or evil.-(Opera, t. iv. p. 42.)-ED.

+ Aristotle, in his Poetics, and Plato,-if the Second Alcibrades he his,attribute the Margites to Homer. (Edit. Bekk. ii. 291.) But, though this certainly proves the great antiquity of the poem, modern critics dispute its authenticity. There existed among the ancients another work on the same subject, written in alternate hexameter and trimeter verses, which, with the

But if it be agreed we shall be tried by visions, there is a vision recorded by Eusebius, far ancienter than this tale of Jerome, to the nun Eustochium, and besides, has nothing of a fever in it. Dionysius Alexandrinus was, about the year 240, a person of great name in the church, for piety and learning, who had wont to avail himself much against heretics, by being conversant in their books; until a certain presbyter laid it scrupulously to his conscience, how he durst venture himself among those defiling volumes. The worthy man, loath to give offence, fell into a new debate with himself, what was to be thought; when suddenly a vision sent from God (it is his own epistle that so avers it) confirmed him in these words: "Read any books whatever come to thy hands, for thou art sufficient both to judge aright, and to examine each matter." To this revelation he assented the sooner, as he confesses, because it was answerable to that of the apostle to the Thessalonians: "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good."

And he might have added another remarkable saying of the same author: "To the pure, all things are pure; not only meats and drinks, but all kind of knowledge, whether of good or evil: the knowledge cannot defile, nor consequently the books, if the will and conscience be not defiled. For books are as meats and viands are; some of good, some of evil substance; and yet God in that unapocryphal vision said without exception, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat;" leaving the choice to each man's discretion. Wholesome meats to a vitiated stomach differ little or nothing from unwholesome; and best books to a naughty mind are not unapplicable to occasions of evil. Bad meats will scarce breed good nourishment in the healthiest concoction; but herein the difference is of bad books, that they to a discreet and judicious reader serve in many respects to discover, to confute, to forewarn, and to illustrate. Whereof what better witness can ye expect I Batrachomuomachia, was supposed to have been the production of Pigres of Halicarnassus, brother of that Artemisia who fought so bravely among the admirals of Xerxes.-(Payne Knight, Prolegom. ad Homer. 5-7.)-ED.

On this point, in which the leading principle of the whole discourse is involved, Mr. Mitford, in his Life of Milton, has made several very judicious observations. "Dr. Johnson," he remarks, "considers the argument which it (the Areopagitica) discusses, to be of very difficult solution. I shall content myself with observing, that when a nation becomes sufficiently enlight VOL II.

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should produce, than one of your own now sitting in parliament, the chief of learned men reputed in this land, Mr. Selden; whose volume of natural and national laws proves, not only by great authorities brought together, but by exquisite reasons and theorems almost mathematically demonstrative, that all opinions, yea, errors, known, read, and collated, are of main service and assistance toward the speedy attainment of what is truest.

I conceive, therefore, that when God did enlarge the universal diet of man's body, (saving ever the rules of temperance,) he then also, as before, left arbitrary the dieting and repasting of our minds; as wherein every mature man might have to exercise his own leading capacity. How great a virtue is temperance, how much of moment through the whole life of man! Yet God commits the managing so great a trust, without particular law or prescription, wholly to the demeanour of every grown man. And therefore when he himself tabled the Jews from heaven, that omer, which was every man's daily portion of manna, is computed to have been more than might have well sufficed the heartiest feeder thrice as many meals. For those actions which enter into a man, rather than issue out of him, and therefore defile not, God uses not to captivate under a perpetual childhood of prescription, but trusts him with the gift of reason to be his own chooser; there were but little work left for preaching, if law and compulsion should grow so fast upon those things which heretofore were governed only by exhortation. Solomon informs us, that much reading is a weariness to the flesh; * but neither he, nor other inspired author, tells us that ened to demand the removal of those restrictions of the press, which have been imposed when governments were arbitrary, and the people ignorant; the correction of the evils attendant on its liberty, must be found, not in the punishment of the offenders, but in the good sense and moral feeling of the community. It is in this way that virtue is stronger than vice, that truth triumphs over falsehood, and law is superior to offence. Johnson's observation, that if every sceptic in theology may teach his follies, there can be no religion,' falls to the ground, when it is remembered that our religion was born amid disbelief and doubt, and has grown up and increased among every variety of heresy and form of scepticism that the ingenuity of man could devise." (p. xliv. xlv.)-ED.

* In that most pleasant book of Baxter, which he has entitled his "Dying Thoughts," there occurs a fine commentary on this text :-" Alas! how dear a vanity is this knowledge!" he exclaims. "That which is but theo

such or such reading is unlawful; yet certainly had God thought good to limit us herein, it had been much more expedient to have told us what was unlawful, than what was wearisome.

As for the burning of those Ephesian books by St. Paul's converts; it is replied, the books were magic, the Syriac so renders them. It was a private act, a voluntary act, and leaves us to a voluntary imitation: the men in remorse burnt those books which were their own; the magistrate by this example is not appointed; these men practised the books, another might perhaps have read them in some sort usefully. Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Pysche as an incessant labour to cull out, and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving

retical and notional, is but a tickling delectation of the phantasy or mind, little differing from a pleasant dream: but how many hours, what gazing of the wearied eye, what stretching thoughts of the impatient brain must it cost us, if we will attain to an excellency! Well saith Solomon, ' Much reading is a weariness of the flesh;' and He that increaseth knowledge, increaseth sorrow.' How many hundred studious days and weeks, and how many hard and tearing thoughts, hath my little, very little knowledge, cost me! And how much infirmity and painfulness to my flesh, increase of painful diseases, and loss of bodily ease and health! How much pleasure to myself of other kinds, and how much acceptance with men, have I lost by it, which I might easily have had in a more conversant and plausible way of life!" Yet, when he comes to enumerate the valuable and delightful things of which death must deprive him, mark how prominent a place is occupied by his books and studies. “ When I die, I must depart, not only from sensual delights, but from the more manly pleasures of my studies, knowledge, and converse with many wise and godly men, and from all my pleasure in reading, hearing, public and private exercises of religion, &c. I must leave my library, and turn over those pleasant books no more: I must no more come among the living, nor see the faces of my faithful friends, nor be seen of man : houses and cities, and fields and countries, gardens and walks, will be nothing, as to me. I shall no more hear of the affairs of the world, of man, or wars, or other news, nor see what becomes of that beloved interest of wisdom, piety, and peace, which I desire may prosper." (p. 106-109. Sacred Classics' edition.) The volume is full of noble passages of this kind, which must render their author dear to all who love piety and eloquence. -ED.