my best friends expect to enter with me, and the studies are such as suit my taste. Theology is certainly a noble science, inasmuch as its subjects are the most exalted in nature, i. e. the relations subsisting between man and his Maker. "This is that science," says Locke, "which would truly enlarge men's minds, were it studied, or permitted to be studied everywhere, with that freedom, love of truth and charity which it teaches, and were not made, contrary to its nature, the occasion of strife, faction, malignity, and narrow impositions."

I did not expect, when I began to write, that I should take up two sheets--but I am proverbially garrulous, and as I shall not put you to the expense of a double postage, I shall continue to run on. I remember with many pleasing associations the time which I spent in your city, about three years ago. The traces of sundry fair countenances remain indistinctly marked upon my memory, and sundry boyish freaks I remember sometimes with pleasure, and sometimes with a little shame. But why should I be ashamed? Dulce est desipere in loco, (and the 1st of May and thereabouts is assuredly the proper season if there is such a locus in the whole year,) and it is no less sweet to remember these desipientias. I might indulge in the usual mawkish reveries usual upon such occasions, such as talking about "halcyon days" and "departed joys never to return;" but I will not falsify, I hope to enjoy happier moments than these; I have enjoyed happier moments, rendered so by nobler and purer joys than those.

I think it probable, that I shall take a journey Southward in the Autumn, to see my relations in Lexington, Staunton, and other parts of Virginia; my travelling lately has all been towards the North. My health appears to me to call for a jaunt; I have not been sick, but my flesh runs from me by degrees, to my great sorrow. A year ago I had a very respectable portion of fat; at present my sharp bones poke out their heads, threatening to pierce the skin. Have I not talked long enough, and incoherently enough, and tiresomely enough, and nos-met-ipsically enough? Farewell. Write, I beg of you. Amicus usque ad aras.

PRINCETON, September 7th, 1822, Saturday.

I received, a few minutes ago, your very welcome letter; and I begin an answer immediately, because I think it probable that a private opportunity of transmitting it will occur during the day. I feel relieved from much embarrassment by the receipt of your goodly two-sheet epistle. You know that a man is in a situation rather awkward when he commences writing to a new friend, or an old one metamorphosed by absence and

years. What shall be my topics? where shall I begin? are the questions which rise in his mind; there is no common ground upon which he may venture, but the ice once broken, all to be done is to seize the cue presented, and swim down the current of your thoughts, wherever they lead you. Now the current of my thoughts is very apt to lead me into dry prosing, or trifling, or some such shoal; still, at all risks, here it goes, neck or nothing. I pray you to be content with whatever may meet your eye, let the partiality of friendship blind you to all faults. And, as I was talking of letter-writing, let me say a few words more upon the same subject. A letter, as I take it, is intended to stand in lieu of an absent friend, to be his proxy in all things, to talk in his stead, and convey his own ideas, in his own style of conversation. Now, so far as the letter is a faithful representative, it is a fair picture of the disposition and sentiments of its author, and its value is to be estimated not so much by the intrinsic weight of the opinions expressed, or the intrinsic excellence of the style, (though these things give it new value,) but by its resemblance to the writer. If the writer be a festive mercurial fellow, and the letter be as sage as an epistle of Seneca, I would not give a groat for it; still I would always have a letter be a vehicle of instruction, (such I am afraid this will not be.) But even this instruction must be given in the same way that its parent would give it vivâ você. That letter which is so characteristic as to present its writer to my eyes during the perusal, is worth its weight in silver. And to obtain this excellence, the writer of a letter must be exceedingly passive, and just pen down whatever comes next. So I intend to do, hoping that it will be as acceptable, as if I should indite a profound dissertation.

As this is almost my first letter, I hope you will pardon me for dwelling so long upon epistolary writing. I am not a friend to quotations in general, but as I intend to spin out a long sheet, I cannot forbear giving you one from the prince of letter writers, Cowper. It appears to me to be the very thing. "I am very apt to forget, when I have any epistolary business on hand, that a letter may be written upon any thing or nothing, just as that any thing or nothing happens to occur. A man that has a journey before him 20 miles in length, which he is to perform on foot, will not hesitate and doubt whether he shall set out or not, because he does not readily conceive how he shall ever reach the end of it, for he knows that by the simple operation of moving one foot forward first, and then the other, he shall be sure to accomplish it. So it is in the present case, and so it is in every case similar. A letter is written as a conversation is maintained, or a journey performed, not by preconcerted or premeditated

means, a new contrivance, or an invention never heard of before, but merely by maintaining a progress, and resolving as a postilion does, having once set out, never to stop 'till we reach the appointed end." By quotation and otherwise, you perceive I manage to maintain a progress, if nothing more. "An interminable preamble," you may possibly exclaim, "What grand display is to be made after all this 'pomp and circumstance?"" I will tell you: I am endeavouring to explain to you the terms upon which this correspondence is to be maintained, upon my part. As my humour is, so will my letter be. If I am grave and sober you may expect at least a dull letter. If I have been reading poetry, Cowper, and Thomson, and Shakespeare, and Ovid, as I have been all the last week, you may look for just such a foggy, sublimated, ethereal production as the present.

You mention that your character has undergone little change. No man is the proper judge of his own character. The changes of our bodily frame, and of our mental part, are so gradual and imperceptible, that they appear nothing to ourselves. "Law John! how you have grown!" has doubtless met your ear ofttimes from the mouth of some good old dame; and the same exclamation was mentally ejaculated by me, in a higher sense, while perusing your letter. I must say something of my own habits and character. Without being guilty of the enormity of eaves-dropping, I have by various chances heard the opinions of divers persons respecting myself, and if I am to judge of myself by these, I am truly an odd compound of qualities. "He's a tolerably clever fellow," say some; "but very eccentric.” I acknowledge that I am a clever fellow, and also eccentric. As to the last attribute, I heartily wish I had none of it, and that my orbit were less elliptical. Like a comet, I am sometimes heated, and extravagant, indulging in untimely mirth; and soon, as you might prophesy, chilled with melancholy. Sometimes Í am accused of unseasonable levity, and oftener of moroseness and obstinacy; so that, if I take all the advice which my kind friends so liberally bestow, I shall soon find myself in the predicament of the old man, who with his son carried the ass to market; you remember the fable. I have long since determined to shape my own course, without reference to the opinions of every counsellor; if I can discover the path of duty, I hope I shall muster up courage to tread it. The advice of my parents, and those who have a right to counsel, I shall always deem invaluable. As to my habits, there are some which I cannot but deplore, but which I fear will cleave to me usque ad canitiem : among these I rank first, an unconquerable spirit of trifling, and levity; my natural temperament makes me ready at all times,

upon all occasions, for any silly jest (verbal jokes, I mean, I have no taste for practical jokes.') Habits of idleness appeared deep-rooted in me when I left college; I have, however, happily acquired a taste for study; so that, as it is my greatest pleasure, I wish I could say that my improvement has been proportional to my labour; I seem to have been very laboriously doing nothing.

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I concur with you in your general remarks upon education; still I would amend your proposition, by saying that boys are sent too early to colleges, instead of "schools." The three or four years spent in college are usually looked upon by the student, and the world, as the top-stones upon the structure of his education. A structure so soon erected, and so slightly, must needs totter under every hurricane. As far as I am enabled to judge from my own experience, I think that boys should leave school, about the age that they usually leave college, i. e. about 18. This indeed does not accord with our present collegiate system, for in that time they would have made a greater progress than boys do in their whole college course. But let the standard of college attainments be elevated far above its present degree. Let the servile work of learning to read Latin and Greek be kept to the schools, and even there let it be taught upon some plan which shall not disgust the scholar, and make him loathe those noble authors, which are prostituted to the base purpose of teaching boys their accidence. Let boys be thoroughly versed in the learned languages before they enter any college. This is the plan pursued in most of the European universities. It is absolutely necessary that the student should be able not merely to read, but to talk Latin, before he can enter them. Let the studies of the schools be so diversified, and so suited to the taste of the learner, that he may take some pleasure in them. A school thus conducted, would not, I think, cramp the genius of any boy, but rather add wings to it, and assist its discursive flight. I think it necessary that boys should be sent early to school. Habits of idleness soon become inveterate ; still, let the studies be proportionate to the scholar's capacity. Another reason I have for this is, that boyhood is the time when we receive with most pleasure, general knowledge; the lighter kind of knowledge obtained by indiscriminate reading, and which then amalgamates itself with the boy's previous knowledge, and sticks by him through life. Now where is the person who has much taste for this knowledge, whose education was not commenced early?

To go on with my Utopian scheme. I would have the student learn in college, the higher branches of education--the higher mathematics, if his taste led him to pursue it, the philosophy of

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the mind, ethics, natural law, political economy, and the classics; not construing and parsing, (for I would have him familiar with them,) but investigating their beauties, drawing from them rules of pure and correct criticism, and thus improving his taste and judgment. Above all, I would have Shakespeare's rule adopted : "Talk logic with acquaintance that you have,

And practise Rhetoric in your common talk:
The mathematics and the metaphysics
Fall to them as your stomach serves you.
No profit grows where is no pleasure taken.
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.'

September 10th, Tuesday. I was unable to obtain an opportunity of sending what I had written on Saturday, and therefore I shall continue to scribble as I have leisure until such an opportunity presents itself. My father returned yesterday, quite ill, from Newtown, Pa. He went on Saturday for the purpose of assisting Mr. Boyd in the administration of the Lord's Supper. He preached in the morning, and attempted it at night, but fainted away. We were very much alarmed when he returned. His disorder is the dysentery. We hope that the disease is subdued by the administration of very powerful medicines yesterday and to-day. He is, however, still extremely weak, and keeps his bed.

I was going on in answer to your letter on Saturday. Your disgust for the ancient classics is by no means wonderful. The method of teaching them in our institutions of learning, is calculated admirably to have that effect. When I commenced studying them after I took my degree, it was merely from a sense of their importance, and not from any love to them. I detested them as most nauseous, and felt disposed to esteem all their admirers arrant pedants, and crack-brained fools.

The words of Byron suited me well,

May he who will, his recollections rake
And quote in classic raptures, and awake
The hills with Latian echoes; I abhorred
Too much, to conquer for the poet's sake,

The drilled dull lesson, forced down word by word
In my repugnant youth, with pleasure to record
Aught that recalls the daily drug which turn'd
My sick'ning memory; and tho' time has taught
My mind to meditate what then it learned,
Yet such the fixed inveteracy wrought
By the impatience of my early thought,
That with the freshness wearing out, before
My mind could relish what it might have sought,
If free to choose, I cannot now restore

Its health, but what it then detested still abhor."