by any productions on earth. No family ought to be without these state papers; more especially those families in which there are children growing up. A great part of those papers have been collected in a manual called The Remembrancer. Having been, myself, old enough to understand and admire them as they came out, I have carefully preserved my original copies and had them all bound together, in one large and sacred volume. This book forms an annual exercise in my family. My boys read it to me once a year with religious punctuality; and never without producing in them the most sensible effects. In the first place it is a salutary recurrence to first principles. It shews them at full length and in the colors of life, what a patriot was, in the golden age of patriotism. It gives them a glorious model on which to form their own principles and characters.-It animates their young bosoms with the same great and noble spirit of republicanism-and the annual recurrence to this source of light and warmth, keeps that spirit from languishing or being smothered under the business of life; on the contrary, it rekindles and revives it and feeds, with never-failing fuel, the holy flame of liberty. Besides this training of the heart to greatness, the practice, of which I speak, produces a correspondent effect upon their minds. It teaches them the difference between solid substance and fantastic shadow. It shews them the superiority of thought to words. It gives them a perfect standard of manly and nervous eloquence; and proves in the most striking and convincing manner, how much more power as well as dignity there is in a plain and simple period, loaded with sense, than in all the pomp and pageantry, and sound and fury of modern declamation. It raises them above that trick of indolence or weakness of taking a short and partial view of things; the common habit of yielding to sudden impulses, or solitary and erratic considerations; and the mean and pitiful artifice of appealing to existing prejudices, instead of making an honorable and manly appeal to reason. On the contrary, it teaches them how to look abroad over the whole of a great subject, and to seize all its strong points; how to arrange, connect and set them forth to advantage; and thus to combine the comprehensive and profound, with the beautifully distinct and luminous view. It is obvious that those men read more and thought much more than their descendants. Their preparation for public life was on a far greater scale. Their minds were enlarged by the contemplation of subjects, and invigorated by the pursuit of studies of which we seen now to have lost sight entirely. And they entered upon business with an intimate knowledge of every consideration which belonged to it, gained by labor; the place of which their children seem to expect to supply by inspiration :It is true that the revolution may have lent a spring to their industry and enterprize :-but are we willing to confess ourselves sunk into an indolence so torpid and disgraceful that nothing less than a revolution can rouse us to life and action?-This I do not believe. Our young men want only to be made to understand their deficiencies: they want only some friendly monitor to point them to those sources of knowledge from which their forefathers drew, to render themselves worthy of being called and known as their descendants. Our great misfortune is, that narrow and contracted preparations for public life have become so strongly fastened upon us by the fashion and practice of the day, that no one lifts his mind to any other course. Look, for example, at that profession from which you draw almost all your great officers-your presidents, governors, judges and statesmen. I mean the profession of law. Let me first shew you how a young man ought to be prepared for this profession, according to the opinion of Lord Mansfield, than whom no man that ever lived was better qualified to judge. The following course of study in that profession was recommended by him to a young friend. "For general Ethics, which are the foundation of all Law, read Xenophon's Memorabilia, Tully's Offices, and Woolaston's Religion of Nature. You may likewise look into Aristotle's Ethics, which you will not like; but it is one of those books, qui a limine salutandi sunt ne verba nobis dentur. For the law of nations, which is partly founded on the law of nature, and partly positive, read Grotius, and Puffendorf in Barbeyrac's translation, and Burlamaqui's Droit Naturel as these authors treat the same subject in the heads, they may be read and compared together. "When you have laid this foundation, it will be time to look into those systems of positive law that have prevailed in their turn. You will begin, of course, with the Roman Law, for the history of which, read Gravina's elegant work De Ortu et Progressu Juris Civilis; then read and study Justitian's Institutes, without any other comment than the short one by Vinnius. Long comments would only confound you, and make your head spin round. Dip occasionally into the Pandects. After this, it will be proper to acquire a general idea of feudal law and the feudal system, which is so interwoven with almost every constitution in Europe, that, without some knowledge of it, it is impossible to understand modern History. Read Craig de Feudis, an admirable book for matter and method; and dip occasionally into the Corpus juris Feudalis, whilst you are reading Giannone's History of Naples, one of the ablest and most instructive books that was ever written. These writers are not sufficient to give you a thorough knowledge of the subjects they treat of; but they will give you general notions, general leading principles, and lay the best foundation that can be laid for the study of any municipal law, such as the Law of England, Scotland, France, &c. &c." Who does not recognize in this plan of forchsic preparation the mind of a master, who well knew and had himself travelled this road to greatness? Who that has ever been upon the mountain summits here pointed out, does not remember, with rapture, the wide and grand horizon which they opened to his mind and the invaluble treasures of which they put him in possession.-From this noble route, by which alone great men can be made, turn to the preparation for the bar which is practised in this stateBlackstone and the Virginia laws, now and then Coke apon Littleton and a few Reporters make the whole snail's race of our young Virginia lawyers. Yet these young men, thus crude and spoiled and crippled, are in a few years returned from their Counties to the General Assembly. for the solemn and important function of making laws for the Commonwealth-In a few years they go to Congress --and when the illustrious remains of the revolution shall leave us, such alone are to be the men who are to be our presidents, and law-givers!With what foreign nation shall we then be prepared to cope? I leave this subject to the reader's reflection. Fathers, think of it. Sons, for your own sakes ponder well upon. it; and arouse your souls to the glorious cmulation of those virtues and accomplishments, which made you free and your country great. Number XXIII. Misce stultitiam consiliis brevem. Dulce est desipere in loco. Hor. Od. XII. Lib. 4. 9. 27. Mix a short folly with thy labour'd schemes; Francis. It was a pleasant evening in the month of May; and my sweet child, my Rosalie, and I had sauntered up to the Castle's top to enjoy the breeze that played around it, and to admire the unclouded firmament that glowed and sparkled, with unusual lustre, from pole to pole. The atmostphere was in its purest and finest state for vision; the milky way was distinctly developed throughout its whole extent; every planet and every star above the horizon, however near and brilliant, or distant and faint, lent its lambent light, or twinkling ray, to give variety and beauty to the hemisphere; while the round, bright moon (so distinctly defined were the lines of her figure, and so clearly visible even the rotundity of her form,) seemed to hang off from the azure vault, suspended in midway air; or stooping forward from the firmament her fair and radiant face, as if to court and return our gaze. We amused ourselves for some time in observing, thro a telescope, the planet Jupiter, sailing in silent majesty, with his squadron of satellites, along the vast ocean, of space between us and the fixed stars; and admired the felicity of that design by which those distant bodies had been parcelled out & arranged into constellations; so as to have served not only for beacons for the ancient naviga tor, but, as it were, for landmarks to astronomers at this day, enabling them, although in different countries, to indicate to each other, with case, the place and motion of those planets, comets and magnificent meteors which inhabit, revolve and play in the intermediate space. We recalled and dwelt with' delight on the rise and progress of the science of astronomy; on that series of astonishing discoveries, through successive ages, which display, in so strong a light, the force and reach of the human mind; and on those bold conjectures and sublime reveries which seem to tower even to the confines of divinftv, and denote the high destiny to which mortals tend. That thought, for instance, which is said to have been first started by Pythagoras, and which modern astronomers ap prove; that the stars which we call fixed, although they appear to us to be nothing more than large spangles of various sizes, glittering on the same concave surface, are, nevertheless, bodies as large as our sun, shining, like him, with original and not reflected light, placed at incalculable distances asunder, and each star the solar centre of a system of planets, which revolve around it, as the planets belonging to our system do around our sun; that this is not only the case with all the stars in the firmament which our eyes discern, or telescopes have brought within the sphere of our vision, but, according to the modern improvements of this thought, that there are probably other stars whose light has not yet reached us, although light moves with a velocity, a million of times greater than that of a cannon ball;-that those luminous appearances which we observe in the firnament, like flakes of thin white cloud, are windows, as it were, which open to other firmaments, far, far beyond the ken of human eye, or the power of optical instrufnents, lighted up, like ours, with hosts of stars or suns; that this scheme goes on through infinite space, which is filled with thousands upon thousands of those suns, attended by ten thousand times ten thousand worlds, all in rapid motion, yet calm, regular and harmonious, invariably keeping the paths prescribed to them; and these worlds, peopled with "myriads of intelligent beings:" One would think, that this conception, thus extended, would be bold enough to satisfy the whole enterprize of the human imagination. But what an accession of magnificence and glory does Doctor Herschell superadd to it, when, instead of supposing all those suns fixed, and the motion confined to their respective planets, he loosens those multitudinous suns, themselves, from their stations, sets them all into motion with their splendid retinue of planets and satellites, and imagines them, thus attended, to perform a stupendous revolution, system above system, around some grander, unknown centre, somewhere in the boundless abyss of space!-And when, carrying on the process, you suppose even that centre itself not stationary, but, also, counterpoised by other masses in the immensity of space, with which, attended by their accumulated trains of.. "Planets, suns, and adamantine spheres, Wheeling unshaken, through the void immense," It maintains harmonious concert, surrounding in their vast career, some other centre still more remote and more stu U |