9.

BERNARD BARTON.

MY DEAR SIR,-When I had the pleasure of meeting you at Ch- -, for the second time in my life, I was much concerned to remark the general dejection of your manner. I may now add, that I was also much surprized; your cousin's visit to me, having made it no longer a point of delicacy to suppress that feeling. General report had represented you as in possession of all which enters into the worldly estimate of happiness-great opulence, unclouded reputation, and freedom from unhappy connexions. That you had the priceless blessing of unfluctuating health, I know upon your own authority. And the concurring opinions of your friends, together with my own opportunities for observation, left me no room to doubt that you wanted not the last and weightiest among the sources of happiness-a fortunate constitution of mind, both for moral and intellectual ends. So many blessings as these, meeting in the person of one man, and yet all in some mysterious waydefeated and poisoned, presented a problem too interesting both to the selfish and the generous curiosity of men to make it at all wonderful, that at that time and place you should have been the subject of much discussion. Now and then some solutions of the mystery were hazarded: in particular, I remember one from a young lady of seventeen, who said with a positive air, "That Mr. M's dejection was well known to arise from an unfortunate attachment in early life:" which assurance appeared to have great weight with some other young ladies of sixteen. But upon the whole, I think that no

account of the matter was proposed at that time which satisfied myself, or was likely to satisfy any reflecting person.

At length, the visit of your cousin L in his road to Th― has cleared up the mystery in a way more agreeable to myself than I could have ventured to anticipate from any communication short of that which should acquaint me with the entire dispersion of the dejection under which you laboured. I allow myself to call such a disclosure agreeable, partly upon this ground-that where the grief or dejection of our friends admits of no important alleviation, it is yet satisfactory to know, that it may be traced to causes of adequate dignity: and, in this particular case, I have not only that assurance, but the prospect of contributing some assistance to your emancipation from these depressing recollections by co-operating with your own efforts in the way you have pointed out for supplying the defects of your early education. Lexplained to me all that your own letter had left imperfect; in particular how it was that you came to be defrauded of the education to which even your earliest and humblest prospects had entitled you: by what heroic efforts, but how vainly, you laboured to repair that greatest of losses: what remarkable events concurred to ra.e you to your present state of prospe→ rity; and all other circumstances which appeared necessary to put me fully in possession of your present wishes and intentions. The two questions, which you addressed to me through him, I have answered below: these were questions which I

could answer easily and without meditation: but for the main subject of our future correspondence, it is so weighty, and demands such close attention (as even I find, who have revolved the principal points almost daily for many years), that I would willingly keep it wholly distinct from the hasty letter which I am now obliged to write; on which account it is that I shall forbear to enter at present upon the Series of Letters which I have promised, even if I should find that my time were not exhausted by the answers to your two questions below.

To your first question,-whether to you, with your purposes and at your age of thirty-two, a residence at either of our English universitiesor at any foreign university, can be of much service?-my answer is firmly and unhesitatingly-no. The majority of the under-graduates of your own standing in an academic sense will be your juniors by twelve or fourteen years; a disparity of age which could not but make your society mutually burthensome. What then is it, that you would seek in a university? Lectures? These, whether public or private, are surely the very worst modes of acquiring any sort of accurate knowledge; and are just as much inferior to a good book on the same subject, as that book hastily read aloud, and then immediately withdrawn, would be inferior to the same book left in your possession, and open at any hour to be consulted, retraced, collated, and in the fullest sense studied. But, besides this, university lectures are naturally adapted not so much to the general purpose of communicating knowledge, as to the specific purpose of meeting a particular form of examination for degrees, and a particular profession to which the whole course of the education is known to be directed. The two single advantages which lectures can ever acquire to balance those which they forego-are either 1. the obvious one of a better apparatus for displaying illustrative experiments than most students can command; and the cases, where this becomes of importance it cannot be necessary to mention: 2. the advantage of a rhetorical delivery, when that is of any use (as in lectures on poetry, JAN. 1823.

&c.) These, however, are advantages more easily commanded in a great capital than in the most splendid university. What then remains to a university, except its libraries? And with regard to those the answer is short: to the greatest of them under-graduates have not free access: to the inferior ones (of their own college, &c.) the libraries of the great capitals are often equal or superior: and for mere purposes of study your own private library is far preferable to the Bodleian or the Vatican.

To you, therefore, a university can offer no attractions except on the assumption that you see cause to adopt a profession and, as a degree from some university would in that case be useful (and indispensable, except for the bar), your determination on this first question must still be dependent on that which you form upon the second.

In this second question you call for my opinion upon the eleventh chapter of Mr. Coleridge's Biogra phia Literaria, as applied to the circumstances in which you yourself are placed. This chapter, to express its substance in the most general terms, is a dissuasion from what Herder, in a passage there quoted, calls Die Authorschaft; or, as Mr. Coleridge expresses it, "the trade of authorship:" and the amount of the advice is-that, for the sake of his own happiness and respectability, every man should adopt some trade or profession-and should make literature a subordinate pursuit. On this advice, I understand you to ask, 1. whether it is naturally to be interpreted, as extending to cases such as yours: and 2. if so, what is my judgment on such advice so extended? As to my judgment upon this advice, supposing it addressed to men of your age and situation, you will easily collect from all which I shall say that I think it as bad as can well be given. Waiving this, however, and to consider your other question-in what sense, and with what restrictions the whole chapter is to be interpreted; that is a point which I find it no easy matter to settle. Mr. Coleridge, who does not usually offend by laxity and indecision of purpose, has in this instance G

allowed the very objects of his advice to shift and fluctuate before him; and from the beginning to the end, nothing is firmly constructed for the apprehension to grasp, nor are the grounds of judgment steadily maintained. From the title of the chapter (an affectionate exhortation to those who in early life feel themselves disposed to become authors), and from the express words of Herder, in the passage cited from him as the final words of the chapter, which words discountenance authorship" only as" zu früh oder unmässig gebraucht" (practised too early, or with too little temperance), it would have been a natural presumption that Mr. Coleridge's counsels regarded chiefly or altogether the case of very youthful authors, and the unfortunate thirst for premature distinction. And if this had been the purpose of the chapter, excepting that the evil involved in such a case is not very great, and is generally intercepted by the difficulties which prevent, and over-punished by the mortifications which attend, any such juvenile acts of presumption, there could have been no room for differing with Mr. Coleridge, except upon the propriety of occupying his great powers with topics of such trivial interest. But this, though from the title it naturally should have been, is not the evil, or any part of it, which Mr. Coleridge is contemplating. What Mr. Coleridge really has in his view are two most different objections to literature, as the principal pursuit of life; which, as I have said, continually alternate with each other as the objects of his arguments, and sometimes become perplexed toge ther, though incapable of blending into any real coalition. The objections urged are:

1. To literature considered as a means of livelihood;-as any part of the resources which a man should allow himself to rely on for his current income, or worldly credit, and respectability: here the evils anticipated by Mr. Coleridge are of a high and positive character, and such as tend directly to degrade the character, and indirectly to aggravate some heavy domestic evils.

2. To literature considered as the means of sufficiently occupying and

exercising the intellect. Here the evil apprehended is an evil of defect: it is alleged that literature is not adequate to the main end of giving due and regular excitement to the mind and the spirits, unless combined with some other summons to mental exercise of periodic recurrence-determined by an overruling cause acting from without-and not dependent therefore on the accidents of individual will, or the caprices of momentary feeling springing out of temper or bodily health.

Upon the last objection, as by far the most important in any case, and the only one at all applicable to yours, I would wish to say a word; because my thoughts on that matter are from the abundance of my heart, and drawn up from the very depths of my own experience. If there has ever lived a man who might claim the privilege of speaking with emphasis and authority on this great question-By what means shall a man best support the activity of his own mind in solitude? I probably am that man; and upon this ground

that I have passed more of my life in absolute and unmitigated solitude, voluntarily, and for intellectual purposes, than any person of my age whom I have ever either met withheard of or read of. With such pretensions, what is it that I offer as the result of my experience? and how far does it coincide with the doctrine of Mr. Coleridge? Briefly this: I wholly agree with him that literature, in the proper acceptation of the term, as denoting what is otherwise called the Belles Lettres, &c. i. e. the most eminent of the fine arts, and so understood therefore as to exclude all science whatsoever,― is not, to use a Greek word, dvrapens -not self-sufficing: no, not even when the mind is so far advanced that it can bring what have hitherto passed for merely literary or æsthetic questions, under the light of philosophic principles: when problems of "taste" have expanded to problems of human nature. And why? Simply for this reason that our power to exercise the faculties on such subjects is not, as it is on others, in defiance of our own spirits: the difficulties and resistances to our progress in these investigations is not susceptible of

cording to a plan which you will collect from the letters I am to write ; and which therefore I need not here anticipate. What, however, you will say (for that is the main inquiry), what has been the success? has it warranted me to look back upon my past life, and to pronounce it upon the whole a happy one? I answer in calmness and with sincerity of heart-Yes. To you with your knowledge of life I need not say that it is a vain thing for any man to hope that he can arrive at my age without many troubles-every man has his own; and more especially he who has not insulated himself in this world, but has formed attachments and connexions, and has thus multiplied the avenues through which his peace is assailable. But setting aside these inevitable deductions, I assure you, that the great account of my days, if summed, would present a great overbalance of happiness; and of happiness, during those years which I lived in solitude, of necessity derived exclusively from intellectual sources: such an evil indeed as time hanging heavy on my hands, I never experienced for a moment. On the other hand, to illustrate the benefits of my plan by a picture of the very opposite plan, though pursued under the most splendid advantages, I would direct your eyes to the case of an eminent living Englishman, with talents of the first order, and, yet upon the evidence of all his works, ill-satisfied at any time either with himself or those of his own age. This Englishman set out in life, as I conjecture, with a plan of study modelled upon that of Leibnitz: that is to say, he designed to make himself (as Leibnitz most truly was) a Polyhistor, or Catholic student. For this reason, and because at a very early age I had become familiar with the writings of Leibnitz, I have been often tempted to draw a parallel between that eminent German, and the no less eminent Englishman of whom I speak. In many things they agreed: these I shall notice at some other opportunity: only in general I will say that as both had minds not merely powerful, but distinguished for variety and compass of power, so in both were these fine endowments com

minute and equable partition (as in mathematics); and therefore the movements of the mind cannot be continuous, but are either of necessity tumultuary and per saltum, or none at all. When, on the contrary, the difficulty is pretty equally dispersed and broken up into a series of steps, no one of which demands any exertion sensibly more intense than the rest, nothing is required of the student beyond that sort of application and coherent attention which in a sincere student of any standing may be presumed as a habit already and inveterately established. The dilemma therefore to which a student of pure literature is continually reduced, such a student suppose as the Schlegels, or any other man who has cultivated no acquaintance with the severer sciences, is this: either he studies literature as a mere man of taste, and perhaps also as a phi lologer; and in that case his understanding must find a daily want of some masculine exercise to call it out and give it play; or (which is the rarest thing in the world) having begun to study literature as a philosopher, he seeks to renew that elevated walk of study at all opportunities: but this is often as hopeless an effort as to a great poet it would be to sit down upon any predetermination to compose in his character of poet. Hence, therefore,-if (as too often it happens) he has not cultivated those studies (mathematics, e. g.) which present such difficulties as will bend to a resolute effort of the mind, and which have the additional recommendation that they are apt to stimulate and irritate the mind to make that effort; he is often thrown by the very cravings of an unsatisfied intellect, and not by passion or inclination, upon some vulgar excitement of business or pleasure, which becomes constantly more necessary to him. I should do injustice to myself, if I were to say-that I owed this view of the case solely to my experience: the truth is-1 easily foresaw, upon the suggestion almost of an instinct, that literature would not suffice for my mind with my purposes. I foresaw this; and I provided for it from the very first: but how? Not in the way recommended by Mr. Coleridge, but ac