for more is to be got from the study of one book, than from the reading of a thousand, and he that will know much will afford to be ignorant of more. It as little avails to be running cursorily over page after page, as it does to split the rays of truth. Cave hominem qui legit unum librum, is an old saying and a good one, and I recollect it to have been well applied by one of those Divines above mentioned-almost every sentence of whose works I once had at my fingers' ends-"A river cut into many rivulets divides also its strength, and grows contemptible, and apt to be forded by a lamb, and drunk up by a summer sun: so is the spirit of a man busied in variety, and divided in itself; it abates its fervor, cools into indifference, and becomes trifling by its dispersion and inadvertency. Aquinas was once asked with what compendium a man might best become learned? he answered, BY READING ONE BOOK meaning, that an understanding entertained with several objects is intent upon neither and profits not "." Wise and excellent hint of that powerful schoolman,―a Colossus in intellectual grasp,-whose writings we cannot find time to read, and therefore abuse!-But too true is what Hudibras Butler observes in his Characters, touching Epitomes-" which many men believe will be the bane and calamity of learning!" 3 Jer. Taylor. "Life and Death of the Holy Jesus," vol. iii. p. 84. Remains, by Thyer, vol. ii. p. 114. It were hardly necessary I should make any observations on the extracts in verse and prose prefixed to each Sermon. The idea originated in the early delight I derived from the pithy sentences of the Fathers appended to Quarle's Emblems. When I recollected no more of the Book, (well worthy to be recollected, as old Fuller intimates in the Epistle to the Reader of his Abel Redivivus,) I recollected them. And so it may be with these volumes. A Sermon may miss of its aim, the introductory sentence, though drawn at a venture, may hit between the harness. As for the occasional sentences from certain of our own poets, what George Herbert says may turn out true, "A verse may find him, who a sermon flies 5!" I read our great Poets in my childhood,-(thanks to the library and the kindness of one departed!)— I studied them, (after I had thoroughly imbued myself with the Greek and Latin Poets,) at a maturer age, from the beginning to the end-epic, dramatic, moral, theological. From these and from our old 'Let me here remark (—ut vineta egomet cædam mea ;) that there are two imperfect quotations in these two volumes, one from Ben Jonson, the other from Wither. They are marked off in my Edition of those Poets, but I find I had accidentally written them on the fly leaf of the Sermon from another work. I could not verify them till the sheets were printed off. Every other quotation and every other extract was copied out from the original works. I mention this to show the inaccuracy of quotations in general. In two instances I trusted to second-hand, and both were wrong! "Habet gens Britannica, qui hoc præstiterunt apud suos, quod Divines, I have derived whatever there may be of straight-forward, plain, simple diction in what I have written. Years gone by I made the two following extracts from "Dan Chaucer's well of English undefiled," and I insert them here: "For out of the old fieldes, as men saith I woke and other bokes toke me to I hope and wis to rede so some day The bet, and thus to rede I will not spare." And certainly I have met with it in the full force and strength of the English language, which none find fault with who know its power. If bad carpenters make many chips, they are the same race that complain of their tools. As George Herbert elsewhere says, "Let foreign nations of their language boast, I like our language, as our men, and coast, Who cannot dress it well, wants wit, not words." And what I have here also said, is not without an object. In some minds it may tend to do away with the notions now prevalent in the subject of education. Dantes ac Petrarcha apud Italos. Et horum evolvendis scriptis linguam expolivit, jam tum se præparans ad præconium sermonis evangelici." Erasmus, Iodoco Jonæ, Jun. 1519. Speaking of Dean Colet. The Greek and Roman Classic Poets, (our own follow naturally,) together with their orators and historians, are the best exercise for the mind of youth. It will be an ill day for sound theological learning when our present studies are dispensed with. Bp. Parkhurst, says Churton, in that beautiful piece of biography, The life of Alexander Nowel", "demands the gratitude of posterity, if it were only for the sententious remark with which he dismissed a Puritan, presented to him for admission to a school in his diocese, who was reported to condemn the reading of profane authors to children; Then I dare boldly say he shall never bring up good scholars." The truth is, this sort of study binds down the mind to stricter application, the ligaments of discipline are tightened by difficulty, taste is improved and formed on the best models, and, what is of much import, the languages subsidiary to Divinity are attained in early years. Of Greek-the original of the New Testament-it were needless to say anything, and though the line of the Satirist have truth in it, "That golden clerks but wooden lawyers bene," still, it is well to recollect, that works such as are 7 See p. 220. Whoever may wish to follow up this subject is directed to " Knight's Life of Dean Colet." It is to him and Camden that we are indebted for our present Latin and Greek Grammars. Colet, it is well known, was the founder of St. Paul's School;" he thought it would better serve the purpose of the restoration and improvement of learning, to provide a grammar school for the instruction of youth in the two subsidiary languages Glanvil, Bracton, Fleta, and Lindwood, are all written in Latin. It is of the latter that old Fuller says, "his works, (though now beheld by some as an Almanack out of date,) will be valued by the judicious whilst learning and civility have a being." As to the hacknied objection of being learned overmuch, there is little danger now, (to use the words of Ant. Farindon,) of theologians making Plato and Aristotle their God. Our deep thinkers are not so common. The mind is not worked out by profounder speculations. We have run into the contrary extreme, and the Horn-Book is study enough for the many! I would we were all wiser,-but to salvation! Let me not then be blamed, if I have drawn largely, and with an object, at so deep a well as our old Divines, and the solid thinkers of the seventeenth century. But and if any will find fault on this head, let old Burton speak for me, in his "Anatomie of Melancholie,"-read and lingered over in my boyhood, together with the "Vulgar Errors" of Sir Thomas Browne, and the "Silva" of Evelyn :- "If that severe doom of Synesius be true, it is a greater offence to steal dead men's labours, than their clothes, what shall become of most writers?—I hold up my hand at the of Latin and Greek, to come at the true sense and spirit of classic authors, to know how to read, speak, and write in a proper and agreeable way; and so to lay the best and only foundation for academical studies, and especially those of divinity." P. 89. 'Lyttleton's History of Henry II., vol. ii., p. 320, 2nd ed. 4to. 'Church Hist. xv. Cent. Book iv., p. 176. It is not requisite to refer to the Latin Fathers, &c. VOL. I. a |