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find that he had any enthusiastic admiration for English poesy. If he loved nature, it was in a serene and equable spirit, rather in thankfulness for its comforts than in love of its beauties. Neither in his writings, nor in such few specimens of his oratory as are still extant, do we find any attempts at flights of rhetoric, nor any indulgence in the dangerous rhetorical arts of simile and trope. He is ever bent, alike as a writer and as an actor on the world's stage, upon that which is practical, tangible, material, attainable. When we consider Franklin's writings on public subjects and for the public eye, we marvel at their directness, their force, their supreme fitness to achieve what it was in his mind to achieve. "At twenty years of age," says Theodore Parker, "he wrote as well as Addison or Goldsmith." He had, with infinite pains and patience, drilled himself into the skilful and rapid use of the purest and most forcible vernacular. His command of language became easy and complete. His sentences were full of the most virile solidity and strength. They abounded in the utmost fertility of suggestion, the utmost substantiality of reasoning. He could handle the dryest topic with such mastery as made it universally interesting. Beneath this carefully trained style there was the substance of the most sensible, the most well considered, the most broadly conceived and developed argument. In many things Franklin anticipated, in his political writings, the enlightened action of future generations. He proposed the abolition of privateering, and the immunity of peaceful trade in time of war,-principles of international comity which are only just now beginning to be fully recognized. He suggested in his writings many of the bases upon which our political fabric now practically rests. Very rarely was it that he ever projected any scheme, political, scientific, or economical, which was visionary or impracticable. His writings are intrinsically sound and strong, and may be read with as much profit now as they were read in his own time.-From "Franklin, the Boston Boy," by George M. Towle, in the Memorial History of Boston, Vol. II.

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South Leaflets

SERIES, 1883

On the Study of History.

BY THOMAS CARLYLE.

As applicable to all of you, I will say that it is highly expedient to go into history; to inquire into what has passed before you on this earth, and in the family of man.

The history of the Romans and Greeks will first of all concern you; and you will find that the classical knowledge you have got will be extremely applicable to elucidate that. There you have two of the most remarkable races of men in the world set before you, calculated to open innumerable reflections and considerations; a mighty advantage, if you can achieve it ;to say nothing of what their two languages will yield you, which your Professors can better explain; model languages, which are universally admitted to be the most perfect forms of speech we have yet found to exist among men. And you will find, if you read well, a pair of extremely remarkable nations, shining in the records left by themselves, as a kind of beacon, or solitary mass of illumination, to light up some noble forms of human life for us, in the otherwise utter darkness of the past ages; and it will be well worth your while if you can get into the understanding of what these people were, and what they did. You will find a great deal of hearsay, of empty rumor and tradition, which does not touch on the matter; but perhaps some of you will get to see the old Roman and the old Greek face to face; you will know in some measure how they contrived to exist, and to perform their feats in the world.

I believe, also, you will find one important thing not much noted, that there was a very great deal of deep religion in both nations. This is pointed out by the wiser kind of historians this profoundly religious nature of the Roman people, notwithstanding their ruggedly positive, defiant and fierce ways. They believed that Jupiter Optimus Maximus was lord.

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of the universe, and that he had appointed the Romans to become the chief of nations, provided they followed his commands to brave all danger, all difficulty, and stand up with an invincible front, and be ready to do and die; and also to have the same sacred regard to truth of promise, to thorough veracity, thorough integrity, and all the virtues that accompany that noblest quality of man, valor - to which latter the Romans gave the name of "virtue proper (virtus, manhood), as the crown and summary of all that is ennobling for a man. In the literary ages of Rome this religious feeling had very much decayed away; but it still retained its place among the lower classes of the Roman people. Of the deeply religious nature of the Greeks, along with their beautiful and sunny effulgences of art, you have striking proof, if you look for it. In the tragedies of Sophocles there is a most deep-toned recognition of the eternal justice of heaven, and the unfailing punishment of crime against the laws of God. I believe you will find in all histories of nations, that this has been at the origin and foundation of them all; and that no nation which did not contemplate this wonderful universe with an awe-stricken and reverential belief that there was a great unknown, omnipotent and allwise and all-just Being, superintending all men in it and all interests in it no nation ever came to very much, nor did any man either, who forgot that. If a man did forget that, he forgot the most important part of his mission in this world.

Our own history of England, which you will naturally take a great deal of pains to make yourselves acquainted with, you will find beyond all others worthy of your study. For indeed I believe that the British nation including in that the Scottish nation produced a finer set of men than any you will find it possible to get anywhere else in the world. I don't know, in any history of Greece or Rome, where you will get so fine a man as Oliver Cromwell, for example. . . . I should say of that Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell's, notwithstanding the censures it has encountered, and the denial of everybody that it could continue in the world, and so on, it appears to me to have been, on the whole, the most salutary thing in the modern history of England. If Oliver Cromwell had continued it out, I don't know what it would have come to. It would have got corrupted probably in other hands, and could not have gone on; but it was pure and true, to the last fibre, in his mind; there was perfect truth in it while he ruled over it. . . . Oliver

Cromwell's Protectorate, or Dictatorate, if you will let me name it so, lasted for about ten years, and you will find that nothing which was contrary to the laws of heaven was allowed to live by Oliver. . . . I reckon, all England, Parliamentary England, got a new lease of life from that Dictatorship of Oliver's; and, on the whole, that the good fruits of it will never die while England exists as a nation.

In general, I hardly think that out of common history books you will ever get into the real history of this country, or ascertain anything which can specially illuminate it for you, and which it would most of all behove you to know. You may read very ingenious and very clever books, by men whom it would be the height of insolence in me to do other than express my respect for. But their position is essentially sceptical. God and the God-like, as our fathers would have said, has fallen asleep for them, and plays no part in their histories. A most sad and fatal condition of matters; who shall say how fatal to us all! A man unhappily in that condition will make but a temporary explanation of anything-in short, you will not be able, I believe, by aid of these men, to understand how this island came to be what it is.

I do not know whether it has been sufficiently brought home to you that there are two kinds of books. When a man is reading on any kind of subject, he will find that there is a division into good books and bad books. Everywhere a good kind of book and a bad kind of book. I am not to assume that you are unacquainted, or ill acquainted, with this plain fact; but I may remind you that it is becoming a very important consideration in our day. And we have to cast aside altogether the idea people have, that if they are reading any book, that if an ignorant man is reading any book, he is doing rather better than nothing at all. I must entirely call that in question; I even venture to deny that. It would be much safer and better for many a reader, that he had no concern with books at all. There is a number, a frightfully increasing number, of books that are decidedly, to the readers of them, not useful. But an ingenuous reader will learn, also, that a certain number of books were written by a supremely noble kind of people — not a very great number of books, but still a number fit to occupy all your reading industry, do adhere more or less to that side of things. In short, as I have written it down somewhere else, I conceive that books are like men's souls; divided into sheep and goats.

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