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The dissenting divines have been for the most part educated in provincial academies, immeasurably inferior in endowments and the apparatus of instruction to the great schools of Eton, Westminster, Harrow, and Rugby, superintended each by two or three hard-working and poorly paid instructers, often pastors as well as teachers, and carrying their pupils through a classical and a theological course in a period of time inadequate for either. But the dissenters have breathed an atmosphere of freedom. They have been nurtured in self-trust and self-dependence. They have not been trammelled by obsolete formalisms or arbitrary prescriptions. They have not bent beneath the crushing tyranny of the past. If they have failed of patronage, they have not paid its inevitable price. If they have lost the shelter of university halls and libraries, they have not been dwarfed under their shadow. On the other hand, the normal education of the English mind has borne a strong analogy to the antique style of horticulture. Its shoots have been clipped, trained into espaliers, twisted into quaint and fantastic forms, forced into lateral expansion instead of being left to seek the open sky, artificially stimulated into flowerless foliage and fruitless flowers. Cambridge and Oxford have produced more learning than wisdom, and nurtured more pedantry than genius; and, while they have presented unparalleled opportunities for the highest and freest mental culture, their inAluences have been such as to cherish mere barren scholarship rather than reproductive energy of mind. Then, again, the very fact that the young churchman finds himself exempted, or rather prohibited, from all investigation on the highest subjects of thought, and held back from all aggressive movements in the direction where curiosity ought to be the most active, must account for the prevalence within the pale of the Establishment of a quiescent state of mind as to all departments of truth, for the resolute clinging to the past in matters of science, literature, and criticism, and for the step or two in the rear of Continental Europe at which England has loved to linger.

With the liberty, which has invigorated the leading minds among the English dissenters, it cannot be denied that they have incurred some strongly marked inconveniences and disadvantages, where their early creed has been such as to exclude them from the universities. One of the most annoying

features in the intellectual life of the man who has not had a public education is the difficulty that he finds in determining his own relative position and comparative attainments. He lacks the standard of self-judgment. He may have acquired on any given subjet all the erudition and the mental discipline which he would have gained on the beaten track; but he must often feel a painful doubt whether this is the case. The question will constantly rise to his mind," Is there not, in this branch of learning, some process of training or some source of instruction open to others, which has been hidden from me? Have I at my command all the resources that others have?" This doubt often renders one diffident in the expression of opinion, where he has a right to speak with confidence and authority, and keeps a truly profound scholar or thinker back in the shadow of those greatly his inferiors, who have passed mechanically through the prescribed forms of culture.

There is another unfortunate tendency, which may often be traced in those who have failed to enjoy the advantages of a public education. They are very apt to regard as exclusively their own, and thus to announce oracularly and dogmatically, thoughts, reasonings, and theories which they have wrought out suo Marte, but which are the common property of colleges and universities, are embodied in textbooks, and seem trite to those who have passed over the worn threshold of the temple of knowledge. An humble and modest man may thus often appear a pedant. He promulgates essential truths, which, if new, should be proclaimed with a flourish of trumpets far louder than his timid heralding, but which lie as axioms in the minds of his hearers or readers.

Both these tendencies are strikingly illustrated in the life and writings of John Foster, and present themselves prominently to our notice in his recently published correspondence. He, though not held back by false modesty, and endowed with an almost unprecedented power of regarding himself objectively and dispassionately, seems to have been constantly perplexed in the attempt to ascertain his true place and relations in the literary republic. Educated in the paltry Baptist Academy at Bristol, familiarly associating from his youth with people of a very narrow range of intellect, he lived in almost entire isolation and solitary self-consciousness,

until his unexpected success as an author disclosed to him a dim, and to the last a feebly credited, glimpse of his own acumen and ability, in which he never acquired a prospective confidence sufficient to give him alacrity for the labor of the pen. We are constantly reminded, also, of the leanness of his early culture, in his frequent enunciation of truisms, as if they had never suggested themselves to any other mind, and in his late solution of many questions, doubts, and difficulties, which under better auspices would have been 'settled in his very boyhood.

All this, we were going to say, and to express therewith our surprise at the entire freedom of Robert Hall from these marks of his Bristol nurture; when, on looking again at his biography, we were reminded that he completed his education by a full course at the University of Aberdeen, where he commenced his life-long intimacy with Sir James Mackintosh, and other young men of superior endowments and promise, with whom he entered at once into the most healthful and friendly communion and competition of intellect. This fact adds new point to our homily on university education, which we are the more solicitous to put on record, on account of the growing disposition of young men in our own community to enter the learned professions (so called), with imperfect preliminary training. A New England college education certainly furnishes a sufficiently small amount of classical and general learning, to serve, in the lowest utilitarian view, as a basis for a professional course, especially as few, after entering upon active life, find or make the time to supply early deficiencies. Young men of only ordinary abilities need all that a college can do for them to make them respectable divines, lawyers, and physicians, to keep them from the rustiness and coarseness that are apt to gather upon a life of mere routine, and to give them the refinement of manners and character necessary to maintain their true place in society. And those, whose native powers can raise them above mediocrity, by hastening prematurely into a professional career, will only work their slow, dim, and circuitous way to an eminence, which, by more thorough training, they might easily and promptly attain, and will always exhibit marks of an irregular and disproportioned intellectual growth. We wish that our colleges would take this matter in hand, would exclude from their professional schools all except

graduates, and would thus purge themselves of all responsibleness for the slovenly process, which is flooding the professions with dunces and boors.

Robert Hall was no doubt a much greater man than his writings indicate. He has appeared before the public under the greatest possible disadvantages. The complete edition of his works is an insult to his memory. It is swollen into three large octavos by short-hand sketches, often travesties, of his sermons, sweepings of his desk, skeletons, and memoranda, which he forgot to burn. Indeed, it is hardly too much to suppose that we have in that collection the contents of every scrap of paper in his hand, or written from his lips,

which his editor could find in existence. He wrote but little. Repeated attacks of insanity made him fearful of overtasking his intervals of soundness. Almost unintermitted neuralgia rendered the manual labor of writing always intensely difficult, often impossible; and some of his best productions were dictated to an amanuensis, while he was writhing on a sofa or the floor in utter agony. Of all his published sermons, he wrote but one before it was delivered; and we can easily conceive, that much of his brilliant rhetoric and many happy turns of thought must have escaped his memory, when he came to write or dictate for the press. He prepared no work which was adapted to test or to exhibit the full extent of his mental power or resources. His controversial tracts were written in haste, and for immediate effect; and in them he simply measures strength with his antagonists, without attempting the full discussion of the subjects at issue. His reviews were mere reviews, not essays, keen, strong, discriminating, but with no purpose beyond that of praising or castigating the work in hand. But it is no mean proof of his compass and vigor of intellect, that, if he seldom rises above the demands of the occasion or his subject, he never falls short of them. Nor does he ever give one the idea that he is making a special effort, or laying out his whole strength. You feel, in reading him, that there is much more in reserve than appears on the page, and that he measures his effort, not by his own capacity, but by the then current needs and expectations of his audience or his readers. He evidently had no design of making an impression on posterity, but simply meant to exert the influence of a Christian mind on the various emergencies that presented themselves in his

walk of duty. And how great that influence must have been we may best learn, perhaps, from those outlines of discourses, which ought never to have been published. They are always outlines, which a feeble or jejune mind could never have drawn or filled. From his own pen we have nothing weak or paltry, while the occasional sottises of his stenographers reveal themselves by their broad contrast with his most hasty and fragmentary writings.

The most striking trait in the character of Hall's mind is its entire lack of striking traits, the evenness, harmony, and breadth of its development. He never astonishes, and never disappoints. His wisdom and learning are never obtrusive, and never at fault. In argument and illustration, we trace no redundancy, and complain of no omission. His eloquence is never quickened into a torrent-like flow, but is never dry or languid. He is majestic without pretension, and sensible without dulness. The spirits all come at his bidding, and vanish when they are no longer needed. His quick wit never encroaches on his reverence, and his scorching sarcasm is kept in check by conscientious justice. He seems to have been hardly better fitted for his chosen profession, than for any other path in life. His sermons indicate the thoroughly furnished and devoted religious teacher, while his political essays display powers that might have adorned the highest places in the state; and his few contributions to the general literature of the day show, that without profession or preferment, he could have acquired brilliant reputation as a crític, scholar, and man of letters.

Yet, with this high praise, we do not feel authorized in assigning to Hall a place in the first rank of genius. His mind lacked the power of concentration. While never

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superficial, he is seldom profound. We are indebted to him for few original ideas, or fresh, first-hand views of truth. He was rather a sagacious student, than a deep thinker. He had more discrimination than invention. was a judicious eclectic, and worked up to admiration the rough materials of thought that lay around him in his library; but seems seldom to have pursued any independent path of research or investigation. We should doubt, even, whether his opinions assumed a systematic form to his own consciousness, or were connected with each other, except by a perception of their moral resemblances, and the instinct of

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