Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/110

 alloy, is is not to be feared that these privileges, through Profusion, may frustrate their own design? If, through their aid, no "royal road to astronomy" has been discovered, has not something very like a dunce's avenue to literature, been laid open? Will the mind, which is released from the necessity of laborious research, obtain that pre-eminence which habits of application can alone bestow? Are we not in some danger of having more superficial, than profound students? The superior learning of the ancients, has been resolved into a single circumstance, the scarcity of books. We would not willingly see a return of that scarcity; yet it might be well for education to impress on youth the importance of making itself master of the necessary elementary works, as thoroughly as if there were none beside. This might demand a perseverance which would disturb the repose of indolence, but it would strengthen the energies of intellect. The respect, which, forty years since, was shewn to the extrinsic value of books, did not diminish the sense of their intrinsic worth. The maxim, then enforced, both by the parent and pedagogue, that it was shameful to deface and destroy them, heightened the estimation of their contents; as, in monarchical governments, the sacredness of the person of the King gives weight to his prerogative. Now, the idler in school finds no method of escaping his lesson, more convenient, than to render it illegible, or to mislay, and destroy his book.

Madam L, educated in the sobriety and economy of