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Rh of his testament, where he “bequeaths his name to posterity, after some generations shall be past.”

Unbounded, however, as the reputation of Grotius was on the Continent, even before his own death, it was not till many years after the publication of the treatise De Jure Belli et Pacis, that the science of natural jurisprudence became, in this Island, an object of much attention, even to the learned. In order, therefore, to give to the sequel of this section some degree of continuity, I shall reserve my observations on Grotius and his successors, till I shall have finished all that I think it necessary to mention further, with respect to the literature of our own country, prior to the appearance of Mr Locke’s Essay.

The rapid advancement of intellectual cultivation in England, between the years 1588 and 1640 (a period of almost uninterrupted peace), has been remarked by Mr Fox. “The general improvement,” he observes, “in all arts of civil life, and above all, the astonishing progress of literature, are the most striking among the general features of that period; and are in themselves causes sufficient to produce effects of the utmost importance. A country whose language was enriched by the works of Hooker, Raleigh, and Bacon, could not but experience a sensible change in its manners, and in its style of thinking; and even to speak the same language in which Spencer and Shakespeare had written, seemed a sufficient plea to rescue the Commons of England from the appellation of Brutes, with which Henry the Eighth had addressed them.”—The remark is equally just and refined. It is by the mediation of an improving language, that the progress of the mind is chiefly continued from one generation to another; and that the acquirements of the enlightened few are insensibly imparted to the many. Whatever tends to diminish the ambiguities of speech, or to fix, with more logical precision, the import of general terms;—above all, whatever tends to embody, in popular forms of expression, the ideas and feelings of the wise and good, augments the natural powers of the human understanding, and enables the succeeding race to start from a higher ground than was occupied by their fathers. The remark applies with peculiar force to the study of the Mind itself; a study, where the chief source of error is the imperfection of words; and where every improvement on this great instrument of thought may be justly regarded in the light of a discovery.