If I were to undertake anything in the way of education, I would set up in New York an Institute of English Literature. I do not know but--might do something of the kind,--have a house and receive classes that should come once or twice in a week and read in the mean time under her direction, and teach them by reading to them, by commenting, talking, pointing out and opening up to them the best things in the best authors, the poets, the essayists, the historians, the fiction-writers, and thus making them acquainted with the finest productions of the English mind; and, what is better, inspiring them with an enthusiasm and taste for pursuing, for reading such things, instead of sensation novels and such stuff. Moliere and Corneille have struck me much on this reading,--the first with the tenuity of his thought, the slender thread on which he weaves his entertaining and life-like drama, making it to live through the ages simply by sticking to nature, making his personages speak so naturally; and the second, with the real dramatic [290] grandeur of his genius. I feel that I have never done justice to Corneille before, I have been so dissatisfied with the formal rhyme, the want of the natural dramatic play of language in his work, the stilted rhetoric. And when I heard Rachel in the Cid, I thought, by the rapid, undramatic way in which she hurried through his declamations, while, in a few exclamatory bursts, she swept everything before her, that she justified my criticism. But this was the misfortune of Corneille; he walked in shackles imposed by the taste of his time. Yet it was a lofty stride. I am particularly struck with his grand moral ideals. I wish I had a good life of him. He must have been a good man. Like Beethoven and Michael Angelo, he does not seem to have liked flattery, court, or ceremony. But I guess that is the case with most men of the higher genius. . . . As ever, ORVILLE DEWEY. To Miss Catherine M. Sea'gwitk. SHEFFIELD, Aug. 27, 1866.