When he had heard the shout of his father, or of the young men, he had given one loud shout in answer, and saying ‘Come on! never fear now!’ sprang forward, and was over the precipice in the dark, and flew down and was dashed to pieces. His sisters heard a rush, a faint shriek, and suddenly stopping, escaped the destruction that poor David had found. NEW LIFE AND OLD LEARNING. There is not, in the whole of Bacon’s writings, a remark more profoundly characteristic of the man and his philosophy, than is embodied in his epigram that Antiquity is the Youth of the World. If men could only have had the courage to act upon this truth as soon as it was pointed out,—if they could but have seen, that, in their mode of reckoning antiquity, they made always the mistake of beginning the calculations from the wrong end, and that, in everything relating to the progress of knowledge, and the advancement of the species, the Present, not the Past, should be deemed of superior authority,—how many miseries society would have spared itself, and how much earlier it would have profited by the greatest of its teachers, Experience! ‘For antiquity,’ says Lord Bacon, ‘the opinion which men cherish concerning it is altogether negligent, and scarcely congruous even to the name. For the old age and grandevity of the world are to be truly counted as antiquity; which are properly to be ascribed to our times, not to the younger age of the world, such as it was with the ancients. Since that age, in respect to us indeed, is ancient and greater; but in respect to the world itself, was new and lesser. And in reality, as we look for a greater acquaintance with human affairs, and a more mature judgment, from an old than from a young man, on account of his experience, and the variety and abundance of the things which he has seen, and heard, and considered, just so it is fit also that much greater things be expected from our age (if it knew its strength, and would endeavour and apply) than from the old times; as being a more advanced age of the world, and enlarged and accumulate with numberless experiences and observations.’ Have these pregnant sentences lost their meaning in the two centuries and a half that have since rolled away? Let us take the wealthiest and most distinguished seminary of learning now existing in England, and judge.