We have now lying before us the “Ecclesiastics” of John Wilkins, the Bishop of Chester. The volume bears every internal evidence of being the property of Dr. Watts: it is interleaved, and in addition to the varied and singular learning of the book itself, in the handwriting of the Doctor there is a perfect storehouse of references, exhibiting the amazing world of knowledge over which his mind travelled; and not merely references, but frequently some condensed expression of sentiment and opinion. We ought to refer to this very valuable little manuscript volume again. It often seems surprising that volumes such as these have fallen into such neglect; but they only share the fate of multitudes of others in various departments equally worthy. The number of those who gaze upon the true regalia of literature is very small; our times delight in startling contrasts, antitheses and paradoxes, and illustrations frequently rather remarkable for their brilliancy than for their solid and abiding persuasiveness. The literature of every time has its vices and its virtues; writers even exercising a far stronger fascination and spell over their day than Watts are very seldom referred to now, they are names and little more. They are like extinct creations of other times, a kind of dodo, a being very near to our own day, but yet only known by a specimen preserved in a museum. Thus probably the two works to which we have referred will have few more readers. Yet safer and wiser charts for travelling the seas of knowledge were never prepared, and while they breathe a fine mental independence, a freshness wafted from undiscovered realms, they are eminently free from all that rashness and audacity of speculation which some have chosen to regard as a pursuit of knowledge, or as adding to the spoils of the understanding. He kept his students within the bounds of the knowable and provable, and if he trampled upon the ridiculous logic which had for years held the mind of Europe in chains, by the fetters of words which had no kind of sense either in the heavens or the earth, and resolutely determining that words could only be valuable when they were the real signs of things, and things of which something could be known; on the other hand, he gave no encouragement to licentiousness of thought, which is as dangerous to the well-being of the intelligence as the servility of opinion. So that, on the whole, whatever advances and attainments we have made since, we may believe that for the discipline and tutelage of the young, a better finger-post could scarcely be set up upon the highways of knowledge than Watts’ “Logic;” a better and more living guide a young man can scarcely have through the cities of instruction than his “Improvement of the Mind.”