The curse of Minerva be on the heads of those who train, who incite them to such sacrilegious mischief! The mischief spreads every day wide and more wide. Till of late years, there had appeared bounds to its progress. Nature seemed to have provided against the devastations of the _infant reciter_. Formerly it seemed, that only those whom she had blessed or cursed with a wonderful memory, could be worth the trouble of training, or by the successful performance of the feats desired, to pay the labour of instruction. But there has arisen in the land, men who set at nought the decrees of nature, who undertake to make artificial memories, not only equal but superior to the best natural memory, and who, at the shortest notice, engage to supply the brainless with brains. By certain technical helps, long passages, whole poems, may now be learnt _by heart_, as they call it, without any aid, effort, or cognizance of the understanding; and retained and recited, under the same circumstances, by any irrational, as well and better, than by any rational being, if, to recite well, mean to repeat without missing a syllable. How far our literature may in future suffer from these blighting swarms, will best be conceived by a glance at what they have already withered and blasted of the favourite productions of our most popular poets, Gray, Goldsmith, Thomson, Pope, Dryden, Milton, Shakspeare. Pope’s Man of Ross was doomed to suffer first. “Rise, honest Muse, and sing the Man of Ross!” Oh, dreaded words! who is there that does not wish the honest muse should rise no more? Goldsmith came next, and shared the same fate. His country curate, the most amiable of men, we heard of till he grew past endurance. As to learning any longer from the bee to build, or of the little nautilus to sail, we gave it up long ago. “To be or not to be”--is a question we can no longer bear. Then Alexander’s Feast--the little harpies have been at that too, and it is defiled. Poor Collins’ Ode to the Passions, on and off the stage, is torn to very tatters. The Seven Ages of Man, and “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women in it”--gone to destruction. The quality of mercy _is_ strained, and is no longer twice blest. We turn with disgust from “angels and ministers of grace.” Adam’s morning hymn has lost the freshness of its charm. The bores have got into Paradise--scaled Heaven itself! and defied all the powers of Milton’s hell. Such Belials and Molochs as we have heard! It is absolutely shocking to perceive how immortal genius is in the power of mortal stupidity! Johnson, a champion of no mean force, stood forward in his day, and did what his single arm could do, to drive the little bores from the country church-yard. “Could not the pretty dears repeat together?” had, however, but a momentary effect. Though he knocked down the pair that had attempted to stand before him, they got up again, or one down, another came on. To this hour they are at it.