The second consideration is of a political character. The feudal governments of Europe may have an interest in discouraging a taste for these studies. The literature of antiquity, in its prevailing tone and character, is deeply impregnated with the free spirit of the age in which it was produced. Nothing can be more repugnant to that temper of patient servility which it is the policy of such governments to foster. Nothing can more powerfully invigorate those generous feelings which are inspired by the consciousness of freedom, than a familiarity with the historians and orators of Greece and Rome. There is an uncompromising spirit of liberty breathing its divine inspirations over every page, wholly irreconcilable with that courtly suppleness which is adapted to the genius of these governments. These proud republicans had no superstitious veneration for anointed heads. They were accustomed to behold suppliant royalty trembling in the antichambers of their Senate, or its haughty spirit still more humbled in swelling the triumphal pomp of their generals and consuls. These sights served to nourish a profound feeling of the dignity, which is attached to the person of a freeman, a feeling more deeply engraved on the spirit of antiquity than any other sentiment of the heart. It seems to have constituted the very soul of their genius, and it breathes its sacred fires through every ramification of their literature. So intimately was it incorporated with the very elements of their intellectual nature, that nothing could extinguish it short of those calamities which spread their deadly mildews over the fires of genius itself. After the constitutional liberty of the country sunk under the weight of military despotism, its scattered flames still broke out at intervals in the few great men who arose to throw a gleam of brightness over the surrounding gloom. It shewed itself in the pathetic and affecting complaints of Tacitus, and burst forth in the bitter and indignant sarcasms of Juvenal. The venerable father of song declared in prophetic numbers that the first day of servitude robbed man of half his virtue, and Longinus, the last of the ancient race of great men, holds up the lights of fifteen centuries experience to verify the words of the poet. It is democracy, says he, that is the propitious nurse of great talents, and it is only in democracy that they flourish. Let the minions of legitimacy then extinguish if they can the emulation of ancient eloquence; it is their most dangerous enemy; but let us, who inherit the liberties of the ancient republics, cherish it with a sacred devotion. It is at once the child and the champion of freedom. RELIGION. By Jason Whitman.