Such a process I should rejoice to see producing such characters in England. Yes! Milton, Thomson, Cowper, the pious and tender Montgomery, and Bloomfield, one of their own kind, would be noble and enriching studies for the simplest cottage, and cottage-garden, and field-walk. Some of our condensed historians, our best essayists and divines, travellers, naturalists in a popular shape, and writers of fiction, as Scott, and Edgeworth, and De Foe, might be with vast advantage diffused amongst them. Let us hope it will one day be so. And already I know some who have reaped those blessings of an awakened heart and intellect, too long denied to the hard path of poverty, and which render them not the less sedate, industrious, and provident, but, on the contrary, more so. They have made them, in the humblest of stations, the happiest of men; quickened their sensibilities towards their wives and children; converted the fields, the places of their daily toil, into places of earnest meditative delight--schools of perpetual observation of God’s creative energy and wisdom. It was but the other day that the farming-man of a neighbouring lady having been pointed out to me as at once remarkably fond of reading and attached to his profession, I entered into conversation with him; and it is long since I experienced such a cordial pleasure as in the contemplation of the character that opened upon me. He was a strong man; not to be distinguished by his dress and appearance from those of his class, but having a very intelligent countenance; and the vigorous, healthful feelings, and right views, that seemed to fill not only his mind but his whole frame, spoke volumes for that vast enjoyment and elevation of character which a rightly directed taste for reading would diffuse amongst our peasantry. His sound appreciation of those authors he had read--some of our best poets, historians, essayists, and travellers--was truly cheering, when contrasted with the miserable and frippery taste which distinguishes a large class of readers; where a-thousand-times-repeated novels of fashionable life, neither original in conception nor of any worth in their object--the languid offspring of a tinsel and exotic existence--are read because they can be read without the labour of thinking. While such works are poured in legions upon the public, like a host of dead leaves from the forest, driven along in mimic life by a mighty wind--and while such things are suffered to swell the Puffiads of publishers, and shoulder away, or discourage, the substantial labours of high intellect--it is truly reviving to see the awakening of mind in the common people. It is, I am persuaded, from the people that a regenerating power must come--a new infusion of better blood into our literary system. The inanities of fashion must weary the spirit of a great nation, and be thrown off; strong, native genius, from the measureless, unploughed regions of the popular mind--robust,