state that this plan would utterly destroy that strengthening of the memory, disciplining of the mind, and refining of the taste, which languages are known to afford, is to prove its absurdity. If his plan should recommend itself to public adoption, the friends of Classical literature would abandon its defence in despair. The followers in any vocation are the best authority in the world in relation to the vocation, whether they be statesmen, teachers, or shoemakers. The united voice of teachers denounces translations as ruinous to the minds and habits of their pupils; hence they are regarded as contraband commodities, and as such, lawful confiscations to the dominion of Vulcan. These labor-saving machines of the mind, like those in mechanics, engender habits of idleness, by shortening the time and toil of accomplishing a task, smoothing the way, leaving the student nothing to elaborate for himself, until his mind is reduced to a state of wretched imbecility and servile dependence. Can a mind thus educated be prepared to make nice discriminations, to trace effect to cause, to winnow away the chaff of error from the golden grains of truth and wisdom? Even the little gained in this way is evanescent—takes no root in the memory. To look for enduring and accurate knowledge from him, would be as unreasonable as to expect a correct description of a country from one who flies through it in a steam car. But we might give up all that has yet been said about translations, and still maintain our argument against them, upon the ground that they do not express the meaning of the translated authors. At least the fire, spirit, enthusiasm are squeezed out and _skeletonized_ in dull, vapid, prosaic copies. And is not this the case with all translations? Have not the French vainly essayed to translate Milton and Shakspeare? Are not their abortive attempts miserable caricatures? What becomes of the halo of glory which the ancient artists threw around the forms of Apollo Belvidere, and the Venus de Medicis, when copied—of the coloring of Titian, the sublimity of Claude, and the grandeur of Raphael, when attempted to be transferred to the canvass of some impotent imitator? Gone! Why should we contemplate Homer and Virgil through those smoked glasses, translations, when we can do it in the bright mirror of their own languages? There remains yet another disadvantage of studying ancient authors by translations. They cannot infuse that self-sacrificing patriotism, that high moral, and almost romantic elevation of character, which even Mr. Carey admits the poets of antiquity have a tendency to create. These virtues must be contemplated, turned and {695} returned in the mind, as they are portrayed in the originals—not conned from “Horace's three hundred and seventeen lines introduced into the Latin primer, to illustrate the rules of Grammar.”