minute marks and letters, together with the exercise of judgment, patience, memory, classification—all of which are component parts of system. No disposition is felt to controvert the position taken by Mr. Carey, that great men have been made under systems from which the learned languages were excluded—or to discourage the gifted child of poverty, who can never enjoy their advantages. Let such a one reflect that there have been orators who never tasted the honied eloquence of Cicero—bards whose lips were never touched with a “live coal” from the poetic fire of Homer and Virgil—patriots whose bosoms were never warmed, whose arms were never nerved by the story of Aristides and Brutus. There are men to keep whom down would be as impossible as to suppress the fires of Ætna. They ask—they need no aid from their predecessors or cotemporaries. They will create opportunities and modes of development and action for themselves. Very properly, therefore, the institutions of society, the systems of education, are not framed for them; but for ordinary beings—persons of mediocre intellect, of which a vast majority of mankind are composed. In reviewing the field of our argument, we find that the Classics have been mainly defended upon the ground of the mental training and good habits which result from the study of them—dry objects of pursuit certainly to boys, but still most necessary. But we might long since have cut this question short, by holding up the argument, the truth of which is now generally admitted by competent judges, that it is impossible to understand English in all its power, beauty, copiousness, without a previous acquaintance with the Classics. But the multitude, in the true spirit of English vanity, are constantly proclaiming the entire independence of their language, and vauntingly assert that it needs no plumage borrowed from any tongue under heaven. Mark you! this was not said until the huge, misshapen skeleton of the Anglo-Saxon had received a filling up—a beauty and proportion from much abused Latin and Greek. Now, as the English language has declared her _Independence_, and set up for herself, it is but fair that she should surrender back to Greek and Latin the harmonious and expressive words, the poetical imagery and rich mythology which she has stolen from them, but which she has just found out she does not need. Let her do this, and what does she become?—what she was originally. _Rudis indigestaque moles_. We have never known the common-sense rule, viz: That to know the _whole_ we must know all the _parts_, to be dispensed with except in the case of the English language, which it appears can be perfectly known without previously studying the languages of which it is made up.[1] We however have no fears that our boasted vernacular will be able to sustain her declaration, since Greek and Roman ideas, illustrations, and allusions are so interwoven with it that they have