[Footnote 5: I would not by any means be understood as advancing the opinion that the language and literature of the ancients have been always an impediment to the progress of modern literature. On the contrary, at the revival of letters, the moderns were an almost immeasurable distance in the rear of the ancients. Ancient literature then became a power, by which the moderns were at once elevated to the literary level of antiquity; but when once we had reached that point, all farther _exclusive_ devotion to the learning and the language of antiquity became hurtful to the mind by the trammels which it imposed. The study of the classics will forever be useful and interesting to him who aspires to be a scholar. But it becomes injurious when we make it our exclusive study, and substitute the undefined and loose system of morality--the high sounding and empty philosophy of the ancients, for the purer morals and deeper learning of the moderns.] {268} But not only do great writers in large nations establish their authority over their successors, and thus set bounds to the progress of literature, but they repress the genius of the country by discouraging those first intellectual efforts of young aspirants for fame, which appear insignificant by comparison with established models. Now in literature, as well as in the accumulation of wealth, the proverb is strictly true, that it is the first step which is the most difficult, "_c'est le premier pas qui coute_." The timid and the modest, (and real genius is always modest,) are frequently deterred from appearing in a particular department of literature, because of the great distance at which their first efforts must fall in the rear of the standard authors who have preceded them. They are overawed and alarmed at the first step which it is necessary to take, and frequently recoil from the task, sinking back into the quiet obscurity of listlessness and mental inactivity--whereas, if a proper encouragement could have been furnished to their incipient labors, it would have cheered and animated them in their literary career, and finally conducted them to proud and exalted rank in the world of letters.