Amid the signs of the times in the present age--fruitful in change if not of improvement,--we have observed with pain not only a growing neglect of classical literature, but continued attempts on the part of many who hold the public ear to cast contempt on those studies which were once considered essential to the scholar and the gentleman, which formed such minds as Bacon's and Milton's, and which afforded the most delightful of occupations to the leisure of a Newton and a Leibnitz. In every age there has been a class of men who from a depravity of taste, or else a passion for singularity, have maligned all that is ancient or venerable. And sometimes with a strange perversity of purpose, we see men wasting their opportunities in a mischievous ridicule of useful pursuits which they might have advanced and illustrated to the benefit of themselves and mankind. Thus the seventeenth century, deeply imbued as it was with the spirit of classical inquiry and the love of ancient literature, gave birth to a Scarron and a Cotton, of whom the latter particularly was fitted for higher pursuits, and the former perhaps worthy of a better fate. But if in a spirit of indulgence for misguided genius we pardon the offence of their jest for its wit, and feel that in so doing we are involuntarily paying that tribute which is due to talent even when misapplied, let us beware of extending the same indulgence to those who from ignorance undervalue pursuits which they cannot appreciate, or to those who contemn like the fox in the fable, objects which they have vainly sought to obtain, or worse than all, to those who have no better motive for their censure than the wish to pilfer without detection, from the rich stores of those whom they have banished from the public eye, and driven from their rightful abodes in public recollection by a course of systematised slander. It would perhaps be unjust to say that the opposers of the ancient and learned universities of England, who have chiefly wrought the evil influence upon English literature to which we have been alluding, belong all of them to one of these three classes, but that many of them may be ranked with the last we cannot doubt, when we see what things they often send forth to the world as _their own_, and this too with an air of the greatest pretension. That some of these persons were actuated by better motives we must admit when we trace to its origin the history of this partially successful war against classical studies. The two universities of Oxford and Cambridge, those ancient abodes of learning, to a certain degree undoubtedly deserved the reproach of lagging behind the march of mind, in denying to modern literature the share of attention to which it was justly entitled. Absorbed in explorations of the past, and wedded to the love of antiquity in all their associations, they sought literature in her