Chap. IV.]

PROFESSION OF MEN OF LETTERS.

347

useful purpose. The duty particularly rests on men of lettersand other men of cultivated minds, as has been said before, tokeep public opinion regulated and enlightened through the me-dium of the press. Besides, considerable intercourse with menof various classes and professions in society, in business transac-tions, and even in the participation of public offices of honor,trust, and profit, reacts favorably upon men of letters, and ren-ders them better fitted for usefulness even within their ownsphere. Unless they mingle in society, and in the transaction ofbusiness, and participate in duties and offices of a public nature,they are very apt to see men and things too much in the abstract,and by the imperfect light of theory, unassisted by experience.Their opinions and sentiments require to be corrected by prac-tice, and by an actual acquaintance with men and things.

If my limits permitted, I might advert to, and enlarge on, theduty resting upon men of letters, to supply in all the variousdepartments of literature, the materials of reading, of the mostappropriate kind, and in the utmost abundance. To this end,history, civil, political, ecclesiastical, military, diplomatic, and^literary, opens her treasures ; poetry offers her vivid and sublimecreations; religion, her holy aspirations ; fancy, her beautifulpictures ; imagination, its exquisite combinations ; taste, its culti-vated decisions ; philosophy, its profound speculations ; reason,its well-matured conclusions ; and fiction, its resources, so richand exhaustless, as to have been used by Lord Bacon as one ofthe natural and most striking proofs of the immortal destinationof mankind. All this seems to be the duty of men of letters;for, as Sir Walter Scott well says, “ the curious will read as thethirsty will drink, whether the cup or the page be clean or pol-luted.”