as concentering the brilliant sports of the finest cluster of geniuses that ever graced the earth, it surely deserves perpetual attention, respect, and consecration.
There is, methinks, my S——, a great fault in the world, as it respects this subject: a giddy instability, a light and fluttering vanity, a prurient longing after novelty, an impatience, a disgust, a fastidious contempt of everything that is old. You will not understand me as censuring the progress of sound science. I am not so infatuated an antiquarian, not so poor a philanthropist, as to seek to retard the expansion of the human mind. But I lament the eternal oblivion into which our old authors, those giants of literature, are permitted to sink, while the world stands open-eyed and open-mouthed to catch every modern, tinseled abortion as it falls from the press. In the polite circles of America, for instance, perhaps there is no want of taste, and even zeal, for letters. I have seen several gentlemen who appear to have an accurate, a minute, acquaintance with the whole range of literature, in its present state of improvement; yet you will be surprised to hear that I have not met with more than one or two persons in this country who have ever read the works of Bacon or of Boyle. They delight to saunter in the upper story, sustained and adorned, as it is, with the delicate proportions, the foliage and flourishes, of the Corinthian order; but they disdain to make any acquaintance, or hold communion at all, with the Tuscan and Doric plainness and strength which base and support the whole edifice. …
AN OLD VIRGINIA PREACHER
It was one Sunday, as I traveled through the county of Orange, that my eye was caught by a cluster of horses tied near a ruinous old wooden house in the forest, not far from the roadside. Having frequently seen such objects before, in
