ae 
1826.] [ 375 Jj 
PHILOSOPHY TEACHING BY EXAMPLES, 
*« Does your Epictetus, or your Seneca here, or any of these poor rich rogues, teach you how to pay 
yourdebts without money? Will they shut up the mouths of your creditors? Will Plato be bail for 
a yon Diogenes, because he understands confinement and lived in a tub, go to prison for you? _’Slife, 
; what do you mean.to mew yourself up here, with three or four musty books; in commendation of 
starving and poverty !”—Loye For Love, u'b sbi 
“Iw the thirty-third number of the “ Connoisseur” there is an’ inge-’ 
nious; plan for the adyancement of the study of the law; in which the 
author recommends his pupils, instead of poring over dry, Institutes 
and wearisome Commentaries, to rush at once into the practice of the: 
profession, by experimenting on themselves. There is nothing, he 
affirms, so likely to bring a man acquainted with the duties of a magis- 
trate and constable as a course of night brawls and batteries on the 
watch; nothing so calculated to make him master of the whole law of 
debtor and creditor, as the defending an action against his tailor—(in 
those days that “‘ Court moyen,” the insolvent court, was unknown). The 
whole art of conveyancing, in like manner, he thinks is best illustrated 
by a series of post-obits; and the details of the penal code, with all its 
intricacies and chaotic jumble of conflicting clauses, rendered familiar 
by an occasional burglary or murder. A course of study like this, it is 
justly observed, is much superior to the old jog-trot method of hard 
reading, and a painful attendance in a special pleader’s office, in which 
eyes, health, time, and money are lost; while from the table of the 
memory it wipes away not only “all trivial fond records,” but all 
traces of classical learning, science, and knowledge of human nature ; 
and the sources of imagination are dried up, till the student is left with 
about as much apprehension as a cabbage. The system here recom- 
mended embraces the “ citd, tutd et jucundé ;” every thing that is 
‘delightful in the pursuit of knowledge: it is, indeed, the ne plus ultra of 
royal roads to instruction ; and I have long lamented that this ingenious 
notion should have been confined to the study of the law, while 
it might have been usefully applied, not only to the other sciences, but 
to morals, politics, and diplomacy,—to the “ quidquid agunt homines,” 
and brought knowledge home to men’s *business and bosoms, far 
quicker than the Paleys and Burlamaquis—those despairs of the light- 
hearted and ingenious kill-cares of our sister universities. 
In this age of steam-engines, rail-roads, and power-looms, one might 
have thought it superfluous to recommend the experimental before the 
dogmatic method. In the natural sciences, men are at length pretty well 
agreed to open their eyes and look about them, “ to see what they shall 
see,” and to weigh the dead salmon before they set about reasoning why 
it should be heavier than when alive. Nor is it necessary any longer to 
knock Bacon at folks’ heads to set them more against a musty and obso- 
lete philosophy, which they are already predisposed to hold sufficiently 
cheap. But in the moral sciences, or, to speak a less pedantic language, 
in all things which concern manners and life; we are but too prone to 
cling to the old 4 priori habits of our ancestors ; to turn to our Senecas 
and Epictetuses ; and’ when ‘we ‘have’ strung together a few pithy 
apothegms, and rounded off a few Johnsonian periods, to imagine that 
we have the whole science,of man at our fingers’ ends. Oh! is it not 
provoking, at the time of day in which we live, to feel: what a long way half 
a dozen empty hypocritical words, «full: of sound signifying nothing,” 
-wili go, when spoken under the’ shadow of a big*wig and a pent-house 
