the expense and loss of time of ordering them from foreign lands. We beseech our intelligent and rich fellow citizens to look at this matter. Can they confer a greater blessing on their country, or on mankind, than by giving to our colleges ample donations of well selected books, or what is better, money for that purpose. The single city of Copenhagen, in the little monarchy of Denmark, has more volumes, probably, than all the public libraries on the American continent. Now these things ought not so to be. To a genuine scholar, no sight is more refreshing and stimulating than a good library. It is a powerful incitement to genius even. It is no cramping-iron upon any power of the human mind.

5. We believe that a reform is demanded in respect to the public examinations in most of our colleges. At some of them as we know from personal observation, the examinations are, to say the least, useless. They are anticipated with no interest, and remembered with disgust, if remembered at all. Either abolish them or make something out of them. We are aware that there are great difficulties connected with this subject, but we think that they are not insuperable. Very little reliance can be placed on committees of trustees or legislatures appointed to attend these examinations, nor upon the inspection of educated men in the neighborhood. The examinations must make an essential and prominent part in the course of study. The three, or four weeks devoted to them should be regarded as the time of all the year in which there is the greatest love of study, the most intellectual excitement, the most rapid and valuable progress. All previous attainments should be brought to an honest and severe test. No labor saving experiments, no excuse, no delinquency should be allowed. Admission to a higher standing or to an honorary testimonial may be made to depend upon the issue, though on such things, we would not repose our main dependence. There must be an invincible love of study for its own sake, and especially from a sense of duty to God, such as will invest a rigid and protracted examination with honorable and delightful associations. We believe that American scholars can be made to feel as much ardor and exhibit as much energy and perseverance, by means of the highest and holiest motives, as the scholars of Prussia do by means of the political and civil influences which are made to bear upon them.

6. Religious principle must, after all, be the main depen

dence of the American colleges. Their prosperity, their high intellectual rank are inseparably associated with the Christian religion. They cannot rely on the interesting associations, which are connected with a venerable antiquity. Legislative patronage is becoming more and more a doubtful support. It has all the glorious uncertainty which has been attributed to the law. We have no legal mandate to enforce college discipline, to prescribe courses of study, or to nominate and expel professors. The path to honorable preferments, sacred or secular, is wide open to all our countrymen, whether educated at college or not. The democratical tendencies of our institutions we cannot alter if we would. A course of public instruction, which would suit the dominions of Nicholas or Louis Philippe, is, in many respects, totally inappropriate to this country. Our young men will not stop to pursue a severe and exact mental discipline when our most popular pulpits, and our principal legislative assemblies are filled with men who have hardly attained thirty years of age. Under the pressure of the most exciting motives, within reach of the loudest calls of interest or of duty from civilized and savage lands, they will not stay to listen to the counsels of a wise experience.

In such an obvious and inevitable condition of things, we have but one alternative, and that is ample enough for our purposes. We must bring in the all powerful aid of Christianity. In the framing of our plans of study, in the organization of our college-government, in our resources for the preservation of internal harmony, in our expectations for the most thorough intellectual improvement, we must look away from all expedients to the spirit of the Christian religion. Literature has long enough been the handmaid of a conventional and negative Christianity. Science has long enough been satisfied with a cold and ambiguous recognition of the authority of revelation. Perhaps our literary institutions depend too much on a periodical or occasional acknowledgement of the claims of Christianity. The entire institution is not pervaded and permanently controlled by the heavenly influences. Science and religion are dissociated too much. There is an unbecoming fear, it may be, of irreligious students and of their friends, or a secret misgiving in respect to the compatibility of the union of ardent study and of high religious feeling. Now, such fear and unbelief must be abandoned. That confidence in the power of divine truth must be cherished as will banish all timidity. At the same time,

practice must correspond with the avowed opinions. The list of text-books, in some colleges, ought to undergo a severe revision. The moral philosophy must be taught which is in accordance with the lessons of the New Testament. Political Economy should not be inculcated independently of the inspired records. The classical authors should be read with the qualifications and exceptions which are indispensable. In short, our colleges should be thoroughly Christian institutions, not merely that the gospel of Jesus Christ may have free course and be glorified, but that human science may be advanced, sound scholarship promoted, and an elevated national literature created. Our country can never acquire a distinguished literary reputation disconnected from Christianity. Taste and genius must bow in allegiance to God's word, in order to attain their own perfection. A day of splendid intellectual glory will dawn on our land, only when the claims of Christianity shall every where be acknowledged and felt.

ARTICLE VIII.

SPEECHES AND FORENSIC ARGUMENTS. BY DANIEL WEBSTER. VOL. II. 8vo. pp. 482. Boston: Perkins, Marvin & Co., 1835.

By Caleb Cushing, Newburyport, Mass.

THERE needs no commendation of the periodical press, to fix the public attention on this second volume of the masterly productions of the great constitutional statesman of our time. Similar in general character to the collection heretofore published, not inferior in permanent and universal value, the speeches before us have already, as they severally issued from the eloquent lips of their author, and diffused themselves throughout the country, become identified with the feelings, and incorporated into the opinions, of a large portion of the people of the United States. But, whatever hold on the minds of men some of these speeches may exert, by reason of the particular view they present of the great national controversies of the day,

they possess higher and wider claims to interest and admiration. As brilliant specimens of the highest parliamentary, popular, and forensic oratory,-as rich repositories of facts and thoughts,-as models of severe induction clothed in a pure, vigorous, and impressive style, and of exact reasoning relieved and adorned with illustrations the most forcible and felicitous,—as invaluable contributions to the best literature of our wide-spread language,in all these respects they constitute a work, which rests not on ephemeral passions of the hour for its titles of honor, but challenges place, in the estimation of our own and the memories of a future age, along with the great intellectual productions of the master-minds of the ancient and modern world. We propose in the present article, to dwell rather on these the more general and enduring claims of interest appertaining to the volume before us, leaving to other journals and occasions the not less important political considerations which it suggests.

We cannot better describe the contents of the volume than in the words of the editorial introduction, bearing on the face of it evidence of the accomplished hand to which it has been ascribed.

'It is now about five years, since the publishers of the present collection presented their fellow-citizens with the former volume of the Speeches and Forensic Arguments of Mr. Webster. It commanded the attention, which might have been anticipated from the reputation of the author; and the curiosity and interest thus excited were amply sustained, by the contents of the work. It is believed, that no volume has ever issued from the American press, better calculated to take a permanent hold of the public mind;-to be regarded as a choice specimen of excellence in the various kinds of intellectual effort which it embraced;-and to be consulted as a standard authority, on the great Political and Constitutional questions, which have agitated the public mind during the last twenty years. The estimation in which it was held from its appearance, may be safely inferred from the tenor of a very judicious and eloquent notice of it, in the eighteenth number of the American Quarterly Review; and the rapid sale of the edition has proved that the judgment of the critic was sanctioned by the reading community at large, not merely in this country, but in Europe. The critical journals of Great Britain have confirmed the estimate formed by his countrymen of Mr. Webster's professional and parliamentary talent, and have quoted his works as containing some of the best specimens of American forensic eloquence.*

Quarterly Journal of Jurisprudence, for August, 1834.

'The publishers now find themselves called upon for a second volume of the speeches and occasional addresses of Mr. Webster. The five years since the appearance of the former volume have, as is known to every one, been passed by Mr. Webster on the same elevated stage of public duty, on which he had before acquired a most enviable reputation. A series of the most important discussions in the Senate of the United States, in which he has borne a highly conspicuous part, has attracted the attention of the people throughout the Union. Those great Constitutional questions, which formed the theme of the closing speeches in the first volume, have been again the subject of strenuous contest, between the master minds of the country. Not inferior in interest to these are the speeches of Mr. Webster, contained in the present volume, in the financial controversy which has lately agitated, and still agitates, the country. Commencing with his argument in answer to the President's veto of the Bank bill, in 1832, down to the overwhelming refutation of the Protest, in 1834, they will all be found in the present volume. It contains also several other speeches, on subjects of less commanding interest, but characterized by the same high qualities. In addition to these parliamentary efforts, the publishers have introduced into the volume several occasional speeches, such as that delivered at a public dinner in New York, the address to the citizens of Pittsburgh, the eulogium on the character of Washington, the speech before the Convention at Worcester in 1832, with some others of a miscellaneous class.'

Such are the contents of this volume. If it do not comprise any written discourse of the same description with Mr. Webster's addresses delivered at Plymouth and Bunker Hill, or his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, still it is not wanting in miscellaneous matter of surpassing excellence of style and thought; and in it are great constitutional arguments, oracles of profound wisdom and statesmanship, parliamentary speeches exceeded by none, unequalled by any, except Mr. Webster's own splendid reply to Mr. Hayne.

In the political institutions of the United States, as of every country of modern Europe possessing any share of liberty, that which most directly concerns, and most universally interests the mass of the community, is the deliberative assembly, by which laws are enacted for the government of the people, by themselves, or through the agency of their chosen representatives. Such assemblies, in our time, are the points of distinction between constitutional and arbitrary governments-between governments administered for the good of the many, and those