his admirers had nearly lost his popular productions, had not a fortunate introduction to Dr. BIRCH enabled him to open the clasped books, and to drink of the sealed fountains. ROBERTSON has confessed his inadequate knowledge, and his overflowing gratitude, in letters which I have elsewhere printed. A suggestion by a man of letters has opened the career of many an aspirant. A hint from WALSH conveyed a new conception of English poetry to one of its masters. The celebrated treatise of GROTIUS ON "Peace and War" was projected by PEIRESC. It was said of MAGLIABECHI, who knew all books, and never wrote one, that by his diffusive communications he was in some respect concerned in all the great works of his times. Sir RoBERT COTTON greatly assisted CAMDEN and SPEED; and that hermit of literature, BAKER of Cambridge, was ever supplying with his invaluable researches Burnet, Kennet, Hearne, and Middleton. The concealed aid which men of letters afford authors, may be compared to those subterraneous streams, which, flowing into spacious lakes, are, though unobserved, enlarging the waters which attract the public eye. Count DE CAYLUS, celebrated for his collections, and for his generous patronage of artists, has given the last touches to this picture of the man of letters, with all the delicacy and warmth of a self-painter. "His glory is confined to the mere power which he has of being one day useful to letters and to the arts; for his whole life is employed in collecting materials of which learned men and artists make no use till after the death of him who amassed them. It affords him a very sensible pleasure to labour in hopes of being useful to those who pursue the same course of studies, while there are so great a number who die without discharging the debt which they incur to society." Such a man of letters appears to have been the late Lord WOODHOUSELEE. Mr. Mackenzie, returning from his lordship's literary retirement, meeting Mr. Alison, finely said, that “he hoped he was going to Woodhouselee; for no man could go there without being happier, or return from it without being better." Shall we then hesitate to assert, that this class of literary men forms a useful, as well as a select order in society? We see that their leisure is not idleness, that their studies are not unfruitful for the public, and that their opinions, purified from passions and prejudices, are always the soundest in the nation. They are counsellors whom statesmen may consult; fathers of genius to whom authors and artists may look for aid, and friends of ail nations; for we ourselves have witnessed, during a war of thirty years, that the MEN OF LETTERS in England were still united with their brothers in France. The abode of Sir JOSEPH BANKS was ever open to every literary and scientific foreigner; while a wish expressed or' a communication written by this MAN OF LETTERS, was even respected by a political power which, acknowledging no other rights, paid a voluntary tribute to the claims of science and the privileges of literature. CHAPTER XXII. Literary old age still learning. -Influence of late studies in life.-Occupations in advanced age of the literary character. Of literary men who have died at their studies. THE old age of the literary character retains its enjoyments, and usually its powers-a happiness which accompanies no other. The old age of coquetry witnesses its own extinct beauty; that of the "used" idler is left without a sensation; that of the grasping Croesus exists only to envy his heir; and that of the Machiavel who has no longer a voice in the cabinet, is but an unhappy spirit lingering to find its grave : but for the aged man of letters memory returns to her stores, and imagination is still on the wing amidst fresh discoveries and new designs. The others fall like dry leaves, but he drops like ripe fruit, and is valued when no longer on the tree. The constitutional melancholy of JOHNSON often tinged his views of human life. When he asserted that "no man adds much to his stock of knowledge, or improves much after forty," his theory was overturned by his own experience; for his most interesting works were the productions of a very late period of life, formed out of the fresh knowledge with which he had then furnished himself. The intellectual faculties, the latest to decline, are often vigorous in the decrepitude of age. The curious mind is still striking out into new pursuits, and the mind of genius is still creating. ANCORA IMPARO!-" Even yet I am learning!" was the concise inscription on an ingenious device of an old man placed in a child's go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, which, it is said, Michael Angelo applied to his own vast genius in his ninetieth year. Painters have improved even to extreme old age: West's last works were his best, and Titian was greatest on the verge of his century. Poussin was delighted with the discovery of this circumstance in the lives of painters. "As I grow older, I feel the desire of surpassing myself." And it was in the last years of his life, that with the finest poetical invention, he painted the allegorical pictures of the Seasons. A man of letters in his sixtieth year once told me, "It is but of late years that I have learnt the right use of books and the art of reading." Time, the great destroyer of other men's happiness, only enlarges the patrimony of literature to its possessor. A learned and highly intellectual friend once said to me, "If I have acquired more knowledge these last four years than I had hitherto, I shall add materially to my stores in the next four years; and so at every subsequent period of my life, should I acquire only in the same proportion, the general mass of my knowledge will greatly accumulate. If we are not deprived by nature or misfortune of the means to pursue this perpetual augmentation of knowledge, I do not see but we may be still fully occupied and deeply interested even to the last day of our earthly term.” Such is the delightful thought of Owen Feltham; "If I die tomorrow, my life will be somewhat the sweeter to-day for knowledge." The perfectibility of the human mind, the animating theory of the eloquent De Staël, consists in the mass of our ideas, to which every age will now add, by means unknown to preceding generations. Imagination was born at once perfect, and her arts find a term to their progress; but there is no boundary to knowledge nor the discovery of thought. How beautiful in the old age of the literary character was the plan which a friend of mine pursued! His mind, like a mirror whose quicksilver had not decayed, reflected all objects to the last. Full of learned studies and versatile curiosity, he annually projected a summer-tour on the Continent to some remarkable spot. The local associations were an unfailing source of agreeable impressions to a mind so well prepared, and he presented his friends with a " Voyage Littéraire," as a new-year's gift. In such pursuits, where life is "rather wearing out than rusting out," as Bishop Cumberland expressed it, scarcely shall we feel those continued menaces of death which shake the old age of men of no intellectual pursuits, who are dying so many years. Active enjoyments in the decline of life, then, constitute the happiness of literary men. The study of the arts and literature spreads a sunshine over the winter of their days. In the solitude and the night of human life, they discover that unregarded kindness of nature, which has given flowers that only open in the evening, and only bloom through the night-season. NECKER perceived the influence of late studies in life; for he tells us, that the era of threescore and ten is an agreeable age for writing; your mind has not lost its vigour, and envy leaves you in peace. The opening of one of LA MOTHE LE VAYER'S Treatises is striking "I should but ill return the favours God has granted me in the eightieth year of my age, should I allow myself to give : way to that shameless want of occupation which all my life I have condemned;" and the old man proceeds with his "Observations on the Composition and Reading of Books." "If man be a bubble of air, it is then time that I should hasten my task; for my eightieth year admonishes me to get my baggage together ere I leave the world," wrote VARRO, in opening his curious treatise de Re Rustica, which the sage lived to finish, and which, after nearly two thousand years, the world possesses. "My works are many, and I am old; yet I still can fatigue and tire myself with writing more," says PETRARCH in his Epistle to Posterity. The literary character has been fully occupied in the eightieth and the ninetieth year of life. ISAAC WALTON still glowed while writing some of the most interesting biographies in his eighty-fifth year, and in the ninetieth enriched the poetical world with the first publication of a romantic tale by Chalkhill, "the friend of Spenser." BODMER, beyond eighty, was occupied on Homer, and WIELAND on Cicero's Letters'. But the delight of opening a new pursuit, or a new course of reading, imparts the vivacity and novelty of youth even to old age. The revolutions of modern chemistry kindled the curiosity of Dr. Reid to his latest days, and he studied by various means,. to prevent the decay of his faculties, and to remedy the deficiencies of one failing sense by the increased activity of another. A late popular author, when advanced in life, discovered, in a class of reading to which he had never been accustomed, a profuse supply of fresh furniture for his mind. This felicity was the delightfulness of the old age of GOETHE-literature, art, and science, formed his daily inquiries; and this venerable genius, prompt to receive each novel impression, was a companion for the youthful, and a communicator of knowledge even for the most curious. Even the steps of time are retraced, and we resume the possessions we seemed to have lost; for in advanced life a return to our early studies refreshes and renovates the spirits: we open the poets who made us enthusiasts, and the philosophers who taught us to think, with a new source of feeling acquired by our own experience. ADAM SMITH confessed his satisfaction at this pleasure to professor Dugald Stewart, while "he was re-perusing, with the enthusiasm of a student, the tragic poets of ancient Greece, and Sophocles and Euripides lay open on his table." Dans ses veines toujours un jeune sang bouillone, The calm philosophic Hume found that death only could in See Curiosities of Literature, on "The progress of old age in new studies." terrupt the keen pleasure he was again receiving from Lucian, inspiring at the moment a humorous self-dialogue with Charon. Happily," said this philosopher, "on retiring from the world, I found my taste for reading return, even with greater avidity." We find GIBBON, after the close of his History, returning with an appetite as keen to "a full repast on Homer and Aristophanes, and involving himself in the philosophic maze of the writings of Plato." Lord WOODHOUSELEE found the recomposition of his "Lectures on History" so fascinating in the last period of his life, that Mr. Alison informs us, "it rewarded him with that peculiar delight, which has been often observed in the later years of literary men; the delight of returning again to the studies of their youth, and of feeling under the snows of age the cheerful memories of their spring." Not without a sense of exultation has the literary character felt this peculiar happiness, in the unbroken chain of his habits and his feelings. HOBBES exulted that he had outlived his enemies, and was still the same Hobbes; and to demonstrate the reality of this existence, published, in the eighty-seventh yearof his age, his version of the Odyssey, and the following year his Iliad. Of the happy results of literary habits in advanced life, the Count DE TRESSAN, the elegant abridger of the old French romances, in his "literary advice to his children" has drawn a most pleasing picture. With a taste for study, which he found rather inconvenient in the movable existence of a man of the world, and a military wanderer, he had, however, contrived to reserve an hour or two every day for literary pursuits. The men of science, with whom he had chiefly associated, appear to have turned his passion to observation and knowledge, rather than towards imagination and feeling; the combination formed a wreath for his gray hairs. When Count de Tressan retired from a brilliant to an affectionate circle, amidst his family, he pursued his literary tastes, with the vivacity of a young author inspired by the illusion of fame. At the age of seventy-five, with the imagination of a poet, he abridged, he translated, he recomposed his old Chivalric Romances, and his reanimated fancy struck fire in the veins of the old man. Among the first designs of his retirement was a singular philosophical legacy for his children. It was a view of the history and progress of the human mind-of its principles, its errors, and its advantages, as these were reflected in himself; in the dawnings of his taste, and the secret inclinations of his mind, which the men of genius of the age with whom he associated had developed. Expatiating on their memory, he calls on his children to witness the happiness of study, so evident in those pleasures which were soothing and adorning his old age. "Without knowledge, |