; some torpid, some aspiring; some in
eager chase to the right hand, some to the left; these wasting down
their moral nature, and those feeding it for immortality? A whole
generation may appear even to sleep, or may be exasperated with
rage,--they that compose it, tearing each other to pieces with more than
brutal fury. It is enough for complacency and hope, that scattered and
solitary minds are always labouring somewhere in the service of truth
and virtue; and that by the sleep of the multitude the energy of the
multitude may be prepared; and that by the fury of the people the chains
of the people may be broken. Happy moment was it for England when her
Chaucer, who has rightly been called the morning star of her literature,
appeared above the horizon; when her Wicliffe, like the sun, shot orient
beams through the night of Romish superstition! Yet may the darkness and
the desolating hurricane which immediately followed in the wars of York
and Lancaster, be deemed in their turn a blessing, with which the Land
has been visited.

May I return to the thought of progress, of accumulation, of increasing
light, or of any other image by which it may please us to represent the
improvement of the species? The hundred years that followed the
usurpation of Henry IV., were a hurling-back of the mind of the country,
a dilapidation, an extinction; yet institutions, laws, customs, and
habits, were then broken down, which would not have been so readily, nor
perhaps so thoroughly destroyed by the gradual influence of increasing
knowledge; and under the oppression of which, if they had continued to
exist, the virtue and intellectual prowess of the succeeding century
could not have appeared at all, much less could they have displayed
themselves with that eager haste, and with those beneficent triumphs,
which will to the end of time be looked back upon with admiration and
gratitude.

If the foregoing obvious distinctions be once clearly perceived, and
steadily kept in view, I do not see why a belief in the progress of
human nature towards perfection should dispose a youthful mind, however
enthusiastic, to an undue admiration of his own age, and thus tend to
degrade that mind.

But let me strike at once at the root of the evil complained of in my
correspondent's letter. Protection from any fatal effect of seductions
and hindrances which opinion may throw in the way of pure and
high-minded youth, can only be obtained with certainty at the