its conductors is such as you approve.

2. Avoid, unless your particular occupation requires it, a _business_
paper. Otherwise your head will become so full of 'arrivals' and
'departures,' and 'prices current,' and 'news,' that you will hardly
find room for any thing else.

3. Do not take a paper which dwells on nothing but the details of human
depravity. It will indeed, for a time, call forth a sensibility to the
woes of mankind; but the final result will probably be a stupidity and
insensibility to human suffering which you would give much to remove.

4. Avoid those papers which, awed by the cry for _short_ and _light_
articles, have rendered their pages mere columns of insulated facts or
useless scraps, or what is still worse, of unnatural and sickening love
stories.

Lastly, do not take a paper which sneers at religion. It is quite
enough that many periodicals do, in effect, take a course which tends
to irreligion, by leaving this great subject wholly out of sight. But
when they openly sneer at and ridicule the most sacred things, leave
them at once. 'Evil communications corrupt' the best 'manners;' and
though the sentiment may not at once be received, I can assure my
youthful readers that there are no publications which have more direct
effect upon their lives, than these unpretending companions; and
perhaps the very reason is because we least suspect them. Against
receiving deep or permanent impressions from the Bible, the sermon, or
the _book_ of any kind, we are on our watch, but who thinks of having
his principles contaminated, or affected much in any way, merely by the
newspaper? Yet I am greatly mistaken, if these very monitors do not
have more influence, after all, in forming the minds, the manners, and
the morals (shall I add, the _religious character_, even?) of the
rising generation, than all the other means which I have mentioned, put
together.

How important, in this view, it becomes, that your newspaper reading
should be well selected. Let me again repeat the request, that in
selecting those papers which sustain an appropriate character, you will
seek the advice of those whom you deem most able and judicious; and so
far as you think them disinterested, and worthy of your confidence,
endeavor to follow it.

_Politics._ As to the study of politics, in the usual sense of the
term, it certainly cannot be advisable. Nothing appears to me more
disgusting than to see young men rushing into the field o