ries, he will, of necessity, become
open, sincere, or generous. We are the children of our education, and of
the century in which we live. The virtuous, alone, can impart virtue: and
refinement will force men to be refined.

Nothing is more disgusting than those individuals, whose sight being not
longer than a span, pretend to judge of distances which they cannot see:
and because they have never been better, thinking mankind a race incapable
of moral perfection, or improvement, they call Plato, Rousseau, Bentham,
and Fourier the dreamers of the ages, in which they lived, and of those to
come, while they do not perceive that, had men never attempted to
ameliorate human frailties, we would be still nothing better, than our
ancient fathers--the cannibals. Because we have not arrived at perfection,
shall we stop on our half civilization?--This is my firm belief: Unless we
practice that, which we profess in theory, we will never be able to
describe in writing, nor speaking, the honest delineaments of morals, or
integrity. The man, who does not feel nobility under his skin, cannot
speak, or write with propriety of the attributes of a Divinity. It is an
axiom: that which is not felt, can not be expressed.

_Si vis me flere dolendum est
Primum ipsi tibi; tunc tua me infortunia laedent,
Telephe, vel Peleu: male si mandata loqueris,
Aut dormitabo, aut ridebo._

Could Horace rise from the dead, he would not wonder a little in finding
out, some men still doubting the above uncontrovertible quotation. Our
boasting nineteenth century, may be properly called the raging time of
scribblers, in which confusion of papers, true men of letters are
neglected. When demagogues become the fashionable leading party of a
community, the worst scribblers, whose money renders editors good enough
to praise what they did not read, or could not understand, are generally
read by a plurality of apes, who buy the new works, in order to be able,
at the first evening party, to echo in the ears of a belle, the praising
criticism of their newspapers. And these individuals sustain before their
admirers, that a man may be either philosopher, orator, or poet, and at
the same time, be quite a stranger to virtue! And while we call ourselves
a civilized people, such empty minds, nursed with empty words, endeavor to
confound literary men with demagogues, wisdom with ignorance, piety with
hypocrisy, virtue with vice; and place into the asylums of luna