that he may safely lay aside all the successive efforts of the English mind, as fashions out of date, contracts his faculties within his own day, and can form no adequate conception of that ample inheritance of the intellectual powers bequeathed to us from age to age. To be ignorant of all antiquity is a mutilation of the human mind; it is early associations and local circumstances which give a bent to the mind of a people from their infancy, and insensibly constitute the nationality of genius, separating the manners and feelings of neighbouring nations. Even the errors or singularities of our predecessors, the sagacious know, become so many accessions to their experimental knowledge; and in whatever is excellent, the impulses of our predecessors stand connected with our own. We but continue the chain of human sympathies, whose remotest link, be it ever so backward, supports what is now around us. There is one more remark in which I must indulge: the author of the present work is denied the satis faction of reading a single line of it, yet he flatters himself that he shall not trespass on the indulgence he claims for any slight inadvertences. It has been confided to ONE whose eyes unceasingly pursue the volume for him who can no more read, and whose eager hand traces the thought ere it vanish in the thinking; but it is only a father who can conceive the affectionate patience of filial devotion. AMENITIES OF LITERATURE. THE DRUIDICAL INSTITUTION. ENGLAND, which has given models to Europe of the most masterly productions in every class of learning and every province of genius, so late as within the last three centuries was herself destitute of a national literature. Even enlightened Europe itself amid the revolving ages of time is but of yesterday. How "that was performed in our tongue, which may be compared or preferred, either to insolent Greece or haughty Rome*," becomes a tale in the history of the human mind. In the history of an insular race and in a site so peculiar as our own, a people whom the ocean severed from all nations, where are we to seek for |