Litchfield enquirer., 1860-01-26
For the Litchfeld Enquirer. COUNSELS TO+YOUNG MEN. REA DTNG
EUMRER FIVE.

COUNSELS TO=YOUNG MEN.
 a# READING
 NUMBER FIVE.
 I hope you will find much leisure in these long winter evenings, for profitable reading. Few persons, believe, reflect as much as they ought, upon the goodness of God, in teaching mankind how to arrest and record their fleeting thoughts, discoveries, inventions and improvements, by writing and printing. The Creator might have endowed our race with the some noble faculties which they now possess, without the power of transmitting the results of their experience, studies and acquisitions to their successors and if he had, what human progress could ever have been made How much wiser would the hundredth generation have been than the first ? Something, indeed, might the fathers, in successive generations, have orally taught their children but how little, without the aid of books, or annals of some sort in permanent form. How much of their oral teaching would soon be forgotten. Memory is proverbially treacherous. In the progress of our short lives, its imperfection costs us the loss of many acquisitions, which we are most anxious to retain. So fading are it's records that they cannot be handed down in any thing like their original fresb- ness and distinctness, to the next generation: how much less to a distant posterity ! Ira dition might have done something :; but how little even in thousand years so fast does it melt into fiction, and leave us entirely un- able to separate the true from the fabulous. Had there been no books, no writings Of any kind in the world, there would have been very littlesmore knowledge in it than there was before the flood. How could there have been? How is it with all those barberous tribes, that have no written Ian guage, no permanent records of the past ! What progress have any of them made in ten or twenty centuries? And what will they make in ten or twenty centuries more, without something more permanent than oral tradition ? Some ancieut nations, in- deed, made considerable advances in knowl- edge and improvements, without pranted
 books, by the aid of manuscripts. But how
 slow was the progress of the most enllght-
 ened of them, in literature aud the arts.
 From the very nature of the case it could
 not be otherwise. These manuscripts were
 so scarce and dear, that but few could have
 access to them, and fewer still could own them, when the earrings of year could
 hardly purchase single copy Of poem, or
 a volume Of history.
 1 And just so. dSy young friends, but for he art of printing, would Il have been with IS. There might have been few mana- ,cript copies Of a very few vaigabe wolk Il the hands of the wealthy , ouv now lc" ,f the common people would ever have cwn- d, CT ever seen one of them We are ai- most ready to envy those scholars, who re- sorted to Athens and Rome, in the days of their glory and who sat at the feet of their and poets, and orators. And well we might, if the art of printing had not stereotyped the;r works for our study how do we wish we could have walked With them in the groves of Academus, and heard Plato, and Socrates, and Aristotle lecture and Homer sing, and Demosthenes thunder against Philip in the Forum, and Cicero, whensby his terrible nvective he drove Cat aliue, goaded to madness and desperation, from the Senate House
 What, young men of Litch6eld County, would ycu no. give for the privilege of list enng, night after night, aud month after month, to the brilliant table-talk of such llt- erary clubs as adorned the reign of Anne How would you exult. if you could now cross the ocean, and be admitted into the society of all the wisest, best and greatest phioso- phers, statesmen and literary men i'll Eng land, Scotland, Germany and France; and drink in their maturest thoughts on every subject of human investigation and welfare T,,,1l o,l %1,n md what would you not give for free and daily access to the oral wisdom and instruction o all the greatest and wisest men of every pro fession and pursuit in our own country :!
 But all these rich enjoyments, conld you have them, would not compare with those which you may enjoy, and stay at home.
 Nay, let me suppose that you could have lived in all former ages, could have sat forty years at the feet of Moses, the great Jew ish Lnw-Givcr could have listened to the wisdom of Solomon in the zenith of his glo- rous reign could have conversed famillarly with the wisest and most learned men of the Grecian Republics, and of the Augustan age yea, and could still have lived on, and come down through all succeeding ages to the present time and listened to all the lectures and discussions of the ablest men in the last three centuries, in every branch of philosophy, science, history and literature /; suppose you conld have enjoyed all these ad- vantages and made the most of them, through lives protracted to the age of Methusaleh, great-yast as the amount of instruction would have been, where, without books could these immense accumulations have been treasured up? Could they have been com mitted to the safe keeping of the strongest memory in the world ? Whose memory IS so perfect and infallible, that it can be rell. ed upon with entire certainty, for the half ot one short life, even? Why, upon the sup position just made, vast amount of what
 you had heard and learned, would have been
 forgotten ages ago. and your general recol,
 lection of things would have been dim and
 altogether unreliable. You might still have oeen prodigies ompared with those who had
 lVed put three score years and ten, but what would nave been the real amount and value , of all oral acquisitions, through thousands
 of years, could you have lived so long, com pared with what the art of printing has
 gathered up, from all past ages, and sterco-
 typed, and brought within the reach of near ly every one of you. In books, all the wisest