Gilpin’s Lectures on the Catechism are of a different character. This also is a very good and a very pleasing book, written with a particular view to young persons engaged in reading the Greek and Latin Classics.
Ogden’s Sermons, on Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments, &c. are the offspring of a clear and powerful intellect, expressed in language remarkably perspicuous and elegant.
After these books, take some opportunity of reading the Sermons of Bishop Butler, including the Preface. This is not a book to be read in a room full of brothers and sisters. It demands close attention, and will give some exercise to all your intellectual powers; but it richly merits to have such attention and pains bestowed upon it. It deserves, indeed requires, more than a single reading. After Butler’s Sermons read his “Analogy.”
You will do well, at any odd intervals, or snatches of time, to make yourself familiar with Addison and Johnson. False delicacy shall not prevent me from recommending the selection from the writings of Addison which I made a few years ago. My reasons for making such selection are given in the Preface. The same reasons now induce me to recommend it to you.
Johnson requires no pruning. You can hardly read a paper in the Rambler or Idler, and, I will add, the Adventurer, without deriving from it some improvement, either moral or intellectual, or both. The structure and cadence of Johnson’s sentences is certainly monotonous; but I seldom read half a page without being struck by the depth of his thought, the accuracy and minuteness of his observation, and the astonishing extent of his multifarious reading.
In order to enter with more discrimination into the style of our different authors, read often “Blair’s Lectures.” They are, I believe, sometimes spoken slightingly of by men of learning; I, however, as an unlearned man, think them particularly useful. The Lecture on the Origin of Language, indeed, the absurdity of which has been exposed with so much playfulness by Cowper, might well have been omitted.
I have already advised you, during the two longer vacations, to acquire, or to keep up, some knowledge of modern history. Russell’s “Modern Europe” is, upon the whole, a useful book. It is, perhaps, too compendious; and I dislike its being given in the form of letters. Robertson’s “Charles the Fifth” you have probably read already; if not, read it carefully when, in Russell, you arrive at the period at which it commences. Pay particular attention to the First Book. Perhaps Robertson was not sufficiently impressed with the importance and the effects of the Reformation in Germany; and he formed, I think, an unfair estimate of the character and motives of Luther. This matter will, I doubt not, be shortly set right in the Life of Luther about to be given to the public by one of the ablest and most learned men of the present day[147:1].
With respect to the history of our own country, I hardly know what advice to give you. Hume’s style is very pleasing, but he cannot be implicitly depended on, especially where religion and the ministers of religion are concerned.
Henry’s “History of Great Britain” is a very good and accurate book; but the continuity of the narrative is broken by the multiplicity of divisions in each period, (learning, arts, commerce, manners, &c. &c.), and by the transitions to the history of Scotland.
Lingard I have not read; I am told that his style is good, and his information extensive. It was natural that, as a zealous Romanist, he should seek to extenuate the faults of men of his own persuasion, and to exaggerate the failings, and place in an unfavourable point of view the motives and actions of the assailants of Popery; but he has, I think, been fully convicted of carrying misrepresentation beyond all reasonable bounds. There was but too much of bigotry and persecution on both sides.