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are useful both to learner and proficient; but if made the objects of their study, rather than occasional assistants, they will certainly be pernicious. The grammars of living and dead languages are too often framed on different principles in the latter, all irregularities, for which an authority can be pleaded, are sanctified by a rule: while the other brands every idiom, or bold combination, as a licentious barbarism. No man ever learned a language, living or dead, from a grammar or dictionary, but by reading the best authors, and partaking of the best conversation. He, who habituates himself to such studies and such society, without proposing to himself a particular model, will insensibly form a style of his own; as, in the mechanical part of writing, every man abandoning himself to his own fancy or powers, almost every man writes a different hand. A certain freedom of style, a manly flow of language, will distinguish the authors of such a school; whose periods will not be divided into formal compartments, like the squares of a Mosaick pavement, exactly answering each other; but the members of a sentence, like the members of the human body, will seem to be put together with ease as well as symmetry, and equally framed for the purposes of elegance and strength.

As to grammars and dictionaries, though not administering to the foundation of our tongue, they may certainly be of great use to contribute to its preservation. They are a kind of scaffold erected by skilful workmen, after our language has been completely built, to repair the ruins of time, and to keep the venerable structure from farther decay. The last great English dictionary will remain, as long as the English tongue shall remain, a monument of the learning and genius of its author; and I cannot better enforce the utility of the studies recommended in this paper, than by concluding it with an extract from the admirable preface to that work; a preface which at once delivers the precepts, and affords the example, of a pure and eloquent style.

"I have studiously endeavoured to collect examples and authorities from the writers before the restoration, whose works I regard as the wells of English undefiled, as the pure sources of genuine diction. Our language, for almost a century, has, by the concurrence of many causes, been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology, from which it ought to be our endeavour to recall it, by making our ancient volumes the groundwork of style, admitting among the additions of

later times, only such as may supply real deficiencies, such as are readily adopted by the genius of our tongue, and incorporate easily with our native idioms.

"From the authors which rose in the time of Elizabeth, a speech might be formed adequate to all the purposes of use and elegance. If the language of theology were extracted from Hooker, and the translation of the Bible; the terms of natural knowledge from Bacon; the phrases of policy, war, and navigation, from Raleigh; the dialect of poetry and fiction from Spenser and Sidney; and the diction of common life from Shakspeare;-few ideas would be lost to mankind, for want of English words in which they might be expressed."

THE GENTLEMAN, No. 3, Wednesday, July 26, 1775.

No. CVI.

Amoto quæramus seria ludo.

HORAT.

Let us lay aside mirth, and be serious.

UNFASHIONABLE Soever as it may be to enter upon religious subjects in such an age as the present, there are some who, I flatter myself, will nevertheless pay attention to a topic of such importance without a blush, and think it no disgrace, either to their gentility or their understanding, to employ a few moments in the consideration of some points, for which, at the awful period of their dissolution, eternities upon eternities will hardly seem too much.

When we consider the differences which daily subsist in the various modes or systems of the Christian religion, and think upon the inflexible partiality which every man entertains in favour of his own, we ought to be absolutely certain that the particular form which each of us glories to possess, is perfectly conformable to our notions of the Deity, and consistent, in the minutest degree, with those divine lessons which were inculcated by the Saviour of the world, in his

mysterious mission to man. If we are not positive in this, let our belief be distinguished by what name soever we think proper, let us be protestants or papists, quakers or presbyterians, I can take upon me to aver, that we have no right to the name of Christians, and may, with equal propriety, take a lesson from the Alcoran as the Gospel.

It is not the ceremony used at baptism, the sprinkling of water, nor the promises of our pa rents in the presence of God, which constitute the Christian; no, it is an actual conformity to the precepts of our blessed Lord, and an undeviating obedience to the tenets which are laid down in the history of his life and miracles. Nothing can be more absurd, nor in reality more criminal, than for a man to aspire at the glorious title of a Christian, who is regardless of the duties which that appellation renders indispensably necessary, or a stranger to the obli gations which are particularly enjoined by the name; it is at once a fatal deception of his own most important expectations, an insult to his Saviour, and a defiance of his God.

With what propriety, shall I beg leave to ask, can the various sects of religion in this kingdom call themselves Christians, when, in the unremitting hatred which they constantly entertain