ERRATA.

Page 19, line 30, for "Achæens"" read "Achæans'." 53, line 14, for "avoided" read" avoid."

68, note, line 2, for "transposed" read "transferred " 79, line 26, for "used" read" issued."

81, line 26, dele comma at "again" and place it at " parties." 103, line 22, for " them" read" him."

,, 128, line 26, for "hands" read "heads."

,, 173, line 25, for "were" read" was."

F we consider the occupations of the bulk of mankind in their waking moments, they may be conveniently divided into what men must do, what they ought to do, and what,

falling under neither of these heads, may be designated as what they may do. What they must do regards chiefly the physical necessities of our nature, and with the bulk of mankind is their daily concernment, viz., to provide shelter, food, and raiment for them and theirs. The second is equally a necessity in the long run; but, regarding our moral more than our physical wants, may be more neglected by individuals, and with seeming impunity for a time; but more or less observed it must be by the race, or things would even here fall to fearful confusion. I allude to what regards the relation of man to his Creator, and of man to his neighbour. The third class embraces

B

such occupation as does not of necessity fall under the above heads, nor does it necessarily contravene or infringe them.

upon

All classification of man and his doings is open to the objection of the divisions running into one another; but for our present purpose it will be sufficiently accurate to divide men's occupations into business, duty, and recreation. Under the last of these divisions we may rank the subject of the present Lecture; and, in so ranking Poetry as a recreation, I hope to escape giving umbrage to any enthusiastic votary of an art for which my admiration is not less, though haply resting on different grounds. And for the reluctance any one may have to contemplate Poetry as a bare recreation, I share it with him to the full, and only rank it as such because of the difficulty of contending, to the satisfaction of many, that it is either men's business, or their duty, to make poetry, or to read it.

We shall, however, shrink the less from contemplating Poetry as a recreation, if we consider the vast functions and importance of recreation-important in its effects upon the character whether of child or man- -important as frustrating many a notable scheme of education, which, sedulously and jealously guarding every avenue on what may be called the busy side of our nature, has unaccountably left this, the idle side, open, through which, however, influences are continually pouring that neutralize the painful endeavours bestowed in other quarters. And no

wonder: for if the influences to which the young are open be rightly estimated, we shall scarcely fail to assign a very high, if not the highest, place to that which they exercise on one another; an influence of force to baffle every scheme of education that fails to harmonize with it—that fails, in fine, to make it a channel for its own teaching. And never is this formidable influence more actively at work than in what we are apt to call recreation, but which,

from the ardour they carry into it, is manifestly an earnest business with the young.

The

Nor is this the sole point in which recreation has a serious aspect. I know not how it may have happened with you, but my mind has often dwelt on what appeared to me a tendency in our nature to reproduce ourselves in our amusements-to carry the earnestness of serious occupation into that which we fly to as a relaxation from the serious. Nay, I am inclined to think that, if all our sports and pastimes could be traced to their original, they would be ultimately found but so many imitations or pictures of serious life at the period of their invention. sportsman of to-day does for amusement what the hunter of old, and the Indian of our times, prosecutes as a means of life. The war-dance of the savage nations is but a picture of actual warfare previously waged by the dancers. Chess again is a mimic battle, and in its original institution was even more so; the very names of the pieces having in the old Sanscrit, as we are informed, a reference to the distribution of an army, with the monarch at its head-what we call the queen being in the Oriental game the vizier of the king, who in those countries is at once his minister and his general. Perhaps every game, if we could trace it, would be found in its origin to have reference to actual occupation. We see the tendency in children. The boy plays at horses or at soldiers, and the little girl dresses her doll, in obvious imitation of the serious occupations of adult life, which they see going on around them.

This tendency to reproduce our earnest life in our recreations is, then, a common instinct of our nature, and will prepare us for finding Poetry to be equally connected with man's serious life; nay, its fundamental interest originally lay but in that; for however we may be content for a moment to look at Poesy on its recreative side, we