enlarging the range of pure mental pleasure.

"In order to this, let us do all we can to cultivate their taste, and innocently indulge their fancy. Let us contend with impure writers, those deadliest enemies to the youthful mind, by opposing to them in the chaster author, images more attractive, wit more acute, learning more various; in all which excellences our first-rate poets certainly excel their vicious competitors."

"Would you, Mr. Tyrrel," said Sir John, "throw into the enemy's camp all the light arms which often successfully annoy where the heavy artillery can not reach?"

"Let us," replied Mr. Stanley, "rescue from the hands of the profane and the impure, the monopoly of wit which, they affect to possess, and which they would possess, if no good men had written works of elegant literature, and if all good men totally despised them."

"For my own part," said Mr. Tyrrel, "I believe that a good man, in my sense of the word, will neither write works of imagination, nor read them."

"At your age and mine, and better employed as we certainly may be," said Mr. Stanley, "we want not such resources. I myself, though I retain the relish, have little leisure for the indulgence, which yet I would allow, though with great discrimination, to the young and the unoccupied. What is to whet the genius of the champions of virtue, so as to enable them successfully to combat the leaders of vice and infidelity, if we refuse to let them be occasionally sharpened and polished by such studies? That model of brilliant composition, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, was of this opinion, when he said, 'by whatever instrument piety is advantaged, use that, though thou grindest thy spears and arrows at the forges of the Philistines.'

"I know," continued Mr. Stanley, "that a Christian need not borrow weapons of attack or defense from the classic armory; but, to drop all metaphor, if he is called upon to defend truth and virtue against men whose minds are adorned with all that is elegant, strengthened with all that is powerful, and enriched with all that is persuasive, from the writers in question—is he likely to engage with due advantage if his own mind be destitute of the embellishments with which theirs abound? While wit and imagination are their favorite instruments, shall we consider the aid of either as useless, much less as sinful in their opponents?"

"While young men will