trines of those who cultivate them; we shall form our judgment, our memory, and our style.

This method is particularly useful for military men, or travellers, whose wandering life prevents them from pursuing a regular and methodical course of study, and allows them scarcely any other means of acquiring information; but who see many different countries, who pass the greatest part of their time in the society of other men, who may be said to have many different persons, nations, events, phenomena, manners, laws, and customs, successively passing in review before them.

There is not an individual, however shallow and ignorant, who may not be superior to another in some point, or useful to him in some way or other, and consequently from whom he may not derive more or less benefit. On this observation is founded the art of employing men, and that of questioning them in society.

If you happen to be in the company of a lawyer, turn the conversation to the courts, their organisation, their forms, the consequent advantages or disadvantages, and the abuses which have crept into the administration of justice. You will obtain useful information of a common attorney, and still more of an able lawyer and an enlightened magistrate.

If you are with a merchant, a banker, or a mere shopkeeper, you direct your enquiries to the nature of his speculations, and to the interests of the class to which he belongs: you acquire a notion of commercial intercourse, considered in detail in society, or in trade, viewed on a large scale, in its connection with the prosperity of a country, and in the communications which it establishes between different and distant nations.

A military man, if you have the art to question him concerning that branch of the service with which he is familiar, will explain to you the internal mechanism of a corps, will make you a spectator, as it were, of its evolutions and manœuvres, will qualify you to judge of the state of the discipline, the intelligence and the administration of the troops. He will furnish you with the information necessary to enable you to decide how the different kinds of troops, the light infantry, the infantry of the line, the cavalry, and the artillery, may be most advantageously employed according to circumstance and local situation. He will give you interesting and instructive descriptions of the battles at which he has been present, and will have it in his power to point out the best works to be consulted on the art of war. It will frequently happen, that objects which appear the most

remote from the ordinary sphere of your occupations and your thoughts will present to your mind observations or processes, which may be beneficially applied to the science or pursuit that especially engages your attention.

With an officer of engineers you will talk of encampments and fortifications: with a seaman of the elements that compose a fleet, of the sciences connected with his profession, of naval tactics, and navigation.

The traveller will transport you into the countries which he has visited; the ambassador and diplomatist will introduce you into the secrets of the cabinets of kings, of the intrigues and interests of courts, and of the respective strength and power of different states.

With a divine, you will insensibly turn the conversation to his religion; you will inform yourself of its object and doctrines; you will study the spirit of the ministers who profess it; and, in general, you will find in that class many worthy and enlightened men. But even the ignorant and the shallow ecclesiastic will furnish you with the means of increasing your knowledge. We ought, according to Bacon, to listen to, nay even sometimes to seek the company of superstitious persons, were it only for the purpose of closely ob

serving superstition, a very common disease, which is incurable, from which we cannot well preserve ourselves unless we are acquainted with it, with which we cannot be acquainted unless we study it, and which we cannot study, without closely watching those who are infected with it: only we approach them with the same kind of caution and reserve as we would persons attacked by disorders that sometimes prove contagious.

You will profit by the experience of the aged, and by the polished manners and delicate tact of the man of the world. Artists, scholars, and the fair sex, will give you at one and the same time a relish for the beautiful, and the rules necessary for the formation and direction of taste. The chemist, the naturalist, the astronomer, the physician, the botanist, the farmer, will furnish you with elementary notions of the science which each of them has more particularly studied. The mere artisan and workman will initiate you into those mechanical details, which ought neither to be neglected nor despised. The most trivial objects are capable of acquiring a degree of utility in a comprehensive mind, which can properly arrange all that it knows. Every individual has lived in some sphere or other, traversed a more or less extensive circle of ideas and observations,

and can impart more or less information to him who possesses the art of extracting it.

Learn then to turn to your advantage all whom you meet with, that you may not lose your time, but be continually adding to your stock of knowledge. The employment of time, and the employment of persons, are jointly the two elements of the art of governing ourselves and others.

The eloquent Bossuet exhibits to us this maxim, as practised by the great Condé. "With what vivacity," exclaims the orator,* "did he appreciate, in a moment, times, places, persons, and not only their interests and their talents, but also their humours and their caprices; nothing escaped his penetration. With that prodigious comprehension of the general plan, and of all the details of military operations, he was incessantly attentive to every occurrence: he extracted from a deserter, a runaway, a prisoner, a passenger, whatever he chose to say, whatever he wished to conceal, all that he knew, and, in some measure, all that he did not know, so correct was he in his conclusions.... But it was not war alone that shed a glory over this prince: his great genius embraced every thing-the ancient as well as the

* See Bossuet's Funeral Oration for the Prince of Condé.