A well-practised eye will, it is true, detect in a moment either the faults or the excellence of the rhyme or the flow; but the effect on the mind cannot be the same as when the impression is received through the ear.

Nor is the fuller appreciation of the poetry you read aloud the only advantage to be derived from the practice I recommend.  Few accomplishments are more rare, though few more desirable, than that of reading aloud with ease and grace.  Great are the sufferings inflicted on a sensitive ear by listening to one’s favourite passages, touching in pathos, or glorious in sublimity, travestied into twaddle by the false taste or the want of practice of the reader.  For it is not always from false taste that the species of reading above complained of proceeds; on the contrary, there may be a very correct perception of the writer’s meaning and object, while from want of practice, from mere mechanical inexpertness, there may be an incapability of giving effect to that meaning:  hence arises false emphasis, and a thousand other disagreeables.

In this art, this important art of reading aloud, simplicity ought to be the grand object of attainment, at the same time that it is the last that can be attained.  It is a point to reach after long efforts; not to start from, as those of uncultivated or artificial taste would imagine.  I must repeat, that it cannot be acquired without persevering practice.  The best time to set vigorously about such practice would be when you have but just listened with dismay to the injuries inflicted on some favourite poet by the laboured or tasteless reading of an unpractised performer.

From reading aloud, I pass on to a still more important subject,—­that of writing:  both are intimately connected branches of the main one—­cultivation of the mind.  When this latter is attained in the first place, a slight individual direction of previously acquired powers will enable you to succeed in both the former.  In your own case, however, as in that of all those who have not the active organisation which involves great facilities for mechanical efforts, it will be quite necessary to give a special direction to your studies for the attainment of any degree of excellence in both those arts.  Those, on the contrary, whose organization is more lively and vigorous, and whose nature and habits fit them more for action than thought, will find little difficulty in making any degree of cultivation of mind an immediate stepping-stone to the other attainments:  such persons can read at once with force and truth as soon as education has given them accurate perceptions; they will also write with ease, rapidity, and energy, as soon as the mind is furnished with suitable materials.  This is a kind of superiority which you may often be inclined to envy, at least until experience has taught you, in the first place, that the law of compensation is universal, and in the second, that every thing is