“I am glad to hear from Neville that you are improved in health and spirits. What you
say of the inconvenience of mathematical studies to a man who has no
inclination for them, no necessity for them, no time to spare for acquiring
them, and no use for them when they are acquired, is perfectly true; and I
think it was one of the advantages (Heaven knows they were very few) which
Oxford used to possess over Cambridge, that a man might take his degree, if he
pleased, without knowing anything of the science. A tenth or a fiftieth part of
the time employed upon Euclid, would serve
to make the under-graduate a
| 74 | LIFE AND CORRESPONDENCE | Ætat. 40. |
“Your repugnance to the expense of time which this
fatiguing study requires, is very natural and very reasonable; and the best
comfort I can offer is to remind you that the time will soon come when you will
have the pleasure of forgetting all you have learned. Your apprehensions of
deficiency in more important things are not so well founded. The Church stands
in need of men of various characters and acquirements. She ought to have some
sturdy polemics, equally able to attack and to defend. One or two of these are
as many as she wants, and as many as she produces in a generation; she cannot
do without them, and yet sometimes they do evil as well as good. Horsley was the militant of the last
generation; Herbert Marsh of the
present. Next to these stiff canonists and sound theologians, she requires some
who excel in the literæ humaniores,
and who may keep up that literary character which J. Taylor, South,
Sherlock, Barrow, &c. have raised, and which of late
days has certainly declined. Of these a few also are sufficient. There are
hardly more than half-a-dozen pulpits in the kingdom in which an eloquent
preacher would not be out of his place. Everywhere else, what is required of
the preacher is to be plain, perspicuous, and in earnest. If he feels himself,
he will make his congregation feel. But it is not in the pulpit that the
minister may do most good. He will do infinitely more by living with his
parishioners like a pastor; by becoming their confidential adviser, their
friend, their comforter;
| Ætat. 40. | OF ROBERT SOUTHEY. | 75 |
