The uses of literature are manifold. Its study gives wholesome food to the
mind, making it strong and systematic. It cultivates and delights the
imagination and the taste of men. It refines society by elevating the
thoughts and aspirations above what is sensual and sordid, and by checking
the grosser passions; it makes up, in part, that "multiplication of
agreeable consciousness" which Dr. Johnson calls happiness. Its
adaptations in religion, in statesmanship, in legislative and judicial
inquiry, are productive of noble and beneficent results. History shows us,
that while it has given to the individual man, in all ages, contemplative
habits, and high moral tone, it has thus also been a powerful instrument
in producing the brilliant civilization of mighty empires.


A TEACHER OF HISTORY.--But apart from these its subjective benefits, it
has its highest and most practical utility as a TEACHER OF HISTORY.
Ballads, more powerful than laws, shouted forth from a nation's heart,
have been in part the achievers, and afterward the victorious hymns, of
its new-born freedom, and have been also used in after ages to reinspire
the people with the spirit of their ancestors. Immortal epics not only
present magnificent displays of heroism for imitation, but, like the Iliad
and Odyssey, still teach the theogony, national policy, and social history
of a people, after the Bema has long been silent, the temples in ruin, and
the groves prostrate under the axe of repeated conquests.

Satires have at once exhibited and scourged social faults and national
follies, and remained to after times as most essential materials for
history.

Indeed, it was a quaint but just assertion of Hare, in his "Guesses at
Truth," that in Greek history there is nothing truer than Herodotus except