At the inaugural meeting for the season of the Shanghai Literary and Debating Society, which took place on' Monday night, in the rooms of the Royal Asiatic Society, Mr. George Jamieson delivered a lecture upon "The principal epochs in European and some books in connection therewith." Mr. John Macgregor occupied the chair, and there was a numerous attendance.
Mr. Jamieson prefaced his address by disclaiming any intention to compile a list of the best hundred books, and said that his remarks were mainly intended for the younger members of the Society, who were prepared to rear upon the foundation of their knowledge a superstructure of large and varied information, and to enrich their. minds with the best ideas of the ages. In Shanghai, in the Public Library and in the Club Library, they had a vast store of literature accessible to all, but whilst it was better to read anything rather than nothing at all, a well directed course of reading was far more conduct ive to mental improvement than a mere desultory flitting from book to book. His own reading, he confessed, had been desultory enough, but he had here and there hit upon what he might call a rich vein of literature, and he always found it most interesting and most useful to work it out to the bottom before passing on to something else. As illustrating this he referred to Boswell's Life of Johnson, and showed how by a systematized following up of the names' there met. with, and the incidents recorded, the student would be introduced to Edmund Burke and the polities of the time; the two Pitts, who guided the destinies of England off and on, and during most critical times, for half a century; Pitt's great antagonist Charles James Fox, sot another distinguished man, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, actor, dramatic author, and in his odd moments amateur statesman, Then as men of action would come Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, dealt with in Lord Macaulay's two famous essays. Of course a great many other names might be mentioned, for the intter half of the eighteenth century was particularly rich in great events and great, names; but what he had said would indi-—that in reading they should work on a system and follow up the lead given by whatever work at hand. 'These remarks applied with greater fores to historical studies, for in all the long course of human events, every change an every development was governed by. fixed laws. Nations rose and fell, cities and towns perished and decayed,' but not by chance caprice. The doctrine of evolution had now so penetrated every field of enquiry that it was not soree to find it applied to historical studies. Here, as elsewhere, everything went by rule; the reign of law was supreme. Through all the turmoil of nations, and notwithstanding the infinite number of causes at work—the ambition of statesmen, the caprice or ill-humour of Kings and princes, the tamilly feuds, the thousand and one causes which had led nations into vain und seatingly useless conflet,—one increasing purpose could be seen leading men to higher things. The progress was ever onward, though there had been many a sad slip backwards, slips that had cost hundreds of years to recover lost ground. The importance of a thorough acquaintance with history for everyone who wanted to have a well cultivated mind could not be too much insisted upon, aiid a man should nothin fact. be satisfied until he was fairly able to write 4 universal history of the world,—that is, be, able to, tt seqiietice of the leading" eud what ernie before, the "World, and"
Battle of Marathon, which secured for
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.