rectly thus:- "discovers the greater extension of the genus with which it had been conversant." Whenever the mind takes a step downward to species, it should also take a step upward towards genus. This admission of the principle of classification is highly important. Upon it hinges the whole doctrine of Toryism in politics and the High Church theory in religion. It is a protest against the falsehood of that infima species, i. e. men counted by the head, or facts similarly taken, are all we need look to; it upholds the necessity of constant reference to a higher law; it teaches the appeal from phenomena to science. In one word, it teaches us patience that pain and inconvenience are not to be remedied off-hand by just adopting the first remedy which our senses suggest; but that we must consider whether there be not a superior law involved, the possible violation of which would entail far worse evils than those we now seek to remedy. Sense suggests to the wearied soldier that he should lie down and sleep in the snow. By reference to a law of which sense knows nothing, he ascertains that to do so would kill him. We merely use this as a familiar illustration. Intellectual laws are not, of course, the same, or reached by the same process as physical laws.

that This

"It is quite certain the dull men will be Lockists." is an assertion we have not yet seen combatted by any of Mr. Emerson's reviewers, though one, we should think, well calculated to excite considerable indignation; the fact is, that "dull men" is too strong an expression. He describes the class that he means much better in the next sentence"men of talents without genius," i. e. clever men, men good at devices and expedients-good at means, but unequal to the intellectual tension demanded by the investigation of final causes. Men of this stamp, of course, love to be told that pursuits which would otherwise proclaim their own inferiority, are useless. They like to have the universe lowered to the level of their own narrow conceptions; and to believe that as soon as a man soars beyond their sight he is necessarily lost in the clouds. Briefly, they deny that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in their philosophy. Such men as these are

not.

the true obstructives of society. By dealing with facts as they arise, without condescending to reflect on their relations to theory, they constantly produce results which do not work, and which either have to be undone at a vast cost and waste of time to the community, or are perpetuated as a burden and clog to future generations. The present state of the English law is a good practical illustration of this truth- -an evil is denounced, and instantly an act is passed to amend it. But we have very seldom taken the trouble to consider whether the proposed remedies might not infringe upon certain other statutes, and as a matter of fact it has usually been found that they have done. So with our institutions. Something is wrong in the Church, or the aristocracy, or what Instantaneously a plaister is stuck on that particular part, without any regard to the patient's constitution, which physicians will tell us is ordinarily more than half the battle. We scorn to consider whether we may not thereby be violating some fundamental principle on which the permanent health of the body politic depends. And this wretched empiricism, forsooth, is now daily dignified with the name of common sense. is high time this phrase was relegated to its more appropriate province. To direct affairs of importance we require not common sense but uncommon sense. Twist it any way we please, the former term is a misnomer-and a most delusive and mischievous misnomer-enabling Mr. Emerson's "dull men" to insult their more thoughtful and spiritual compeers by proclaiming them unfit for the affairs of the world, as long as they themselves are supposed to be under the special protection of this earthen Deity. The vanity of mankind has been pleased by observing that emergencies sometimes arise in the administration of kingdoms calling for the exercise of the same qualities which the meanest of them frequently displays in the conduct of his farm or his warehouse. Hence they have jumped to the conclusion that no higher qualities are demanded in any case, and that the welfare of two million human beings could safely be entrusted to the most successful fattener of prize oxen, or the most adroit adulterator of coffee and flour.

It

After an eloquent encomium on the Elizabethan literature, Mr. Emerson proceeds :

Such richness of genius had not existed more than once before. These heights could not be maintained. As we find stumps of vast trees in our exhausted soils, and have received traditions of their ancient fertility to tillage, so history reckons epochs in which the intellect of famed races became effete. So it fared with English genius. These heights were followed by a meanness, and a descent of the mind into lower levels; the loss of wings; no high speculation. Locke, to whom the meaning of ideas was unknown, became the type of philosophy, and his "understanding" the measure, in all nations, of the English intellect. His countrymen forsook the lofty sides of Parnassus, on which they had once walked with echoing steps, and disused the studies once so beloved; the powers of thought fell into neglect. The later English want the faculty of Plato and Aristotle, of grouping men in natural classes by an insight of general laws, so deep that the rule is deduced with equal precision from few subjects or from one, as from multitudes of lives. Shakespeare is supreme in that, as in all the great mental energies. The Germans generalise; the English cannot interpret the German mind. German science comprehends the English. The absence of the faculty in England is shown by the timidity which accumulates mountains of facts, as a bad general wants myriads of men and miles of redoubts to compensate the inspirations of courage and conduct.

And again :

Nothing comes to the book-shops but politics, travels, statistics, tabulation, and engineering; and even what is called philosophy and letters is mechanical in its structure, as if inspiration had ceased, as if no vast hope, no religion, no song of joy, no wisdom, no analogy, existed any more. The tone of colleges, and of scholars and of literary society, has this mortal air. I seem to walk on a marble floor, where nothing will grow. They exert every variety of talent on a lower ground, and may be said to live and act in a sub-mind. They have lost all commanding views in literature, philosophy, and science. A good Englishman shuts himself out of three-fourths of his mind, and confines himself to one-fourth. He has learning, good sense, power of labour, and logic: but a faith in the laws of the mind like that of Archimedes; a belief like that of Euler and Kepler, that experience must follow and not lead the laws of the mind; a devotion to the theory of politics, like that of Hooker, and Milton, and Harrington--the modern English mind repudiates.

This

These two passages alone would furnish matter for a long essay. The publication of Locke's philosophy was undoubtedly coincident with a great change which came over the English mind towards the end of the seventeenth century, and which marks the decay of the second manifestation of Christian idealism as a practical agency in the world. Loyalty was the legitimate successor of chivalry, and did not begin to shew itself in its modern form till the feudal system was on the wane. The old institution of Christian knighthood, itself the offspring of the purest idealism, had engendered in the human heart a class of sensations for which a vent of necessity must be found. was afforded by knight-errantry, by the crusades, by the various vows to which the enthusiastic spirits of the time subjected themselves. But when the original forms of chivalry had departed, the spirit remained behind. Generosity and self-sacrifice must still have an object on which to lavish themselves with noble recklessness. The knightly soul still felt the need of some guiding rule of life-some power to which he should tender an unquestioning but thoroughly willing obedience, which should be the nurse alike of his gentleness and his courage. This was now found in the person of the sovereign. In Spain, France, and England, the sentiment of loyalty took deep root. Its voice was heard in the shouts of the Hungarians for Maria Theresa, and to its relics is to be attributed that marvellous fidelity to the Stuarts, which lasted to within the memory of men now alive. But only to its relics. Whether it was in the power of Charles II., had his character been different, to have arrested the decline of that chivalric devotion to his family which endured death and proscription and exile, but could not resist the march of materialism, it is vain to conjecture; at all events, he could but have preserved it for a time. But first the civil war, and then the cold and selfish profligacy of the Restoration, gave prominence to a class of men who talked down the idealists. Locke, partly cause and partly effect, lent his powerful aid to this orginal "hard facts" school. Men began to lay their hands hard

on material advantages; certain of the present good, and careless of posterity beyond expecting that they would be acute enough to do the same. Faith in laws comprehensible by the intellect alone, and which override and give meaning to facts, was now an object of derision. What was a theory? The divine right of kings! What did it mean? "The right divine of kings to govern wrong," said Pope, uttering a dexterous fallacy which has served the Lockists for a century. Principles were doubtful things, and better left alone. The details of government men were competent to deal with. "The greatest happiness of the greatest number," became their best notion of a final cause, and they endeavoured to adapt these details to it. They never reflected whether happiness was the primary end of man's existence in this world, or whether they would ensure it best by making it the express object of their labours. In illustration of which it is to be observed that, in spite of Mr. Macaulay, intelligent thinkers are still accustomed to doubt whether Englishmen have been as happy for the last century and a half as they were before, i. e. since it has been considered the express object of government to make them so; for that they are happier is a proposition which it seems almost impossible to support by any reasonable evidence whatsoever.

We not mean to deny that the Re

volution of 1688 was productive of more good than evil. We only say that the wheat was considerably intermingled with tares. We are emboldened by having Mr. Emerson on our own side; for Lockism and the Revolution certainly reacted on each other. Coleridge also thought the same, and expressed it in bold and memorable words.* It tainted deeply both our philosophy, our morals, and our religion. But there are certain sturdy virtues in the English character which the deluge of corruption failed to obliterate; and on the retirement of the waters they began to be developed anew. We are by degrees, it is to be hoped, growing less and less worthy of the taunt contained in the last sentence of our extract. We are slowly relearning the importance of theories, without, at the same time, becoming slaves to them. The beginning of this century witnessed some noble indications of our old historic traditions,† and the virtues of our ancestors. The Church has thrown off the lethargy of a hundred years, and the people are again an object of solicitude to the rich. far these are hopeful signs, marred only by our mistakes on the subject of education, which forcibly bring home to us the admirable warning of that inspired genius we have already so often quoted:-"You begin with the attempt to popularize learning and philosophy; but you will end in the plebeification of knowledge."

So

fell upon a colored drawing over the chimney. It was an officer in hussar uniform, mounted on a splendid charger, and seated with all the graceful ease of a consummate horseman. This much alone he could perceive from where he lay, and indolently raising himself on one arm, he asked if it were "a portrait of his master?"

"No, sir-of my master's colonel, Lord Glencore, when he commanded the Eighth, and said to have been the handsomest man in the service."

"Show it to me!" cried he, eagerly, and almost snatched the drawing from the other's hands. He gazed at it intently and fixedly, and his sallow cheek once reddened slightly as he continued to look.

"That never was a likeness!" said he, bitterly.

66 My master thinks it a wonderful resemblance, sir; not of what he is now, of course; but that was taken fifteen years ago or more."

"And is he so changed since that?" asked the sick man, plaintively.

"So I hear, sir.

He had a stroke

of some kind, or fit of one sort or another, brought on by fretting. They took away his title, I'm told. They made out that he had no right to it, that he wasn't the real lord; but here's the colonel, sir," and almost as he spoke Harcourt's step was on the stair. The next moment his hand was cordially clasped in that of his guest.

"I scarcely expected you before six; and how have you borne the journey?" cried he, taking a seat beside the sofa. A gentle motion of the eyebrows gave the reply.

"Well, well, you'll be all right after the soup. Marcom, serve the dinner at once. I'll not dress-and mind, no admittance to any one." "You have heard from Upton ?" asked Glencore.

mach," said Glencore, smiling faintly.

"You shall be reported well, and fit for duty to-day, or my name is not George Harcourt. The strongest and toughest fellow that ever lived couldn't stand up against the united effects of low diet and low spirits. To act generously and think generously, you must live generously, take plenty of exercise, breathe fresh air, and know what it is to be downright weary when you go to bed; not bored, mark you, for that's another thing. Now here comes the soup, and you shall tell me whether turtle be not the best restorative a man ever took after twelve hours of the road."

Whether tempted by the fare, or anxious to gratify the hospitable wishes of his host, Glencore ate heartily, and drank what for his abstemious habit was freely, and, so far as a more genial air and a more ready smile went, fully justified Harcourt's anticipations.

"By Jove, you're more like yourself than I have seen you this many a day," said the Colonel, as they drew their chairs towards the fire, and sat with that now banished, but ever to be regretted, little spider table, that once emblematized after-dinner blessedness, between them. "This reminds one of long ago, Glencore, and I don't see why we cannot bring to the hour some of the cheerfulness that we once boasted."

A faint, very faint smile, with more of sorrow than joy in it, was the other's only reply.

"Look at the thing this way, Glencore," said Harcourt, eagerly. "So long as a man has, either by his fortune or by his personal qualities, the means of benefitting others, there is a downright selfishness in shutting himself up in his sorrow, and saying to the world, 'My own griefs are enough for me; I'll take no care or share in yours.' Now, there never was a fellow with less of this selfishness than you"

"Do not speak to me of what I was, my dear friend. There's not a plank of the old craft remaining. The name alone lingers, and even that will soon be extinct."

"Why, there's Charley-he's not ill, surely. You have no apprehensions about him?"

"What do you mean?" cried Glen