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if it occasion you any thing beyond inconvenience. How a private sec. should permit himself the luxury of an attack of influenza I cannot conceive. We shall hear of one's hairdresser having the impertinence to catch cold, to-morrow or next day!

"If I dont mistake, it was you yourself recommended Crawley to me, and I am only half grateful for the service. He is a man of small prejudices; fancies that he ought to have a regu lar hour for dinner; thinks that he should have acquaintances; and will persist in imagining himself an existent something, appertaining to the legation, while in reality he is only a shadowy excrescence of my own indolent habits, the recipient of the trashy superfluities one commits to paper, and calls despatches. Latterly, in my increasing laziness, I have used him for more intimate correspondence ; and, as Doctor Allitore has now denied me all manual exertion whatever, I am actually wholly dependent on such aid. I'm sure I long for the discovery of some other mode of transmitting one's brain-efforts than by the slow process of manuscript-some photographic process, that by a series of bright pictures might display en tableau what one is now reduced to accomplish by narrative. As it ever did, and ever will happen too, they have deluged me with work when I crave rest. Every session of parliament must have its blue book; and by the devil's luck they have decided that Italy is to furnish the present one.

"You have always been a soldier, and whenever your inspecting general came his round, your whole care has been to make the troop horses look as fat, the men's whiskers as trim, their overalls as clean, and their curb-chains as bright, as possible. You never imagined or dreamed of a contingency when it would be desirable that the animals should be all sorebacked, the whole regiment under stoppages, and the trumpeter in a quinsey. Had you been a diplomatist instead of a dragoon, this view of things might perhaps have presented itself, and the chief object of your desire been to show that the system under which you functionated worked as ill as need be; that the court to which you were accredited abhorred you; its ministers snubbed, its small officials slighted

you; that all your communications were ill received, your counsels ill taken; that what you reprobated was adopted, what you advised rejected; in fact, that the only result of your presence was the maintenance of a perpetual ill will and bad feeling; and that without the aid of a line of battle ship, or at least a frigate, your position was no longer tenable. From the moment, my dear H-that you can establish this fact, you start into life as an able and active minister, imbued with thoroughly British principles-an active assertor of what is due to his country's rights and dignity, not truckling to court favour, or tamely submitting to royal impertinences-not like the noble lord at this place, or the more subservient viscount at that but, in plain words, an admirable public servant, whose reward, whatever courts and cabinets may do, will always be willingly accorded by a grateful nation.

"I am afraid this sketch of a special envoy's career will scarcely tempt you to exchange for a mission abroad! And you are quite right, my dear friend. It is a very unrewarding profession. I often wish myself that I had taken something in the colonies, or gone into the church, or some other career which had given me time and opportunity to look after my health; of which, by the way, I have but an indifferent account to render you. These people here can't hit it off at all, Harcourt; they keep muddling away about indigestion, deranged functions, and the rest of it. The mischief is in the blood; I mean in the undue distribution of the blood. So Treysenac, the man of Bagneres, proved to me. There is a flux and reflux in us as in the tides, and when, from deficient energy, or lax muscular power, that ceases, we are all driven by artificial means to remedy the defect. Treseynac's theory is position. By a number of ingeniously contrived positions he accomplishes an artificial congestion of any part he pleases; and in his establishment at Bagneres you may see some fifty people strung up by the arms and legs, by the waists or the ancles, in the most marvellous manner, and with truly fabulous sucI myself passed three mornings suspended by the middle, like the sheep in the decoration of the Golden

cess.

Fleece, and was amazed at the strange sensations I experienced bfeore I was cut down.

"You know the obstinacy with which the medical people reject every d scovery in the art, and only sanction its employment when the world has decreed in its favor. You will, therefore, not be surprised to hear that Larrey and Cooper, to whom I wrote about Treysenac's theory, sent me very unsatisfactory, indeed very unseemly, replies. I have resolved, however, not to let the thing drop, and am determined to originate a suspensorium in England, when I can chance upon a man of intelligence and scientific knowledge to conduct it. Like mesmerism, the system has its antipathies, and thus yesterday Crawley fainted twice after a few minutes' suspension by the arms. But he is a bigot about anything he hears for the first time, and I was not sorry at his punishment.

"I wish you would talk over this matter with any clever medical man in your neighbourhood, and let me hear the result.

"And so you are surprised, you say, how little influence English representations exercise over the determinations of foreign cabinets. I go further, and confess no astonishment at all at the no-influence! My dear dragoon, have you not, some hundred and fifty times in this life, endured a small martyrdom in seeing a very indifferent rider torment almost to madness the animal he bestrode, just by sheer ignorance and awkwardness -now worrying the flank with incautious heel, now irritating the soft side of the mouth with incessant jerkings always counteracting the good impulses, ever prompting the bad ones of his beast? And have you not, while heartily wishing yourself in the saddle, felt the utter inutility of administering any counsels to the rider? You saw, and rightly saw, that even if he attempted to follow your suggestions, he would do so awkwardly and inaptly, acting at wrong moments and without that continuity of purpose which must ever accompany an act of address; and that for his safety and even for the welfare of the animal, it were as well they should jog on together as they had done, trusting that after a time they might establish a sort of com

promise endurable if not beneficial to both.

"Such, my dear friend, in brief, is the state of many of those foreign governments to whom we are so profuse of our wise counsels. It were doubtless much better if they ruled well; but let us see if the road to this knotty consummation be by the adoption of methods totally new to them, estranged from all their instincts and habits, and full of perils, which their very fears will exaggerate. Constitutional governments, like underdone roast beef, suit our natures and our latitude; but they would seem lamentable experiments when tried south of the Alps. Liberty with us means the right to break heads at a county election, and to print impertinences in newspapers. With the Spaniard or the Italian it would be to carry a poignard more openly, and use it more frequently than at pre

sent.

"At all events, if it be any satisfaction to you, you may be assured that the rulers in all these cases are not much better off than those they rule over. They lead lives of incessant terror, distrust, and anxiety. Their existence is poisoned by ceaseless fears of treachery-they know not where. They change ministers as travellers change the direction of their journey, to disconcert the supposed plans of their enemies; and they vaccillate between cruelty and mercy, really not knowing in which lies their safety. Don't fancy that they have any innate pleasure in harsh measures. The likelihood is, they hate them as much as you do yourself; but they know no other system; and, to come back to my cavalry illustration, the only time they tried a snaffle, they were run away with.

I trust these prosings will be a warning to you how you touch upon politics again in a letter to me; but I really did not wish to be a bore, and now here I am, ready to answer, so far as in me lies, all your interrogatories; first premising that I am not at liberty to enter upon the question of Glencore himself, and for the simple reason, that he has made me his confidant. And now as to the boy, I could make nothing of him, Harcourt; and for this reason,-he had not what sailors call "steerage way" in him. He went wherever you

bade him, but without an impulse. I tried to make him care for his career-for the gay world-for the butterfly life of young diplomacy--for certain dissipations-excellent things occasionally to develop nascent faculties. I endeavoured to interest him by literary society and savans, but unsuccessfully. For art indeed he showed some disposition, and modelled prettily; but it never rose above amateurship.' Now enthusiasm, although a very excellent ingredient, will no more make an artist, than a brisk kitchen-fire will provide a dinner where all the materials are wanting.

"I began to despair of him, Harcourt, when I saw that there were no features about him. He could do everything reasonably well; because there was no hope of his doing anything with real excellence. He wandered away from me to Carrara, with his quaint companion the doctor; and after some months wrote me rather a sturdy letter, rejecting all monied advances, past and future, and saying something very haughty, and of course very stupid, about the "glorious sense of independence." I replied, but he never answered me, and here might have ended all my knowledge of his history, had not a letter, of which I send you an extract, resumed the narrative.

The

writer is the Princess Sablonkoff, a lady of whose attractions and fascinations you have often heard me speak. When you have read and thought over the enclosed, let me have your opinion. I do not, I cannot believe in the rumour you allude to. Glencore is not the man to marry at his time of life, and in his circumstances. Send me, however, all the particulars you are in possession of. I hope they don't mean to send you to India, because you seem to dislike it. For my own part, I suspect I should enjoy that country immensely. Heat is the first element of daily comfort, and all the appliances to moderate it are ex officio luxuries; besides that in India there is a splendid and enlarged selfishness in the mode of life, very different from the petty egotisms of our rude Northland.

"If you do go, pray take Naples in the way. The route by Alexandria and Suez, they all tell me, is the best and most expeditious.

"Mellish desires me to add his remembrances, hoping you have not forgotten him. He served in the 'Fifth' with you in Canada; that is, if you be the same George Harcourt who played Tony Lumpkin so execrably at Montreal. I have told him it is probable, and am yours

ever,

H. U.

BACON.*

Ir would be difficult to say to what class a book like this belongs, unless to those volumes of Ana in which great thinkers have sometimes bound together their loose thoughts. We have here, collected under one cover, the "wise saws" of Lord Bacon and the "modern instances" of the Archbishop of Dublin.

The table of contents of "Bacon's Essays" is, as our readers well know, a miscellaneous one; and the Archbishop's additions are taken from sources quite as various. Together, the Essays and the Annotations remind us of the work of Smalgruenius,

who wrote a work entitled, " De Omnibus Rebus," and afterwards added a supplementary treatise, "De quibusdam aliis.”

The first edition of "Bacon's Essays" was printed in 1597; it then contained only ten Essays. The volume was reprinted several times during the author's life time, and received continual additions. In 1612, Bacon published an enlarged edition, which he dedicated to Prince Henry. He seems then to have adopted the word “ Essays" as a new name for this style of composition. He calls them in his dedication, "Certain brief

* Bacon's Essays, with Annotations by Richard Whately, D.D., Archbishop of Dublin, London: John W. Parker.

1856.

notes set down rather significantly than curiously, which I have called Essays the word is late but the thing is ancient." In the title-page of the first edition, they are quaintly described as places (loci) of persuasion and dissuasion.

To these Essays or Places the Archbishop of Dublin has contributed another collection of thoughts and common-places. It is thus a treatise on human nature, to which two wise observers, separated by an interval of two centuries, have contributed their several stock of experience. The critics will, no doubt, object that this is not so much an edition of Bacon as a compilation of Baconiana and Whateleiana bound up together;

and it will be further asked, is such an act of literary partnership justifiable, for which consent has been obtained only on one side? The Chancellor, who can only act the sleeping partner in such a concern, must not be held accountable for the opinions of the Archbishop.

Limited liability must be the rule in this concern, in which the dead and the living are entered for an equal amount of shares. This much must be premised in fairness to the great Chancellor, who cannot appear either to consent or dissent to the act of the Archbishop. But admitting this, the combination is a useful one for the general reader. There is sufficient congeniality of mind be tween the essayist and and his annotator to smooth down the differences of age and expression. The wise saw and the modern instance are so thoroughly one at bottom, but so unlike each other on the surface, that we feel on reading the two all the force of the argument from undesigned coincidence.

On some points, particularly cases of Christian experience, the annotator is, as might be expected, in advance of the essayist. Although the king's conscience-keeper, the Chancellor is not always a safe guide to a weak conscience. His empirical principles often appear where they ought not. It is the glory of physics but the weakness of ethics to be tried by experience. In Bacon's moral maxims we are sometimes unpleasantly reminded that he was the father of the Experimental Method. Honesty is the best policy, it is true,

but it will not do to be honest from policy. In morals, high principles produce high practice-if you lower the one, the other necessarily falls with it. Bacon is not professedly, as many of his degenerate disciples, au experimentalist in morals. But the standard is not always as high as could be wished. We need an occasional "caution for the time," such as the Archbishop judiciously supplies.

There is an Irish proverb quoted by the Archbishop, "He is a good hurler that's on the ditch." To judge of worldly wisdom by its own rules, we must look down on it from a height. The "wisdom which is from above" can alone truly pronounce on the wisdom of this world. Bacon in this respect was only the hurler in the field. He had not stood on the ditch, at least when he wrote the Essays. Perhaps, when, old and sick at heart, he flung the writ of summons to the upper house with an air of contempt on the table, exclaiming, "I have done with such vanities," he may have learned that sagacity is not wisdom. But such an appendix to his Essays we must note as deficient. The annotations in part supply this

want.

His

It is strange that the man who sailed round the coasts of intellectual knowledge, explored every bay (to follow out his own metaphor) and sounded every creek, who noted all its deficiencies, and almost filled them up himself, should have shown as striking a specimen of moral littleness as of mental greatness. own age and posterity have both fallen into strange confusion through this anomaly. The one rejected what was great, and the other has long revered what was little and mean. His intellect was misunderstood by the men of his own age. Queen Elizabeth said of him, "Bacon hath a great wit and much learning; but in law showeth to the utmost of his knowledge, and is not deep." King James affectedly compared his Novum Organum to the peace of God, "for it passeth all understanding." Posterity, to which Bacon appealed, has reversed this judgment as to his parts as a writer; but posterity should remember that Bacon made no appeal against the judgment of his own age on his conduct as a man. They forgave, and we may forget that

he was fined, imprisoned, degraded; but to apologise for these things is simply absurd.

If his faults were only vitia temporis, the common features of his age, his genius too by the same rule should belong to the age and not to the man. It is well that biographers have given up at last this line of defence. Let the reader compare the two verdicts -the one of a modern editor of Bacon, who has with the rest confounded the ideas of great and good; the other of Dr. Whately-and judge for himself which is nearest the truth :

It is true, says the hero-worshipper, that the condition of the times offers some' excuse for him; and his legal treatises, the settlement of the law of real property; his attempts at law reform, and many of his judicial and political acts, show a nature naturally obeying the impulse of reason and conscience; while the unimpeachable blamelessness of his private life, and the calm earnestness of his moral lessons, prove that he only needed a purer atmosphere and more civilized times to act with all the dignity of the sage, and speak with the unadulterated eloquence of an Augustan classic.

The verdict of the Archbishop of Dublin is sounded in a more Christian key, and runs as follows:

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I wish I could feel justified in concluding without saying anything of Bacon's own character; without holding him up as himself a lamentable example of practice at variance with good sentiments, and sound judgment, and right precepts. He thought well, and Ire spoke well; but he had accustomed himself to act very far from well. And justice requires that he should be held up as a warning beacon to teach all men an impor tant lesson; to afford them a sad proof that no intellectual power,-no extent of learning, not even the most pure and exalted moral sentiments confined to theory, will supply the want of a diligent and watchful conformity in practice to Christian principle. All the attempts that have been made to vindicate or palliate Bacon's moral conduct tend only to lower, and to lower very much, the standard of virtue. He appears but too plainly to have been worldly, ambitions, covetous, base, selfish, and unscrupulous. And it is remarkable that the Mammon which he served proved but a faithless master in the end. He reached the highest pinnacle, indeed, to which his ambition had aimed; but he died impoverished, degraded, despised, and broken-hearted. His example, therefore, is far from being at all seductive.

VOL. XLVIII.-NO. CCLXXXVI.

But let no one, thereupon, undervalue or neglect the lessons of wisdom which his writings may supply, and which we may, through divine grace, turn to better account than he did himself. It would be absurd to infer, that because Bacon was a great philosopher, and far from a good man, therefore of his philosophy. His intellectual supeyou will be the better man for keeping clear riority was no more the cause of his moral

failures than Solomon's wisdom was of his. You may be as faulty a character as either, of them was, without possessing a particle of their wisdom, and without seeking to gain instruction from it. The intellectual light which they enjoyed did not, indeed, keep them in the right path; but you will not be the more likely to walk in it, if you quench any. light that is afforded you.

How many on the other hand have been misled by the sounding couplet of Pope

If parts allure thee, think how Bacon shined, The wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind..

Here we have an instance in the opposite extreme of the confusion between moral and mental greatness which men so often fall into. As' some of Bacon's admirers excuse his baseness by his genius-so others with Pope accuse his genius as if the cause of his baseness. Bacon is in-, deed at once our example and our warning. As a light at sea may either hide a sunken rock, and so is to be: avoided-or stand at the mouth of a harbour, and so should be made for,' so the same character may at one time or another serve a two-fold use. The wise pilot knows both when to avoid and when to sail towards a light. Bacon's genius neither covers his faults nor do his faults extinguish. his genius-it is well to know when. to be warned and when invited. It. is not often that the two lessons are taught in the life of one man; but to learn the lesson at all, we must distinguish things that differ.

As we anticipate that the Essays and the Annotations will live by themselves, and that time that dissolves all things will dissolve at last, this partnership of Bacon and Whately, we prefer to review them. separately.

We will first select some extracts from the Annotations, and then re-> mark more at large on Bacon.

In Essay XIX, on Seditions and

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