upon his shoulder caused him to start to his feet with surprise, and a certain shame at being found in that miserable posture.. 'Howitt! my dear fellow, what do you here?' The voice and touch were those of as veritable a "Good Samaritan' as ever sought to aid and comfort the cast-down and destitute of earth's poor children. Howitt looked at him half-terrified, as if he thought him some spirit. His wild appearance, his dry, red eyes, and ghastly face in turn alarmed Fortescue; for it was he who had assiduously tracked and found his wandering and miserable friend. 'Fortescue! why did you come?' said Howitt, in quiet, calm, unnatural tones. Why won't you leave me to my fate?' 'Because it is not your fate to be a castaway, unless you will it,' replied Fortescue. 'Be a man, Howitt, and don't succumb to temptation and circumstances, as if you were a machine, and had no will or power of your own. Remember what Dryden says of fate or fortune : "Fortune a goddess is to fools alone, The wise are always masters of their own." Excuse the plain language of the quotation; it is true, as you must know.' 'Yes, yes; I see that I've been a fool, a weak, weak, fool!' said Howitt. Byron's lines just recurred to me, and I might have taken them to myself long ago : "The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree I planted; they have torn me, and I bleed; I should have known what fruit would spring from such a seed." Yes, I have been a poor, weak fool!' He sank down again, and hid his face. Fortescue stood beside him with a feeling of thankfulness that his friend felt conscious of his folly; it was the first time he had ever heard anything like self-reproach from his lips, and he felt sure that it gave promise of better things. The shades deepened around them; the far-stretching moors began to take the appearance of a still, grey, boundless sea; and the breath of evening softly and mournfully sighed now and then; nothing else broke the almost awful silence. The stars peeped out tremulously overhead; the time and scene were peculiarly beautiful. 'Howitt, the night is coming on; we must be going home,' said his friend. 'You can go, but leave me; I am not worthy of your slightest regard. I have bitterly wronged you, do you know? You can take me and deliver me up to justice; do it, I entreat you! it would be a satisfaction to me to get my deserts. I have outraged law, and your goodness and confidence; I deserve deserve all that can be inflicted upon me. I would have expiated my sin here by wandering till I met death; but, since that is not my fate, I will go with you to justice.' 'I have discovered what you have done against me, Howitt, and I forgive you with all my heart. It is folly for man to talk about expiating sin. Don't talk again about fate, it is foolish and cowardly. If you have hitherto felt that it is your fate to act sinfully, to yield to temptation, to succumb to adverse circumstances, in God's name play the man now! Struggle with and overcome it! Be master of yourself, and say in the words of one of my favourite sonnets : "Contend with me! my heart shall never drop From its resolves, nor rest for thee, inert, Though in thy strength e'en double strong thou wert; To help me onward. Arouse thee, then! alert! My heart is bent against thee. Come! the charge! This war-word's written-- WHAT I WILL I CAN!'"' The two were perfectly silent when Fortescue had uttered these words, which he did as if inspired. 'Ah, I see it,' Howitt at length said; it is self that I have deified and bowed to as to Fate. Well, I must just suffer the consequences of my madness.' 'No, I'll tell you what you must do, Howitt; you must just make a new start in life, and redeem the past as much as possible. Come, let the struggle cease, and declare yourself victor! What a grand battle-field you have upon which to conquer, man! Here on these grand old moors, in this deepening twilight, with only "heart within and God o'erhead," -it is a glorious time to struggle with and conquer any evil!' But still Howitt sat bowed and immovable. Fortescue presently laid a hand on his shoulder: 'Seek strength from above, my dear fellow,' he said. 'Don't be proud: what are we in God's sight? and how ill it becomes us proudly to set up our puny selves against Him. Let us be ever constrained by His unfailing goodness and longsuffering towards us. He is our Father, though we have rebelled against Him.' Ah, you are so good and fortu- I mean blessed,' said Howitt, rising; 'blessed, because you are good and do right, I suppose. How good of you to seek me here to-night, to overlook,-in fact, I feel quite overcome!' And he turned away, and walked a few paces. Now, let us go home, Howitt,' said Fortescue, 'it is getting late, and my wife will be alarmed.' 'Fortescue,' said Howitt, drawing near again, and speaking firmly, firmly, if I thought that I should ever do again as I have done, I would stay here and die on these moors. I haven't been living: I have merely lingered and endured life, suffering horribly. Death would be preferable to such a life in the future, I think.' 'I thought you were beginning to enjoy life, during the past winter when you spent such happy evenings with us,' said Fortescue. You did not appear to be suffering then.' 'No, I believe I was happy enough then; but you see it did not last long: I very soon fell again.' 'How?' 'As you never can fall, because you have nothing to do with it. I must confess that drink has been my bane.' 'I feared it, Howitt. Thank God, you never had the opportunity given you at my house to stumble through it. Forswear it now and for ever, as I did years ago, much to my happiness and well-being. It is at the root of most wrongdoing.' 'It has been at the root of all mine, I can safely say. It paves the way to every imaginable evil. Oh, to be free from it!' 'Be free, Howitt! With strength from the Great Helperwithout whose aid the strongest of us are powerless successfully to combat evil-say now, "What I will I can.' Assert your dignity, proclaim your own freedom! We are our own masters. Come, your hand upon it, ere we go home.' Howitt stood irresolute in the fast-gathering darkness. Fortescue stood with outstretched hand. The conflict within the former none but the Omniscient might know. At length he took the hand of his friend in a firm grip, and said, 'Yes, I shall conquer: I think I have conquered, "WHAT I WILL I CAN.", They stood in silence, with clasped hands, for several moments. Then Fortescue said, 'Let us return.' Without a word Howitt took up his valise, and walked beside his friend. The stars glimmered overhead, and in the west were still lingering gleams of light. They tramped on through the gloom, and very soon the lurid glow from the distant ironworks was their beacon to direct them homeward. When they reached the outskirt of the moor, Howitt turned and looked behind him into the gloom. 'Your last words ring in my ears yet, Fortescue,' he said: "Let us return." So do some others, which I think I must have heard at church some time: "Let us return unto the Lord our God, and He will abundantly pardon." Is that it?' 'Yes, they are from the Bible, Howitt.' 'I thought so,' was the reply. No more was said; only when when they reached the town, they stood to say good-night; and Howitt added, 'I have strange feelings, Fortescue,solemn yet elate. I think it is how everybody commonly feels after gaining a real victory. I feel that somehow strength has been given me to conquer. I have gained a victory, I firmly believe. May there be no defeat in the future!' 'God grant it!' fervently responded Fortescue. And time proved that the hope of the one and the prayer of the other were fulfilled. The moorland struggle and victory proved to be effectual; and Howitt's future life promises to be as prosperous and happy in every respect as that of the generous friend whose bright example he is emulating. SOCIAL SCIENCE SELECTIONS. Mr. Carlyle has invented the Herocure, and all who recommend any other method, or see any hope of healing elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or their victims. His lively imagination conjures up the image of an impossible he, as contradictorily endowed as the chief personage in a modern sentimentel novel, and who, at all hazards, must not lead mankind like a shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry them toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr. Carlyle would only now and then recollect that men are men, and not sheep,-nay, that the farther they are from being such, the more well-grounded our hope of one day making something better of them! It is indeed strange that one who values Will so highly in the greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least of men; nay, that he should so often seem to confound it with its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilfulness. The natural impatience of an imaginative temperament, which conceives so vividly the beauty and desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner political order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by which the All-Wise brings about His ends, and turns the very foolishness of men to His praise and glory. Mr. Carlyle is for calling down fire from heaven whenever he cannot readily lay his hand on the matchbox. No doubt it is somewhat provoking that it should be so easy to build castles in the air, and so hard to find tenants for them. It is a singular intellectual phenomenon to see a man who, earlier in life, so thoroughly appreciated the innate weakness and futile tendency of the 'storm and thrust' period of German literature, constantly assimilating, as he grows older, more and more nearly to its principles and practice. It is no longer the sagacious and moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in human nature, but far rather some Götz of the Iron Hand, some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht. It is odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the sway of any of his heroes,-how Cromwell would have scorned him as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, but less clear and practical,how Friedrich would have scoffed at his tirades as dummes Zeug not to be compared with the romances of Crébillon fils, or possibly have clapped him in a marching regiment as a fit subject for the cane of the sergeant. Perhaps. something of Mr. Carlyle's irritability is to be laid to the account of his early schoolmastership at Ecclefechan. This great booby World is such a dull boy, and will not learn the lesson we have taken such pains in expounding for the fiftieth time. Well, then, if eloquence, if example, if the awful warning of other little boys who neglected their accidence and came to the gallows, if none of these avail, the birch at least is left, and we will try that. The dominie spirit has become every year more obtrusive and intolerant in Mr. Carlyle's writing, and the rod, instead of being kept kept in its place, as a resource for desperate cases, has become the alpha and omega of all successful training, the one divinely-appointed means of human enlightenment and progress,in short, the final hope of that absurd animal who fancies himself a little lower than the angels. Have we feebly taken it for granted that the distinction of man was reason? Never was there a more fatal misconception. It is in the gift of unreason that we are unenviably distinguished from the brutes, whose nobler privilege of instinct saves them from our blunders and our crimes. But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed with the hallucination that he is head-master of this huge boys' school which we call the world, his pedagogic birch has grown to the taller proportions and more ominous aspect of a gallows. His article on Dr. Francia was a panegyric of the halter, in which the gratitude of mankind is invoked for the self-appointed dictator who had discovered in Paraguay a tree more beneficent than that which produced the Jesuits' bark. Mr. Carlyle seems to be in the condition of a man who uses stimulants, and must increase his dose from day to day as the senses become dulled under the spur. He began by admiring strength of character and purpose, and the manly self-denial which makes a humble fortune great by steadfast loyalty to duty. He has gone on till mere strength has become such washy weakness that there is no longer any titillation in it; and nothing short of downright violence will rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement. At first he made out very well with remarkable men; then, lessening the water and increasing the spirit, he took to Heroes and now he must have downright inhumanity, or the draught has no savour;-so he gets on at last to. Kings, types of remorseless Force, who maintain the political views of Berserkers by the legal principles of Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a failure, representative government is a gabble, democracy a birth of the bottomless pit; there is no hope for mankind except in getting themselves under a good driver who shall not spare the lash. And yet, unhappily for us, these drivers are providential births not to be contrived by any cunning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the last of them. Meanwhile the world's wheels have got fairly stalled in mire and : other matter of every vilest consistency and most disgustful smell. What are we to do? Mr. Carlyle will not let us make a lever with a rail from the next fence, or call in the neighbours. That would be too commonplace and cowardly, too anarchical. No; he would have us sit down beside him in the slough, and shout lustily for Hercules. If that indispensable demigod will not or cannot come, we can find a useful and instructive solace, during the intervals of shouting, in a hearty abuse of human nature, which, at the long last, is always to blame. Since Sartor Resartus,' Mr. Carlyle has done little but repeat himself with increasing emphasis and heightened shrillness. Warning has steadily heated toward denunciation, and remonstrance soured toward scolding. The image of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed from Richter and turned to such humorous purpose, might be applied to himself. The same phase comes round and round, only the machine, being a little crankier, rattles more, and the performer is called on for a more visible exertion. If there be not something very like cant in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then cant is not the repetition of a creed after it has become a phrase by the cooling of that white-hot conviction which once made it both the light and warmth of the soul. We do not mean intentional and deliberate cant, but neither is that which Mr. Carlyle denounces so energetically in his fellowmen of that conscious kind. Mr. Carlyle's style is not so well suited to the historian as to the essayist. He is always great in single figures and detached scenes, but there is neither gradation nor continuity. He has extraordinary patience and conscientiousness in the gathering and sifting of his material, but is scornful of commonplace facts and characters, impatient of whatever will not serve for one of his clever sketches, or group well in a more elaborate figure-piece. He sees history, as it were, by flashes of lightning. A single scene, whether a landsscape or an interior, a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may be snatched by the eye in that instant of intense illumination, is minutely photographed upon the memory. Every tree and stone, almost every blade of grass; every article of furniture in a room; the attitude or expression, nay, the very buttons and shoe-ties of a principal |