In order to reach this ideal, let us forswear expensive wines, silks, and other mere luxuries; let us vigorously cultivate literature, and provide education for all classes and religions; let people marry from love, and not for money (207. Whether to the multiplying of human kind it would not much conduce if marriages were made with good liking?'); let the poor be taught by clergy and catechists who know Irish; let the rich live at home and try to set the poor to work; let us, at all hazards, make the people work.

This is powerfully enforced in the following queries, 380-386 Whether it would be an hardship on people destitute of all things, if the public furnished them with necessaries which they should be obliged to earn by their labour? Whether other nations have not found great benefits from the use of slaves, in repairing high roads, making rivers navigable, draining bogs, erecting public buildings, bridges, and manufactures? Whether temporary servitude would not be the best cure for idleness and beggary? Whether the public has not a right to employ those who cannot, or who will not, find employment for themselves? Whether all sturdy beggars should not be seized and made slaves to the public for a certain term of years? .. What the word servant signifies

in the New Testament? Whether the view of criminals chained in pairs and kept at hard labour would not be very edifying to the multitude?'

It is worth notice that Berkeley had a theory of

race about the Irish to which he frequently reverts. He asks 'Whether our natural Irish are not partly Spaniards and partly Tartars; and whether they do not bear signatures of their descent from both these nations which is also confirmed by all their histories?'

These few illustrations may, we hope, give some notion of the character of one of the sturdiest and most sensible, and at the same time one of the most subtle thinkers, if not the very most subtle thinker, of the eighteenth century. As in the whole range of English literature hardly any name is held in more affectionate regard than Berkeley's, so there is none which illustrates in a more striking manner the best, and at the same time the deepest and most important, side of the English character. The sanguine, subtle, intensely practical, and almost over-logical character of the race was never more strikingly embodied. If Cobbett had been a good man and a gentleman, and if he had been educated as Berkeley was, they would have had much in

common.

IV

TUCKER'S 'LIGHT OF NATURE'1

THERE are in the world a certain number of remarkable books which have a reputation only in small but influential classes. They are, for the most part, books which are not on the popular side, which are rather powerful than attractive, and which, for some reason or other, lie out of the general current of literature. Henry's History of Britain, for instance, is an excellent book, but it never got anything like the reputation of Hume's. The same may be said of Carte, whose Jacobitism effectually obscured the reputation due to his great qualities; but it would be difficult to find a stronger illustration than is afforded by the book named at the head of this article.

Many people hardly know Tucker, even by name. Of those who do know him by name, few have read him; yet he exercised a deep influence over men whose writings have, in their turn, exercised a deep and wide influence over more generations than one. Paley, for instance, in the introduction to his Moral

1 The Light of Nature Pursued. By Abraham Tucker.

Philosophy, says: 'There is one work to which I owe so much, that it would be ungrateful not to confess the obligation. I have found in this writer more

original thinking and observation than in any other, not to say in all others put together.' And Dr. Whately, if we are not mistaken, spoke hardly less strongly on the subject.

The

Tucker was a Surrey country gentleman of large property, who had been educated at Oxford, and had afterwards studied law, though without any intention of practising. He lived a very quiet life, and never appears to have taken an interest in politics, or in any other public pursuit. From his childhood he had always been fond of morals and metaphysics, and when he was upwards of fifty years of age he began to put the reflections of his life into shape. undertaking occupied him for nearly twenty years, when he died. The result was the Light of Nature, some parts of which were published during his life. The complete work, so far as it is complete, was published by his daughter after his death. So little did literary ambition enter into the author's views that the fragments of the book published during his lifetime were published under a false name.

It certainly is by no means surprising that the Light of Nature should never have been a popular book. One edition of it fills six octavo volumes of a handsome size. Another, which is later and more economical, is compressed into two, but these two consist of no less than 1365 pages, of fifty-three lines

to the page and thirteen words to the line. Few readers care so much about moral and theological inquiries as to attack such a pièce de resistance as this, with anything like a serious intention of triumphing over its difficulties.

Nor is the enterprise in itself much worth undertaking, especially in the present day, except by a serious student of such subjects. The moral teaching of the book has passed into other forms, and is to be got in a condensed shape in Paley's Moral Philosophy. The metaphysics are little more than an expansion of Locke, with some special adaptations to Tucker's own mind; and the theology has never met with as much favour or notice as the good intentions of the author deserved. It relates to moral rather than to critical and historical inquiries. The style is very curious, though both powerful and picturesque. A gentle, innocent vein of gaiety runs through the whole of it, and bubbles over in a constant stream of good-natured old-gentlemanly gossip, not altogether unlike the style of Our Own Correspondent, or perhaps something between that and Montaigne. Notwithstanding all this, there are still reasons for reading Tucker's Light of Nature even in these days, and those who do discharge that task will get from the book itself something which they will hardly find anywhere else.

It has always been a favourite undertaking with men of a certain class to write, in some form or other, a good Religio Laici-that is to say, to contribute to