Then, when the Saxon instinct had secured a service in the vernacular tongue, it was the tutor and university of the people. In York minster, on the day of the enthronization of the new archbishop, I heard the service of evening prayer read and chanted in the choir. It was strange to hear the pretty pastoral of the betrothal of Rebecca and Isaac, in the morning of the world, read with circumstantiality in York minster on the 13th of January, 1848, to the decorous English audience, just fresh from the Times newspaper and their wine; and listening with all the devotion of national pride. was binding old and new to some purpose. The reverence for the Scriptures is an element of civilization, for thus has the history of the world been preserved, and is preserved. Here in England every day a chapter of Genesis, and a leader in the Times.

That

How does Mr. Emerson reconcile this with those other passages upon the Church which we have already cited?

*

The chapter upon Literature is the most interesting and valuable portion of Mr. Emerson's work. His observations upon Bacon, Locke, and Platonism, though it is no injustice, we hope, to Mr. Emerson to say that they are derived in the first instance from Coleridge, are deeply suggestive, and the utility of their re-publication at the present moment it is impossible to over estimate. They open up the whole question of the bearing of ancient philosophy upon modern politics. The first passage we shall quote is as follows:

Lord Bacon has the English duality. His centuries of observations on useful science, and his experiments, I suppose, were worth nothing. One hint of Franklin, or Watt, or Dalton, or Davy, or any one who had a talent for experiment, was worth all his lifetime of exquisite trifles. But he drinks of a diviner stream, and marks the influx of idealism into England. Where that goes, is poetry, health, and progress. The rules of its genesis or its diffusion are not known. That knowledge, if we had it, would supercede all that we call science of the mind. It seems an affair of race, or of meta-chemistry; the vital point being, how far the sense of unity, or instinct of seeking resemblances, predominated. For wherever the mind takes a step, it is to put itself at one with a larger class, discerned beyond the lesser class with which it has been conversant. Hence all poetry and all affirmative action comes.

Bacon, in the structure of his mind, held

*Coleridge's "Friend," sec. II.

of the analogists, of the idealists, or (as we popularly say, naming from the best example) Platonists. Whoever discredits analogy, and requires heaps of facts before any theories can be attempted, has no poetic power, and nothing original or beautiful will be produced by him. Locke is as surely the influx of decomposition and of prose, as Bacon and the Platonists of growth. The Platonic is the poetic tendency; the so-called scientific is the negative and poisonous. It is quite certain that Spenser, Burns, Byron, and Wordsworth will be Platonists, and that the dull men will be Lockists. Then politics and commerce will absorb from the educated class men of talents without genius, precisely because such have no resistance.

The first two or three sentences of this extract coincides so closely with a passage in the Friend,† that our readers will, perhaps, be willing to see them placed side by side. "Nor let it be forgotten that the sunny side of Lord Bacon's character is to be found neither in his inductions, nor in the application of his own method to particular phenomena or particular classes of physical facts, which are at least as crude for the age of Gilbert, Galileo, and Kepler, as Aristotle's for that of Philip and Alexander. . . Let any unprejudiced naturalist turn to Lord Bacon's questions and proproblems, to his discourse on the posals for the investigation of single winds, or to the almost comical carricature of this scheme in the " method of improving natural philosophy," by Robert Hooke, and put it to his conscience whether any desirable end could be hoped for from such a process."

"He marks the influx of idealism into England." This is not quite correct. Bacon may be said to have purified the Platonic idealism from the "dreams and verbiage" which in his time passed current for such. But the truth had been rather overlaid than destroyed. The fire had never gone out, but had been securely transmitted through the hands of the scholastic logicians, despite the curious but unsubstantial exaggerations under which they had buried it.

"For whenever the mind takes a step," &c. This is a valuable statement from Mr. Emerson; but it would, in our opinion, have been worded more cor

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 philosophyv. Such men as these cre

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. 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

But

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,t 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. So 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."

treaties, dues, and duties, occurred in every line. Three other documents of like nature accompanied this; after which came a very ill-written scrawl on coarse paper, entitled, "Hints as to diet and daily exercise for his Excellency's use."

The honest Colonel, who was not the quickest of men, was some time before he succeeded in unravelling to his satisfaction the mystery before him, and recognizing that the papers on his table had been destined for a different address, while the letter of the Princess had, in all probability, been despatched to the Foreign Office, and was now either confounding or amusing the authorities in Downingstreet. While Harcourt laughed over the blunder, he derived no small gratification from thinking that nothing but great geniuses ever fell into these mistakes, and was about to write off in this very spirit to Upton, when he suddenly bethought him that, before an answer could arrive, he himself would be far away on his journey to India.

"An ordinary mortal-one of your every day folk"-said he to himself, "would just have answered my few questions about this lad frankly and briefly. I asked nothing that could be difficult to reply to. It was plain enough, too, that I only wanted such information as he could have given me off-hand. If I could but assure Glencore that the boy was worthy of him that there was stuff to give good promise of future excellencethat he was honorable and manly in all his dealings,-who knows what effect such assurance might have had? There are days when it strikes me Glencore would give half his fortune to have the youth beside him, and be able to call him his own. Why he cannot, does not do it, is a mystery which I am unable to fathom. He never gave me his confidence on this head; indeed, he gave me something very like a rebuff one evening, when he erroneously fancied that I wanted to probe the mysterious secret. It shows how much he knows of my nature," added he, laughing. 66 Why, I'd rather carry a man's trunk or his portmanteau on my back than his family secrets in my heart. I could rest and lay down my burthen in the one case-in the other, there's never a moment of repose! And now Glen

core is to be here this very day- the ninth-to learn my views. The poor fellow comes up from Wales, just to talk over these matters, and I have nothing to offer him but this blundering epistle. Aye, here's the letter:

'Dear Harcourt,-Let me have a mutton-chop with you on the ninth, and give me, if you can, the evening after it.-Yours, G

"A man must be ill off for counsel and advice when he thinks of such aid as mine. Heaven knows I never was such a brilliant manager of my own fortunes, that any one should trust his destinies in my hands. Well, he shall have the mutton-chop, and a good glass of old port after it; and the evening, or, if he likes it, the night shall be at his disposal;" and with this resolve, Harcourt, having given orders for dinner at six, issued forth to stroll down to his club, and drop in at the Horse Guards, and learn as much as he could of the passing events of the day,-meaning thereby, the details of whatever regarded the army list, and those who walk in scarlet attire.

It was about five o'clock of a dreary November afternoon that a hackneycoach drew up at Harcourt's lodgings in Dover-street, and a tall and very sickly-looking man, carrying his carpet-bag in one hand and a dressing-case in the other, descended and entered the house.

"Mr. Massy, sir?" said the Colonel's servant, as he ushered him in; for such was the name Glencore desired to be known by. And the stranger nodded, and throwing himself wearily down on a sofa, seemed overcome with fatigue.

"Is your master out?" asked he, at length.

"Yes, sir; but I expect him immediately. Dinner was ordered for six, and he'll be back to dress half an hour before that time."

"Dinner for two?" half impatiently asked the other.

"Yes, sir, for two."

"And all visitors in the evening denied admittance? Did your master say so ?"

"Yes, sir; out for every one."

Glencore now covered his face with his hands, and relapsed into silence. At length he lifted his eyes till they