lusts of youth, the intrigues of courtiers, were stronger than the warning voice of God; then I ceased to hope; I ceased to pray for the glorious city, for I knew that her sentence was gone forth; I saw her in the spirit, even as Saint John saw her in the Revelations, her, and her sins, and her ruin. And I fled secretly at night, and buried myself here in the desert, to await the end of the world. Night and day I pray the Lord to accomplish his elect, and to hasten his kingdom. Morning by morning I look up trembling, and yet in hope, for the sign of the Son of Man in heaven, when the sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, and the stars shall fall from heaven, and the skies pass away like a scroll, and the fountains of the nether fire burst up around our feet, and the end of all shall come. And thou wouldst go into the world from which I

fled?'

If the harvest be at hand, the Lord needs labourers. If the times be awful, I should be doing awful things in them. Send me, and let that day find me, where I long to be, in the forefront of the battle of the Lord.'

thers of all mischiefs which I have seen under the sun. Come; the abbot waits for us at the gate.'

With tears of surprise, joy, sorrow, almost of dread, Philammon hung back.

Nay come. Why shouldst thou break thy brethren's hearts and ours by many leave-takings? Bring from the storehouse a week's provision of dried dates and millet. The papyrus boat lies at the ferry; thou shalt descend in it. The Lord will replace it for us when we need it. Speak with no man on the river, except the monks of God. When downward, ask for the mouth of the thou hast gone five days' journey canal of Alexandria. Once in the city, any monk will guide thee to thy welfare by some holy mouth. the archbishop. Send us news of

Come.'

the glen to the lonely beach of the Silently they paced together down

already, his white hair glittering in great stream. Pambo was there the rising moon, as with slow, feeble arms he launched the light canoe. Philammon flung himself at the old men's feet, and besought, with many tears, their forgiveness and their blessing.

We have nothing to forgive, Follow thou thine inward call. If it be of the flesh, it will avenge itself: if it be of the Spirit, who are we, that we should fight against God? Farewell.'

A few minutes more, and the youth and his canoe were lessening down the rapid stream in the golden summer twilight. Again a minute, and the swift southern night had fallen, and all was dark, but the cold glare of the moon on the river, and on the rock-faces, and on the two old men, as they knelt upon the beach, and with their heads upon each other's shoulders, like two children, sobbed and prayed together for the lost darling of their age.

GOOD NIGHT, Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-one! Good night, once brilliant, but now decrepid Old Friend! Whether we are willing to let you go, is a question which neither our breeding nor our good will, to say nothing of other genial and social qualities, will permit us to touch upon at the moment of separation, even if we had not passed so long a time in your company as to have acquired a kind of household regard for you. We cannot snap established habits of familiarity without a slight recoil of the feelings; and many shadows must chase each other round the dial, before we shall become as intimate with your successor, of whose complexion and attributes we as yet know nothing, and whose very name, out of that affectionate custom we had contracted in our daily intercourse with you, we shall continue to confound with yours for days and weeks to come.

Besides, it is not so easy to convert a new acquaintance all at once into a close friend. One cannot take a stranger into one's house, and set him down to dinner in an offhand, family way, and run adrift into all one's old stories, and abandon oneself to the luxury and table-glory of a confidential gossip with a stranger, as if one had known him all one's life. We must have a little formality and ceremony with him at first, and observe that measure of prudence and reserve in the beginning which is necessary to beget respect at both sides in the long run. We must note him well, and see what he is like, and whether he is the sort of person we can warm into a friendship with, to whom we can open our hearts and thoughts, and admit to the core of our sympathies and affections. Above all, we must make him understand that we have drawn a few useful lessons from the experience of the past-that we are not to be imposed upon by shows and pageants and fine professions, as we used to be-and that he cannot throw us off our guard as some of his predecessors have done, much to our cost and suffering in divers ways. As the world grows

older, it ought to grow wiser; and hence, instead of giving credit in advance to the New Year for speculative benefits which may never be realized, we prefer looking back upon the actual advantages we have derived from the Old One, and considering how we may improve upon them in the future.

Therefore it is that we stand lingeringly upon the door-step, and cry, Good Night! to Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-one, as, having finished his work, and gathered his cloak of innumerous colours' about him, he goes out from amongst us. The hour of separation comes, and you are going for ever into darkness and oblivion, and we shall see you no more in that well-known configuration of Almanacks and Newspapers, Time-Tables and Ledgers, Proclamations, Gazettes and Epistles, Promissory Notes and Actions at Law, Playbills, Tax-papers, and Invitations to Dinner, or any of the other infinite formula to which for a twelvemonth past we have been accustomed to look for your signature. Your functions are over-your office is at an end-your lease is run out.

An

hour ago, you were the Age we lived in-you are now History. There is a homily in the Thirty-first of December worth most of the sermons that will be preached before it comes round again.

It is true that Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-one grew rather dark and morose latterly, and put on quite a different sort of aspect from that which it wore at first. We remember well, what a brightening up there was everywhere when it was coming, and what a joyous clatter of preparations heralded its approach-not

The clink of hammers closing rivets up, but clinking and hammering of a totally opposite character, such as was calculated, not to scare peaceful people from their honest slumbers, but to supply them with something grand and glorious and beautiful to dream about. In this way the Old Year came in upon us, stepping in music,' and bringing in its train the arts and sciences, the living poetry,

pre

and the souls of all the great thoughts and projects that had been shaping themselves in men's minds for years and years before, and yearning for utterance and execution. All this world of inchoate and fulfilled wonders, of will and energy, of suggestion and accomplished labour, was to be brought out into one magnificent tableau, more gorgeous and effulgent than the earth had ever witnessed, or human imagination conceived before. And all this was to be done and perfected; tens of thousands of lines of communication to be drawn from the remotest regions to a common centre on a particular day, in the first year of the half century just commenced. Compare the preliminaries of this spectacle with the opening of the ceding half century: when the forges of Europe were hissing and thundering night and day with the fabrication of murderous fire-arms; when the world was hard put to it to get ammunition enough for the slaughter that was going forward on its surface; when the fields were ploughed by artillery; villages and towns burried in the smoke-not of steamengines and manufactory chimneys -but of the desolating conflagrations of war; and the ocean was covered with flaming bulwarks more pestilent, destructive, and implacable than the direst maelstroms and most furious hurricanes. A wondrous contrast this for men, women, and children in their places of public resort, their homesteads, and their schools, to make to themselves and ponder over: the forges extinguished, or employed only in the beating out of fortunate horseshoes; the fire-arms burnished and hung up for ornament,' to trace stars and bright devices in the sun on the walls of show-rooms in palaces and idle armories; corn and turnips, beet-root and mangel-wurzel, and other varieties of produce, turning the earth green and golden where the iron ploughshares had scarred and deformed it; towns and villages alive with cheerful industry, and sending forth from their looms, furnaces, and workshops, contributions of thoughtful ingenuity, in which the discoveries and art-triumphs of all time were brought to the last point of finish and elaboration; and the

seas, gladdened by fleets of vessels, hastening to their common destination from the north, south, east, and west, with freights to which civilization hereafter will owe larger obligations than all the admirals and generals that ever flourished by land or water, with the help of the mountains of brimstone they blew up in their victories, have laid upon mankind. The contrast is startling and profitable, and is no less a special mark of honour of the year just gone out, than it is an emphatic evidence of the moral change that has passed over the spirit of the nations.

We by no means desire it to be inferred, because civilization has been working so successfully in these pacific channels, that we are therefore of opinion the globe will be disturbed no more by wars, or rumours of wars. There are unfortunately two elements in human nature, the good and the evil, to speak by the card; and until the Peace Society shall have got rid of the evil, we cannot, for the life of us, see how it proposes to govern the world without an occasional campaign or so, a demonstration here and there of the power that is to restrain turbulence and preserve order, and the very conservation and exhibition of which is, after all, the best guarantee against the necessity of its exercise. We have as great a horror of war as Mr. Cobden; we may go further, and say, we have so profound a horror of it, that, if we had the ordering of these matters, we would leave no country in such a defenceless state as to expose it to the wanton incursions of its neighbours, who, out of any pretext, might be tempted to take advantage of its weakness. We believe the surest way to avert war is to be always prepared for it. This is a very trite maxim. It is the rule upon which every man acts in his own affairsthe self-protecting instinct which leads the farmer to keep a blunderbuss in his bed-room and a dog in his yard, and which suggests to the tradesman the precaution of bolts, bars, and alarum-bells, and a night watchman, to parade up and down under his windows. Everybody understands it, and puts faith in it, except the members of the Peace

Society; but until they supply us with a better, and show us a shorter road to universal concord, they will hardly prevail on any government, outside the frontiers of Utopia, to break up its ships for firewood, and disband its army. If the Peace Society be in earnest, why don't they begin at home, and dismiss the police of Manchester ? If they really believe that a great kingdom, with all its complex relations abroad, and its conflict of interests at home, can be safely and securely governed without a troop of dragoons, or a platoon of musketry, surely they can have no hesitation in trusting the guardianship of a manufacturing town to that theory of natural law upon which they confidently rely for the preservation of the peace of the world, to those daggers of conscience in the air, which, since they will have no other, are alone to awaken the moral justice and control the passions of men. When they shall have abolished the local magistracy and constabulary force of Manchester, and turned the station-houses and police-offices into reading-rooms and lecture-halls, we will admit that they will have practically qualified themselves to launch their doctrines upon a larger field of experiment; but in the meanwhile, we must continue to think that, bad a thing as war is, it would be much worse if the means were not kept in hand for preventing it, or, in the last extremity, for narrowing its operations and curbing its progress.

We must not suffer the Peace Society, however, to carry us out of our way, as it has already carried so many honest and worthy people. This little digression is only meant to let the reader know that, in comparing the tranquil industry of last year with the sanguinary conflicts in which the whole of Europe was plunged fifty years before, we have no other purpose to enforce, than his own common-sense will enable him to extract from it at a single glance. It will be admitted by all reasonable people, that the open intercourse of ideas is better than bloodshed; and that it is pleasanter and more useful, to exchange commodities and inventions than knocks on the head. We would rather,

even, that America should beat us in yachts, ploughs, and pick-locks than in brute force; and if we had our choice of victories over other countries, we should undoubtedly prefer the triumphs of the easel and the anvil, of handicraft and mechanism, to those of pitched battles and sieges. But it does not consequently follow that fighting may not be necessary and unavoidable, ay, and salutary, too, sometimes; for cases arise in the history of states, as in the lives of individuals, when it is utterly a waste of time to argue, and when forbearance may give impunity to wrong which the strong hand could set to rights at once.

It is true, as we have said, that the Old Year went out in a bad temper, finishing its civilizing career with a renewal of those internecine massacres, of which Paris has acquired an alarming monopoly. But it will be remembered hereafter, nevertheless, as the year in which the cultivation of the brotherhood of the arts and sciences all over the earth had made greater progress than the isolated efforts of hundreds of preceding years had been able to achieve. We have nothing to do with politics here. We are merely gossiping or rhapsodizing upon things in general, plucking off the fruits and blossoms of current topics, and leaving the branches to be cut, and gathered, and seasoned, for rougher use, by other hands. It is in this aspect of mingled pleasure and utility, of exultation in the accomplishment of a great work, of the millennium of tongues and industries, drawn together for the first time, upon a few acres of ground, and united by a pervading sympathy in the production of one grand result, that we speak of the year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-one, and that it will be spoken of by posterity after posterity to the end of time. What year since the beginning of the Christian era is so conspicuously distinguished, or stands out from the roll of ages with so large a claim upon historical honours? If we could disinter the philosophers and savans of the earth, from the pagan times downwards-the Plinys, Aristotles, Bacons, Newtons, and the rest of the glorious intellects that were in advance of the knowledge