And, further, there are not many persons who, with all their pretended love of life, would not, if it had been in their power, have melted down the longest life to a few hours. "The schoolboy," says Addison, "counts the time till the return of the holidays; the minor longs to be of age; the lover is impatient till he is married." "Hope and fantastic expectations spend much of our lives; and while with passion we look for a coronation or the death of an enemy or a day of joy, passing from fancy to possession without any termediate notices, we throw away a precious year" (Jeremy Taylor). We would willingly and without remorse sacrifice not only the present moment, but all the interval (no matter how long) that separates us from any favorite object. We chiefly look upon life, then, as the means to an end. Its common enjoyments and its daily evils are alike disregarded for any idle purpose we have in in view. It should seem as if there were a few green sunny spots in the desert of life to which we are always hastening forward; we eye them wistfully in the distance, and care not what perils or suffering we endure so that we arrive at them at last. However weary we may be of the same stale round, however sick of the past, however hopeless of the future, the mind still revolts at the thought of death, because the fancied possibility of good, which always remains with life, gathers strength as it is about to be torn from us for ever, and the dullest scene looks bright compared with the darkness of the grave. Our reluctance to part with existence evidently does not depend on the calm and even current of our lives, but on the force and impulse of the passions. Hence that indifference to death which has been sometimes remarked in people who lead a solitary and peaceful life in remote and barren districts. The pulse of life in them does not beat strong enough to occasion any violent revulsion of the frame when it ceases. He who treads the green mountain turf or he who sleeps beneath it enjoys an almost equal quiet. The death of those persons has always been accounted happy who had attained their utmost wishes, who had nothing left to regret or to desire. Our repugnance to death increases in proportion to our consciousness of having lived in vain, to the violence of our efforts and the keenness of our disappointments, and to our earnest desire to find in the future, if possible, rich amends for the past. We may be said to nurse our existence with the greatest tenderness according to the pain it has cost us, and feel at every step of our varying progress the truth of that line of the poet, "An ounce of sweet is worth a pound of sour." The love of life is, in fact, the sum of all our passions and of all our enjoyments; but these are by no means the same thing, for the vehemence of our passions is irritated not less by disappointment than by the prospect of success. Nothing seems to be a match for this general tenaciousness of existence but such an extremity either of bodily or mental suffering as destroys at once the power both of habit and imagination. In short, the question whether life is accompanied with a greater quantity of pleasure or pain may be fairly set aside as frivolous and of no practical utility, for our attachment to life depends on our interest in it, and it cannot be denied that we have more interest in this moving, busy scene, agitated with a thousand hopes and fears and checkered with every diversity of joy and sorrow, than in a dreary blank. To be something is better than to be nothing, because we can feel no interest in nothing. Passion, imagination, self-will, the sense of power, the very consciousness of our existence, bind us to life and hold us fast in its chains as by a magic spell in spite of every other consideration. Nothing can be more philosophical than the reasoning which Milton puts into the mouth of the fallen angel : "And that must end us, that must be our cure, Nearly the same account may be given in answer to the question which has been asked why so few tyrants kill themselves. In the first place, they are never satisfied with the mischief they have done and cannot quit their hold of power after all sense of pleasure is fled. Besides, they absurdly argue from the means of happiness placed within their reach to the end itself, and, dazzled by the pomp and pageantry of a throne, cannot relinquish the persuasion that they ought to be happier than other men. The prejudice of opinion, which attaches us to life, is in them stronger than in others and incorrigible to experience. The great are life's fools, dupes of the splendid shadows that surround them and wedded to the very mockeries of opinion. Whatever is our situation or pursuit in life, the result will be much the same. The strength of the passion seldom corresponds to the pleasure we find in its indulgence. The miser "robs himself to increase his store ; the ambitious man toils up a slippery precipice only to be tumbled headlong from its height; the lover is infatuated with the charms of his mistress exactly in proportion to the mortifications he has received from her. Even those who succeed in nothing, who, as it has been emphatically expressed, "Are made desperate by too quick a sense From peace, like exiles on some barren rock, are yet as unwilling as others to give over the unprofitable strife: their harassed, feverish existence refuses rest and frets the languor of exhausted hope into the torture of unavailing regret. The exile who has been unexpectedly restored to his country and to liberty often finds his courage fail with the accomplishment of all his wishes, and the struggle of life and hope ceases at the same instant. We once more repeat that we do not in the foregoing remarks mean to enter into a comparative estimate of the value of human life, but merely to show that the strength of our attachment to it is a very fallacious test of its happiness. WILLIAM HAZLITT. other, sometimes even to recede, by the force of circumstances over which the pilot can have no control. To judge of its actions at any given time of history, we ought to assimilate our own mind to the condition of the public mind at such a period. We ought to forget, if possible, the experience which has been since then acquired, but, taking our stand at the origin of any historical question, to travel downward with the current of its development, instead of absurdly rowing our shallow boat of criticism against its mighty stream. progress counts by centuries which in indi- | is obliged to tack on the one side and on the viduals is numbered by years. To judge the past by the present, therefore, is absurd. The benefit of studying history at all consists in the wisdom which may be gleaned from it; and the wisdom can only result from the truth which it furnishes, and the truth can be discovered only by studying it in the proper manner. In fact, there is another great difference between the individual and public mind. The former is trained up by other minds, already ripened, but the latter has no senior tutor. The aggregate mind, in its largest sense, moves forward on the mysterious point dividing two eternities, the past and the future. It has a certain measure of experience, a certain general idea of the ground over which it has travelled, but of its direction or tendency in reference to the future all is at all given times uncertain and unknown. There is a mysterious veil at all times hanging over the future which moves onward in exact keeping with the advance of the present, so that men may preserve a vague recollection of what has happened, but no man is able to tell with certainty what is to come. Thus, looking back at the history of civilization, we can now discover that society has made many a curve and many a pause, while those of whom it was composed imagined themselves to be always in motion and always moving on a straight line. We suppose this to be the case in our own regard, but it is quite possible that the five-and-twentieth century, looking back to the nineteenth, will perceive how divergent from the straight line were the leading impulses and directions of our age. In fact, the public mind in its progress is like the course of a vessel at sea. It The first period of the Christian Church was a period in which she knew the State only as the source of her sufferings and her triumphs. Her missionaries had extended themselves throughout the length and breadth of the Roman empire. man empire. They had penetrated countries where the Roman eagles had never been known or heard of. Her converts were numerous in all the provinces, in the capital, in the army, in the Senate, and even in the houses of the Cæsars themselves. Still, the frown of the State was upon her, and to escape it she found a hiding-place in the catacombs of Rome. If she met the State at all, it was only at the tribunal of some consul or governor, or on the scaffold to witness the triumph of some glorious member of her body against whom the sword of the State was uplifted for no other crime save that of belief in Jesus of Nazareth. At length Constantine is triumphant over his rivals and his enemy. He embraces the Christian religion, and the cross, which had hitherto been the emblem of all that is vile, is now set in the imperial diadem as the most precious of its ornaments and the most expressive type of its duties. The condition of the world, even the civilized world of the Roman empire, was lamentable in the extreme, and, unless it should be derived from the cross, there was no hope of its renovation. Every department of society was not only depraved by the natural depravity of man's heart, but that depravity itself was incorporated in almost all the legal and social institutions of the degenerate times. In the family the father alone was under the protection of the law; the wife, the children, the slaves-or, rather, all were then slaves-had no protection beyond the caprice of the husband, the father and the master. His order was enough to consign these or any of them even to public prostitution, against which neither the laws of the empire nor the morality of paganism opposed a barrier. Now, to allow thus disorder and corruption in the family was to vitiate and corrupt the whole of society in its very root. Hence the public crimes which history has recorded of that age and those immediately preceding. The people plundered by every petty officer of the government, the oppression and impotence of the rural and provincial populations, the licentious and unpunished conduct of the Roman soldiers, the debaucheries and cruelties of the imperial court and all connected with it, present a picture which causes the heart to sicken at the condition of humanity at that period, the setting sun of old Roman civilization. As one fact to give an idea of the times I will mention that during the hundred years which preceded the age of Constantine the average reign of each emperor was but two and a half years, that out of forty emperors more than one-half had per ished by a death of violence, that the Prætorian Guards and their prefect had put up the throne of the great empire at public auction to the highest bidder, and that the purchaser had scarcely time to wear off the novelty of his elevation when he was murdered to create an opportunity for a new sale. Constantine moved the seat of empire to Byzantium, now Constantinople. His successors in the empire, with a few exceptions, fell infinitely below him in every attribute of talent, capacity and virtuous greatness. Of his successors it is sufficient to say in general that, with some few exceptions, they were lost in luxury and effeminacy, showing always a greater disposition to meddle in the metaphysics of theological disputation than either to govern or defend their empire according to the better morals of the law they professed. There is not a single dispute of the subsequent ages in which they did not interpose their sovereign will on one side or on the other. By joining with the iconoclasts, or image-breakers, of the eighth century, they prepared the way for the Greek schism; and the Greek schism in its turn prepared the way for their utter annihilation by wrenching from their feeble hands, to be transferred to the disciples of Mohammed, that sceptre of which they were unworthy. When such weakness and such imbecility were at the head and heart of the imperial government, the events which occurred throughout its extremities ceased to be surprising. The barbarians, of every name and of no name, from the East and North of Europe, from the shores of the Baltic and the interior of Tartary, rushed into the empire as if by concert and inundated it with their savage and ferocious habits. Huns, Burgundians, Goths and Vandals all came in mingled confusion to | under such a catastrophe there was no hope take possession of the undefended provinces for the renovation of the human mind. The as of a rich but abandoned prey. Not by Not by only models of government which the ancient a single irruption-though even that would world had left would seem to have perished. have been sufficient to extinguish the feeble Government and society-upon a large scale, remains of Roman institutions-but wave at least-must result from the exercise of after wave from this inexhaustible ocean of power somewhere, but here were men who ignorance and barbarism, rushed with de- acknowledged no power on earth and hardly structive fury over the length and breadth any in heaven; they may be said to have of the Roman empire. had no law but their own will, and it may further be said that it was not in their nature to submit to any other. It would be wrong to say that they had not brought with them certain rude elements from which a future civilization might, under a propitious culture, be matured and ripen, but their code of police was suited rather to the common good in their common condition of a banditti of robbers than to any state of settled, peaceable and social life. The type of the civilization which they came to overthrow and extinguish was in their mind, with all its developments and accidents, a type of effeminacy which they held in the most sovereign and unutterable contempt. Of this type they looked upon the Roman legislation, Roman habits, architecture, books, learning, arts and sciences, as the pernicious offspring. Hence they regarded them as things to be destroyed with the same determination which had vanquished the authors of them. Lombardy, Gaul, the southern coasts of the Mediterranean, Spain and other portions of Europe, the choicest of imperial Rome, became the seat of their ravages and future habitations. Other hordes may have come subsequently to disturb their residence, but finally the whole remnant of Roman government, Roman laws and usages and institutions are made to give place to the crude and barbarous habits of these ignorant but warlike invaders of the North. It would seem that Out of this chaos, not the deliberations of men, but the irresistible force of necessity, brought about slowly something like civil government. This government is stamped with all the rude prejudices of those on whose will its formation depended. Privilege, distinction, power, were supposed to be the prerogative of the bold, the daring and the few; submission, obedience, degradation, were conceived as resulting from the natural distribution of things in reference to the weak, the timid and the many. Hence the formation of what at a later period, when it became better organized, is known as the feudal system. In a period of social disorder and the absence of all laws except the laws of physical strength life and protection are the first necessities of man. The common people, therefore, for the sake of life and the protection of it, attached themselves to the train of chieftains from whom these first claims of human existence might be expected. The chieftain was bound to provide for their subsistence and protection. They, on their part, as an equivalent, were bound to go to war with him and to fight for him in every quarrel, aggressive or defensive, which he might |