Bocket where the joints of things met? Parvo regitur mundus intellectu. A small intellect, once in the position of government, may suffice for the official forms of it; and with Laud's laboriousness and tenacity of purpo-e. his power of maintaining his place of minister, under such a master as Charles, needs be no mystery. So long as the proprietor of an estate is satisfied, the tenants must endure the bailiff, whatever the amount of his wisdom. Then, again, in the last stages of Land's ascent, he rose through Buckingham and Charles, to both of whom surely his nature, without being great, may have recommended itself by adequate affinities.

Still, that Land impressed these men when he did come in contact with them, and that, from his original position as a poor student in an Oxford college, he rose step by step to the point where he could come in contact with them, are facts not explicable by the mere supposition of a series of external accidents. Perhaps it is that a nature does not always or necessarily rise by greatness, or intrinsic superiority to the element about it, but may rise by peculiarity, or proper capillary relation to the the element about it. When Lord Macaulay speaks of Laud as intellectually an 'imbecile,' and calls him a ridiculous old bigot,' he seems to omit that peculiarity which gave Laud's nature, whatever its measure by a modern standard, so much force and pungency among his contemporaries. To have hold of the surrounding sensations of men, even by pa n and irritation, is a kind of power; and Laud had that kind of power from the first. He affected strongly, if irritatingly, each_successive part of the body-politic in which he was lodged. As a fellow of a college, he was more felt than liked; as a master of a college, he was still felt, but not liked; when he came first about court, he was felt still, but still not liked. And why was he felt? Why, in each successive position to which he attained, did he affect surrounding sensation so as to domineer? For one thing, he was a man whose views, if few. were extraordinarily definite. His nature, if not great, was very tight. Early in life he had taken up certain propositions as to the proper theology of the Anglican Church, and had combined them with certain others as to the divine right of Prelacy, and the necessity and possibility of uniformity in creed and worship. These few very definite propositions, each answering to some tendency of society or of opinion at the time in England, he had tied and knotted round him as his sufficient doctrinal outfit. Wherever he went, he carried them with him and before him, acting upon them with a brisk and incessant perseverance, without regard to circumstances, or even to estab ish notices of what was fair, high-minded, and generous. Thus, seeing that the propositions were of a kind upon which some conclusion or other was or might be nade socially imperative, he could force to his own conclusions all laxer, though larger natures, that were tending lazily the same way, and, throwing a continually increasing crowd of such and of others behind him as his followers, leave only in front of him those who opposed to his conclusions as resolute contraries. His indefatigable official activity contributed to the result. Beyond all this, however, and adding secret force to it all, there was something else about Land. Though the system which he wanted to enforce was one of strict secular form, the man's own being rested on a trembling basis of the fantastic and unearthly. Herein lay one notable, and perhaps compensating difference between his narrow intellect and the broad but secular genius of Williams. In that strange diary of Laud, which is one of the curiosities of our literature, we see him in an aspect in which he probably never wished that the public should know him. His hard and active public life is represented there but casually, and we sce the man in the secrecy of his own thoughts. as he talked to himself when alone. We hear of certain sins, or, at least, unfortunatenesses' of his early and past life, which clung about his memory, were kept by anniversaries of sadness or pen nee, and sometimes intruded grinning faces through the gloom of the chamber when all the house was asleep. We see th t, after all whether from such causes or from some form of constitutional melancholy, the old man, who walked so briskly and cheerily about the court, and was so sharp and unhesitating in all his notions of what was to be done in secret, carry in him some sense of the burden of life's mystery, and feel the air and earth to some depth around him to be full of sounds and agencies unfeatured and unimaginable. At any moment they may break through! The twitter of two robin redbreasts in his room, as he is writing a sermon, sets his heart beating; a curtain rustles-whose hand touched it? Above all he has a belief in revelation through dreams and coincidences; and as the very definiteness of his scheme of external worship may have been a refuge to him from that total mystery,

the skirts of which, and only the skirts, were ever touching him, so in his dreams and small omens he seems to have had, in his daily advocacy of that scheme, some petty sense of near metaphysical aid. Out of his many dreams we are fond of this one: January 5 [1626-7]. Epiphany Eve and Friday, in the night I dreamed,' he says, that my mother, long since dead, stood by my bed, and drawing aside the clothes a little, looked pleasantly upon me, and that I was glad to see her with so merry an aspect. She then shewed to me a certain old man, long since deceased, whom, while alive, I both knew and loved. He seemed to lie upon the ground merry enough, but with a wrinkled countenance. His name was Grove. While I prepared to salute him, I awoke.' Were one to adopt what seems to have been Laud's own theory, might not one suppose that this wrinkled old man of his dream, squat on the super natural ground near its confines with the natural, was Laud's spiritual genius, and so that what of the supernatural there was in his policy consisted mainly of monitions from Grove of Reading? The question would still remain—at what depth back among the dead Grove was permitted to roam ?

Mr. Masson has published Essays Biographical and Critical,' 1856; 'British Novelists and their Styles,' 159; Recent British Philosophy,' 1865; The Life of William Drummond of Hawthornden,' 1873; &c. Mr. Masson has also been a copious contributor to our reviews, magazines, and other literary journals. He is a native of Aberdeen (born Dec. 22, 1822), and enjoys universal respect as a genial and accomplished author, professor, and member of the literary society of the Scottish capital.

Luther's Satan.

Milton's Satan and Goethe's Mephistopheles are literary performances; and, for what they prove neither Milton nor Goethe nee' have believed in a devil at all. Luther's devil, on the other hand was a being recognised by him as actually existingas existing, one might say, with a vengeance. The strong conviction which Luther had on this point is a feature in his character. The narrative of his life abounds in anecdotes, shewing that the devil with him was no chimera, no mere orthodoxy, no fiction. In every page of his writings we have the word Teufel, Teufel, repeated again and again Occasionally there occurs an express dissertation upon the nature and functions of the evil spirit; and one of the longest chapters in his Table-talk' is that entitled 'The Devil and his Works'-indicating that his conversation with his friends often turned on the subject of Satanic agency. Teufel was actually the strongest signification he had; and whenever he was excited to his highest emotional pitch, it came in to assist his utterance at the climax, and give him a corresponding powerful expression. This thing I will do,' it was common for him to say, in spite of all who may oppose me, be it duke, emperor, priest. bishop, cardinal, pope, or devil.' Man's heart, he says, is a Stock. Ste'n, Eisen, Teufel, hart Herz' (a stock, stone, iron. devil, hard heart). And it was not a mere vague conception he had of this being, such as theology might oblige. On the contrary, he had observed him as a man would his personal enemy, and in so doing had formed a great many conclusions regarding his powers and his character. In general. Luther's devil may be defined as a personification. in the spirit of Scripture. of the resisting medium which Luther had to coil his way throngh-spiritual feare. passionate uprisings, fainting resolutions, within himself; error, weakness, envy, in those around him; and, without, a whole world howling for his destruction. It is in effect as if Luther had said: Scripture reveals to me the existence of a great accursed being, whose function it is to produce evil. It is for me to ascertain the character of this being, whom I, of all men, have to deal with. And how am I to do so except by observing him working? God knows I have not far to go in quest of his manifestations." And thus Luther went on filling up the scriptural proposition with his daily experi ence. He was constantly gaining a clearer conception of his great personal antagonist, constantly stumbling upon some more concealed rait in the spirit's character. The being himself was invisible; but men were walking in the midst of his mani

festations. History to Luther was not a physical course of events. It was God acting and the devil opposing.

London Suburbs-Hampstead.

London, with all the evils resulting from its vastness, has subu: bs as rich and beautiful, after the English style of scenery, as any in the world; and even now, despite the encroachments of the ever-encroaching brick and mortar on the surrounding country, the neighborhood of Hampstead and igugate, near London one in which the lover ot natural beauty and the solitary might well delight. The ground is much the highest round London; there are real heights and hollows, so that the omnibuses coming from town have put on additional horses; you ascend steep roads lying in part througa villages or quaint shops, and old high-gabled brick houses, still distinct from the great city, though about to be devoured by it-in part through straggling hues of villas, with gardens and grassy parks round them, and here and there an old inn; aud from the mghest eminences, when the view is clear, you can see Londou left behind. a mass of purplish mist, with domes and steeples visible through it. When the villages end, you are really in the country. There is the Heath, on the Hampstead side-an extensive tract of knolls and li.tle gleus, covered here and there with furze, all aboom with yellow in the summer, when the larks may be heard singing over it; thr aded here and there by paths with seats in them, or broken by clumps of trees, and bue rusty-nailed palings, which inclose oldfashioned family-houses and shrubberies, where the coachman in livery may be seen talking lazily to the gardener, but containing also seques ered spots where one might wander a.one for hours, or ne concealed amid the sheltering furze. At night, Hampstead Heath would be as ghastly a pace to wander in as an uneasy spirit could desire. In every hollow seen in the starlight, one could fancy that there had been a murder; nay, tradit.on points to spots where toul crimes have been committed, or where, in the dead of night. forgers, who had walked, with discovery on their track, along dark intervening roads from the hell of lamp-lit London, had lain down and poisoned themselves. In the day, however, and especially on a bright summer day, the scene is open, healthy, and cheerful.

The Essays on Ecclesiastical Biography.' by SIR JAMES STEPHEN (1789-1859), contain brief memoirs of Hildebrand, St. Francis of Assisi, Loyola, Luther, Baxter, Wilberforce, the founders of Jesuitism, the Port-Royalists, the Clapham Sect, &c. As originally published in the Edinburgh Review,' these essays were nearly as popular with a large body of readers as those of Macaulay, though on less attractive subjects. They were first published in a collective form in 1849, and have gone through several editions. Sir James Stephen was long legal adviser to the Colonial Office, then assistant Undersecretary to the Colonial Office, and afterwards Under-secretary of State, which office he held from 1836 to 1847. He was a valuable public servant and a good man.

J. P. MUIRHEAD (Life of Watt)—s SMILES (Life of Stephenson).

A relative of James Watt, JAMES PATRICK MUIRHEAD, M. A., who had access to all the family papers, published a volume in 1854, entitled 'The Origin and Progress of the Mechanical Inventions of James Watt' three volumes, 1858 The large copper-plate engravings of machinery by which it was illustrated necessarily raised the cost of this work above the means of most people, while the minute descriptions of patents and their relative drawings, were more desirable for the use of the scientific engineer and the mechanical philoso

pher than of the general reader. To meet the wishes of the latter, Mr. Muirhead, in 1858, remodeled and reproduced, in a form at once more comprehensive, more convenient, and less costly, the biographical memoir of Watt, incorporating with it the most interesting passages in his correspondence, and, as far as possible, Watt's own clear and forcible descriptions of his inventions. This volume furnishes an interesting account of the career of the great inventor, of whom Sir Walter Scott has said that he was not only the most profound man of science, the most successful combiner of powers and calculator of numbers, as adapted to practical purposes-was not only one of the most generally well-informed, but one of the best and kindest of human beings.' James Watt was born on the 19th of January 1736, at Greenock, and came of a family that for more than a bundred years had more or less professed mathematics and navigation. Many stories are told of his early turn for science. When he was six years of age, a gentleman, calling on his father, observed the child bending over a marble hearth with a piece of coloured chalk in his hand. Mr. Watt,' said he, you ought to send that boy to a public school, and not allow him to trifle away his time at home.' Look how my child is occupied before you condenin him,' replied the father. The gentleman then observed that the boy had drawn mathematical lines and circles on the marble hearth, and was then marking in letters and figures the result of some calculation he was carrying on; he put various questions to him, and ended by remarking, he is no common child.' Sitting one evening with his aunt, Mrs. Muirhead, at the tea-table, she said: James Watt, I never saw such an idle boy: take a book, or employ yourself usefully. For the last hour, you have not spoken one word, but taken off the lid of that kettle and put it on again, holding now a cup and now a silver spoon over the steam.' James was already observing the process of condensation. Before he was fifteen years of age, he had made for himself a small electrical machine, with which he sometimes startled his young friends by giving them sudden shocks from it. This must have been only a few years after the Leyden phial was invented. His father's store-rooms, in which he kept a stock of telescopes, quadrants, and optical instruments for the supply of ships at Greenock, were a valuable school of observation to the young philosopher, and may have tended to decide the profession which he selected for himself-that of mathematical instrument-maker.

At the age of eighteen, he removed to Glasgow to learn this business, and a year afterwards repaired to London for the same purpose. But bad health- a gnawing pain in his back, and weariness all over his body'-obliged him to quit London in the year 1756; and after investing about twenty guineas in tools and useful books on his trade, he returned to Scotland In 1757 he received permission to occupy an apartment and open a shop within the precincts of the college of Glasgow, and to use the designation of mathematical

instrument-maker to the university.' And now, in his twenty-first year, may be said to have commenced the wonderful career of James Watt as a man of inventive genius. Business was sufficiently prosperous, and in his leisure hours he studied without intermission. Observare' was the motto he adopted, and his object, as he himself expressed it, was to find out the weak side of Nature, and vanquish her;' for Nature,' he says again, ‘has a weak side, if we can only find it out. Nothing came amiss. Without knowing one musical note from another, he undertook to build an organ for a mason-lodge in Glasgow. He had studied the philosophical theory of music, and not only did he make the organ, but in the process a thousand things occurred to him which no organ-builder ever dreamed of-nice indicators of the strength of the blast, regulators of it, &c. He afterwards made many organs; and guitars, flutes, and violins of his manufacture are still in existence. About this time he also contrived an ingenious machine for drawing in perspective. The great discovery which led to the ultimate triumphs of the steam-engine was made when Watt was only twenty-seven or twenty-eight years of age-namely, in 1764 or 1765. Dr. Black, au intimate friend, thus narrates the circumstance:

The Steam-engine.

A few years after he was settled at Glasgow, he was employed by the Professor of Natural Philosophy to examine and rectify a small workable model of a steamengine, which was out of order. This turned a part of his thoughts and fertile invention to the nature and improvement of steam-engines, to the perfection of their machinery, and to the differeut means by which their great consumption of fuel might be diminished. He soon acquired such a reputation for his knowledge on this subject, that he was employed to plan and erect several engines in different places, while at the same time he was frequently making new experiments to lessen the waste of heat from the external surface of the boiler. and from that of the cylinder. But, after he had been thus employed a considerable time, he perceived that by far the greatest waste of heat proceeded from the wast of steam in filling the cylinder with steam. In filling the cylinder with steam, for every stroke of the common engine a great part of the steam is chilled and condensed by the coldness of the cylinder, before this last is heated enough to qualify it for being filled with elastic vapour or perfect steam; he perceived, therefore, that by preventing this waste of steam an incomparably greater saving of heat and fuel would be attained than by any other contrivance. It was thus in the beginning of the year 1765 that the fortunate thought occurred to him of condensing the steam by cold in a separate vessel or apparatus, between which and the cylinder a communication was to be opened for that purpose every time the steam was to be condensed; while the cylinder itself might be preserved perpetually hot, no cold water or air being ever admitted into its cavity. This capital improveinent flashed on his mind at once, and filled him with rapture.

Here was the weak side of Nature, by the discovery of which he vanquished her. Dr. Robison, also an intimate friend, assigns the discovery to the year 1764 Dr Robison gives an account of an interview with Watt at this time: I came into Mr. Watt's parlour without ceremony, and found him sitting before the fire, having lying on his knee a little tin cistern, which he was looking at. I entered into conversation on what we had been speaking of at last