words with little meaning, actions with little worth, one loves to reflect on the great Empire of Silence. The noble silent men, scattered here and there, each in his department; silently thinking, silently working; whom no Morning Newspaper makes mention of! They are the salt of the Earth. A country that has none or few of these is in a bad way. Like a forest which had no roots; which had all turned into leaves and boughs;— which must soon wither and be no forest. Woe for us if we had nothing but what we can show, or speak.

-H. VI. Cromwell.

THE REAL MAN.

WHAT are your historical Facts; still more your biographical? Wilt thou know a Man, above all a Mankind, by stringing together beadrolls of what thou namest Facts? The man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he became. Facts are engraved Hierograms, for which the fewest have the key.

-S. R. II. 10.

THE WORLD'S JUDGMENT OF MEN Of genius. THE world is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men; unjust on many grounds, of which this one may be stated as the substance: It decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of fect or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured: and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared with them! Here lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one

never listens to with approval. Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs. -M. Burns.

GOOD AND EVIL.

MORAL reflection first: That, in these centuries men are not born demi-gods and perfect characters, but imperfect ones, and mere blamable men; men, namely, environed with such short-coming and confusion of their own, and then with such adscititious scandal and misjudgment (got into the work they did), that they resemble less demi-gods than a sort of god-devils,very imperfect characters indeed. The demi-god arrangement were the one which, at first sight, this reviewer might be inclined to prefer.

Moral reflection second, however: That probably men were never born demi-gods in any century, but precisely god-devils as we sce; certain of whom do become a kind of demi-gods! How many are the men, not censured, misjudged, calumniated only, but tortured, crucified, hung on gibbets,-not as god-devils even, but as devils proper; who have nevertheless grown to seem respectable, or infinitely respectable! For the thing which was not they, which was not anything, has fallen away piecemeal; and become avowedly babble and confused shadow, and no-thing; the thing which was they, remains. Depend on it, Harmodius and Aristogiton, as clear as they now look, had illegal plottings, conclaves at the Jacobins' Church of Athens; and very intemperate things were spoken, and also done. Thus too, Marcus Brutus and the elder Junius, are they not palpable Heroes? Their praise is in all Debating Societies; but didst thou read what the Morning Papers said of those transactions of theirs, the

week after? Nay, Old Noll, whose bones were dug-up and hung in chains here at home, as the just emblem of himself and his deserts, the offal of creation at that time, has not he too got to be a very respectable grim bronze-figure, though it is yet only a century and a half since; of whom England seems proud rather than otherwise?

-M. Mirabeau.

HERO AND VALET.

No man, it has been said, is a hero to his valet; and this is probably true; but the fault is at least as likely to be the valet's as the hero's. For it is certain, that to the vulgar eye few things are wonderful that are not distant. It is difficult for men to believe that the man, the mere man whom they see, nay perhaps painfully feel, toiling at their side through the poor jostlings of existence, can be made of finer clay than themselves. Suppose that some dining acquaintance of Sir Thomas Lucy's, and neighbour of John-a-Combe's, had snatched an hour or two from the preservation of his game, and written us a Life of Shakspeare! What dissertations should we not have had,-not on Hamlet and The Tempest, but on the wool-trade, and deer-stealing, and the libel and vagrant laws; and how the Poacher became a Player; and how Sir Thomas and Mr. John had Christian bowels, and did not push him to extremities!

-M. Burns.

FAULTS.

ON the whole, we make too much of faults; the details of the business hide the real centre of it. Faults? The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none. Readers of the Bible above all, one would think, might know better. Who is called there the man according to God's own heart'? David, the Hebrew King, had fallen into sins enough; blackest crimes; there was no want of sins. And therefore the unbelievers sneer and ask, Is this your man according to God's heart? The sneer, I must say, seems to me but

a shallow one. What are faults, what are the outward details of a life; if the inner secret of it, the remorse, temptations, true, often-baffled, never-ending struggle of it be forgotten? 'It is not in man that walketh to direct his steps.' Of all acts, is not, for a man, repentance the most divine? The deadliest sin, I say, were that same supercilious consciousness of no sin;that is death; the heart so conscious is divorced from sincerity, humility and fact; is dead; it is 'pure' as dead dry sand is pure. David's life and history, as written for us in those Psalms of his, I consider to be the truest emblem ever given of a man's moral progress and warfare here below. All earnest souls will ever discern in it the faithful struggle of an earnest human soul towards what is good and best. Struggle often baffled, sore baffled, down as into entire wreck; yet a struggle never ended; ever, with tears, repentance, true unconquerable purpose, begun anew. Poor human nature!

Is not a man's walking, in truth, always that: a succession of falls'? Man can do no other. In this wild element of Life, he has to struggle onwards; now fallen, deep-abased; and ever, with tears, repentance, with bleeding heart, he has to rise again, struggle again still onwards. That his struggle be a faithful unconquerable one: that is the question of questions. We will put up with many sad details, if the soul of it were Details by themselves will never teach us what

true.

it is. -H. II.

MISUNDERSTANDINGS.

Creatures who live in

So, however, are men made. confusion; who, once thrown together, can readily fall into that confusion of confusions which quarrel is, simply because their confusions differ from one another; still more because they seem to differ! Men's words are a poor exponent of their thought; nay their thought itself is a poor exponent of the inward unnamed Mystery, wherefrom both thought and action have their birth.

No man can explain himself, can get himself explained; men see not one another, but distorted phantasms which they call one another; which they hate and go to battle with for all battle is well said to be misunderstanding. -F. R. Part III. B. iii. 2.

EVIL RESISTED.

EVIL, once manfully fronted, ceases to be evil; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead passive misery; the evil itself has become a kind of good.

IMPOSSIBLE.

-Ch. X.

IT is not a lucky word this same impossible: no good comes of those that have it so often in their mouth. Who is he that says always, There is a lion in the way? Sluggard, thou must slay the lion then; the way has to be travelled! In Art, in Practice, innumerable critics will demonstrate that most things are henceforth impossible; that we are got, once for all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and must contentedly continue there. Let such critics demonstrate; it is the nature of them: what harm is in it? Poetry once well demonstrated to be impossible, arises the Burns, arises the Goethe. Unheroic commonplace being now clearly all we have to look for, comes the Napoleon, comes the conquest of the world. It was proved by fluxionary calculus, that steamships could never get across from the farthest point of Ireland to the nearest of Newfoundland: impelling force, resisting force, maximum here, minimum there; by law of Nature, and geometric demonstration: what could be done? The Great Western could weigh anchor from Bristol Port; that could be done. The Great Western bounding safe through the gullets of the Hudson, threw her cable out on the capstan of New York, and left our still moist paper-demonstration to dry itself at leisure. "Impossible?" cried Mirabeau to his secretary, "Ne me dites jamais ce bête de mot, Never name to me that blockhead of a word!" -Ch. X.