dence roundly to task. His friends, indeed, plead hard with him, and use all arguments, right or wrong, to patch up objections, and set the affairs of Providence upon an equal foot. They make a merit of saying all the good they can of God, at the very stretch of their reason, and sometimes quite beyond it. But this, in Job's opinion, is flattering God, accepting of God's person, and even mocking Him. And no wonder. For what merit can there be in believing God, or his Providence, upon frivolous and weak grounds? What virtue in assuming an opinion contrary to the appearance of things, and resolving to hear nothing which may be said against it? Excellent character of the God of truth! that He should be offended at us for having refused to put the lie upon our understandings, as much as in us lay; and be satisfied with us for having believed, at a venture, and against our reason, what might have been the greatest falsehood in the world for anything we could bring as a proof or evidence to the contrary!

The gradual progress of the young man's thought will be unfolded hereafter. But, from the time he leaves his Byronic passion behind him with his boyhood, during all his years, in whatever of struggle and perplexity he may be involved, he is always in heart and life a worshipper. The sun is often behind a cloud; he vainly strains his eyes to discern its orb; but its softened light suffuses the heavens and earth about him. A passage in one of his latest writings describes in the character of Clough that quality which was the accepted law of his own life.

The only thing absolutely essential to him was the approval of his own conscience. This man, so free in speculation, who had sounded all the perilous depths of human thought, who had cast off dogmas as the serpent casts his skin, and with as little thought of returning to them again, was a very slave to the sentiment of duty. The thing that was right-the doing of this stood to him in the place of ambition; and it had sometimes to stand in the place of doctrine too. Faith in the right this never forsook him; nor in that Being whom, when the reason refuses to clothe in any mythological or objective form, it still finds even in itself!

THE last two chapters have portrayed in grave hues the young man's thought and life. But with the sombre strain there was interwoven in him an element of pure joy and even of light-heartedness. The noble delight of the thinker is portrayed in the passage which his wife quotes (page 32). There were, too, lighter kinds of intellectual resource, on which he feasted with healthy youthful appetite. It was something very different from theological problems which engaged his pen in his earliest published writings.

In the year 1828 a weekly literary paper called "The Athenæum," which had lately made an unnoticed beginning in London, was observed to take on a new quality, and to show fine and promising work, as of vigorous though youthful hands. It had come into the control and editorship of two young men, fresh from Cambridge University, John Sterling and Frederick Denison Maurice. Among the contributions of this first year was a series of eight papers, on various topics, signed "A Wool-Gatherer." The writer was William Smith, then twenty years of age. The first paper, "On Periodicals," pleads the cause of this species of literature in a style which plays easily between the grave and the humorous. The magazine, says the writer, is not to be despised because it scarcely aims at more than a transient interest. "It is the perpetual fountain, whose life and whose beauty are not to be found in any one drop of the ever-changing liquid, a fountain whose boast it is to be continually exhibiting

under a graceful form some portions of the collected and otherwise stagnant waters of learning." For his own part, he even disclaims the usual contempt for an antiquated periodical, and finds in it a curious interest. "There the writer stands, in the same attitude of defiance or astonishment into which he was surprised by the popular excitement of the time; he is still gazing with awe and wonder upon the ghost which the rest of the world has long since discovered to have been a white sheet upon an ivy bush." As to the broad question of the periodical form, he admits there is a drawback in the tendency of the paper to interrupt the social chat of the family; and for this, he says: "I would propose it as a remedy that everybody should make it a stipulation in the marriage settlement that the said A. or B. shall not, nor will, during the hours of breakfast, tea, or supper, or for the space of sixty minutes after each and every of the said meals (the said sixty minutes to be calculated by the minute hand of the outside clock of the nearest parish church, provided that the said clock be going, and be in thorough repair, certificate of which, etc.)-read or peruse, or appear to be reading or perusing, any gazette, journal, magazine, etc."" In conclusion, the essayist disavows any expectation of imitating either the excellences or defects of the eighteenth-century writers whose forms and machinery he has adopted. "The playful wit and elegance of the lighter parts of the 'Tatler' and 'Spectator,' I have never dreamed of copying; neither will I wilfully imitate the manner of their more serious papers, a manner more polite than honest, in no danger of being ruffled by zeal, or made dogmatic by too strong a conviction or too cogent a reason."

The second paper is "On Enthusiasm." It justifies the general distaste for so-called "perfect characters," in literature, on the ground that that is no real or human perfection in which "every passion is under the calm and

apathetic sway of reason." Tranquillity is to be obtained "not by moderating all passions; it is to be sought only by delivering ourselves up to one. There is no garden virtue, which can lie on beds of roses in indolence and security; but there is a virtue to whose more enraptured gaze the wilderness becomes glad, and the desert blossoms as the rose."

The next paper, " On Martyrs," is a plea for toleration of free thought and speech, on the highest grounds. "All martyrs ought to be looked upon not as sufferers for this dogma or for that, not as supporters of this religion or the other, but as common sufferers in one and the same cause, that of liberty of opinion and of speech." The writer extols the historic martyrs of England in a strain in which he might be sure of his readers' sympathy. "They fought the good fight. They fought it often blindly, not knowing the true end of their labours, and little disposed, perhaps, if they had, to contemplate it with pleasure. Still it is to that phalanx of men who in any age, in any country, for any opinion, have braved the cruelty of bigots, that we owe the mental freedom we now enjoy. If there remains anything to perfect it, let us not sleep." When this was written, it appears, a Mr. Taylor had been imprisoned for attacking Christianity; and the journals which had condemned the imprisonment had generally done so on the ground that it gave undue conspicuousness and importance to an advocate of contemptible opinions. But the issue involved, says the essayist, is a far more serious matter; it touches the most important question that can be agitated, namely: Whether men may or may not reason openly against religion. "I would not," he declares, “stop the mouth of the direst ranter who ever dealt damnation to a world of which he knew nothing."

Another paper is "On Mystics," a name, we are told, coming into frequent use, generally in a vague and often in an opprobrious sense, but which is defined thus: "I

apprehend that he is strictly a mystic who arrives at any sentiment or belief by any other than those modes of reasoning common to all mankind. It is not necessary that this belief should be unintelligible, or peculiar to himself; it is enough that he has reached it by a method which the rest of the world cannot pursue. All inspired people, all who appeal to the influences of some spiritual agent upon their minds, all who discover in their own consciousness what others look in vain for in theirs, however good, however fortunate, however sincere, they may be, are essentially mystics. Be it remembered, however, that in attaching this name to them I do not charge them with any deception or any error. I imply only by it that with regard to that subject on which their consciousness has been otherwise informed, it is impossible to reason with them; as impossible as to argue upon external objects with one who should have more senses than five. Our paths cannot be the same, but they will not be very divergent; and wishing each other God speed' we part as did Faithful and Christian, of whom the readers of Bunyan will remember that the one took the upper road and the other the lower road, but both travelled toward the same point." And with this friendly farewell the author turns to eulogize a work of a widely different school, Shaftesbury's "Characteristics." He defends Shaftesbury against the censure he has received for applying the term "beauty" to virtue; and urges that the "good humour " on which he insists in religious discussion describes not a frivolous state of mind, but that composure and benignity which are the most favorable conditions for finding the truth.

An essay on "Sir Andrew Aguecheek" contains this passage: "To have conceived and portrayed such a character was the highest effect of humour. There was a time when this word seems to have been applied only to a lower species of wit, but lately humour has been allowed to