THOMAS CARLYLE.

Lyttelton Times, Volume III, Issue 110, 12 February 1853, Page 8

THOMAS CARLYLE.

[From • Hogg's Instructor.1]

Unprepared readers, coming for the first time upon the writings of Thomas Cavlyle, are apt enough to be confounded and repelled. It is like finding one's self alone, on a desolate road, with a big, suspicious-looking, bludgeon-armed fellow-traveller : now, you fancy he is about to strike you; now, to leave you, when you really need his help. At one moment, he is talking, with the most unequivocally sardonic scorn, of some institution, or function, or thought, you hare been taught to hallow ; at another, he is squelching the very brains out of some poor devilkin who had tried to insult the said institution, function, or thought, in some other fashion than his. Then, he will appeal to you, to all than is manly and godly in you, to give your assent to some quite old-world truth, which you never knew yourself doubting ; then, he tvUI seriously ask you, whether you suppose things are going on in and around you as tbey ought. Anon, he has broken away from your side, and is crooning-up into the azure depths a lament that would wring tears from the very stones, if they would try to understand it. In the twinkling of an eye, he is back upon you, looking at you earnestly, not without fierceness, and over your inmost soul rolling surge after surge of most terrific prophecy, with applications in every paragraph to yourself. A word, here and there, seems to come out of the very page and spit upon you—another word, a whole page of words, to flash light down into the deepest parts of the soul. Unknown authors, unheard-of editors, start up in every chapter, beckon to you, bow to you, talk sense or nonsense, as the dramatic necessity may demand, and then fall back into unseenness, "until they are appealed to again. Books are quoted, whose quotations no man can verify. Newspapers are referred to, from whose existence government derives no income. Extracts are given from philosophies, which no universities"out of the moon will profess. And the whole of this, quotation, speech, and prophecy, as far as style is concerned, is a perlect outbursting of Germanised sentences, superfluous capitals, street cries, newspaper slang, sanitary technicalities, and scraps of poetry (original,'not rhyme) j^nd history.

It is an unhappy result, when such an impression drives the unprepared reader away from Carlyle's books. A. second reading, still more a third, would convince him that the confusion and contradiction did not belong to the author, but to himself. It is the couched eye concluding that the people on the street are'walking on the window pane?, and thrusting their umbrella points inconveniently near. Patience! 0 reader: your eje will strengthen. Those rude Germanisms, when anatomically examined, will turn out to have a strong back-hone running all through them of hale idiomatic English; those mad-looking characters and quotations, those unrerifiable passages from Herr Sauerti"-, Teutelsdrochk, my young friend the Houndsi\ iC} Editor < Jefferson Brick the Yankee, M-Crowdy, Crabbe,and Company, to be simply different standing points from which to show you more completely the facts under consideration. The sour tobacco-smoke tint with which some of the descriptive passages are painted-in will, by and by, commend itself to you as a too literal transcript of the opinion-eiement of a world winch stones its prophet*, and ' kills them who are sent.' And under that savage-faced ungam .ness whiuh repelled you at the first, yon will find an intellect which has lio-ht in it ior all readers living in England in this "eneraticm; an intellect, Teutonic indeed, but colossal ike some ti.ll lighthouse on a stormvexed shore, and regulated, disciplined, reverentiy submissive to truth, to fact; English into its inmost core ; with deeper insight into the life and history of European men at present, and truer views of the social tendencies of our a-e than has been vouchsafed to any other countryman of ours for many years. By way of postscript to these introductory assertions, let this further statement be received —worthless enough fo.i disciples of Carlyle, not worthless enough for nibds who have hitherto been repelled from him—that there is not another English writer of our century, Walter Scott and Wordsworth included, who has obtained such wide and intrinsically well-deserved and hard-to-obtain recognition-and homage The Waverly excitement', wonderful as it was' stands related to it much as magic docs to miracle. The Wordsworth worship wanted its

breadth and human interest. Coleridge alone, and rather the traditional, ideal Coleridge, than the living;, actual one, has received anything1 like a fair approach to it; and not a little of what even he has received has been from a generation whom Carlyle helped up to obtain a glimpse of his precursor. In Carlyle's case, moreover, there was that which made the possibility of recognition, to say nothing of homage, peculiarly small. Wordsworth, with the highest aims in some directions, confessed to this, that he embodied his thoughts in rhyme 'to please' his reader. Walter Scott, without high aims of any sort, wrote novels to build Abbotsford. But Carlyle came upon his generation with unwelcome words, given sternly forth, ' calling upon men everywhere to repent,' and live somewhat as God intended them to live. A speaker of cutting words ! A writer of books not • made to sell!' Without any purpose of pleasing, still less of amusing his readers ! And yet the noblest of the land have said of him, * Here is a brother and peer.' for the circulating libraries, Bulwer, Dickens, and Thackeray shall answer; for the politicians, the late Charles Buller and John Bright; for the men of science, Hugh Miller and Samuel Brown ; for the teachers of Christianity, Edward Irving and Thomas Chalmers, that were ; Thomas Erskine for the Christian mystics ■, Professor Maurice and A. J. Scott for the philosophers ; for the scholars, the late Dr. Arnold ; for the ponts, Tennyson ; for the rising generation of literary men, Gilfillan and the author of ' Yeast;' and artists, and other well-doers, without number. With the views of these men, of any one of them, on any given subject, Carlyle would probably not thoroughly coincide. Certainly, he has enunciated opinions against which some of them have recorded their distinct protest. Nevertheless, by such men, endowed so variously, so differently employed, he —an open hater of eclecticism—has been heartily, lovingly honoured. Each of them, from his own throne, has recognised, if not a higher, a more central one, on which Carlyle sits; and each, in his turn, has stepped out of his own more definite sphere towards Carlyle's, expecting and receiving, sometimes guidance, always sympathy.

To know the views which a mind of such large sympathies has been enabled to take of the perennial subjects of human thought, would indeed be, as he himself has somewhere taught, like the acquiring of a new and higher sense. And the diligent seeker will find that he has revealed his views, on not a few of these subjects, with abundant frankness throughout his writings; and that, regarding many of them, answers to the most recondite inquiries will be found, in likely and unlikely places, latent, and waiting to be evolved. From the exploration of such heights and breadths of thought-land, however, we, in the present circumstances, altogether shrink. Our little venture shall be confined to a river sail, whereby we and our readers, dropping down between high banks to the sea, shall enjoy the visible as we may, and fancy how rich the unseen must be which stretches away on either side. In other words, we purpose to separate from the breadth of subjects, over which his mind has brooded, that mingled and tangled entity—part passive, part active; part spiritual, part physical—which we name indifferently ' our Age,' ' the Age we live in, 3 and ' the Present,' and endeavour to present some scantling of his views concerning it. There will be this advantage in doing so,"that our course will be along the central current into which his literary labours have flowed ; and if we miss much, we shall also be able to connect what we do see with almost all the works he has published. Of him, or of his works, we strongly feel, it is fast becoming an impertinence to speak apologetically. Yet we will confess that it enters into our purpose to carry our readers to such true and just standingpoints, as will enable us, with the smallest amount of controversy, to disabuse their minds of the misconstructions and misconceptions which are still floating about regarding his books and thoughts.

When Carlyle opened his ear to the voices of his generation, the Edinburgh reviewers were singing their paeans on die grave of ignorance. 'J'lie social activities were in a painfully selfeonsuious and self-righteous condition. The pln-ases that reached liira—' progress of the species,' ' march of intellect' 'decay of supersiiiion,' and the like—were to him symptomatic of most deadly disease.— (Characteristics.) When he turned from this noisy proclamation

of small virtues to the thoughts of God and human duty, which were exercising influence in men's hearts, lie missed from their number those which the old prophets and singers had given forth. An ignorant age was praising its own enlightenment. An irreverent age was defaming the reverence which had bequeathed, to it all the worth it possessed, Rust had eaten into the soul of man, and it was behymned as the burnish of gold. Mechanical philosophers had supplanted faith. The_ hangman's whip had taken the place of loyalty. For the law and the prophets we had the force of public opinion; for inspiration and normal growth, appliances of the proiit-and-loss lever. Benthamism was our bread from heaven. The natural virtue, the free life, of the believing past were gone. For religion, we had utilitarianism according to Paley ; for politics, utilitarianism according to Bentham ; for sun and rain, and seed-time and harvest, to the whole human race, utilitarianism. The very universe was utilitarianism—'one huge, dead, immeasurable steam-engine, rolling on in its dead indifference' to faith, genius, and the human soul.

' Men have lost their belief in the invisible, and believe, and hope, and work only in the visible ; or, to speak it in other words, this is not a believing age. Only the material, the immediately practical, not the divine and spiritual, is important to us. The infinite, absolute character of virtue has passed into a finite conditional one ; it is no longer a worship of the beautiful and the good, but a calculation of the profitable. Worship, indeed, in any sense, is not recognised amongst us, or is mechanically explained into fear of pain or hope of pleasure. Our true deity is mechanism. It has subdued external nature for us, and we think it will do all other things. We are giants in physical power; in a deepei* than metaphysical sense, we are Titans, that strive, by heaping mountain on mountain, to conquer heaven also.'—• (Signs of the Times.)

Carlyle was not blind to the pre-eminence of the age in mechanical appliances. The acquiring of better tools for the subjugation of matter is to him, not a worthless acquisition. Wonderful is the ' fire-demon panting1 across all oceans'—beautiful ' the awakening- of a Manchester, on a Monday morning, at half-past five by the clock; the rushing oft" of its thousand mills, like the boom of an Atlantic tide.' Whatever really distinguishes in worth the times in which we live—whatever, belonging to them, is fitted to help man forward on his appointed path—whatever, if they had organs of speech, they could truly publish as their own laudations, Carlyle has recognised and published as cheerfully as any. But all the smoke and steam which were flying could not hide from him that there was disease at work. Spinners' strikes, Manchester insurrections, Chartist movements were not to be mistaken. clt never smokes, but there is fire.' The laudation of the age can be left to posterity. Carlyle took up its pathology. And a large portion of his writings is simply a diagnosis of its deceased

organs.

With cool, scientific precision, at first, in his Critical Essays ; with deepening earnestness and warmth, more recently, in his 'Chartism' and ' Past and Present;'and last of all, with what, to man_y readers, has seemed mei'3 rabid fury, in his ' Latter-Day Pamphlets'—he has applied the knife. He has pointed to the growing separation between the employer and the employed—to the masses of idle wealth in one street, and the masses of idle workmen, typhushaunted, sorrow-stricken, in the next. The beasts of the field are cared for more than man. The people are ungoverned, and their governors preserving' game. The people are idle, and Australia is empty. The poor-law unions are crowded with able-bodied workmen, and warships that might transport them to fields of labour rotting idle in the docks. Religion is vanishing, and the poor untaught. Contradiction are petrified into laws. The young are assuming to rule the world. The honest live in cellars, and palaces are built for criminals. Our governing classes do . not aspire to govern, Statues are proposed to George Hudson.—The excerpt from the ' Pig-Philosophy'in 'Jesuitism' may be looked upon as a dissection of the Age's stomach, and the deepest cut of our pathologist.

To point out the symptoms of disease is a useful faculty, but not'the greatest. A greater is his who, from the disease, can elucidate the cause, and trace it from its first cenn down

through all stages'to its present. Even such a gift is Carl vies. His eye ranges back into the, far past, down into the roots of events. The centuries defile before him, each carrying its inevitable burden—its inheritance from the past, its gift to the future—its terrible seedsheet of weal or woe. All history becomes life in his hands. The remotest events rise into miraculous importance. Hengest and Ilorsa landing on our island, John Knox preaching, the sailing of the little May Rower from Delfthaven, are epical, full of grand results, little streamlets which have broadened their bosoms for a thousand and a thousand fleets. We can readily understand, therefore, how impossible it was for him to rest his pathology of the Age on the facts of the Present. The festering sores of tfte Present have their inflamed and irritated fibres in the Past. The Irish beggar, who darkens our doorway and undersells out labour, was not produced in a day. No more was our Bentham philosophy, our mammon worship, our selfish,-isolations. The century that towed us into existence ate sour grapes, and our teeth are set on edge. We are dodged and haunted by the eighteenth century; this is our misfortune and apology. It overlaps us, and suffocates us that we cannot breathe. A most unbelieving, insincere century ! ' Accordingly, what century since the end of the Roman world, which also was a time of scepticism, simulacra, and universal decadence, so abounds with quacks as that eighteenth ? Consider them, with their tumid, sentimental vapouring- about virtue, benevolence—the wretched quack-squa-dron, Cagliostro at the head of them! Few men were without quackery ; they had got to consider it a necessary ingredient and amalgam for truth. Chatham, our brave Chatham himself, comes down to the House, all wrapt and bandaged ; he 'has crawled out in great bodily suffering,' and so on— forgets says Walpole, that he is acting the sick man__in the fire of debate, snatches his arm from the sling and oratorically swings and brandishes it!'— {Hero Worship.)

It was, to a great extent, in the exercise of this pathological function that ' The French Revolution ; a History,' was written. In this revolution, or rather in the horrors of it, we have the gangrenous outcome and seal) crown of the unbelieving- century. Change was inevitable, but the fashion of it, not. The form it did take was the Nemesis of quackery. ' Europe lay pining-, obstructed, moribund, quack-ridden, hag-ridden.5 The feudal forms of society was long- effete and impossible. The Iring was no longer the canning, able man, or rex. The pope was no longer papa, father of the people. Three hundred years before, Luther had taught them this. Voltaire followed, and they believed Voltaire—believed that they themselves were lies, inutilities, shams. They inwardly laughed at the debris of respect which tradition had preserved for them. They mocked the simple people who paid them for work they did not do. And they did not govern, did not teach, did not aspire to govern or teach. In their lordly palaces, they led unclean lives. They bowed down to meanness and wioked sJ*)th. And hollow echoes from hollow hearts, and false mimetic actions, consumed the hours which God had given them to improve the world. And ' the anger of the Lord did kindle against them ... and their carcasses were torn in the midst of the streets.' In this light, let that marvellous history of Thomas Carlyle's be read. It is a terrible ' Bewake !' to the insincerity in England. It is the pourtrayal of a divine judgment overtaking continental quacks. Basiiles are overthrown, constitutions are set up, Vagabonds are floated, in the seething cauldron, to the top; Mhabeaus, Dantons, come and vanish; the narrator has an eye for all. Paris, France, the whole continent, is raised from the dead. The events are bodied forth to the mind of the reader with an eerie reality. The actor* move, speak, perish before jour eye. But, in the midst of all, in the very thick and storm of hurrying death, one fact facinates the historian's eye, gleams lurid over death and life, speaks to him from the prison, Abe guillotine, the convention—the fact that he is looking upon a retribution of the Lord. In any other light than this, the history is an intolerable panorama of brutal ferocities— ' the French revolution illustrated — tableaux, wonderful in execution, nothing in conception'— without light or hope for man—a mere history ©f a c constitution between a prison and a scaffold,' as Joseph Mazzini reproaches it with being. Let Mazzini read again. Revolts of

the people, we know, are sacred events to him. They represent ideas which one day will be clothed with laws and institutions. Was the Girondist constitution, then, the embodiment of ideas which shall so fare in coming times? Carlyle crushes it between his fingers, and shakes the dust of it to the ground. Of the earth earthy, at his tribunal, are it and its builders ; products, both of them, of a heartless, unbelieving age. ' The end of these things is death.' ' French philosophisms, Hume scepticisms, Diderot atheisms,' were, in their very nature^ barren. Nature hid placed them 'between a prison and a. scaffold ;' he only reported nature. Beautiful, no doubt, over that sea of blood rise the forms of Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland. But neither shall they redeem the constitution. They came in spite of the revolution ; they did not express it; they were not its products. ' Honour to great nature/ he exclaims. Gleams of living sunlight still reach us through the deepest gloom! In a word, the revolution, according to Carlyle, was not the assertion of some heaven-sent truth; but, principally, the outpouring of heaven sent wrath. And let it be remembered that he had to write for England. His countrymen had missed all sight of the reality, were bewildered, shocked, horrified. Burkes philippic was almost their sole theorem of the transaction. The victory at Waterloo had increased their blindness. Where the continental democrats heard the utterances of a new evangel, they heard only the shrieks of Tophet. ' A work of the devil'—that was there summing up. Carlyle taught us that God was in that' devil's work ;' that the revolution, whatever else it might be, was this first of all, the stern end of lies and quackery, the fiery indignation of the Lord overtaking his adversaries.

' Wherefore, let all men know what of depth and of height is still revealed in man ; and, with fear and wonder, with just sympathy and just antipathy, with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it, and appropriate it, and draw innumerable inferences from it. This inference, for example, among the first, that if the gods of this lower world will sit in their glittering thrones, indolent as Epicurus' god, with the living chaos of ignorance and hunger weltering uncared for at their feet, and smooth parasites, preaching ' peace, peace, when there is no peace,' then the dark chaos, it would seem, will rise, has risen, and, 0 heavens ! has it not tanned their skin into breeches for itself? That there be no second sanscullottism in our earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was ; and let rich and poor of us* go and do othenoise.' — (French Revolution).

Into the midst of such phenomina, then, have we of this age been sent! On the continent, revolution—at home, chartism, pauperism, and mammon-worship—the wrath of God overtaking some, others hasting into its devouring flame! So has Carlyle taught. ' The outcome of morbid rancour!'cries one, 'The philosophy of dissatisfaction!' echoes another. And his books are closed. Of this way of treating an author, there are many things to be said. We restrict ourselves to these two. The surgeon, who shuts himself up with the plaguesmitten corpse, to unfold, for his brethren, the hidden workings of the disease, would not, we suppose, be accused of morbid rancour or the philosophy of dissatisfaction. Only loving hearts, who have entered into the secret that life is a 'dying daily,' yoke themselves to such tasks. The facts they set forth are no unreal burden to their own spirits. The c bitter passages' are also bitter to write. And a very small amount of love in the reader of Carlyle's works; will enable him to detect that deeper and more vital far than the bitterness, is the unselfish, sorrow it aims to express. But, besides this, there is hope in Carlyle as well as sorrow. He does not merely write laments for the age. Our Jeremiah-Tacitus is also a Savonarola. Whatever we may think of his teaching, we ought to see that he utters it in the strong assurance of its being glad-tidings. Let any candid soul take up, for example, the three works in which he comes forward more expressly in the character of a social reformer, ' Chartism,'' Past and Present,' and ' The Lat-ter-day Pamphlets,' and consciously set himself to answer ibis question—what is this man aiming at ? He will find that there is more clearness respecting our social diih'culties, more assurance that deliverance is possible, and a franker, plainer, forth-telling of the kind of work we need to do, down even to practical details as to the mo*le of doing it, than in any

other political writer or teacher of the age extant.

It would be easy to make good ouv statements by quotation from any of these three works; but, at present, we shall merely extract from these and his other writings a faint outline of what we shall name his Gospel to the Age. It is summed up in three words—Growth, Heroworship, Work.

Of these, Growth and Hero-"Worship represent the laws of the universe, the facts which God takes care of in human history. The reference to them is consequently Carlyle's 'call to believe.' The third indicates its own place in his theory of man's life. It is the synonym for all healthy activity of soul and body. Man's chief end is work. The following is our outline of the Gospel of Carlyle :—

Growth.—There is good as -well as evil in the decay and down-rushing1 of our times. The eighteenth century, with its scepticism, was intrinsically a rending assunder of the false, a preparation for the true. So was the French Revolution ;so is Chartism. The old perishes —must perish. Institutions do not live for ever. Tilings sacred, things profane, come to waste. The thoughts of xneu alter like the altering clouds. All that proceed from these thoughts likewise change. The seed dies. The rind bursts. Be not dismayed. Decay and down-rushing are but external facts. The great world-secret is Growth. This throbs at the heart, this pulsates at the exti'exnities. All things grow, and tend to higher growth— thoughts, actions, societies, the life of man. What does not grow is dead. * Being is ever a birth into higher being.' Th.c higher replaces the lower by absorbing it. The lower form is fated to disappear in a higher; this is necessity ;to yield to this is duty. When the lower has to pass into the higher, through a whirlwind of fire, as in the French Revolution, there has been a previous resistance of necessity; Fire whirlwinds need not be. Nature inclines to work out her changes softly, tenderly, invisibly. Only when her open secret is scorned, and the old resolves to continue, does she dry it up, and make stubble of it, and send fire to consume it. The full development of this word in Carlyle's message will be found in ' Sartor Resartus.' .In this quaint but royal hook, under the garb of ' Clothes Philosophy,' he manifoldly sets forth the fact. Diogenes Teufelsdrochk, the hero, wakes out of childhood into love, doubt, faith —discovers that life to him is a pulling off of the old that the new may be put on. The still sleep of childhood, the soft environment of boyhood, old Andreas himself, his nursery father, descend into the abysses of the death-kingdom. Through school experiences, first love, temptation in the wilderness, he waxes into manhood. Yesterday he was a believer; to-day a doubter; to-morrow his doubt is ended. The 'everlasting no' has given place to the ' everlasting yea.' Looking abroad upon Society, all things appear to him in similar flow and movement. Society, religion, art, commerce, have their growth periods, are always growing, consciously or unconsciously, through fiery spasms or calm mutation, as well as he. ' Destruction and creation, death and birth, go on together.' The existing forms of thirsrs are only the time vestures of the life within. Words, institutions, philosophies, poems, by which it embodies itself for the use of man, ' wax old as doth a garment,' are garments to be put off when their day is ended. Our own age is one in which the unseen visibly puts off its old vestures. Once more have faith. The vesture is not the reality! One there is who never changes. The change is in us, and we put off our childish things. Why should we fret ? The law of our life is growth.

Hero-worship.—The existence of such worship, its Necessity, the provision for it, is the supplement of the law of growth. Let ub clear our minds of fragment-notions of ibis second word. Sincerity, earnestness, energy, do not make heroes. Heroes have all these ; but these are not the vital facts of the heroic. The hero lives next door to fact; this is his inmost characterestic. He is nearer the source of life and fact than other men. Sometimes in the depth, sometimes in the height; a brother of Morms like Mirabeau and Napoleon, a denizen of the stars like Shakspere and Goethe; his ear is clo.ser to the present word of the jVXaker than any other. God speaks through him to the, generation. By speech or act he interprets what he has heard. That these divine words do not float away unheard ; that men are raised up to receive them and proclaim them ; that nil

other men, less gifted, must and do obey the sent hero—this is Carlyle's second article of faith mid-com fort The separate exposition of this will be found in the lectures on ' Heroes and Hero-worship.' He appeals to the ages which have preceded our own in Europe. Each of them had its hero, and worshiped him. The inner life of the man Odin became the objective faith of our Scandinavian ancestors; to rebuke and purify a world sinking back into paganism, Mahomet was sent; the Christian church waited Ion? for its poet, but at last came Dante; Shakshere caught the grand old day of chivalry, when it was falling into oblivion, and preserved its light for the race ; when the papal church had become a nuisance, Luther was born ; when Scotland was to be raised out of barrenness, Knox was commissioned to preach; to a devout England, rolling hither and thither, seeking rest and finding none, a clear-eyed, strong-handed, Cromwell was appointed. Even the eighteenth century had heroic men; Johnson, Eousseau, Burns were such. And democracy itself, the ostensible denial of all worship, found its soldier in Bonaparte, and worshipped him. No age went down to the grave for want of heroes. Each crisis, each birth-throe, each period of decay, finds, as soldier, preacher, or man of letters, the interpreter and guide prepared. European history, all history, is this at bottom, the history of heroes. What they were, the world became. What they did, the world imitated. The battles and institutions, which bulk out so largely in hooks of history, had their germs first of all in the hearts and thoughts of these men. To see how all this is glad tidings is not difficult. Let any man recall the fears for society which Lave swept through his own mind. Confining ourselves to European society, two movements are visible enough within the last sixty 3'ears; in the one, thrones and loyalties, and churches and opinions, like some vast navy, are dragged into the abyss in the grasp of a sinking wave; in the other, through the wreck and heaped destruction, the living ware is roaring upwards, struggling to free itself from the wreck. "What serious man has not put these questions to himself—What if the down-rushing should continue? If the returning wave be driven back? Carlyle comes to the vexed spirit.with this comfort, that the hour and the man are sent together. On the lowest platform of the deep are stationed those who shall give to.the descending wave an upward impulse: where the topmost crest shall foam in sunlight, an unseen spirit is waiting, ready to sing the psalm of victory. Heroes never fail. God sees to that. In the abyss and in the height he plants them ever. And men must worship, them. The sympathies displayed by Caijlyleun his 'History «f the French Revolution,'jb.ave here their explanation and defence. Mirabeau and Danton, brutal, foul-livers though they were, in this one thing transcended their fellows—they knew what was to be dune, and aimed at doiug it. Be sure that Carlyle, in his admiration of such, does not forget that they were heroes of the pit. Far rather would he that their heroism had not been needed ; that the virtuous lives of a generation of heroes had averted the form of the revolution, and given nature freedom to work her changes softly, imperceptibly, without such help. But that not taking place, in the skirts of the Lord's wrath he discerns this token of mercy, that the people are not left to chaos wholly, but have here and there, amongst them aiid of them, this and the other begrimed, misshapen, but kin»iy spirit.

(To be continued-)