ledge? What wants there to such a towardly and pregnant soil, but wise and faithful laborers, to make a knowing people, a nation of prophets, of sages, and of worthies? We reckon more than five months yet to harvest; there need not be five weeks, had we but eyes to lift up; the fields are white already."*

It is true, the waves of darkness rolled back, and seemed, to a superficial eye, to cover the land. But liberty, after all, liberty of thought, is the very genius of our ancestors. It flows in the blood of English and Americans. As Webster says, it is imbedded in our soil; and it is a sober liberty, because it has always walked hand in hand with religion. After many trepidations, and ebbings and flowings of the public tide of oppression and independence, we may consider liberty as established in the reign of King William.

Now I say there never was a time when such an interesting conflict was exhibited. The history of most ancient nations is the history of oppression. Mind is sunk—there is nothing like principle-the internal nature of man is subjected to outward force. Even the liberty of Greece and Rome, so often vaunted, was a very partial and defective liberty. It was combined with no high moral principle; it was the ambition of a selected corps against one, while, at the same time, both parties should combine to crush the many. When Christianity woke the world from the slumbers of paganism, it seemed for a while as if great scenes were to be exhibited, and great principles were to be discussed; and, true enough, the Christian religion did for a while struggle with the torporific tendency of the age; it kept alive whatever was great and good in the character of the times. But Christianity, instead of inspiring the world, sunk under its corruptions. It burst on mankind healthful and fresh, like a mountain stream, rolling down the rock, scattering coolness and freshness in its path; but, as that same stream, however fresh and pure at its origin, may roll into the level plain, and, amidst its saline and bituminous sands, become calm, polluted and sluggish, so did Christianity linger and languish in our world, until the days of Luther. Then she started from her sleep; and England has been the spot of her most genuine operations. RELIGION and LIBERTY! these are the greatest names that ever arrested the attention of man

* Areopagitica.

kind; and such are the themes of our history, since the days of Henry the VIII. Say, then, was there ever a subject more worthy of an eloquent pen-the organ of a just and glowing heart!

All this requires a historian to relate it, who should be, whatever David Hume was not. Sometimes I have felt a transient wish that Milton had completed his design, and given us a full body of English history. He had all the glow of soul, all the high conception of the sublime and beautiful in morals, which was necessary. But Milton was born for a poet, and not for a historian. His prose is poetry; and his diction is too ponderous and encumbered for common readers. He might have given a good narrative for those who would have studied it out; but that number would have been small. Besides, Milton, though having a strong intuitive insight into truth, yet was no reasoner; his deductions are perfect, but his premises are often laid in the imagination. He was not the man to balance probabilities, to sum up the argument, and to lead the reader's mind through a narrow path, to retiring truth. The same subject was attempted by Burke. His vast capacity and his unbounded eloquence would no doubt have left us an English history of great value. No man knew, better than he, how to seize hold of a leading fact, or principle, which should shed light on all the complex entanglements of annexed events. Thus, in his speech on American affairs, he has thrown out a thought, which goes farther to explain why Britain could not conquer America, than all the narratives and speculations which may be found in the professed historians. He just asks the ministry to state to themselves, what it would be to conquer America? Taking a town, was not conquering America; marching through the country, was not; surveying it, was not; and as for occupying a space of so many millions of square miles, it was out of the question. There was not one vital spot, at which they could strike, and say that the provincials would be subdued. Now this was the true secret, notwithstanding all the flattering unctions addressed to our vanity, on the fourth of July, about our invincible arms-this is the true secret why we were not conquered. The wide surface of our country, and the intelligent yeomanry spread over it, was, under God, our salvation. No man, therefore, had more of some of the most splendid requisites of a historian, than the bright

minded Edmund Burke. But, after all, this orator hardly answers to one's conception of a historian. His diction is too splendid, and his mind roves too far after the gaudy images of his own fertile conception, to pursue the beaten path of narrative. It is dangerous to say what a great man can do, or to attempt to limit his power; but it is not, perhaps, superfluous superstition, to express a fear that Burke's history, like Homer's Fame, would not even have walked the ground, without sometimes hiding its head in the clouds.

But never was there a mind, of equal power, less fitted for the task, than that of David Hume. I can imagine Sir Isaac Newton writing novels, in the style of Richardson; I can imagine Thomas Moore writing pious hymns, as he did, though it must be confessed he makes sad work of it; I can imagine Mr. Locke translating the epigrams of Martial; I can almost imagine Milton, (horresco referens,) writing a comedy, in the style of Congreve-I say I can imagine all these things, more easily than I could imagine the supersensuous and high-principled history of England, with all its spiritual lights and shades, falling into the grasp of such an animalized being as David Hume-if it had not actually taken place. What is it? It is the serpent of seduction, crawling beneath the flowers of paradise.

In the first place, his unfitness for the task was seated in the very tissue of his soul. He had no perception of the sublime and beautiful in morals. He could follow the patriot to his agony of glory, and the martyr to his stake, without one touch of sympathy with the generosity of the one, or the devotion of the other. His conception, as well as his heart, seems to have been defective. We often find that men of very imperfect lives, and gross in their pleasures, still preserve a bright apprehension of moral beauty. Thomson, the poet, if his biographers have not been unjust to his memory, was on the whole a luxurious and sensual man, loving a good supper better than the morning landscape, which he so finely describes. However low his pleasures might have been, (and I am afraid they were much lower than we should be willing to remember, while reading the Seasons,) he still preserved in his mind the bright ideal of moral beauty. There was a discord and divorce between his fancy and his heart. But it was not so with Hume. There was a dreadful harmony between them. No glowing forms of spiritual life flitted before his mind; no high con

ceptions of man's final destiny and social improvement visited his waking or sleeping dreams. He was the most impassive being that ever crawled among the reptiles of lower life. It was said by Rosseau, that when a man begins to reason, he ceases to feel; and I believe it is strictly true, that when a man begins to reason sophistically, he loses his heart in his sophistry. Hume never seems to sympathize with the selfsacrifices which the patriot makes; he sees men pleading, suffering, dying, in the cause of the best interests of mankind, and never catches one spark of the flame. He puts down, with a caustic satire, some of the most generous hearts that ever beat and bled for the elevation or felicity of the human race. He loves repose; he wants all things to continue as they were; he is always ready to make a treaty with bigots and tyrants, on the terms of uti possidetis. Now such a man has abilities, and is fit for something. Let him go and write his metaphysical essays; let him prove to his own satisfaction, if he can, that it is doubtful whether bread will nourish, or the next morsel of meat, however well killed and cooked, may not prove rank poison; let him raise his skeptical doubts, until he doubts his own being; and give a skeptical solution of these doubts, until he begins to think he does exist all this is legitimate quarry for such a mind-but oh, let him not come within the awful limits of English history! It is consecrated ground. There are suns which he never saw, and flowers which he cannot smell. He can scarce write a line, without satirizing the subject, and throwing a deeper satire on his own heart.

In the second place, Hume was, by nature and disposition, a sophist-a race of men who have always existed, but the last men who ought to deal in facts. The sophists are a sort of men, who arose in Greece, and are often alluded to by the best writers of antiquity. A sophist is not a man who, misled by subtleties and the darkness of his own mind, falls into error because he honestly mistakes it for truth. Such a man is the dupe of sophistry. But he is one, who considers words as counters, to prove any sum which he may wish to pass current. He is one, who has no object but to excite admiration by showing his ingenuity. He purposely chooses the wrong side, and defends it with all the plausibility in his power. A paradox is his delight; he covets and purloins the robes of truth, only to polish them, and fit them, with the nicest adjustment, to the wen-spotted and distorted

limbs of delusion. An idea of the sophist may be obtained from the speeches of Hippias, in the 5th book of the Memorabilia of Xenophon, 4 c. When Hippias came to Athens, Socrates was, as usual, discoursing on moral subjects; and was lamenting that, while every man knew where to send his son to learn to make a shield, or tame a horse, yet it was so very hard to know where to go to learn righteousness. O, said Hippias, laughing and jeering at him, you are sawing on the same old string; I think I have heard all this before. Yes, said Socrates, and what is worse, O Hippias, when my subject is the same, I always treat it in the same manner, that is, I always use the same arguments to accomplish the same conviction. But you, Hippias, are an original genius. You, I suppose, never support the same truth by the same arguments.* No, by no means, replied Hippias, I always try to say something new. Πειρῶμαι καινόν τι λέγειν ἀεί, Well, now, said Socrates, let us take a subject most level to our faculties. Suppose, now, a painter were to ask you how big I am, and what is my color and shape. Would you answer one thing at one time, and another at another? Or, suppose an arithmetician were to ask you how much twice five is. Would you say to-day it is ten, and to-morrow fifteen? O, said Hippias, on these subjects, to be sure, I always say the same thing. But when I come to the essence of morals, I think I can show you that it is right to vary. Socrates goes on to show him, by irresistible induction, that here, too, truth is immutable. He appeals to the laws of all nations, and especially to the unwritten laws of eternal justice, I quote this, to show, from the mouth of Hippias, the very spirit of a sophist—xawov tı—that is his sole object. He is a kind of intellectual rope-dancer, whose only aim is to astonish mankind at the feats he can perform.

τι

Now, this propensity was engraved in the very genius of Hume. It was an impulse, which, though sometimes he tries to suppress it, is always rising to overpower his resolution, and fill the channel of his favorite passion. Now sophistry, on some subjects, is harmless and amusing. It is pleasant to trace the vagaries of the human mind, and to see to what startling conclusions our deductions may lead us, I,

* It will be seen by the Greek scholar, who chooses to consult the origi nal, that my translation is intentionally free.