for refutation, as no one takes the trouble to deny that it is the sun which gives us light at noon. On the other hand, it is to be hoped that no reader of these light pages will suspect an intention of wishing in the remotest manner to insinuate any doubt respecting the philosophic exactness of those formulas which we are all bound to accept and venerate, and which contradict nothing that we advocate, though they are sometimes interpreted as if they did. But the world is wide enough to hold all realities; and if we should seem to allege any thing at variance with one order of truths, the reader will please to remark that this will arise simply from the imperfection of human language. "It is the fault of our rhetoric," as some one says, "that we cannot strongly state one fact without seeming to belie some other." In all that we have to hear, as in all that we have heard, there are no pretensions to support any singular views in the way practised by philosophic writers; we merely please ourselves in listening to a few suggestions expressed in the most popular way, and only adapted to the place and persons from which the book itself derives its title. So much then for that.

66

Aristotle says that persons advanced in life are apt to view things in an unfavourable light, and to judge of every thing on the worst side. Idiots do the same. 66 'They are mischievous; and the most superficial persons," as Hazlitt says, "are the most disposed to find fault because they understand the fewest things." But, what is worse, persons of great intellectual culture are apt to fall into the same unhappy ways. "In Iago and Mephistophiles," as an eminent writer says, we find a kind of wit which is keen, nimble, quick-sighted, feelingless, undermining all virtue and all beauty with suspicions and fiendish mockeries. Both would deny that virtue existed among men. Both are malignant intelligences-infinitely ingenious in evil, infinitely merciless in purpose; and wherever their scorching sarcasm falls, it blights and blackens all the humanities of life." From our point of view it seems wonderful how even the grave and learned sometimes indulge in visions of this kind, which appear to common understandings gratuitous, exaggerated, and absurd. Fichte's view of human society as it exists is sombre enough to suit Apemantus or any one else of his college. From the lawless hordes of savages devouring their captives, to the good men of

civilized ages opposing each other, he sees nothing but sins, and vices, and false existences; and all good intentions appear to him as leaving behind them no traces." Having in his mind's eye what men he thinks might be, he says, "The true religious man's governing affection is a holy indignation at their actual existence, so unworthy and void of honour." He seems to say with Apemantus, "I wonder men dare trust themselves with men." 66 Knaves-why dost thou call them knaves?" asks Timon. "Thou knowest them not. They are Athenians?" replies the misanthrope interrogatively, that is, his countrymen ; then," he concludes, "I repent not." Metaphysicians, and others too, without being philosophers, and professed haters of their species, are not, however, the only persons who seem to relish such views of humanity; there are men of more imposing pretensions who talk as if they thought that "one spirit of the first-born Cain reigned in all bosoms." They say like Asper, in Every Man out of his Humour,

Who is so patient of this impious world

That he can check his spirit or reign his tongue?

Or who hath such a dead, unfeeling sense

That heaven's horrid thunders cannot wake?

To see the earth crack'd with the weight of sin,

Hell gaping under us, and o'er our heads

Black, ravenous ruin with her sail-stretched wings,
Ready to sink us down and cover us?

Who can behold such prodigies as these

And have his lips seal'd up?"

All this sounds very strangely at the Lover's Seat, where, according to the old adage, “Le bien cherche le bien;" and where it is usual to consider celestial joys in connexion with humanity at large, and not with an infinitesimal minority of mortals. But the truth is, the persons who hold such views are not found under its boughs, and when their lips move elsewhere it is often when they are their own audience. "Who does this ass speak to?" some one demands in an old play, adding, "surely to himself; and 'tis impossible he should ever be wise that has always such a foolish auditory." Common mortals like the two seated here can hardly be brought to view things like Malcontent, where he says, “Think this—this earth is only the

grave and Golgotha wherein all things that live must rot: 'tis but the draught wherein the heavenly bodies discharge their corruption, the very muck hill on which the sublunary orbs cast their excrements. Man is the slime of this pit, and princes are the governors of these men." If the echo of such horrid words

ever reaches this leafy bower, there is a soft sweet voice that will exclaim with Elissa, in Festus,

"Speak not so bitterly of human kind.

Oh! unsay

What thou hast said of man; nor deem me wrong.

And, oh! humanity is the fairest flower

Blooming in earthly breast; so sweet and pure

That it might freshen even the fadeless wreaths

Twined round the golden harps of those in heaven."

But enough of these paradoxes, which are almost sufficient to disgust us, though apt to veneration, as we must be while breathing the atmosphere of our bower, with all gravity. We know that there is imperfection and weakness in our nature; that man, alas! is sometimes an untamed creature, and dares break through any fence of goodness: but that vice is predominant and virtue the exception, is a theory in contradiction with our own personal experience and with public facts. Humanity, in this place at least, may turn from its wisest accusers with hopes of hearing a different sentence; and may say, in the language of our old poet,

Of every nature are in common to you.
I have trespassed, and I have been faulty;
Let not too rude a censure doom me guilty,
Or judge my error wilful without pardon."

Names have an influence on those who use them affecting their judgment of the things to which they are applied. If you call men bad, they will appear so; if you call them good, they will appear so. Besides, as a great poet says, alluding to common speech,

"Men might be better if we better deemed

Of them. The worst way to improve the world
Is to condemn it. Men may overget
Delusion-not despair."

And another says, "When we take people merely as they are, we make them worse; when we treat them as if they were what they should be, we improve them as far as they can be imimproved." That is, however, a point for others to consider.

It is a strange mania, methinks, to wish to follow in the train of him who is called the accuser of mankind par excellence, and whose overthrow was heard proclaimed in heaven, where he was styled "accusator fratrum nostrorum, qui accusabat illos ante conspectum Dei nostri die ac nocte." Is it not a strange way of being religious to teach us to hate what we are told God loved, and so loved as to sacrifice for it his Son?

"Believe it, 'tis the mass of men he loves *."

Is it not a perverse wisdom that teaches us to judge and condemn what the Judge of all did not send his Son to judge and condemn, and that requires us to believe lost what He came professedly to save t? Such views have not even the merit of a difference from those of many pagans. Aristotle speaks of persons who esteem no one to be good, and who will think every one deserving of evil, being in consequence rendered by such an opinion inaccessible to pity. It is hard to read such conclusions in the book of nature, though they fall in with the views of the indignant prophet who would have destroyed the city which the Almighty looked on with tenderness. "Towards all mankind," says a great writer, "we see a rich and free love flowing from the common Parent; and, touched by this love, we are the friends of all, compassionating the most guilty."

But what are the facts to which we appeal in support of our proposition that virtue is a common thing? As we have already observed, we call to witness the very existence of society; in which, as a religious author says, "we see reign an almost infinite variety of positions, circumstances, virtues, and merits, all furnishing a mutual and reciprocal assistance towards the general good of the whole, a univeral tendency to the same end, which is happiness, in an immense diversity of roads leading to it." We appeal to the domestic relations, to the family, to the public order, to the maintenance of rights, to the

Lowell.
† John iii.
Roussel, Dieu contemplé dans ses Œuvres.

daily and hourly discharge of painful duties, to the frequent acts of heroism in defence of strangers, to friendship, love, disinterested acts, generosity, to the constant exercise of unobtrusive graces, to the predominance of a desire to please, to serve, to oblige, to repay. Is all this to pass for nothing because it does not clothe itself in the garb of something extraordinary and transcendental? What right have men to pretend to stigmatize all our ordinary actions with I know not what mystical names of obloquy when we find that, all simple and human as they may appear, they are registered in heaven and accepted by its voice? The publicans came to John to be baptized, and said to him, "Master, what shall we do?" But he said to them, “Do nothing more than that which is appointed you”—“nihil amplius, quam quod constitutum est vobis faciatis." And the soldiers asked him, saying, " And what shall we do?" And he said to them, "Do violence to no man; neither calumniate any man; and be content with your pay *." What absurdity to wish to see clearer and farther than Him vested with omniscience, who did not pray that his disciples should be taken from the world, but only that they should be preserved from evil +! What impiety to be always calling men common and unclean, when God showed to his chief Apostle that he should call no man common or unclean! What an arbitrary assumption to maintain that men must be practically and thoroughly evil because they are declared to spring from a contaminated source by a sacred announcement, which with the same breath proclaims that they are, in a manner equally mysterious and in a way of exact proportion, delivered from its effects; so that if the fault of one passed unconsciously to all, the justice of another has come, and from the whole analogy of nature we may believe often unconsciously too, to all men—"in omnes homines § !"

But perhaps it does not become us in this bower to adduce such testimony, which belongs to a higher sphere and demands a graver auditory. It is enough for us to observe what is around us, and, with all due reserve and respect for what is to be respected, to look at facts only and to judge of them for ourselves.