-quite as little as any one can erect a church in Gothic style which will compare with the ecclesiastical structures of the middle ages—or quite as little as any one can create a statue which shall equal the sculpture of antiquity."

We do not repine at this downfall of the speculative chairs of the German universities. The Devil sat in them with supremacy, and long enough. But we regret the manner of their fall, and the indication which it presents. We regret that it results from the materialistic tendency which we have affirmed-" the toil for the passing moment, which has well nigh destroyed all inclination for general and comprehensive studies," and which, in our own country even, is threatening collegiate education with modifications that must stultify it down from all classic elevation and vigor to practical arts of moneygetting an education not for the development of intellect and character, but of practical dexterity.

While the Germans have thus supposed that the "catastrophe" of all speculative philosophy had come, the very tendency of the times, which was destroying their old schools, itself took, in France, a philosophic form, and we have there the materialism of the day scientifically expressed in Comte's Positive Philosophy. whole reptile brood, begotten in the muddy bog of German thought, has been swallowed down by the new monster

The

Allusion has already been made to this philosophic form of modern infidelity, and we have hardly space here to enter fully into an exposition of it. We may remark, however, that Comte sees, in the history of the human mind, three stages of development, three philosophical epochs: the first is Theological-the earliest form of thought, when men are simple and credulous, and refer all phenomena to divine agency; the second is Metaphysicalwhen the spirit of inquiry finds out "intermediate links of causation," and the limitless range of conjecture and hypothesis is entered; the third is the Positive stage, in which nothing is admissible but what is capable of positive appreciation and has direct relation to man. Comte throws away all theology, all metaphysics, considered as sciences. He denies a personal God; he "repudiates all religious belief, and substiVOL. I, No. 3.—P*

tutes the adoration of a typical humanity for all forms of divine worship." Material nature, and its relations or laws, with the social and political relations of men placed amidst and parts of that nature, he considers the only appropriate subjects of philosophic inquiry. It will be perceived at once how congenial with the material and infidel predilections of the times is this philosophy. It is their legitimate product, and indicates how profound and pervading is their power.

The system is not only thus in strict analogy with the times, but it is sustained by signal ability on the part of its founder. His opponents, as well as his adherents, pronounce Comte the great man of the learned world: some hesitate not to rank him with Bacon, and to ascribe to him a "nova instauratio." The best critique he has found in this country,* pronounces him next to Bacon, among modern philosophers, and remarks that "whatever may be thought of him in comparison with the founder of modern science-and he himself pretends to no equality—he is certainly entitled to rank with, if not above, Hobbes, Descartes, and Leibnitz-perhaps we might add Kant. We admit him to be second only to Bacon and Aristotle among the mighty intellects of all time: had he as rigidly incorporated religious faith into his system, as he has strictly excluded it; had he shown its indissoluble connexion and perfect harmony with all knowledge, scientific or other, instead of endeavoring to show, which he has not succeeded in doing, its absolute antagonism to science, we should then have hailed in him one greater than Bacon, for he would have infallibly furnished the solution required for the intellectual and social difficulties of the times." Sir David Brewster, Mill, Whewell, and other competent judges, acknowledge his vast erudition and commanding powers.

We have thus traced the peculiar form of the irreligion of these times-" the last word of infidelity," as a critic already quoted has called it,-showing its origin, its relations to the literature and the popular mind of the day, and the formidable scientific character which it has assumed.

Before dismissing the subject, two characteristics of this infectious unbelief should be noticed-as it owes to them much of its insidious influence.

Methodist Quarterly Review, January, 1852.

of the famous tribune, with whom he had become acquainted while she was visiting some friends in Edinburgh. In the autumn of 1815 the restoration of peace gave him an opportunity of gratifying his old desire to visit the Continent. In 1820, his literary honors were crowned by his election to the Lord Rectorship of Glasgow College. In June, 1829, his professional eminence was recognized in his appointment as Dean of the Faculty of Edinburgh; and he therefore resigned the editorship of the "Review," as incompatible with that position. On the long-deferred accession of the Whigs to power, he was made Lord-Advocate, and sat in Parliament successively for the Forfarshire burghs, Malton, and Edinburgh; the first and second, though Malton was a nomination borough, costing $50,000. In 1834, he was raised to the Scottish bench. On the 26th of January, 1850, in his seventy-seventh year, he died.

These few briefly-recorded incidents are the bones of a public and private life intensely interesting. Lord Cockburn has not written as a literary artist; but he has not failed—he could not well fail-to produce the narrative of an animating career and the portraiture of a beautiful character. We trace through his pages the development of the tiny, timid child, trembling at the footstep of the unknown, dreaded master, and weeping at the loss of a first place in his class—the "little black creature" haranguing his college fellows against the election of Adam Smith to the Lord Rectorship-the homesick youth, distraught with sorrow at the solitude of Oxford, but panting with the thirst of fame, and despairing of reaching it but by poems so mediocre that his friendly editor suppresses their remains the briefless advocate, consumed with impatience to earn his bread, projecting books that never saw the light, suing in vain for employment to London editors and bibliopoles, turning his aching eyes to India for means of livelihood, yet venturing to marry on a hundred a year, and exhausting his patrimony in the furniture of a top story-refused an appointment that would have worn out his days in an obscure clerkship, having offended his only patron by political heresy, conspiring with half a dozen aspirants, mostly poor as himself, to start a quarterly magazine-lifted, in a few months, to a dazzling elevation of in

tellectual renown and to the enjoyment of comparative affluence-abased to the dust, a year or two later, by the blows that shivered his household gods, more cherished than the idols of intellect or ambitionslowly finding consolation in the exercise of mental energies, and the renewal of heart ties-rejoicing in the attainment, successively, of the highest honors of the literary and forensic vocations, the just rewards of political service, and the constant delights of a charming home and godlike friendships-sinking quietly into the vale of years, and dying at an age beyond threescore and ten, in the midst of as much of happiness as earth could afford. It is only on one or two points of this picture that we can dwell.

Of the establishment and early history of the "Edinburgh Review," we had hoped to have learned even more than Lord Cockburn tells us, or, rather, permits Jeffrey to tell. Sydney Smith's account of the affair is well known. "One day we happened to meet in the eighth or ninth story or flat, in Buccleuch-place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey. I proposed that we should set up a Review. This was acceded to with acclamation. I was appointed editor, and remained long enough in Edinburgh to edit the first number of the Edinburgh Review.'"* This version, however, is more dramatic than accurate. Smith was confessedly the first to "propose that we should set up a Review;" but the proposition was one to be anxiously debated in a committee of ways and means, rather than to be voted by acclamation. Constable, "though the most spirited of publishers," seems to have been reluctant to embark in an enterprise of which he must bear the pecuniary risk. When determined on and announced, the appearance of the first number was delayed three months. The confederates were themselves timid, and the laughing Sydney by far the most so, "making us hold our dark divans at Willison's office, to which he insisted on our repairing singly, and by back approaches or by different lanes." Smith was not the formally appointed editor of even the first number. The writers met, " as many as could be got to attend," at the printing-office, corrected their proofs, and criticised each other's articles. The extraordinary success of

Preface to Sydney Smith's collected Works.

the "Review" put an end to this unmethodical and profitless management. After the first three numbers, Constable was told, in a letter from Smith, who had gone South, that he should give an editor £50 for each number, and allow the writers ten guineas a sheet. That the bookseller readily agreed, is the best evidence that can be given to this generation of the sensation which these young unknown penmen had effected. Jeffrey was at once appointed editor, at which Horner, then at the Chancery-bar, records that he is glad, and "that few know the genius of that little man." This same Horner, in common with his fellow-contributors, was already a cause of harass to his old comate and chief. For contributions to the third, fourth, and subsequent numbers, we find the anxious editor dunning and entreating him. An article on Malthus, the Chancery barrister had had two years under hand. At length, Jeffrey writes :— "The cry is still for copy. We must publish, it seems, by the 15th of July, to attain the object for which we went back to the 18th; and they wish, if possible, to set the press agoing in the course of ten days from this time. Now, my most trusted and perfidious Horner, I earnestly conjure you to think how necessary it is for you to set instantly about Malthus. Shut yourself up within your double doors; commit the doctor for one eight days to his destiny; and cease to perplex yourself with 'what the Dutch intend, and what the French; let the blue stockings of Miss

For this onerous labor, what preparation had Jeffrey made? For the effect which his first stroke produced, where was the adequate cause? The reply is a lesson to the idle dreamer, who, infected with the vain conceit of genius, excuses his indolence by the apparently untrained efforts of his fancied exemplars. "If there be. anything valuable in the history of his progress," says Jeffrey's biographer, “it seems to me to consist chiefly in the example of meritorious labor, which his case exhibits to young men, even of the highest talent. If he had chosen to be idle, no youth would have had a stronger temptation, or a better excuse for that habit; because his natural vigor made it easy for him to accomplish far more than his prescribed tasks, respectably, without much trouble, and with the additional applause of doing them off-hand. passion for distinction was never separated from the conviction that in order to attain it he must work for it. Accordingly, from his boyhood, he was not only a diligent, but a systematic student." At Glasgow, he seems to have commenced the habit of not only taking copious notes of every lecture he heard and every book he read, but to have expanded them by the record of his reflections. From that he advanced to translation and theme-writing. The essays that remain and are specified, are on such subjects as still engage the pens and tongues of tyros, but display a very unusual acuteness, fullness of thought, command of language, and continuity of purpose.

But his early

Some of these productions occupy fifty, seventy, or a hundred folio pages, in a small crabbed handwriting; and the whole would certainly fill many printed volumes. Their most instructive and re

Such are the toils of literature, such the temptations to idleness, even in that fresh, vigorous season, when labor-once fairly begun is a delight, and the urgings of res angusta domi join with the wooings of ambition!

• Addington.

mentioned" Nearly the whole of his prose writings are of a critical character; and this inclination toward analysis and appreciation was so strong, that almost every one of his compositions closes with a criticism upon himself." A letter written at fifteen years of age to Dr. Adam, is marvelous for its display of natural juvenility and advanced self-culture. He apologizes to his old master for his "uninvited intrusion," by the information that for some weeks he has been " impelled to the deed by the impulse of some internal agent;" and that this impulse he has tracked, after "a weary way," to 66 some emotion

in the powers of the will rather than of the intellect." The burden of his epistle, and the only apparent object of his writing, is expressed in this Johnsonian sentence:

"When I recollect the mass of instruction I have received from your care when I consider the excellent principles it was calculated to convey-when I contemplate the perspicuous, attentive, and dispassionate mode of conveyance-and when I experience the advantages and benefits of all these, I cannot refrain the gratification of a finer feeling, in the acknowledgment of my obligations. I am sufficiently sensible that these are hackneyed and cant phrases; but as they express the sentiments of my soul, I think they must be tolerated."

It is possible, however, to attribute too much to even well-directed industry. No expenditure of lapidary skill can put the deep mirroring luster of the diamond upon the dull, soulless pebble; nor will the selfconsuming ardor of a Pollok kindle within him the genius of a Milton. Jeffrey was naturally endowed with qualities favorable to the writing faculty. The poetry and polish of his style-to which far more than to their critical acumen his writings their popularity-expressed the warmth of his admiration for physical loveliness, and his keen sensibility to the domestic affections. The love of country scenery was in him almost as passionate and tender as in Shelley. The hard-headed lawyer and critic could appropriate, with the omission of a word,* the invocation of "Alastor"

Owe

"Earth, ocean, air, beloved brotherhood!"

His filial love to "our great mother" grew with the expansion of his intellect, and intensified with his pursuits. His youthful tours afoot through Wales and the Highlands were repeated at every opportunity through life. He would turn with impatience from the drawing-room of London, to pace beneath the oaks of Kensington; and describes, with a gusto that must have solaced Wordsworth, a view of sunrise from Wesminster-bridge. But it was rather according to his own theory of beauty for its associations, than its sensuous charms, that he loved the picturesque. Among his youthful compositions is one on this subject, and evidently

"Ocean" is the rejected word.

the germ of his celebrated treatise in the "Encyclopædia Britannica." In an imaginary dialogue, he exclaims—

"See that little dim distant light, which shines like a setting star on the horizon; is there anything in the whole circle and series of objects with which we are surrounded on every side that pleases and affects you more than its soft and tranquil light-than the long line of trembling fire with which it has crossed the lake at the bottom of the cliff under which it burns? And what is it that yields this simple object so high a power of pleasing, but that secret and mysterious association by which it represents to us the calmness and rustic simplicity of the inhabitants of that cottage; by which we are transported within its walls, and made to see and to observe the whole economy and occupation of the household."

About the same time, he wrote, in the true spirit of a student of the "humanities:" "All that regards man is interesting to me. Everything which explains his character and his contradictions; every investigation that promises to illustrate the phenomena which he unfolds, I pursue and explore with insatiable eagerness and affection." It was in thus searching into his own heart, that he found the source of mastery over his fellows. He made his pages glow with the warmth of the fire that burnt within his bosom, and men caught the contagion of his earnestness, while they were pleased with the play of his fancy. From this " dear, retired, adored, little window" of his top flat, he looked upon the chequered surface of society-upon the vanity and oppression that is done under the sun, upon the labor wrought and the rest enjoyed-then turned within, to the woman who had taken him, poor and obscure, for the love and pride he had excited-and wove the whole into the work of the hour, the paper on poetry, history, or politics, that lay before him; for such a soul will utter itself on whatever called to speak. No wonder that the new magazine, thus written, electrified the whole reading public of that generation, annihilated the venal or partisan scribblers that lived on the timid disgust of honest men, and constituted a new epoch in the literary history of Britain. We have not at hand the numbers of the "Review" for 1805-6, but we have not the least doubt that upon its pages is distinctly visible the