amined here to-day, the ladies gets into a wery great state o' admiration at the honorable conduct of Mr. Dodson and Fogg,-them two gen'l'm'n as is settin' near you now." This of course drew general attention to Dodson and Fogg, who looked as virtuous as possible.

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'The attorneys for the plaintiff," said Mr. Serjeant Buzfuz. 'Well, they spoke in high praise of the honorable conduct of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, the attorneys for the plaintiff, did they?"

"Yes," said Sam, they said what a wery gen'rous thing it was o' them to have taken up the case on spec. and to charge nothin' at all for costs, unless they got 'em out of Mr. Pickwick."

At this very unexpected reply the spectators tittered again, and Dodson and Fogg, turning very red, leant over to Serjeant Buzfuz, and in a hurried manner whispered something in his ear.

"You are quite right," said Serjeant Buzfuz aloud, with affected composure. It's perfectly useless, my lord, attempting to get at any evidence through the impenetrable stupidity of this witness. I will not trouble the court by asking him any more questions. Stand down, sir." Would any other gen'l'm'n like to ask me anythin' ?" inquired Sam, taking up his hat, and looking around most deliberately.

"Not I, Mr. Weller, thank you," said Serjeant Snubbin, laughing. "You may go down, sir," said Serjeant Buzfuz, waving his hand impatiently. Sam went down accordingly, after doing Messrs. Dodson and Fogg's case as much harm as he conveniently could, and saying just as little respecting Mr. Pickwick as might be, which was precisely the object he had had in view all along.

LESSON 54.

PHILOSOPHICAL AND POLITICAL LITERATURE.- "An eloquent school of Scotch metaphysicians came after Hume, and, for the most part, opposed the ideal system on which he had founded his famous argument on causation. Dr. Reid, Dr. Stewart, and Dr. Brown carried this school on to 1820. The Utilitarian view of morals was put forth with great power by Jeremy Bentham, and in our own day by JOHN STUART MILL, 1806-1873, whose name, with that of SIR W. HAMILTON, 17881856, and Professor Whewell's, belongs to the literature of philosophy. The philosophy of Jurisprudence may be said to have been founded by JEREMY BENTHAM, 1748-1832, and law

was for the first time made a little clear to common minds by BLACKSTONE'S Commentaries.

BURKE'S Reflections on the French Revolution, 1790, and the Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1796-7, were most powerful. The first of these two spread all over England a terror of the principles of the Revolution; the second increased the eagerness of England to carry on the war with France.

MISCELLANEOUS LITERATURE. —The miscellaneous literature of the early part of the nineteenth. century took mainly the form of long ess ys, most of which were originally published in the Reviews and Magazines. It was in Blackwood's Magazine that Christopher North (Professor Wilson) published the Noctes Ambrosiana-lively conversations that treated of all the topics of the day. It was in the Edinburgh Review that Macaulay and Sydney Smith and Jeffrey wrote essays on literature, politics, and philosophy. It was in Fraser's Magazine that THOMAS CARLYLE, 1795-1881, first came before the public with Sartor Resartus and the Lectures on Heroes, books which gave an entirely new impulse to the generation in which we live. Of all these miscellaneous writers, Carlyle was the most original, and Thomas De Quincey the greatest writer of English prose. The style of DE QUINCEY, 1785-1859, has so peculiar a quality that it stands alone. The sentences are built up like passages in a fugue, and there is nothing in English Literature which can be compared in involved melody with the prose of the Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

One man alone in our own day is as great a master of English prose, JOHN RUSKIN, born in 1819. He has created a new literature, that of art, and all the subjects related to it; and the work he has done has more genius and is more original than any other prose work of our time. Some of De Quincey's best work was done on the lives of the poets of his day; and, indeed, a great part of the miscellaneous literature consisted of Criticism on Poetry, past and present. Coleridge, Charles Lamb, and Campbell carried on that study of the Elizabethan and

earlier poetry which Warton had begun in the eighteenthcentury. Wordsworth wrote admirable prose on poetry, and the prose of his Essays, just now published, especially of that on the Convention of Cintra, is quite stately. W. Hazlitt, W. S. Landor, Jeffrey, and a host of others added to the literature of criticism, and the ceaseless discussion of the works of the poets made them the foremost literary figures of the day."

BIBLIOGRAPHY. HAMILTON.-J. Veitch's Memoir of; T. S. Baynes' Edinburgh Essays; De Quincey's Essays on Ph. Writers; H. Calderwood's Philos. of the Infinite; J. Martineau's Essays; Mill's Exam. of Sir Wm. Ham.'s Philos.; J. H. Stirling's Ham.'s Philos. of Perception; Black. Mag., v. 86, 1859; N. A. Rev., vs. 76, 92, and 99; N. Br. Rev., v. 18, 1852.

CARLYLE.-J. Morley's Crit. Miscellanies; J. Martineau's Essays; Minto's Man. Eng. Pr. Lit.; Lowell's My Study Windows; P. Bayne's Lessons from my Masters; W. R. Greg's Lit. Judgments; J. Sterling's Essays; H. Giles' Lectures and Essays; Fras. Mag., v. 72, 1865; Quar. Rev., v. 132, 1872; Ecl. Mag, v. 18, 1849; 22, 1851; 26 and 7, 1852, and April and June, 1881; Froude's Life of.

DE QUINCEY.-P. Bayne's Essays; L. Stephen's Hours in a Library; H. Giles' Illus. of Genius; Minto's Man. Eng. Pr. Lit.; Fras. Mag., vs. 62 and 63; Nat. Quar. Rev., v. 22, 18.1; N. A. Rev., v. 14, 1852, and 88, 1859; Quar. Rev., v. 110, 1861; Ecl. Mag., July, 1850; July, 1854; Dec., 1863; and Oct., 1868.

LAMB.-Eng. Men of Let. Series: Talfourd's Life and Memorials of; Bulwer's Prose Works; De Quincey's Biog., Essays and Lit. Reminis.; At. Mo., v. 3. 1859; Ed. Rev., v. 124, 1866; Fras. Mag., v. 75, 1867; Harper's Mo., vs. 20 and 39; Macmillan, Apr., 1867; N. A. Rev., v. 104, 1867; Quar. Rev., v. 122, 1867: Temple Bar, Apr., 1862; West. Rev., Oct., 1874.

Carlyle's subject,-almost his only subject,-whether he wrote history or biography, or the sort of musings which contained his conceptions of life, was always the dim struggle of man's nature with the passions, doubts, and confusions by which it is surrounded, with special regard to the grip of the infinite spiritual cravings, whether good or evil, upon it. He was always trying to paint the light shining in darkness and the darkness comprehending it not, and therefore it was that he strove so hard to invent a new sort of style which should express not simply the amount of human knowledge but also, so far as possible, the much vaster amount of human ignorance against which that knowledge sparkled in mere radiant points breaking the gloom.

Some critics have attempted to account for the difference in style between his early reviews in the Edinburgh and his later productions, by the corrections of Jeffrey. But Jeffrey did not correct Carlyle's Life of Schiller, and, if any one who possesses the volume containing both the life of Schiller and the life of Sterling will compare the one with the other, he will see at once that, between the two, Carlyle had deliberately devel

oped a new organon for his own characteristic genius, and that, so far from losing, his genius gained enormously by the process. And I say this not without fully recognizing that simplicity is, after all, the highest of all qualities of style, and that no one can pretend to find simplicity in Carlyle's mature style.

The purpose of style is to express thought, and if the central and pervading thought of all which you wish to express and must express if you are to attain the real object of your life, is inconsistent with simplicity, let simplicity go to the wall, and let us have the real drift. And this seems to me to be exactly Carlyle's case. It would have been impossible to express adequately in such English as was the English of his Life of Schiller, the class of convictions which had most deeply engraved themselves on his own mind. That class of convictions was, to state it shortly, the result of his belief-a one-sided belief no doubt, but full of significance that human language, and especially our glib, cultivated use of it, had done as much or more to conceal from men how little they do know, and how ill they grasp even that which they partly know, as to define and preserve for them the little that they have actually puzzled out of the riddle of life.

To expose the pretensious of human speech, to show us that it seems much clearer than it is, to warn us habitually that it swims as a mere superficial film' on a wide, unplumbed sea of undiscovered reality, is a function hardly to be discharged at all by plain and limited speech. Genuine Carlylese--which, of course, in its turn is in great danger of becoming a deceptive mask, and often does become so in Carlyle's own writings, so that you begin to think that all careful observation, sound reasoning, and precise thinking are useless, and that a true man would keep his intellect foaming and gasping, as it were, in an eternal epileptic fit of wonder-is intended to keep constantly before us the relative proportions between the immensity on every subject which we fail to apprehend, and the few well-defined focal spots of light that we can clearly discern and take in. Nothing is so well adapted as Carlyle's style to teach one that the truest language on the deepest subjects is thrown out, as it were, with more or less happy effect, at great realities far above our analysis or grasp, and not a triumphant formula which contains the whole secret of our existence."-Richard H. Hutton.

From Carlyle's Death of Goethe.

To measure and estimate all this, as we said, the time is not come; a century hence will be the fitter time. He who investigates it best will find its meaning greatest, and be the readiest to acknowledge that it

transcends him. Let the reader have seen, before he attempts to oversee. A poor reader, in the mean while were he, who discerned not here the authentic rudiments of that same new era, whereof we have so often had false warning. Wondrously, the wrecks and pulverized rubbish of ancient things, institutions, religions, forgotten noblenesses, made alive again by the breath of genius, lie here in new coherence and incipient union, the spirit of art working creative through the mass: that chaos, into which the eighteenth century with its wild war of hypocrites and sceptics had reduced the past, begins here to be once more a world. This, the highest that can be said of written books, is to be said of these: there is in them a new time, the prophecy and beginning of a new time The corner-stone of a new social edifice for mankind is laid there; firmly, as before, on the natural rock, far extending traces of a ground-plan we can also see, which future centuries may go on to enlarge, amend, and work into reality. These sayings seem strange to some; nevertheless they are not empty exaggerations, but expressions, in their way, of a belief, which is not now of yesterday; perhaps when Goethe has been read and meditated for another generation, they will not seem so strange.

Precious is the new light of knowledge which our teacher conquers for us; yet small to the new light of love which also we derive from him; the most important element of any man's performance is the life he has accomplished. Under the intellectual union of man and man, which works by precept, lies a holier union of affection, working by example; the influences of which latter, mystic, deep-reaching, all-embracing, can still less be computed. For love is ever the beginning of knowledge, as fire is of light; works also more in the manner of fire. That Goethe was a great teacher of men means already that he was a good man; that he himself learned; in the school of experience had striven and proved victorious. To how many hearers languishing, nigh dead, in the airless dungeon of unbelief (a true vacuum and nonentity) has the assurance that there was such a man, that such a man was still possible, come like tidings of great joy! He who would learn to reconcile reverence with clearness, to deny and defy what is false, yet believe and worship what is true; amid raging factions, bent on what is either altogether empty or has substance in it only for a day, which stormfully convulse and tear hither and thither a distracted, expiring system of society, to adjust himself aright; and, working for the world, and in the world, keep himself unspotted from the world-let him look here.

This man, we may say, became morally great, by being in his own age what in some other ages many might have been-a genuine man.