would affect the ignorant observer, and tell their story more effectively if no memorial of man were by to distract his attention. But, in fact, eternity needs the contrast of time to most minds for its faintest apprehension; and what fitter portraiture of time than a thousand years of monuments? There are people of taste now using all their efforts to get rid of Laud's north doorway into St Mary's, because those twisted columns, indeed, the tout ensemble, are-we do not dispute it-out of harmony with the building. But surely all expression is attained at some expense of regularity of outline. It is better for Oxford to show traces of having been a centre of thought and action in one of England's most stirring periods than that it should. outrage no rule of taste. St Mary's is more instructive and suggestive as it stands, with this incongruous record of a man, and he a benefactor, who made himself a name, and worked with a purpose, than it could be were the anomaly replaced by a marvel of correct conformity to the main building. A worthy nobleman of our day has pulled down the monument of a family ancestress, the model in her time of beauty, grace, and all conjugal virtues—a monument set up by an adoring husband, and itself the work of a noted sculptor-because the cherubs on her tomb had a faux air of Cupids and Hymens which interfered with the medieval repose of restored aisles.

The great work of education, religious and secular, is to enable men to master the idea of time and time's work. If people cannot realise a past, it is a matter of

experience that they cannot realise a future. Multitudes live in the present because, out of their own lives, but dimly remembered, they know nothing. "Before my time" embraces all they can conceive of what has been before them. A hundred or a thousand years are all one. It has been asked how many people in England would express a doubt if told that Buonaparte's father was Julius Cæsar; and we fear the true answer would be alike startling and mortifying. We have read lately of a class of school children, well up in their dates, who betrayed in the end an inextricable confusion of ideas between the inspired prophet Samuel and the Bishop of Oxford. It requires more teaching than their circumstances supply to erect anything like an idea, permanent and unfluctuating, of a long course of eventful ages. Every sense, it is true, does something to keep us all en rapport with the past. Certain odours awake a vague memory disconnected with anything to remember; and for a moment we feel a weight of intervening years with a sense of some infant joy at the end of them. A quaint sweet tune of unfamiliar cadences will, if touched off by cunning fingers, convince us of generations of forefathers. But nothing is so all-persuasive as sight; nothing in moral effect is like visible memorials, old people, old cities, old churches, old stones, which are with us to this day. Let the same filial piety extend to and protect them all.

ALLOYS.

WE are in the habit of hearing from the pulpit—and that not now and then, but as a perpetual theme and as a basis of teaching-that men cannot give up the notion of merit, of some inherent positive goodness in themselves; that to be told plainly of the corruption of their nature raises all the venom of the natural man. Without inquiring here how far it is universal with men to care either to be good or to be thought so, we do not deny that truth lies somewhere in the charge, though it is often hard to find it in the technical conventional language exacted by the subject. We have ourselves heard people talk in a very unaccountable way of their deserts and so forth; but we still think it a more difficult matter to believe in human goodness than in the absence of it. People may rebel against a dogma, especially put as some persons put it, but there is something in the idea of any man being positively meritorious which some minds cannot take in. We may and must believe in worthy actions and in relative

goodness, but in positive merit we own to seeing a difficulty. It is much more easy for a looker-on to explain away the apparent goodness of those who do the good of the world than frankly to acknowledge it, and honestly, and with heart and understanding, to realise pure bona fide virtue; and if anything should be a pure and simple essence, virtue should. The work may be valuable, the man may do it well, and we may on this account feel him to be immeasurably better than ourselves; but something always inserts itself between the man and the merit, if we survey the matter at all critically, and in the spirit of analysis. No observer, if allowed a full and clear view, can help seeing some alloy in every great and good action whatever-something to abate the first grand idea. If he is amiable and enthusiastic, he may shut his eyes against what he fears to see; but the cool unimpassioned temper has seldom far to seek for a qualification—something to reduce the action from the heroic to the human. sibly, the preacher may look on this as a case in point, proving how innate envy and uncharitableness are in man; but we are simply acting on his teaching, working out his theory (which goes far beyond the unreality and imperfection of all human virtue), bringing to the touchstone of individual experience the dogma that merit is an illusion as applied to weak, fallible, complex beings.

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All cynicism, however differing in tone, adopts the preacher's language. We cannot, therefore, think it so hard for humanity to disbelieve in human goodness, to

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see failure and incompleteness in all of it—something that will not stand a thorough daylight investigation. And does it tell better or worse for the cynic that it is not scrutiny of others, after all, so much as of self, which is at the bottom of his conclusions ? In spite of the apparent denial given to our suspicions by the pretensions of vanity and self-conceit-those commonest of all human infirmities-we are disposed to maintain that it is more possible and easy for a mind of any discernment to believe in goodness through other people than through itself. We are very capable of delusion, no doubt; but can any sane man seriously, and in full faith, say to and of himself—I am good and virtuous, I am good at this moment; not only what I do is good, but I am good in doing it? We do not believe it possible. The same hitch slips in here as in the former case. He repudiates the statement, not only because he is told it is wrong and unchristian, shocking, unprotestant, and heretical to say it, but because he does not in his heart think it, and could not get up the conviction; though we grant that he very possibly considers he makes so excellent an appearance that other people ought to think him good, and, if he is of a hopeful and confiding turn, he supposes that they do, and values himself accordingly. Men do not really get beyond thinking themselves better than they actually are. The assurance of virtue, innate or achieved, is not, we think, compatible with rational humanity. The vainest mortal, the most confident self-deceiver, knows better. When a foolish fellow tells us a long