old Polonius's intellect, not less than in the endless confirmations and most undeniable matters of fact of Tapster Pompey or the hostess of the tavern prove to our feelings, even before the word is found which presents the truth to our understandings, that confusion and formality are but the opposite poles of the same null-point? It is Shakespeare's peculiar excellence, that throughout the whole of his splendid picturegallery (the reader will excuse the acknowledged inadequacy of this metaphor), we find individuality everywhere, mere portrait nowhere. In all his various characters, we still feel ourselves communing with the same nature, which is everywhere present as the vegetable sap in the branches, sprays, leaves, buds, blossoms, and fruits, their shapes, tastes, and odours. Speaking of the effect, that is, his works themselves, we may define the excellence of their method as consisting in that just proportion, that union and interpenetration, of the universal and the particular, which must ever pervade all works of decided genius and true science. For method implies a progressive transition, and it is the meaning of the word in the original language. The Greek μé odos is literally a way or path of transit. Thus we extol the Elements of Euclid, or Socrates' discourse with the slave in the Menon cf Plato, as methodical, a term which no one who holds himself bound to think or speak correctly, would apply to the alphabetical order or arrangement of a common dictionary. But as without continuous transition there can be no method, so without a preconception there can be no transition with continuity. The term, method, cannot therefore, otherwise than by abuse, be applied to a mere dead arrangement, containing in itself no principle of progression. LOOKING UPWARD. Every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it. The metal at its height of being seems a mute prophecy of the coming vegetation, into a mimic semblance of which it crystallises. The blossom and flower, the acme of vegetable life, divides into correspondent organs with reciprocal functions, and by instinctive motions and approximations seems impatient of that fixture, by which it is differenced in kind from the flower-shaped Psyche, that flutters with free wing above it. And wonderfully in the insect realm doth the irratibility, the proper seat of instinct, while yet the nascent sensibility is subordinated theremost wonderfully, I say, doth the muscular life in the insect, and the musculo-arterial in the bird, imitate and typically rehearse the adaptive anderstanding, yea, and the moral affections and charities of man. Let us carry ourselves back, in spirit, to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator: as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian "of the generations of the heaven and the earth, in the to days that the Lord God made the earth, and the heavens" (Gen. ii. 4). And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, could, as the vision evolving, still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home-building, wedded and divorceless swallow; and above all the manifoldly intelligent* ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husbandfolk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin sisters, with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity-and not to say to himself, behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop? Shall his pursuits and desires, the reflections of his inward life, be like the reflected image of a tree on the edge of a pool, that grows downwards, and seeks a mock heaven in the unstable element beneath it, in neighbourhood with the slim water-weeds and oosy bottomgrass that are yet better than itself and more noble, in as far as substances that appear as shadows are preferable to shadows mistaken for substance! No! it must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labour for anything below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet "Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!* CHURCH SINGING. I exceedingly regret that our church pays so little attention to the subject of congregational singing. See how it is! In that particular part of the public worship in which, more than in all the rest, the common people might, and ought to, join-which, by its association with music, is meant to give a fitting vent and expression to the emotions, -in that part we all sing as Jews; or, at best, as mere men, in the abstract, without a Saviour. You know my veneration for the Book of Psalms, or most of it; but with some half-dozen exceptions, the Psalms are surely not adequate vehicles of Christian thanksgiving and joy! Upon this deficiency in our service, Wesley and Whitfield seized; and you know it is the hearty congregational singing of Christian hymns which keeps the humbler Methodists together. Luther did as much for the Reformation by his hymns as by his translation of the Bible. In Germany, the hymns are known by heart by every peasant; they advise, they argue from the hymns, and every soul in the church praises God, like a Christian, with words which are natural and yet *See Huber on Bees and on Ants. sacred to his mind. No doubt this defect in our service proceeded from the dread which the English Reformers had of being charged with introducing anything into the worship of God but the text of Scripture. A SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY. My system, if I may venture to give it so fine a name, is the only attempt I know ever made to reduce all knowledges into harmony. It opposes no other system, but shows what was true in each; and how that which was true in the particular, in each of them became error, because it was only half the truth. I have endeavoured to unite the insulated fragments of truth, and therewith to frame a perfect mirror. I show to each system that I fully understand and rightfully appreciate what that system means; but then lift up that system to a higher point of view, from which I enable it to see its former position, where it was, indeed, but under another light and with different relations: -so that the fragment of truth is not only acknowledged, but explained. Thus the old astronomers discovered and maintained much that was true; but because they were placed on a false ground, and looked from a wrong point of view, they never did, they never could, discover the truth-that is, the whole truth. As soon as they left the earth, their false centre, and took their stand in the sun, immediately they saw the whole system in its true light, and their former station remaining, but remaining as a part of the prospect. I wish, in short, to connect by a moral copula natural history with political history; or, in other words, to make history scientific, and science historical-to take from history its accidentality, and from science its fatalism. GENIUS FEMININE-PIRATES. -'s face is almost the only exception I know to the observation that something feminine-not effeminate mind-is discoverable in the countenances of all men of genius. Look at the face of old Dampier, a rough sailor, but a man of exquisite mind. How soft is the air of his countenance, how delicate the shape of his temples ! I think it very absurd and misplaced to call Raleigh and Drake, and others of our naval heroes of Elizabeth's age, pirates. No man is a pirate, unless his contemporaries agree to call him so. Drake said "The subjects of the King of Spain have done their best to ruin my country; ergo, I will try to ruin the King of Spain's country." Would it not be silly to call the Argonauts pirates in our sense of the word? SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS. I believe it possible that a man may, under certain states of the moral feeling, entertain something deserving the name of love towards a male object-an affection beyond friendship, and wholly aloof from appetite. In Elizabeth's and James's time it seems to have been almost fashionable to cherish such a feeling; and perhaps we may account in some measure for it by considering how very inferior the women of that age, taken generally, were in education and accomplishment of mind to the men. Of course there were brilliant exceptions enough, but the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher-the most popular dramatists that ever wrote for the English stage-will show us what sort of women it was generally pleasing to represent. Certainly the language of the two friends, Musidorus and Pyrocles, in the "Arcadia" is such as we could not now use except to women; and in Cervantes the same tone is sometimes adopted, as in the novel of the "Curious Impertinent." And I think there is a passage in the "New Atlantis" of Lord Bacon, in which he speaks of the possibility of such a feeling, but hints the extreme danger of entertaining it, or allowing it any place in a moral theory. I mention this with reference to Shakespeare's sonnets, which have been supposed, by some, to be addressed to William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, whom Clarendon calls the most beloved man of his age, though his licentiousness was equal to his virtues. I doubt this. I do not think that Shakespeare, merely because he was an actor, would have thought it necessary to veil his emo tions towards Pembroke under a disguise, though he might probably have done so, if the real object had perchance been a Laura or a Leonora. It seems to me that the sonnets could only have come from a man deeply in love, and in love with a woman; and there is one sonnet which, from its incongruity, I take to be a purposed blind. These extraordinary sonnets form, in fact, a poem of so many stanzas of fourteen lines each; and, like the passion which inspired them, the sonnets are always the same, with a variety of expression,-continuous, if you regard the lover's soul,-distinct, if you listen to him, as he heaves them sigh after sigh. These sonnets, like the "Venus and Adonis," and the "Rape of Lucrece," are characterised by boundless fertility and laboured condensation of thought, with perfection of sweetness in rhythm and metre. These are the essentials in the budding of a great poet. Afterwards habit and consciousness of power teach more easepræcipitandum liberum spiritum. THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. I think St Paul's Epistle to the Romans the most profound work in existence; and I hardly believe that the writings of the old Stoics, now lost, could have been deeper. Undoubtedly it is, and must be, very obscure to ordinary readers; but some of the difficulty is accidental, arising from the form in which the Epistle appears. If we could now arrange this work in the way in which we may be sure St Paul would himself do, were he now alive, and preparing it for the press, his reasoning would stand out clearer. His accumulated parenthesis would be thrown into notes, or extruded to the margin. You will smile after this, if I say that I think I understand St Paul; and I think so, because really and truly I recognise a cogent consecutiveness in the argument-the only evidence I know that you understand any book. How different is the style of this intensely passionate argument from that of the catholic circular charge called the Epistle to the Ephesians!—and how different that of both from the style of the Epistles to Timothy and Titus, which I venture to call ἐπιστολαὶ Παυλοειδείς. DR JOHNSON-BOSWELL-BURKE— Dr Johnson's fame now rests principally upon with such a book. But his bow-wow manner must have had a good deal to do with the effect produced; for no one, I suppose, will set Johnson before Burke-and Burke was a great and universal talker; yet now we hear nothing of this except by some chance remarks in Boswell. The fact is, Burke, like all men of genius who love to talk at all, was very discursive and continuous; hence he is not reported; he seldom said the sharp short things that Johnson almost always did, which produce a more decided effect at the moment, and which are so much more easy to carry off. Besides, as to Burke's testimony to Johnson's powers, you must remember that Burke was a great courtier; and after all, Burke said and wrote more than once that he thought Johnson greater in talking than in writing, and greater in Boswell than in real life. Newton was a great man, but you must excuse me if I think that it would take many Newtons to make one Milton. (From the "Essays of Elia,"* and the "Last Essays of Elia.") still more sacred interiors of court and committeerooms, with venerable faces of beadles, doorkeepers; directors seated in form on solemn days (to proclaim a dead dividend), at long THE SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. READER, in thy passage from the Bank-where thou hast been receiving thy half-yearly dividends (supposing thou art a lean annuitant like my-worm-eaten tables, that have been mahogany, self) to the Flower Pot to secure a place for Dalston, or Shacklewell, or some other suburban retreat northerly, didst thou never observe a melancholy-looking, handsome, brick and stone edifice, to the left-where Threadneedle Street abuts upon Bishopsgate! I dare say thou hast often admired its magnificent portals ever gaping wide, and disclosing to view a grave court, with cloisters, and pillars, with few or no traces of goers-in or comers-out-a desolation something like Balclutha's.+ This was once a house of trade, a centre of busy interests. The throng of merchants was herethe quick pulse of gain-and here some forms of business are still kept up, though the soul be long since fled. Here are still to be seen stately porticos; imposing staircases, offices roomy as the state apartments in palaces-deserted, or thinly peopled with a few straggling clerks; the *The first series of these popular essays appeared in the London Magazine between August 1820 and October 1822; the second series, between May 1823 and August 1825. "I passed by the walls of Balclutha, and they were desolate."-Ossian, with tarnished gilt-leather coverings, supporting massy silver inkstands long since dry; the oaken wainscots hung with pictures of deceased governors and subgovernors, of Queen Anne, and the two first monarchs of the Brunswick dynasty; huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated; dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams, and soundings of the Bay of Panama! the long passages hung with buckets, appended, in idle row, to walls whose substance might defy any, short of the last, conflagration: with vast ranges of cellarage under all, where dollars and pieces of eight once lay, an "unsunned heap," for Mammon to have solaced his solitary heart withal, long since dissipated, or scattered into air at the blast of the breaking of that famous BUBBLE Such is the SOUTH-SEA HOUSE. At least, such it was forty years ago, when I knew it a magnificent relic! What alterations may have been made in it since, I have had no opportunities of verifying. Time, I take for granted, has not freshened it. No wind has resuscitated the face of the sleeping waters. A thicker crust by this time stagnates upon it. The moths, that were ther battening upon its obsolete ledgers and day books, have rested from their depredations, but other light generations have succeeded, making fine fret-work among their single and double entries. Layers of dust have accumulated (a superfœtation of dirt !) upon the old layers, that seldom used to be disturbed, save by some curious finger, now and then, inquisitive to explore the mode of bookkeeping in Queen Anne's reign; or, with less hallowed curiosity, seeking to unveil some of the mysteries of that tremendous HOAX, whose extent the petty peculators of our day look back upon with the same expression of incredulous admiration, and hopeless ambition of rivalry, as would become the puny face of modern conspiracy contemplating the Titan size of Vaux's superhuman plot. Peace to the manes of the BUBBLE! Silence and destitution are upon thy walls, proud house, for a memorial! Situated as thou art, in the very heart of stirring and living commerce-amid the fret and fever of speculation-with the Bank, and the 'Change, and the India-house about thee, in the hey-day of present prosperity, with their important faces, as it were, insulting thee, their poor neighbour out of business-to the idle and merely contemplative, to such as me, old house! there is a charm in thy quiet, a cessation, a coolness from business, an indolence almost cloistral, which is delightful! With what reverence have I paced thy great bare rooms and courts at eventide! They spoke of the past:-the shade of some dead accountant, with visionary pen in ear, would flit by me, stiff as in life. Living accounts and accountants puzzle me. I have no skill in figuring. But thy great dead tomes, which scarce three degenerate clerks of the present day could lift from their enshrining shelves-with their old fantastic flourishes, and decorative rubric interlacings-their sums in triple columniations, set down with formal superfluity of ciphers-with pious sentences at the beginning, without which our religious ancestors never ventured to open a book of business, or bill of lading-the costly vellum covers of some of them almost persuading us that we are got into some better library,-are very agreeable and edifying spectacles. I can look upon these defunct dragons with complacency. Thy heavy odd-shaped ivory-handled pen-knives (our ancestors had everything on a larger scale than we have hearts for) are as good as anything from Herculaneum. The pounceboxes of our days have gone retrograde. Humorists, for they were of all descriptions; and not having been brought together in early life (which has a tendency to assimilate the members of corporate bodies to each other), but for the most part, placed in this house in ripe or middle age, they necessarily carried into it their separate habits and oddities, unqualified, if I may so speak, as into a common stock. Hence they formed a sort of Noah's ark. Odd fishes. A lay monastery. Domestic retainers in a great house, kept more for show than use. Yet pleasant fellows, full of chat, and not a few among them had arrived at considerable proficiency on the German flute. The cashier at that time was one Evans, a Cambro-Briton. He had something of the choleric complexion of his countryman stamped on his visage, but was a worthy sensible man at bottom. He wore his hair, to the last, powdered and frizzed out, in the fashion which I remember to have seen in caricatures of what were termed in my young days Maccaronies. He was the last of that race of beaux. Melancholy as a gibcat over his counter all the forenoon, I think I see him, making up his cash (as they call it) with tremulous fingers, as if he feared every one about him was a defaulter; in his hypochondry ready to imagine himself one; haunted, at least, with the idea of the possibility of his becoming one; his tristful visage clearing up a little over his roast neck of veal at Anderton's at two (where his picture still hangs, taken a little before his death by desire of the master of the coffee-house, which he had frequented for the last five-andtwenty years), but not attaining the meridian of its animation till evening brought on the hour of tea and visiting. The simultaneous sound of his well-known rap at the door with the stroke of the clock announcing six, was a topic of neverfailing mirth in the families which this dear old bachelor gladdened with his presence. Then was his forte his glorified hour! How would he chirp, and expand, over a muffin! How would he dilate into secret history. His countryman, Pennant himself, in particular, could not be more eloquent than he in relation to old and new London-the site of old theatres, churches, streets gone to decay, where Rosamond's Pond stood, the Mulberry gardens, and the conduit in Cheap-with many a pleasant anecdote, derived from paternal tradition, of those grotesque figures which Hogarth has immortalised in his picture of Noon, the worthy descendants of those heroic The very clerks which I remember in the confessors, who, flying to this country, from the South-Sea House--I speak of forty years back-wrath of Louis XIV. and his dragoons, kept alive had an air very different from those in the public the flame of pure religion in the sheltering offices that I have had to do with since. They obscurities of Hog Lane, and the vicinity of the partook of the genius of the place! Seven Dials! They were mostly (for the establishment did not admit of superfluous salaries) bachelors. Generally (for they had not much to do) persons of a curious and speculative turn of mind. Old-fashioned, for a reason mentioned before. Deputy, under Evans, was Thomas Tame. He had the air and stoop of a nobleman. You would have taken him for one, had you met him in one of the passages leading to Westminster Hall. By stoop, I mean that gentle bending of the body forwards, which, in great men, must be supposed to be the effect of an habitual condescending attention to the applications of their inferiors. While he held you in converse, you felt strained to the height in the colloquy. The conference over, you were at leisure to smile at the comparative insignificance of the pretensions which had just awed you. His intellect was of the shallowest order. It did not reach to a saw or a proverb. His mind was in its original state of white paper. A sucking-babe might have posed him. What was it then? Was he rich? Alas, no! Thomas Tame was very poor. Both he and his wife looked outwardly gentlefolks, when I fear all was not well at all times within. She had a neat meagre person, which it was evident she had not sinned in over-pampering; but in its veins was noble blood. She traced her descent, by some labyrinth of relationship, which I never thoroughly understood, much less can explain with any heraldic certainty at this time of day, to the illustrious but unfortunate house of Derwentwater. This was the secret of Thomas's stoop. This was the thought, the sentiment, the bright solitary star of your lives, ye mild and happy pair, which cheered you in the night of intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank, instead of glittering attainments: and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but, while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it. Decus et sola men. Of quite another stamp was the then accountant, John Tipp. He neither pretended to high blood, nor, in good truth, cared one fig about the matter. He "thought an accountant the greatest character in the world, and himself the greatest accountant in it." Yet John was not without his hobby. The fiddle relieved his vacant hours. He sang, certainly, with other notes than to the Orphean lyre. He did, indeed, scream and scrape most abominably. His fine suite of official rooms in Threadneedle Street, which, without anything very substantial appended to them, were enough to enlarge a man's notions of himself that lived in them (I know not who is the occupier of them now), resounded fortnightly to the notes of a concert of "sweet breasts," as our ancestors would have called them, culled from club-rooms and orchestras, chorus-singers, first and second violoncellos, double basses, and clarionets, who ate his cold mutton and drank his punch, and praised his ear. He sat like Lord Midas among them. But at the desk Tipp was quite another sort of creature. Thence all ideas, that were purely ornamental, were banished. You could not speak of anything romantic without rebuke. Politics were excluded. A newspaper was thought too refined and abstracted. The whole duty of man consisted in writing off divi dend warrants. The striking of the annual balance in the company's books (which, perhaps, differed from the balance of last year in the sum of £25, 1s. 6d.) occupied his days and nights for a month previous. Not that Tipp was blind to the deadness of things (as they call them in the city) in his beloved house, or did not sigh for a return to the old stirring days when South-Sea hopes were young (he was indeed equal to the wielding of any the most intricate accounts of the most flourishing company in these or those days): but to a genuine accountant the difference of proceeds is as nothing. The fractional farthing is as dear to his heart as the thousands which stand before it. He is the true actor, who, whether his part be a prince or a peasant, must act it with like intensity. With Tipp form was everything. His life was formal. His actions seemed ruled with a ruler. His pen was not less erring than his heart. He made the best executor in the world; he was plagued with incessant executorships accordingly, which excited his spleen and soothed his vanity in equal ratios. He would swear (for Tipp swore) at the little orphans, whose rights he would guard with a tenacity like the grasp of the dying hand, that commended their interests to his protection. With all this there was about him a sort of timidity (his few enemies used to give it a worse name), a something which, in reference to the dead, we will place, if you please, a little on this side of the heroic. Nature certainly had been pleased to endow John Tipp with a sufficient measure of the principle of self-preservation. There is a cowardice which we do not despise, because it has nothing base or treacherous in its elements; it betrays itself, not you: it is mere temperament; the absence of the romantic and the enterprising; it sees a lion in the way, and will not, with Fortinbras, "greatly find quarrel in a straw," when some supposed honour is at stake. Tipp never mounted the box of a stage-coach in his life; or leaned against the rails of a balcony; or walked upon the ridge of a parapet; or looked down a precipice; or let off a gun; or went upon a waterparty; or would willingly let you go, if he could have helped it: neither was it recorded of him, that for lucre, or for intimidation, he ever forsook friend or principle. Whom next shall we summon from the dusty dead, in whom common qualities become uncommon? Can I forget thee, Henry Man, the wit, the polished man of letters, the author. of the South-Sea House! who never enteredst thy office in a morning, or quittedst it in midday—what didst thou in an office?)—without some quirk that left a sting! Thy gibes and thy jokes are now extinct, or survive but in two forgotten volumes, which I had the good fortune to rescue from a stall in Barbican, not three days ago, and found thee terse, fresh, epigrammatic, as alive. Thy wit is a little gone by in |