regard to Art alone, was indeed advantageous. Printing was then unknown, and letters were a mystery. The interchange of ideas and news, which now permeate every corner of society, had then no existence. No one knew what was going on except in his immediate neighbourhood. In such circumstances, the system of caste was the most likely to obviate the impediments to the preservation and propagation of knowledge in the arts: for the discoveries made by the fathers were thus transmitted directly to their children; and the spread of improvements was comparatively easy among a class, all of whose members were bound together by community of station and employment. But when knowledge is easy of communication, the system becomes pernicious. Knowledge is the life-blood of Genius, and must, when it can, be spread and circulated. When confined to caste of station, Genius droops for the want of freedom. Genius is aspiring, but caste chains it immovably to one station. Genius is impulse, action; it cannot move in fetters. Pent up within the walls of conventional rank, Genius collapses,her inspirations can only be drawn from the atmospheres of boundless liberty.

Conquest and tyranny must ever be short-lived. A free State always, in the end, lives down a despotism. The latter derives talent from one class only, while in the former it leaps up from all. Even when Liberty is born in blood and nursed on carnage, she is the foster-child of Genius. The extraordinary development of talent by France during her first Revolution, had no parallel among the despotic powers of the Continent. Though the strife was horrible and sanguinary, it summoned every man in France to exertion; while the path to the guillotine was trodden smooth by victims, it threw open the road to honour, and thousands entered. The man who raised himself from subaltern of artillery to the Imperial throne; who beheld the half of Europe beneath the shadow of his sceptre; who wedded the daughter of the Cæsars, and raised around his throne a martial galaxy unparalleled in the

world's history-was the offspring of Liberty; of gory Liberty; such Liberty as makes Genius shine forth with preternatural lustre but only develops it in a few at the expense of the happiness of the many.

Happily, here in England, freedom sheds her influence unrestrained and untarnished. Genius is not choked by caste. Our aristocracy is ever invigorated from the ranks of the commons. Scores of titled families die out in a century, and their place is filled up with the worthiest of the nation. Be a man the son of a coal-merchant, like Eldon and Stowell-or of a cotton-spinner, like Peel-the path to wealth and fame is ever open to him. A tradesman's son may die on the woolsack. A clerk may rise, like Clive, to be a Governor-General. The fourth son of a country parson, like Nelson, may find a tomb among the great ones in Westminster Abbey. Turn to our Senate; consider its annals for the last sixty years, and say if France, with her triple Revolution, can present a parallel to the genius there developed-if France, stirred to the very dregs by frantic struggles after liberty, can equal the steady glories of a nation inured to freedom.

One word more, and we have done-one word to the student who may peruse these pages-to the young aspirant, who sees Life as yet only through the bright colouring of Youth, or in the unreal guise which it wears to the recluse.

There is a self-imposed thraldom more fatal to genius than the blight of external oppression. Beneath the allurements of passion there lurks a worse than Egyptian bondage. No man ever excelled without the exercise of much self-denial. To live like a hermit, and work like a horse," is the surest of all roads to fame, and has been the uninviting path trodden by most of those who have risen to permanent renown. True liberty, the liberty which genius demands, consists as much in exemption from the slavery within as from the slavery without. Let the young aspirant ever remember, that whatever elevates man's nature-whatever lifts him above the trammels of earth,

and places him nearer heaven, proportionally elevates his genius: and, on the contrary, that every passion immoderately indulged is a fetter placed on his intellect; that every foolish or guilty loitering in the mazes of pleasure, if redeemable at all, must one day be redeemed at too dear a price. "The Present and the Future are rivals," said Sir Joshua Reynolds to his pupils, "and whoever pays court to the one, must resign the other."

YOUTH AND SUMMER

Ir is Summer. Day is now at its longest, the season at its brightest; and the heat comes down through the glowing heavens-broiling the sons of labour, but whitening the fields for the harvest. Like hapless Semele, consumed by the splendours of her divine lover, Earth seems about to perish beneath the ardent glances of the God of Day. The sun comes bowling from the Tropics to visit the Hyperboreans. The strange phenomenon of the Polar day-when for six months he keeps careering through the sky, without a single rising or setting, rolling like a fiery ball along the edge of the horizon, and glittering like a thousand diamonds on the fields of ice-is now melting the snows that hide the lichens, the reindeer's food; and, quivering down through the azure shallows of the Greenland coast, infuses the fire of love and the lust for roaming into the "scaly myriads" of the herring tribe.

On ourselves, the Summer sun is shining, glowing-robing in gold the declining days of July, and taking her starry jewels from the crown of Night,-nay, lifting the diadem from her sable brow, and invading the skies of midnight with his lingering beams. Oh, what a glory in those evening skies! The sun, just set, brings out the summits of the far-off hills sharp and black against his amber light. Nature is dreaming. Yonder sea is calm as if it had never known a storm. It is the hour of Reverie. Old memories, half-forgotten poetry, come floating like dreams into the soul. We wander in thought

to the lonely Greek isle, where Juan and Haidee are roaming with encircling arms upon the silvery sands, or gaze in love's reverie from the deserted banquet-room upon the slumbering waters of the Egean. We see the mariner resting on his oars within the shadow of Etna, and hear the "Ave Sanctissima" rising in solemn cadence from the waveless sea. We stand beneath the lovely skies of Italy-we rest on the woody slopes of the Apennines, where the bell of some distant convent is proclaiming sundown, and the vesper hymn floats on the rosy stillness, a vocal prayer.

"Ave Maria! blessed be the hour,

The time, the clime, the spot where I so oft
Have felt that moment in its fullest power

Sink o'er the earth so beautiful and soft;
While swung the deep bell in the distant tower,
And the faint dying day-hymn stole aloft;
While not a breath stole through the rosy air,

And yet the forest leaves seemed stirred with prayer!"

Study is impossible in the Summer evenings-those long, clear, mellow nights, when the Evening Star hangs like a diamond lamp in the amber skies of the West, and the hushed air seems waiting for serenades. The very charm of our Study is then our ruin. Whenever we lift our eyes from the page, we look clear away, as from a lofty turret, upon the ever-shifting glories of a Sunset, where far-off mountains form a purple horizon, and a wide arm of the sea sleeps calmly between, reflecting the skyey splendours. Our heart is not in our task. There is a vague yearning within us, for happiness more ethereal than any we have yet beheld-a happiness which the eye cannot figure, which only the soul can feel: it is the Spirit dreaming of its immortal home. Now and then we pause-the beauty without, half-unconsciously fixes upon itself our dreamy gaze.

"Oh, Summer night!

So soft and bright!"

That air, that lovely serenade of Donizetti's-or rather, which Donizetti picked up from the Italian peasants-seems floating