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XXVII.-CHARACTER OF PITT, (LORD CHATHAM.)—Grattan. THE secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, sunk him to the vulgar level of the great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition was fame. Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous. France sunk beneath him. With one hand he smote the house of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England. The sight of his mind was infinite; and his schemes were to affect, not England, not the present age only, but Europe and posterity. Wonderful were the means by which these schemes were accomplished; always seasonable, always adequate; the suggestions of an understanding animated by ardour, and enlightened by prophecy.

The ordinary feelings which make life amiable and indolent were unknown to him. No domestic difficulties, no domestic weakness, reached him; but, aloof from the sordid occurrences of life, and unsullied by its intercourse, he came occasionally into our system to counsel and to decide.

A character so exalted, so strenuous, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all classes of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his glory, and the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country, and the calamities of the enemy, answered and refuted her. Nor were his political abilities his only talents: his eloquence was an era in the senate, peculiar and spontaneous, familiarly expressing gigantic sentiments and instinctive wisdom; not like the torrent of Demosthenes, or the splendid conflagration of Tully; it resembled sometimes the thunder, and sometimes the music of the spheres. He did not conduct the understanding through the painful subtilty of argumentation, nor was he for ever on the rack of exertion; but rather lightened upon the subject, and reached the point by the flashings of the mind, which, like those of his eye, were felt, but could not be followed. Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding,

a spirit, and an eloquence, to summon mankind to society, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and to rule the wildness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm empire, and strike a blow in the world that should resound through the universe.

XXVIII.-THE STUDY OF NATURE.-Humboldt.

HE who regards the influences of the study of Nature in their relations, not to particular grades of civilization, or the individual requirements of social life, but in their wider bearings upon mankind at large, promises himself, as the principal fruit of his researches, that the enjoyment of Nature will be increased and ennobled through insight into the connexion of her phenomena. Such increase, such nobility, however, is the work of observation, of intelligence, and of time, in which all the efforts of the understanding of man are reflected. How the human kind have been striving for thousands of years, amidst eternally recurring changes in the forms of things, to discover that which is stable in the law, and so, gradually, by the might of mind, to vanquish all within the wide-spread orbit of the earth; is familiar to him who has traced the trunk of our knowledge, through the thick strata of bygone ages, to its root. To question these ages is to trace the mysterious course of the idea, stamped with the same image as that which, in times of remoter antiquity, presented itself to the inward sense, in the guise of an harmoniously ordered whole; and which meets us at last as the prize of long and carefully accumulated experience.

In these two epochs in the contemplation of creation-the first dawn of consciousness among men, and the ultimate and simultaneous evolution of every element of human sciencetwo distinct kinds of enjoyment are reflected. The mere presence of unbounded Nature, and an obscure feeling of the harmony that reigns amid the ceaseless changes of her silent workings, are the source of the one. The other belongs to a higher state of civilization of the species, and the reflection of this upon the individual; it springs from an insight into the order of the universe, and the co-ordination of the physical forces. Even as man now contrives instruments by which he may question Nature more closely, and step beyond the limited circle of his fleeting existence; as he no longer observes only, but has learned to produce phenomena under determinate conditions; as, in fine, the philosophy of Nature

has doffed her ancient poetical garb, and assumed the earnest character of a thinking impersonation of things observed; positive knowledge and definition have taken the place of obscure imaginings and imperfect inductions. The dogmatical speculations of former ages only exist at present in the prejudices of the vulgar, or in circumstances where, as if conscious of their weakness, they willingly keep themselves in the shade. They also maintain themselves as a heavy inheritance in language,—which is disfigured by symbolical words and phrases innumerable. A small number only of the elegant creations of the imagination which have reached us, surrounded, as it were, with the haze of antiquity, acquire a more definite outline and a renovated shape.

Nature, to the eye of the reflecting observer, is unity in multiplicity; it is combination of the manifold in form and composition; it is the conception of natural things and natural forces as a living whole. The most important consequences of physical researches are therefore these:-To acknowledge unity in multiplicity; from the individual to embrace all; amidst the discoveries of later ages to prove and separate the individuals, yet not to be overwhelmed with their mass; to keep the high destinies of man continually in view; and to comprehend the spirit of Nature, which lies hid beneath the covering of phenomena. In this way, our aspirations extend beyond the narrow confines of the world of sense; and we may yet succeed, comprehending Nature intimately, in mastering the crude matter of empirical observation through the might of mind.

XXIX.-DANTE AND MILTON.--Macaulay.

THE character of Milton was peculiarly distinguished by loftiness of thought; that of Dante by intensity of feeling. In every line of the Divine Comedy, we discern the asperity which is produced by pride struggling with misery. There is perhaps no work in the world so deeply and uniformly sorrowful. The melancholy of Dante was no fantastic caprice. It was not, as far as at this distance of time can be judged, the effect of external circumstances. It was from within. Neither love nor glory, neither the conflicts of the earth nor the hope of heaven, could dispel it. It twined every consolation and every pleasure into its own nature. It resembled that noxious Sardinian soil of which the intense bitterness is said to have been perceptible even in its honey. His mind

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was, in the noble language of the Hebrew poet, a land of darkness, as darkness itself, and where the light was as darkness!" The gloom of his character discolours all the passions of men and all the face of nature, and tinges with its own livid hue the flowers of paradise and the glories of the Eternal Throne.

Milton was, like Dante, a statesman and a lover; and, like Dante, he had been unfortunate in ambition and in love. He had survived his health and his sight, the comforts of his home and the prosperity of his party. Of the great men by whom he had been distinguished on his entrance into life, some had been taken away from the evil to come; some had carried into foreign climates their unconquerable hatred of oppression ; some were pining in dungeons; and some had poured forth their blood on scaffolds. That hateful proscription-facetiously termed "The act of indemnity and oblivion"—had set a mark on the poor, blind, deserted poet, and held him up by name to the hatred of a profligate court and an inconstant people. Venal and licentious scribblers, with just sufficient talent to clothe the thoughts of a pander in the style of a bellman, were now the favourite writers of the sovereign and the public. It was a loathsome herd-which could be compared to nothing so fitly as to the rabble of Comus;-grotesque monsters, half bestial, half human,-dropping with wine, bloated with gluttony, and reeling in obscene dances. Amidst these his Muse was placed, like the chaste lady of the Masque, lofty, spotless, and serene to be chatted at, and pointed at, and grinned at, by the whole tribe of Satyrs and Goblins.

If ever despondency could be excused in any man, it might have been excused in Milton. But the strength of his mind overcame every calamity. Neither blindness, nor gout, nor penury, nor age, nor domestic afflictions, nor political disappointments, nor abuse, nor proscription, nor neglect, had power to disturb his sedate and majestic patience. His spirits do not seem to have been high, but they were singularly equable. His temper was serious, perhaps stern; but it was a temper which no sufferings could render sullen or fretful. Such as it was, when on the eve of great events he returned from his travels, in the prime of health and manly beauty, loaded with literary distinctions and glowing with patriotic hopes; such it continued to be-when, after having experienced every calamity which is incident to our nature, old, poor, sightless, and disgraced, he retired to his hovel to die!

XXX.-CONNEXION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION.-Wiseman.

I KNOW not why any one who possesses but ordinary abilities, may not hope, by persevering diligence, somewhat to enlarge the evidences of truth. There are humble departments in this as in every other art; there are calm, retired walks, which lead not beyond the precincts of domestic privacy, over which the timid may wander, and, without exposure to the public gaze, gather sweet and lowly herbs,-that shall be as fragrant on the altar of God, as the costly perfume which Bezaleel and Oholiab compounded with so much art. The painted shell which the child picks up on the hill-side, may be sometimes as good evidence of a great catastrophe, as the huge bones of sea mousters which the naturalist digs out of the limestone rock; a little medal may attest the destruction of an empire, as certainly as the obelisk or triumphal arch. "While others," says St. Jerome, "contribute their gold and their silver to the service of the tabernacle, why should not I contribute my humble offerings,—at least of hair and skin?"

But whosoever shall try to cultivate a wider field, and follow, from day to day, the constant progress of every science, careful ever to note the influence which it exercises on his more sacred knowledge, shall have therein such pure joy, and such growing comfort, as the disappointing eagerness of mere human learning may not supply. Such a one I know not unto whom to liken; save to one who unites an enthusiastic love of Nature's charms to a sufficient acquaintance with her laws, and spends his days in a garden of the choicest bloom. And here he seeth one gorgeous flower, that has unclasped all its beauty to the glorious sun; and there, another is just about to disclose its modester blossom, not yet fully unfolded; and beside them, there is one only in the hand-stem, giving but slender promise of much display: and yet he waiteth patiently, well knowing that the law is fixed whereby it too shall pay, in due season, its tribute to the light and heat that feed it. Even so, the other doth likewise behold one science after the other, when its appointed hour is come and its ripening influences have prevailed, unclose some form which shall add to the varied harmony of universal truth; which shall recompense, to the full, the genial power that hath given it life; and, however barren it may have seemed at first, produce something that may adorn the temple and altar of God's worship.

And if he carefully register his own convictions, and add them to the collections already formed, of various converging

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