in place of Hobbes's notion of the universal will of the people concentrated by mutual bargain and concession in the person of the monarch, or in place of the benevolent despot which was to be formulated by Bolingbroke and disastrously imitated by George III. It rested on a supreme "passion for liberty," which the Trimmer held "to be the foundation of all virtue and the only seasoning that giveth a relish to life." And equally, in the last resort, it rested on the conviction that "there is a soul in that great body of the people," and that, "when all is said, there is a natural reason of State, an undefinable thing grounded upon the common good of mankind, which is immortal, and in all changes and revolutions still preserveth its original right of saving a nation, when the letter of the law perhaps would destroy it; and by whatsoever means it moveth, carrieth a power with it that admitteth of no opposition, being supported by Nature, which inspireth an immediate consent at some critical times into every individual member to that which visibly tendeth to preservation of the whole." But if Law, as thus conceived by Halifax, depends in the final test for efficacy on the consent of the governed, it implies also a settled mistrust of the first motions of human nature. It is the experience of time against the desires of the present, a restraining force imposed upon the action of the nation comparable to the habits grafted upon

the individual man in childhood. As the Trimmer says, Law is a security for men not only against one another, but against themselves.

How deep this mistrust of uncontrolled human nature extended in the case of Halifax can be better learned from the three little groups of Thoughts and Reflections published posthumously from his papers in 1750. For models in English Halifax had the Essays of Bacon, the Leviathan and Behemoth of Hobbes, and the Table Talk of John Selden, the last-named like himself a Trimmer. In French he had the Maxims of La Rochefoucauld and, more particularly, the Characters of La Bruyère, to which his work approaches most nearly in style and ideas. In compass and minuteness of observation he no doubt falls behind his French model; nor has he the literary neatness due as much to the finer resources of the language of the Characters as to the conscientious labour of their author. But he possesses in compensation a certain honesty of his own, and a memorable gravity born of practical experience. What he learned from the business of life is pretty well summed up in the brief chapter entitled Of the World:

It is from the shortness of thought that men imagine there is any great variety in the world.

Time hath thrown a vail upon the faults of former ages, or else we should see the same deformities we condemn in the present times.

When a man looketh upon the rules that are made, he will think there can be no faults in the world; and when he looketh upon the faults, there are so many he will be tempted to think there are no rules.

They are not to be reconciled, otherwise than by concluding that which is called frailty is the incurable nature of mankind.

A man that understandeth the world must be weary of it; and a man who doth not, for that reason ought not to be pleased with it.

The uncertainty of what is to come is such a dark cloud that neither reason nor religion can quite break through it; and the condition of mankind is to be weary of what we do know, and afraid of what we do not.

The world is beholden to generous mistakes for the greatest part of the good that is done in it.

Our vices and virtues couple with one another and get children that resemble both their parents.

If a man can hardly inquire into a thing he undervalueth, how can a man of good sense take pains to understand the world?

To understand the world, and to like it, are two things not easily to be reconciled.

That which is called an able man is a great over. valuer of the world, and all that belongeth to it. [True, no doubt, of the ordinary efficient, successful man, but scarcely true of the great practical genius, such as a Cæsar or a Napoleon.]

All that can be said of him is, that he maketh the best of the general mistake.

It is the fools and the knaves that make the wheels of the world turn. They are the world; those few who have sense or honesty sneak up and down single, but never go in herds.

To be too much troubled is a worse way of over-valuing the world than the being too much pleased.

A man that steps aside from the world, and hath leisure to observe it without interest or design, thinks all mankind as mad as they think him, for not agreeing with them in their mistakes.

First of all, one is struck in these aphorisms by the writer's feeling of superiority to the common interests of life. "The government of the world is a great thing," he declares elsewhere; "but it is a very coarse one too, compared with the fineness of speculative knowledge." And this is the view of La Bruyère: "Je ne mets au-dessus d'un grand politique que celui qui néglige de le devenir, et qui se persuade de plus en plus que le monde ne mérite point qu'on s'en occupe." Something of this rather chilly aloofness in our English statesman, which was felt and resented by his contemporaries, was due to philosophy; something of it also sprang from foiled vanity no doubt. But, lest we ascribe too much weight to his personal pique, it must be remembered that he has, in The Trimmer, written one of the most magnanimous passages in the English tongue on the passion of patriotism and one of the noblest encomiums of his native land. If pressed, he might, perhaps, have admitted cynically that such a passion was to be included among the "generous mistakes" to which the world is beholden for its good, but at least no man of his age made of it a purer call to the patient performance of duty. And it is to be remembered also that in

the most admired words he ever wrote, the peroration in praise of Truth, he represents that goddess as no indifferent idol of the schools, but as the active, though long-suffering, judge of righteousness. Altogether he would have subscribed, in his softer moments, to that other Jugement of La Bruyère: "Il y a une philosophie qui nous élève au-dessus de l'ambition et de la fortune. ... Il y a une autre philosophie qui nous soumet et nous assujétit à toutes ces choses en faveur de nos proches ou de nos amis: c'est la meilleure.”

With the memory of these things in mind we shall not go astray in interpreting his chapter Of the World in some such way as this: Life at bottom is a vain and endless repetition of things that have no outcome. Men are but frail creatures, forever reforming and correcting themselves, yet never cured of their weakness. They are divided in the mass into fools and knaves, and only by the malleability of the former and by the selfish practices of the latter is the common business of society kept in motion. Even the knave is a fool in a way, for he is deceived in his valuation of the things he seeks, whereas the man who really knows the world must be weary of its emptiness. From such a dilemma there is only one escape for wisdom, and that is into a higher folly, as human speech must call it, a folly which acts without illusion and without attachment, waiting serenely for the approbation of the everlasting Truth.