Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843

"'Warton,' she exclaimed, 'if you love me, leave this cruel business. Let us live upon a crust. I will work for you. I will submit to any thing to see you calm and happy. This will kill you.'

"'It will, it must!' I cried out in misery. 'I cannot help it. What is to be done?'

"'Retire from it—resign all—every thing—but save us both. This agitation—this ceaseless wear and tear—must eventually, and soon, destroy you. What, then, becomes of me?'

"'Show me, Anna, how I can do what you desire with honour. Show me the way, and I will bless you. Oh, why did I not heed your words before! Why did I suffer myself to be entrapped'—

"She stopped me in my exclamations.

"'You have promised, dear,' said she, 'never to look upon the past. You acted for the best. So did we all. It is our consolation and support. But the present is sad and mournful, and, I believe, it rests with ourselves to secure our happiness for the future. Are you content to do it?'

"'Oh, can you ask me, Anna? Tell me how I may escape without discredit—without shame and one dishonourable taint—and you take me from the depths of my despair. I see no end to this career. I am fixed to the stake, and I must burn.'

"'Listen to me, dearest. You shall write to your uncle without delay, and explain to him your wishes. You shall tell him of your difficulties frankly and unreservedly. Make known to him your state of health, and tell him firmly that you are unequal to the burden which is laid upon you. Should he insist upon a recompense for your loss, you have money of your own there—yield it to him, and these hands shall never rest until they have earned for you every shilling of it back again. Be tranquil, resolute, cheerful, and all will yet be well, I trust—I feel it will.'

"I had once refused to act on her advice, and the consequences had been dire enough. When compliance was too late, I implicitly obeyed her. The letter was written, and an answer came as speedily as we could wish it. It was a kind reply. My uncle was sorry for my illness, and was content to take the business off my hands, if I was ready to resign it in the condition that I had found it. And this, I thanked my God with tears of joy, I was prepared to do. My personal expenses had been trifling. The amount of business done was large—my the profits had not been withdrawn. Although my sufferings had been great, and difficulties had met me which I could neither prevent nor comprehend, still reason told me that the property must have increased in value. It was with alacrity that I engaged, at my uncle's particular request, an accountant to investigate the proceedings of the house, and to pronounce upon its present state. The result of the examination could not but be most satisfactory. It did not occur to me at the time, that my uncle had deemed no accountant necessary when he heaped upon me the responsibility which I had borne so ill. It would have been but fair, methinks. A time was fixed for a meeting with my uncle, and for producing the result of the enquiry. The accountant had been closely engaged at his work for many days, and had brought it to an end only on the evening preceding the day of our appointment. He submitted his estimate to me, and you shall judge my horror when I perused it. There were many sheets of paper, but in one line my misery was summed up. EIGHT THOUSAND POUNDS were deficient and unaccounted for. Yes, and my own small fortune had been included in the amount of capital. The accountant had been careful and exact—there was not a flaw in his reckoning. The glaring discrepancy stared me in the face, and pronounced my ruin. I knew not what to think or do. In accents of the most earnest supplication, I entreated the accountant to pass the night in reviewing his labours, and to afford me, if possible, the means of rescuing my name from the obloquy which, in a few hours, must attach to it. I offered him any sum of money—all that he could ask—for his pains, and he promised to comply with my request. The idea that I had been the victim of a trick, a fraud, never glanced across my mind. No, when my wretchedness permitted me to think at all, I suspected and accused no one but myself. I could imagine and believe that, inadvertently, I had committed some great error when my soul had been darkened by the daily and hourly anxieties which had followed it so long. But how to discover it? How to make my innocence apparent to the world? How to face my uncle? How to brave the taunts of men? How, above all, to meet the huge demands which soon would press and fall upon me? The tortures of hell cannot exceed in acuteness all that I suffered that long and bitter night. The accountant was waiting for me in the parlour when I left my bed. He had spent the night as I had wished him but had not found one error in his calculations. I tore the papers from his hands, and strained my eyes upon the pages to extract the lie which existed there to damn me. It would not go—it could not be removed. I was a doomed, lost man. Whatever might be the consequence, I resolved to see my uncle, and to speak the truth. I relied upon the sympathy which I believed inherent in the nature of man. I relied upon my own integrity, and the serenity which conscious innocence should give. I met my uncle. I shall never forget that interview. He received me in his private house—in his drawing-room. We were alone. He sat at a table: his face was somewhat pale, but he was cool and undisturbed—ah, how much more so than his trembling sacrifice! I placed before him the condemning paper. It was that only that he cared to see. He looked at once to the result, and then, without a word, he turned his withering eye upon me.

"'I know it,' I cried out, not permitting him to speak. 'I know what you would say. It is a mystery, and I cannot solve it. There is a fearful error somewhere—but where I know not. I am as innocent—'

"'Innocent!' exclaimed my uncle, in a tone of bitterness, 'Well, go on, sir.'

"'Yes, innocent,' I repeated. 'Time will prove it, and make the mystery clear. My brain is now confused; but it cannot be that this gigantic error can escape me when I am calm—composed. Grant me but time.'

"'I grant nothing,' said my uncle, fiercely. 'Plunderer! I show no mercy. You would have shown me none—you would have left me in the lurch, and laughed at me as you made merry with your stolen wealth. Mark me, sir—restore it—labour till you have made it good, or I crush you—once, and for ever.'

"I was rendered speechless by these words. I attempted to make answer; but my tongue clove to the roof of my mouth—my throat grew dry and hot—my brain was dizzy, and the room swam round me. I thought of the name which I had been striving for years to build up—the honourable name which I had gained—the height from which I was about to fall—the yawning gulf below—a thousand painful thoughts rushed in one instant to my mind, and overcame me. I should have fallen to the earth, had not my heart found in my eyes a passage for its grief, and rendered me weaker than a child before a creature who had never felt the luxury of one human tear. I wept aloud and fearfully.

"'Guilt, guilt, palpable guilt!' exclaimed my uncle. 'None but the guilty weep. You do not take me by surprise, young man. I was prepared for this—I have but a word to say. Restore this money, or undertake to pay it back to me—to the last farthing of my lawful claim. Do this, and I forgive you, and forget your indiscretion. Refuse, and to-morrow you are a bankrupt and a beggar. Leave me, and take time for your decision. Come to me again this evening. If you fail—you may expect a visit in the morning.'

"This was said deliberately, but in a tone most expressive of sincerity. I staggered from his presence, and hurried homeward. A sickening sensation checked me as I approached my door. I could not enter it. I rushed away; and in the open fields, where I could weep and rave unnoticed and alone, I cursed my fate, and entreated heaven to smite me with its thunders. My mind was tottering. Hours passed before I reached the house again, how, when, or by what means I arrived there, I could not tell. The servant girl who gave me admittance looked savagely upon me, as I thought. It was sorrow, and not anger, that was written in her face; but how could I discriminate? Her mistress was seriously ill. She had been alarmed by the visit of a gentleman, who waited for me in the parlour, and by my protracted absence; and her agitation had brought on the pangs of labour. A physician was now with her. Who was this gentleman? I entered the room, and there the fiend sate, white with irritation and gnawing disappointment. I started back, but he advanced to me—held my papers to my face, and pointed to one portion of them with a finger that was alive with rage and agitation.

"'Is it true?' asked my uncle, gnashing his teeth. 'Answer me—yes or no?—one word, is it true?'

"'It is a lie!' I answered, ignorant of his meaning, and half crazed with the excitement. 'I am innocent—innocent—Heaven knows I am.'

"'Have you, or have you not given to Gilbert, for these heavy sums, a power of attorney? Has he got it? Answer me in a word.'

"'He advanced me money,' I replied, 'and I gave him such documents as he required.'

"'Enough!' said my uncle. 'You are a beggar!'—and without another word he left me.

"For a week my wife remained in a dangerous condition. Threatened with the loss of her, I did not leave her side. What was the business to me at such a time?—what was reputation—what life? Life!—sir, I carried about with me a potent poison, and I waited only for her latest breath to drink it off, and join her in the grave. She rallied, however, and once more I walked abroad—to find myself a bankrupt and a castaway. The very day that my uncle quitted me, he called my creditors together—exposed the state of my affairs—and accused me of the vilest practices. A docket was struck against me. Every thing that I possessed was dragged away—even to the bed on which my Anna had been cast, and which she so much needed now. Every thing was gone; but the blow had fallen, and I was callous to the loss. In the midst of the desolation I struggled to preserve one trifle from the common wreck. Do not smile, sir, when I mention my reputation. Yes, I felt that if it could be rescued all might be spared, and I might yet defy and shame my persecutors. I appealed to the commissioner who had charge of my estate. I proclaimed aloud, and in the face of men, my innocence. I conjured him to subject me to the severest trial—to compel the closest examination of my affairs—my books—and every individual connected with the house. I demanded it for the sake of justice—for my own sake, and for the sake of the poor creatures—I was a father now—whose fortunes were linked with mine, whose bread depended upon the verdict which should be pronounced against me. My passionate supplication was not in vain. The affairs of our house were looked into—the business that had been done for years was sifted—and clerks and men were subjected to every interrogatory that could elucidate a fact. At the end of six months it was publicly announced that an important error had been discovered—that the estimate given to me was incorrect, and by many thousand pounds greater than the true value.

"There had been a mistake! The bankrupt departed from the court without a blemish on his character. He had been indiscreet in entering heedlessly upon so large an undertaking, and must pay dearly for that in discretion. He was strictly liable and bound to pay what he had acknowledged with his hand to be a lawful debt. There was no help for him. The young man was worthy of commiseration, and his creditors should show him mercy." This was the verdict of the commissioner, spoken in the ears of one who was a stranger to mercy, and who had vowed to show me none. Guilt, however, attached to my good name no longer, and I smiled at his malignity. It was too soon to smile. The secret of all my difficulty was now explained. Trading upon a false capital, to an extravagant extent beyond the real one—draining my exchequer of its resources to pay an ever-recurring interest, whilst the principal was but a fiction in the estate, it was no wonder that I became hemmed in by claims impossible to meet, and that the services of Mr Gilbert were so soon in requisition. In giving to Mr Gilbert a power over the firm, I acted according to my ideas of justice. When I was impoverished, he furnished me with the means of keeping up the credit of the house. But for him it must have fallen. I believed that I was solvent. Why should I hesitate to make this man secure? But it is for this preference, which rendered my uncle's dividend comparatively nothing, that I have been followed through my life with rancour and malevolence unparalleled. Mark me, sir; the mistake, as it was called—the vital error—was a deliberate fraud committed by my uncle at the outset.

He had withdrawn this heavy sum of money at the beginning—he had resolved to keep me for my life his servant and his slave—to feast upon the dropping sweat of my exhausted mind—to convert my heart's blood into gold, which was his god. He hated me for my conduct towards him in my boyhood, which he had neither forgotten nor forgiven; and his detestation gave zest to his hellish desire of accumulating wealth at any cost. Had I applied to him, had I entered into new engagements with him, given to him the securities which, from a notion of right, I had presented to Gilbert—had I made over to the fiend soul as well as body, I might still have retained his friendship, still been permitted to labour and to toil for his aggrandizement and ease. It was Gilbert himself who revealed to me his patron's villany. It was time for the vultures to quarrel when they could not both fatten on my prostrate carcass; but they were bound together by the dark doings of years, and it was only by imperfect hints and innuendoes that I was made aware of their treachery. If proofs existed to convict my uncle, Gilbert could not afford to produce them. The price was life, or something short of it; but I heard enough for satisfaction. Although I was deprived of everything that I possessed, my mind recovered its buoyancy, and my spirit, after the first shock, grew sanguine. I had been proclaimed an innocent and injured man, and my beloved Anna was at my side smiling and rejoicing. In our overthrow, she beheld only the dark storm of morning, that sometimes ushers in the glorious noon and golden sunset. I spoke of the past with anger; she reverted to it with the chastened sorrow of a repentant angel. I looked to the future with distrust and apprehension, she, with a bright, abiding confidence. Never had she appeared so happy, so contented—never had the smile remained so constant to her cheek, so unalloyed with touch of care, as when we stood houseless and homeless in the world, and nothing but her fortitude and love were left me to rely upon. My first care after my dismission into life again, was to obtain my certificate from my creditors, and with almost all of them I was successful. The exceptions were my uncle, and three individuals—his creatures, and willing instruments of torture. They were sufficient to brand me with disgrace, and to affix for ever to my name that mark of infamy which an after life of virtue shall never wash away or hide. UNCERTIFICATED BANKRUPT was the badge I carried with me. From this period my decline was rapid and unequivocal. A creditor, who had not proved his debt upon the estate, hearing tell of my defenceless situation, cast me forthwith into prison. I will not tell you of the sufferings we endured during a two years' cruel incarceration. Starvation and its horrors came gradually upon us. Application upon application was made to my uncle; entreaties for nothing more than justice; and my poor meek Anna was turned with contumely from his doors. After years of privation, a glimmering of light stole in upon us, to be soon extinguished. I obtained temporary employment in a school far away from the scenes of my misery, and hither my evil fortune followed me. The schoolmaster was an ignorant, gross man. He gained my services for a song, and he treated me with disrespect in consequence. I had been with him about six months when some silver spoons were stolen from his house. The thief escaped detection; but the master received an anonymous communication, containing a false history of my life, with a true statement of my unfortunate position. He at once charged me with the crime of being an uncertificated bankrupt. I confessed to it, and the very day I was dragged before a magistrate on suspicion of felony. I was acquitted, it is true, for want of evidence; but what could acquit me—what could release me from the super-added stigma? An uncertificated bankrupt, and a suspected felon! Alas! the charity of man will not look further than the surface of things, and is it not secretly pleased to find there, rather an excuse for neglect, than a reason for exertion? Excited almost to madness by privation and want, and unable to get assistance from a human being, I visited my uncle. I could not see my wife and children drooping and sinking day by day, and not make one great struggle for their rescue. I resolved to accost him with meekness and humility—yes, to fall upon my knees and kiss the dust before him, so that he would fill their famished mouths. He would not see me. I watched for him in the street, and there addressed him. He reviled me—cast me off—provoked me to exasperation, and finally gave me into custody for an attempt upon his life. Again I was taken to the magistrate, but not again discharged so easily. My character and previous offences were exhibited. The magistrate, serious with judicial sorrow, looked upon me as you would turn an eye towards a reptile that defiles the earth. I appealed to him, and in a loud and animated voice proclaimed my grievances. It was suggested that I was a lunatic, and whilst the justice committed me to hard labour, he benevolently promised that the prison surgeon should visit me, and pronounce upon my fitness for Saint Luke's. It was during my temporary confinement for this offence, that I was seized with the illness from which I have never since been free. For three years I was unable to work for my family, and by the end of that period we were sunk into the lowest depths. My Anna sickened likewise; but as long as she was able she laboured for our support. We have been hunted and driven from place to place, and the little which we have been able to earn in our wanderings, has hardly kept us alive. Twice have I stolen a loaf of bread to appease the children's hunger. What could I do? I could not bear to see their languid glassy eyes, and hear their little voices imploring for the food—God knows, I could not let them die before my face—I could not be their murderer—I could not—"

"Stay, Mr Warton," said I, interrupting the narrator, "I have heard enough. Spare me for the present. Your statements must be corroborated. This is all I ask. Leave the rest to me."

If the reader has perused, with painful interest, the account that I have laid before him, let me gratify him with the intelligence that I have accomplished for this unfortunate family all that I could wish. Warton's account of himself was strengthened and confirmed by the strict enquiry which I set on foot immediately. He was, as he asserted, an innocent and injured man. Satisfied of this, I transmitted to the worthy judge, who had been moved by the man's misfortunes, a faithful history of his life. I was not disappointed here. It was that functionary who obtained for Warton the situation which he at present fills—and for his children the education which they are now receiving. Nor was this his first exertion on their behalf. It was he who furnished them with clothing on the night of the criminal's discharge. They are restored to happiness, to comfort, and to health. The moderate ambition of the faithful Anna is realized, and my vision is a vision no longer.

Reader, I have nothing more to add. I have told you a simple tale and a true one. It is for you to say whether it shall be—useless and uninstructive.

* * * * *

FREDERICK SCHLEGEL.[1 - 1. Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur von FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL. Neue auflage. Berlin, 1842.2. Lectures on the History of Ancient and Modern Literature, from the German of Frederick Schlegel. New edition. Blackwood: Edinburgh and London, 1841.3. The Philosophy of History, translated from the German of FRIEDRICH VON SCHLEGEL, with a Memoir of the Author, by JAMES BURTON ROBERTSON, Esq. In two vols. London, 1835. Reprinted in America, 1841.4. Philosophie des Lebens von FRIEDRICH SCHLEGEL. Wien, 1828.]

"I would not have you pin your faith too closely to these SCHLEGELS," said FICHTE one day at Berlin to VARNHAGEN VON ENSE, or one of his friends, in his own peculiar, cutting, commanding style—"I would not have you pin your faith to these Schlegels. I know them well. The elder brother wants depth, and the younger clearness. One good thing they both have—that is, hatred of mediocrity; but they have also both a great jealousy of the highest excellence; and, therefore, where they can neither be great themselves nor deny greatness in others, they, out of sheer desperation, fall into an outrageous strain of eulogizing. Thus they have bepraised Goethe, and thus they have bepraised me."[2 - Denkwürdigkeiten von K. A. VARNHAGEN VON ENSE. Mannheim, 1837. Vol. ii. p. 60.]

Some people, from pride, don't like to be praised at all; and all sensible people, from propriety, don't like to be praised extravagantly: whether from pride or from propriety, or from a mixture of both, philosopher Fichte seemed to have held in very small account the patronage with which he was favoured at the hands of the twin aesthetical dictators, the Castor and Pollux of romantic criticism; and, strange enough also, poet Goethe, who had worship enough in his day, and is said to have been somewhat fond of the homage, chimes in to the same tune thus: "the Schlegels, with all their fine natural gifts, have been unhappy men their life long, both the one and the other; they wished both to be and do something more than nature had given them capacity for; and accordingly they have been the means of bringing about not a little harm both in art and literature. From their false principles in the fine arts—principles which, however much trumpeted and gospeled about, were in fact egotism united with weakness—our German artists have not yet recovered, and are filling the exhibitions, as we see, with pictures which nobody will buy. Frederick, the younger of these Dioscouri, choked himself at last with the eternal chewing of moral and religious absurdities, which, in his uncomfortable passage through life, he had collected together from all quarters, and was eager to hawk about with the solemn air of a preacher to every body: he accordingly betook himself, as a last refuge, to Catholicism, and drew after him, as a companion to his own views, a man of very fair but falsely overwrought talent—Adam Müller.

"As for their Sanscrit studies again, that was at bottom only a pis aller. They were clear-sighted enough to perceive that neither Greek nor Latin offered any thing brilliant enough for them; they accordingly threw themselves into the far East; and in this direction, unquestionably, the talent of Augustus William manifests itself in the most honourable way. All that, and more, time will show. Schiller never loved them: hated them rather; and I think it peeps out of our correspondence how I did my best, in our Weimar circles at least, to keep this dislike from coming to an open difference. In the great revolution which they actually effected, I had the luck to get off with a whole skin, (sie liessen mich noth dürftig stehen,) to the great annoyance of their romantic brother Novalis, who wished to have me simpliciter deleted. 'Twas a lucky thing for me, in the midst of this critical hubbub, that I was always too busy with myself to take much note of what others were saying about me.

"Schiller had good reason to be angry with them. With their aesthetical denunciations and critical club-law, it was a comparatively cheap matter for them to knock him down in a fashion; but Schiller had no weapons that could prostrate them. He said to me on one occasion, displeased with my universal toleration even for what I did not like. 'KOTZEBUE, with his frivolous fertility, is more respectable in my eyes than that barren generation, who, though always limping themselves, are never content with bawling out to those who have legs—STOP!'"[3 - Briefwechse Zwischen GOETHE und ZELTER. Berlin, 1834. Vol. vi. p. 318.]

That there is some truth in these severe remarks, the paltry personal squibs in the Leipzig Almanach for 1832, which called them forth, with regard to Augustus Schlegel at least, sufficiently show: but there is a general truth involved in them also, which the worthy fraternity of us who, in this paper age, wield the critical pen, would do well to take seriously to heart; and it is this, that great poets and philosophers have a natural aversion as much to be praised and patronized, as to be rated and railed at by great critics; and very justly so. For as a priest is a profane person, who makes use of his sacred office mainly to show his gods about, (so to speak,) that people may stare at them, and worship him; so a critic who forgets his inferior position in reference to creative genius, so far as to assume the air of legislation and dictatorship, when explanation and commentary are the utmost he can achieve, has himself only to blame, if, after his noisy trumpet has blared itself out, he reaps only ridicule from the really witty, and reproof from the substantially wise. Not that a true philosopher or poet shrinks from, and does not rather invite, true criticism. The evil is not in the deed, but in the manner of doing it. Here, as in all moral matters, the tone of the thing is the soul of the thing. And in this view, the blame which Fichte and Goethe attach to the Schlegels, amounts substantially to this, not that in their critical vocation the romantic brothers wanted either learning or judgment generally, but that they were too ambitious, too pretenceful, too dictatorial that they must needs talk on all subjects, and always as if they were the masters and the lions, when they were only the servants and the exhibitors; that they made a serious business of that which is often best done when it is done accidentally, viz. discussing what our neighbours are about, instead of doing something ourselves; and that they attempted to raise up an independent literary reputation, nay, and even to found a new poetical school, upon mere criticism—an attempt which, with all due respect for Aristarchus and the Alexandrians, is, and remains, a literary impossibility.

But was Frederick Schlegel merely a critic? No He was a philosopher also, and not a vulgar one; and herein lies the foundation of his fame. His criticism, also, was thoroughly and characteristically a philosophical criticism; and herein mainly, along with its vastness of erudition and comprehensiveness of view, lies the foundation of its fame. To understand the criticism thoroughly, one must first understand the philosophy. Will the _un_philosophical English reader have patience with us for a few minutes while we endeavour to throw off a short sketch of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel? If the philosophical system of a transcendental German and Viennese Romanist, can have small intrinsic practical value to a British Protestant, it may extrinsically be of use even to him as putting into his hands the key to one of the most intellectual, useful, an popular books of modern times—"The history of ancient and modern literature, by Frederick Von Schlegel,"—a book, moreover, which is not merely "a great national possession of the Germans," as by one of themselves it has been proudly designated, but has also, through the classical translation of Mr Lockhart,[4 - Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern. Blackwoods, Edinburgh, 1841.] been made the peculiar property of English literature.

In the first chapter of his "Philosophie des Lebens," the Viennese lecturer states very clearly the catholic and comprehensive ground which all philosophy must take that would save itself from dangerous error. The philosopher must start from the complete living totality of man, formed as he is, not of flesh merely, a Falstaff—or of spirit merely, a Simon Pillarman and Total Abstinence Saint—but of both flesh and spirit, body and soul, in his healthy and normal condition. For this reason clearly—true philosophy is not merely sense-derived and material like the French philosophy of Helvetius, nor altogether ideal like that of Plotinus, and the pious old mathematical visionaries at Alexandria; but it stands on mother earth, like old Antaeus drinking strength therefrom, and filches fire at the same time, Prometheus-like, from heaven, feeding men with hopes—not, as Aeschylus says, altogether "blind," ([Greek: tuphlas d eu autois elôidas katôkioa)] but only blinking. Don't court, therefore, if you would philosophize wisely, too intimate an acquaintance with your brute brother, the baboon—a creature, whose nature speculative naturalists have most cunningly set forth by the theory, that it is a parody which the devil, in a fit of ill humour, made upon God's noblest work, man; and don't hope, on the other hand, as many great saints and sages have done, by prayer and fasting, or by study and meditation, to work yourself up to a god, and jump bodily out of your human skin. Assume as the first postulate, and lay it down as the last proposition of your "philosophy of life," that a man is neither a brute, nor a god nor an angel, but simply and sheerly a MAN. Furthermore, as man is not only a very comprehensive and complex, but also, (to appearance at least,) in many points, a very contrary and contradictory creature, see that you take the whole man along with you into your metaphysical chamber; for if there be one paper that has a bearing in the case amissing out of your green bag, (which has happened only too often,) the evidence will be imperfect, and the sentence false or partial—shake your wig as you please. Remember, that though you may be a very subtle logician, the soul of man is not all made up of logic; remember that reason, (Vernunft,) the purest that Kant ever criticized withal, is not the proper vital soul in man; is not the creative and productive faculty in intellect at all, but is merely the tool of that which, in philosophers no less than in poets, is the proper inventive power, IMAGINATION, as Wordsworth phrases it: Schlegel's word is fantasie. Remember that in more cases than academic dignities may be willing to admit, the heart (where a man has one) is the only safe guide, the only legitimate ruler of the head; and that a mere metaphysician, and solitary speculator, however properly trimmed,

"One to whose smooth-rubb'd soul can cling
Nor form nor feeling, great nor small;
A reasoning, self-sufficing thing,
An intellectual all-in-all,"

may write very famous books, profound even to unintelligibility, but can never be a philosopher. Therefore reject Hegel, "that merely thinking, on a barren heath speculating, self-sufficient, self-satisfied little EGO;"[5 - This is Menzel's phrase, not Schlegel's. "Hegel's centrum war ein blos denkendes, auf öder Heide spekulirendes, kleines, suffisantes, selbstgenügsames Ichlein." The untranslatable beauty of the German is in the diminutive with which the sentence closes. It is difficult to say whether Menzel or Schlegel shows the greater hostility to the poor Berlin philosopher.] and consider Kant as weighed in the balance and found wanting on his own showing: for if that critical portal of pure reason had indeed been sufficient, as it gave itself out to be, for all the purposes of a human philosophy, what need was there of the "practical back-door" which, at the categorical command of conscience, was afterwards laid open to all men in the "Metaphysic of Ethics?" As little will you allow your philosophical need to be satisfied with any thing you can get from SCHELLING; for however well it sounds to "throw yourself from the transcendental emptiness of ideal reason into the warm embrace of living and luxuriant nature," here also you will find yourself haunted by the intellectual phantom of absolute identity, (say absolute inanity,) or in its best phasis a "pantheizing deification of nature." Strange enough as it may seem, the true philosophy is to be found any where rather than among philosophers. Each philosopher builds up a reasoned system of a part of existence; but life is based upon God-given instincts and emotions, with which reason has nothing to do; and nature contains many things which it is not given to mortal brain to comprehend, much less to systematize. True philosophy is not to be found in any intellectual system, much less in any of the Aristotelian quality, where the emotional element in man is excluded or subordinated; but in a living experience. To know philosophy, therefore, first know life. To learn to philosophize, learn to live; and live not partially, but with the full outspread vitality of human reason. You go to college, and, as if you were made altogether of head, expect some Peter Abelard forthwith, by academic disputation, to reason you into manhood; but neither manhood nor any vital WHOLE ever was learned by reasoning. Pray, therefore, to the Author of all good, in the first place, that you may be something rather than that you may know something. Get yourself planted in God's garden, and learn to GROW. Woo the sun of life, which is love, and the breeze which is enthusiasm, an impulse from that same creative Spirit, which, brooding upon the primeval waters, out of void brought fulness, and out of chaos a world.

Such, shortly, so far as we can gather, is the main scope, popularly stated, of Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, as it is delivered in his two first lectures on the philosophy of life, the first being titled, "Of the thinking soul, or the central point of consciousness;" and the second, "Of the loving soul, or the central point of moral life." The healthy-toned reader, who has been exercised in speculations of this kind, will feel at once that there is much that is noble in all this, and much that is true; but not a little also, when examined in detail, of that sublime-sounding sweep of despotic generality, (so inherent a vice of German literature,) which delights to confound the differences, rather than to discriminate the characters, of things; much that seems only too justly to warrant that oracular sentence of the stern Fichte with which we set out, "The younger brother wants clearness;" much that, when applied to practice, and consistently followed out in that grand style of consistency which belongs to a real German philosopher, becomes what we in English call Puseyism and Popery, and what Goethe in German called a "chewing the cud of moral and religious absurdities." But we have neither space nor inclination, in this place, to make an analysis of the Schlegelian philosophy, or to set forth how much of it is true and how much of it is false. Our intention was merely to sketch a rapid outline, in as popular phrase as philosophy would allow itself to be clothed in; to finish which outline without extraneous remark, with the reader's permission, we now proceed.

If man be not, according to Aristotle's phrase, a [Greek: zôon logikon] in his highest faculty, a ratiocinative, but rather an emotional and imaginative animal; and if to start from, as to end, in mere reason, be in human psychology a gross one-sidedness, much more in theology is such a procedure erroneous, and altogether perverse. If not the smallest poem of a small poet ever came to him from mere reason, but from something deeper and more vital, much less are the strong pulsations of pure emotion, the deep-seated convictions of religious faith in the inner man, to be spoke of as things that mere reason can either assert or deny; and in fact we see, when we look narrowly into the great philosophical systems that have been projected by scheming reasoners in France and Germany, each man out of his own brain, that they all end either in materialism and atheism on the one hand, or in idealism and pantheism on the other. All our philosophers have stopped short of that one living, personal, moral God, on whose existence alone humanity can confidently repose—who alone can give to the trembling arch of human speculation that keystone which it demands. The idea of God, in fact, is not a thing that individual reason has first to strike out, so to speak, by the collision or combination of ideas, the collocation of proofs, and the concatenation of arguments. It is a living growth rather of our whole nature, a primary instinct of all moral beings, a necessary postulate of healthy humanity, which is given and received as our life and our breath is, and admits not of being reasoned into any soul that has it not already from other sources. And as no philosopher of Greek or German times that history tells of, ever succeeded yet in inventing a satisfactory theology, or establishing a religion in which men could find solace to their souls, therefore it is clear that that satisfactory Christian theology and Christian religion which we have, and not only that, but all the glimpses of great theological truth that are found twinkling through the darkness of a widespread superstition, came originally from God by common revelation, and not from man by private reasoning. The knowledge of God and a living theology is, in fact, a simple science of experience like any other, only of a peculiar quality and higher in degree. All true human knowledge in moral matters rests on experience, internal or external, higher or lower, on tradition, on language as the bearer of tradition, on revelation; while that false, monstrous, and unconditioned science to which the pride of human reason has always aspired, which would grasp at every thing at once by one despotic clutch, and by a violent bound of logic bestride and beride the ALL, is, and remains, an oscillating abortion that always would be something, and always can be nothing. A living, personal, moral God, the faith of nations, the watch-word of tradition, the cry of nature, the demand of mind, received not invented, existing in the soul not reasoned into it—this is the gravitating point of the moral world, the only intelligible centre of any world; from which whatsoever is centrifugal errs, and to which whatsoever is opposed is the devil.

Not private speculation, therefore, or famous philosophies of any kind, but the living spiritual man, and the totality of the living flow of sacred tradition on which he is borne, and with which he is encompassed, are the two grand sources of "the philosophy of life." Let us follow these principles, now, into a few of their wide-spread streams and multiform historical branchings. First, the Bible clearly indicates what the profoundest study of the earliest and most venerable literatures confirms, that man was not created at first in a brutish state, crawling with a slow and painful progress out of the dull slime of a half organic state into apehood, and from apehood painfully into manhood; but he was created perfect in the image of God, and has fallen from his primeval glory. This is to be understood not only of the state of man before the Fall as recorded in the two first chapters of Genesis; but every thing in the Bible, and the early traditions of famous peoples, warrants us to believe, that the first ages of men before the Flood, were spiritually enlightened from one great common source of extraordinary aboriginal revelation; so that the earliest ages of the world were not the most infantine and ignorant to a comprehensive survey, as modern conceit so fondly imagines, but the most gigantic and the most enlightened. That beautiful but material and debasing heathenism, with which our Greek and Latin education has made us so familiar, is only a defaced fragment of the venerable whole which preceded it, that old and true heathenism of the holy aboriginal fathers of our race. "There were GIANTS on the earth in those days." We read this; but who believes it? We ought seriously to consider what it means, and adopt it bona fide into our living faith of man, and man's history. Like the landscape of some Alpine country, where the primeval granite Titans, protruding their huge shoulders every where above us and around, make us feel how petty and how weak a thing is man; so ought our imagination to picture the inhabitants of the world before the Flood. Nobility precedes baseness always, and truth is more ancient than error. Antediluvian man—antediluvian nature, is to be imaged as nobler in every respect, more sublime and more pure than postdiluvian man, and postdiluvian nature. But mighty energies, when abused, produce mighty corruptions; hence the gigantic scale of the sins into which the antediluvian men fell; and the terrible precipitation of humanity which followed. This is a point of primary importance, in every attempt to understand how to estimate the value of that world-famous Greek philosophy, which is commonly represented as the crown and the glory of the ancient world. All that Pythagoras and Plato ever wrote of noble and elevating truths, are merely flashes of that primeval light, in the full flood of which, man, in his more perfect antediluvian state, delighted to dwell; and it is remarkable in the case of Pythagoras, Anaxagoras, Thales, and so many other of the Greek philosophers, that the further we trace them back, we come nearer to the divine truth, which, in the systems of Epicurus, Aristippus, Zeno, or the shallow or cold philosophers of later origin, altogether disappears. Pythagoras and Plato were indeed divinely gifted with a scientific presentiment of the great truths of Christianity soon to be revealed, or say rather restored to the world; while Aristotle, on the other hand, is to be regarded as the father of those unhappy academical schismatics from the Great Church of living humanity, who allowed the ministrant faculty of reason to assume an unlawful supremacy over the higher powers of intellect, and gave birth to that voracious despotism of barren dialectics, in the middle ages commonly called the scholastic philosophy. The Greek philosophy, however, even its noblest Avatar, Plato, much less in the case of a Zeno or an Aristotle, was never able to achieve that which must be the practically proposed end of all higher philosophy that is in earnest; viz. the coming out of the narrow sphere of the school and the palaestra, uniting itself with actual life, and embodying itself completely in the shape of that which we call a CHURCH. This Platonism could not do. Christianity did it. Revelation did it. God Incarnate did it. Now once again came humanity forth, fresh from the bosom of the divine creativeness, conquering and to conquer. There was no Aristotle and Plato—no Abelard and Bernard here—reason carping at imagination, and imagination despising reason. But once, if but once in four thousand years, man appeared in all the might of his living completeness. Love walked hand in hand with knowledge, and both were identified in life. The spirit of divine peace brooded in the inner sanctuary of the heart, while the outer man was mailed for the sternest warfare. Such was pure Christianity, so long as it lasted—for the celestial plant was condemned to grow in a terrestrial atmosphere; and there, alas! it could only grow with a stunted likeness of itself. It was more than stunted also—it was tainted; for are not all things tainted here? Do we not live in a tainted atmosphere? do we not live in a time out of joint? Does not the whole creation literally groan? Too manifestly it does, however natural philosophers may affect to speak of the book of nature, as if it were the clear and uncorrupted text of the living book of God. Not only man, but the whole environment of external nature, which belongs to him, has been deranged by the Fall. In such a world as this, wherein whoso will not believe a devil cannot believe a God, it was impossible for Christianity to remain in that state of blissful vital harmony with itself with which it set out. It became divided. Extravagant developments of ambitious, monopolizing faculties became manifest on every side. Self-sufficing Pelagianisn and Arianism, here; self-confounding Gnosticism and Manichaeism there. Then came those two great strifes and divisions of the middle ages—the one, that old dualism of the inner man, the ever-repeated strife between reason and imagination, to which we have so often alluded—the other, a no less serious strife of the outward machinery of life, the strife between the spiritual and the temporal powers, between the Pope and the Emperor. This was bad enough; that the two vicars of God on earth should not know to keep the peace among themselves, when the keeping of the peace among others was the very end and aim of the appointment. But worse times were coming. For in the middle ages, notwithstanding the rank evils of barren scholasticism, secular-minded popes, and intrusive emperors, there was still a church, a common Christian religion, a common faith of all Christians; but now, since that anarchical and rebellious movement, commonly called the Reformation, but more fitly termed the revolution, the overturning and overthrowing of the religion of Christendom, we have no more a mere internal strife and division to vex us, but there is an entire separation and divorce of one part of the Christian church (so called) from the main mother institution. The abode of peace has become the camp of war and the arena of battles; that dogmatical theology of the Christian church, which, if it be not the infallible pure mathematics of the moral world, has been deceiving men for 1800 years, and is a liar—that theology is now publicly discussed and denied, scorned and scouted by men who do not blush to call themselves Christians; there is no universal peace any longer to be found in that region where it is the instinct of humanity, before all things, to seek repose; the only religious peace which the present age recognises, is that of which the Indian talks, when he says of certain epochs of the world's history, Brahma sleeps! Those who sleep and are indifferent in spiritual matters find peace; but those who are alive and awake must beat the wind, and battle, belike, with much useless loss of strength, before they can arrive even at that first postulate of all healthy thinking—there is a God. "Ueber Gott werd ich nie streiten," said Herder. "About God I will never dispute." Yet look at German rationalism, look at Protestant theology—what do you see there? Reason usurping the mastery in each individual, without control of the higher faculties of the soul, and of those institutions in life by which those faculties are represented; and as one man's reason is as good as another's, thence arises war of each self-asserted despotism against that which happens to be next it, and of all against all—a spiritual anarchy, which threatens the entire dissolution of the moral world, and from which there is no refuge but in recurring to the old traditionary faith of a revolted humanity, no redemption but in the venerable repository of those traditions—the one and indivisible holy Catholic church of Christ, of whom, as the inner and eternal keystone is God, so the outer and temporal is the Pope.

Such is a general outline of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel—a philosophy belonging to the class theological and supernatural, to the genus Christian, to the species sacerdotal and Popish. Now, without stopping here to blame its sublime generalities and beautiful confusions, on the one hand, or to praise its elevated tendency, its catholic and reconciling tone on the other, we shall merely call attention, in a single sentence, physiologically, to its main and distinguishing character. It was, in fact, (in spirit and tendency, though not in outward accomplishment,) to German literature twenty years ago what Puseyism is now to the English church—it was a bold and grand attempt to get rid of those vexing doubts and disputes on the most important subjects that will ever disquiet minds of a certain constitution, so long as they have nothing to lean on but their own judgment; and as Protestantism, when consistently carried out, summarily throws a man back on his individual opinion, and subjects the vastest and most momentous questions to the scrutiny of reason and the torture of doubt, therefore Schlegel in literary Germany, and Pusey in ecclesiastical England, were equally forced, if they would not lose Christianity altogether, to renounce Protestantism, and to base their philosophy upon sacerdotal authority and ecclesiastical tradition. That Schlegel became a Romanist at Cologne, and Dr Pusey an Anglo-Catholic at Oxford, does not affect the kinship. Both, to escape from the anarchy of Protestant individualism, (as it was felt by them,) were obliged to assert not merely Christianity, but a hierarchy—not merely the Bible, but an authoritative interpretation of the Bible; and both found, or seemed to find, that authoritative interpretation and exorcism of doubt there, where alone in their circumstances, and intellectually constituted as they were, it was to be found. Dr Pusey did not become a Papist like Frederick Schlegel, for two plain reasons—first, because he was an Englishman, second, because he was an English churchman. The authority which he sought for lay at his door; why should he travel to Rome for it? Archbishop Laud had taught apostolical succession before—Dr Pusey might teach it again. But this convenient prop of Popery without the Pope was not prepared for Frederick Schlegel. There was no Episcopal church, no Oxford in Germany, into whose bosom he could throw himself, and find relief from the agony of religious doubt. He was a German, moreover, and a philosopher. To his searching eye and circumspective wariness, the general basis of tradition which might satisfy a Pusey, though sufficiently broad, did not appear sure enough. To his lofty architectural imagination a hierarchical aristocracy, untopped by a hierarchical monarch, did not appear sufficiently sublime. To his all-comprehending and all-combining historical sympathies, a Christian priesthood, with Cyprian, Augustine, and Jerome, but without Hildebrand, Innocent, and Boniface, would have presented the appearance of a fair landscape, with a black yawning chasm in the middle, into which whoever looked shuddered. Therefore Frederick Schlegel, spurning all half measures, inglorious compromises, and vain attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, vaulted himself at once, with a bold leap, into the central point of sacerdotal Christianity. The obstacles that would have deterred ordinary minds had no effect on him. All points of detail were sunk in the over-whelming importance of the general question. Transubstantiation or consubstantiation, conception, maculate or immaculate, were a matter of small moment with him. What he wanted was a divinely commissioned church with sacred mysteries—a spiritual house of refuge from the weary battle of intellectual east winds, blasting and barren, with which he saw Protestant Germany desolated. This house of refuge he found in Cologne, in Vienna; and having once made up his mind that spiritual unity and peace were to be found only in the one mother church of Christendom, not being one of those half characters who, "making I dare not wait upon I would," are continually weaving a net of paltry external no's to entangle the progress of every grand decided yes of the inner man, Schlegel did not for a moment hesitate to make his thought a deed, and publicly profess his return to Romanism in the face of enlightened and "ultra-Protestant" Germany. To do this certainly required some moral courage; and no just judge of human actions will refuse to sympathize with the motive of this one, however little he may feel himself at liberty to agree with the result.

But Frederick Schlegel, a well informed writer has said,[6 - Varnhagen Von Ense, Rahel's Umgang, i. p. 227. "Er war auf besondere Weise Katholisch, und hatte seine Geistesfreiheit dabei gar nicht aufgegeben."] "became Romanist in a way peculiar to himself, and had in no sense given up his right of private judgment." We have not been able to see, from a careful perusal of his works, (in all of which there is more or less of theology,) that there is any foundation for this assertion of Varnhagen. Frederick Schlegel, the German, was as honest and stout a Romanist in this nineteenth century as any Spanish Ferdinand Catholicus in the fifteenth. Freedom of speculation indeed, within certain known limits, and spirituality of creed above what the meagre charity of some Protestants may conceive possible in a Papist, we do find in this man; but these good qualities a St Bernard, a Dante, a Savonarola, a Fénélon, had exhibited in the Romish Church before Schlegel, and others as great may exhibit them again. Freedom of thought, however, in the sense in which it is understood by Protestants, was the very thing which Schlegel, Göres, Adam Müller, and so many others, did give up when they entered the Catholic Church. They felt as Wordsworth did when he wrote his beautiful ode to "Duty;" they had more liberty than they knew how to use—

"Me this uncharter'd freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires;
My hopes no more must change their name—
I long for a repose that ever is the same."

And if it seem strange to any one that Frederick Schlegel, the learned, the profound, the comprehensive, should believe in Transubstantiation,[7 - The following is Schlegel's philosophy of transubstantiation—"Though it be true, that in the Holy Scriptures, in accordance with the symbolical nature of man, there is much that is generally symbolical, and symbolically to be understood; yet when a symbol proceeds immediately from God, it can in this case be nothing less than substantial; it cannot be a mere sign, it must also be something actual; otherwise it would be as if one would palm on the eternal LOGOS, who is the ground of all existence and all knowledge, words without meaning and without power. Quite natural, therefore, it must be regarded, i.e. quite suitable to the nature of the thing, although per se certainly supernatural, and surpassing all comprehension, when that highest symbol which forms the proper principle of unity, and the living central point of Christianity, is perceived to possess this character, that it is at once the sign and the thing signified. For now, that on the high altar of divine love the one great sacrifice has been accomplished for ever, and no flame more can rise from it save the inspiration of a pure God-united will, that solemn act by which the bond formed between the soul and God is from time to time revealed, can consist in nothing else than this—that here the essential substance of the divine power and the divine love is in all its lively fullness communicated to, and received by man, as the miraculous sign of his union with God."—Philosophie des Lebene, p. 376. On the logic of this remarkable passage, those who are strong in Mill and Whately may decide; its orthodoxy belongs to the consideration of the Tridentine doctors.] let him look at a broader aspect of history than that of German books, and ask himself—Did Isabella of Castile—the gentle, the noble, the generous—establish the Inquisition, or allow Ximenes to establish it? In a world which surrounds us on all sides with apparent contradictions, he who admits a real one now and then into his faith, or into his practice, is neither a fool nor a monster.

In his political opinions, Schlegel maintained the same grand consistency that characterizes his religious philosophy. He had more sense, however, and more of the spirit of Christian fraternity in him than, for the sake of absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, from some passages in the Concordia—a political journal, published by him and his friend Adam Müller, in 1820, and quoted by Mr Robertson—it would almost appear that he would have preferred a monarchy limited by states, conceived in the spirit of the middle ages, to the almost absolute form of monarchical government, under whose protection he lived and lectured at Vienna. To some such constitution as that which now exists in Sweden, for instance, we think he would have had no objections. At the same time, it is certain he gave great offence to the constitutional party in Germany, by the anti-popular tone of his writings generally, more perhaps than by any special absolutist abuses which he had publicly patronized. He was, indeed, a decided enemy to the modern system of representative constitutions, and popular checks; a king by divine right according to the idea of our English nonjurors, was as necessary a corner-stone to his political, as a pope by apostolical succession to his ecclesiastical edifice. And as no confessed corruption of the church, represented as it might be by the monstrous brutality of a Borgia, or the military madness of a Julius, was, in his view, sufficient to authorize any hasty Luther to make a profane bonfire of a papal bull; any hot Henry to usurp the trade of manufacturing creeds; so no "sacred right of insurrection," no unflinching patriotic opposition, no claim of rights, (by petitioners having swords in their hands,) are admissible in his system of a Christian state. And as for the British constitution, and "the glorious Revolution of 1688," this latter, indeed, is one of the best of a bad kind, and that boasted constitution as an example of a house divided against itself, and yet not falling, is a perfect miracle of dynamical art, a lucky accident of politics, scarcely to be looked for again in the history of social development, much less to be eagerly sought after and ignorantly imitated. Nay, rather, if we look at this boasted constitution a little more narrowly, and instruct ourselves as to its practical working, what do we see? "Historical experience, the great teacher of political science, manifestly shows that in these dynamical states, which exist by the cunningly devised balance and counter-balance of different powers, what is called governing is, in truth, a continual strife and contention between the Ministry and the Opposition, who seem to delight in nothing so much as in tugging and tearing the state and its resources to pieces between them, while the hallowed freedom of the hereditary monarch seems to serve only as an old tree, under whose shades the contending parties may the more comfortably choose their ground, and fight out their battles."[8 - Philosophie des Lebens, p.407.] It is but too manifest, indeed, according to Schlegel's projection of the universe, that all constitutionalism is, properly speaking, a sort of political Protestantism, a fretful fever of the social body, having its origin (like the religious epidemic of the sixteenth century) in the private conceit of the individual, growing by violence and strife, and ending in dissolution. This is the ever-repeated refrain of his political discourses, puerile enough, it may be, to our rude hearing in Britain, but very grateful to polite and patriotic ears at Vienna, when the cannon of Wagram was yet sounding in audible echo beneath their towers. The propounder of such philosophy had not only the common necessity of all philosophers to pile up his political in majestic consistency with his ecclesiastical creed, but he had also to pay back the mad French liberalism with something more mad if possible, and more despotic. And if also Danton, and Mirabeau, and Robespierre, and other terrible Avatars of the destroying Siva in Paris, had raised his naturally romantic temperament a little into the febrile and delirious now and then, what wonder? Shall the devil walk the public streets at noon day, and men not be afraid?

We said that Frederick Schlegel's philosophy, political and religious, but chiefly religious, was the grand key to his popular work on the history of literature. We may illustrate this now by a few instances. In the first place, the "many-sided" Goethe seems to be as little profound as he is charitable, when he sees nothing in the Sanscrit studies of the romantic brothers but a pis aller, and a vulgar ambition to bring forward something new, and make German men stare. We do not answer for the elder brother; but Frederick certainly made the cruise to the east, as Columbus did to the west, from a romantic spirit of adventure. He was not pleased with the old world—he wished to find a new world more to his mind, and, beyond the Indus, he found it. The Hindoos to him were the Greeks of the aboriginal world—"diese Griechen der Urwelt"—and so much better and more divine than the western Greeks, as the aboriginal world was better and more divine than that which came after it. If imagination was the prime, the creative faculty in man, here, in the holy Eddas, it had sat throned for thousands of years as high as the Himalayas. If repose was sought for, and rest to the soul from the toil and turmoil of religious wars in Europe, here, in the secret meditations of pious Yooges, waiting to be absorbed into the bosom of Brahma, surely peace was to be found. Take another matter. Why did Frederick Schlegel make so much talk of the middle ages? Why were the times, so dark to others, instinct to him with a steady solar effluence, in comparison of which the boasted enlightenment of these latter days was but as the busy exhibition of squibs by impertinent boys, the uncertain trembling of fire-flies in a dusky twilight? The middle ages were historically the glory of Germany; and those who had lived to see and to feel the Confederation of the Rhine, and the Protectorate of Napoleon, did not require the particular predilections of a Schlegel to carry them back with eager reaction to the days of the Henries, the Othos, and the Fredericks, when to be the German emperor was to be the greatest man in Europe, after the Pope. But to Schlegel the middle ages were something more. The glory of Germany to the patriot, they were the glory of Europe to the thinker. Modern wits have laughed at the enthusiasm of the Crusades. Did they weep over the perfidy of the partition of Poland? Do they really trust themselves to persuade a generous mind that the principle of mutual jealousy and mere selfishness, the meagre inspiration of the so called balance of power in modern politics, is, according to any norm of nobility in action, a more laudable motive for a public war, than a holy zeal against those who were at once the enemies of Christ, and (as future events but too clearly showed) the enemies of Europe? Modern wits sneer at the scholastic drivelling or the cloudy mistiness of the writers of the middle ages. Did they ever blush for the impious baseness of Helvetius, for the portentous scaffolding of notional skeletons in Hegel? But, alas! we talk of we know not what. What spectacle does modern life present equal to that of St Bernard, the pious monk of Clairvaux, the feeble, emaciated thinker, brooding, with his dove-like eyes, ("oculos columbinos,") over the wild motions of the twelfth century, and by the calm might of divine love, guiding the sceptre of the secular king, and the crosier of the spiritual pontiff alike? Was that a weak or a dark age, when the strength of mind and the light of love could triumph so signally over brute force, and that natural selfishness of public motive which has achieved its cold, glittering triumphs in the lives of so many modern heroes and heroines—a Louis, a Frederick, a Catharine, a Napoleon? But indeed here, as elsewhere, we see that the modern world has fallen altogether into a practical atheism by the idolatry of mere reason; whereas all true greatness comes not down from the head, but up from the heart of man. In which greatness of the heart, the Bernards and the Barbarossas of the middle ages excelled; and therefore they were better than we.