cation, for instance, of the character and heart through pain; a much higher end, properly speaking, more truly the final cause of pain, than the preservation of the organic framework from harm. In all such departments Science must for ever be at fault. She has not the organ nor the intuitive sense whereby their truths are discovered. It is like attempting to explain the ecstasies of music by mathematics. Mathematics have to do with music, because music coincides with mathematical truths and principles; but there is something in music which no mere mathematician can pronounce upon or discover—a something which the very child who has an ear knows by intuition. He can tell the child, and Jenny Lind herself, the laws on which her science rests, much better than Jenny Lind knows, or with the deepest study could know; but then the spirit and life of it—he is a miserable charlatan if he pretends to say a word about them as discovered, or even discoverable, by mathematical science. So with electricity, phrenology, &c.; they can tell us phenomena, but what lies beyond those phenomena they cannot tell for ever. And the pretence to do it is the great absurdity of these charlatans, like Mr. Atkinson and Co. Christ told us, but by the intuitions of the soul, not by science. I wonder whether this is intelligible, for I am so really worn in mind, far rather than in body, that I can scarcely get my mind to work at the simplest thought, without a sensation of restlessness. I wish it were not so, but this will all come round with time and rest. CV. - I am Thanks for the information respecting Mrs. afraid to go, lest my conception of the characters should be again linked with inferior associations. I do not think any woman could understand Macbeth or Macduff, only because both their good and bad are essentially masculine. And Lady Macbeth must be either sublime or ludicrous. Twenty to one on the latter. I wish I had heard 'Midsummer Night's Dream,' but I was otherwise engaged. I return Sterling, &c. You must take the consequences of reading 'The Law of Man's Nature.' It is a book thoroughly worthless, but it also leaves a mental degradation which I would not accept as the price of the highest intellectual banquet. The author has done with Humanity what a certain lady did with a bone of a brother's skeleton-made a whistle of it, and with equal good taste and good feeling. Luckily, the concord of sweet sounds was not very bewitching in either case, and if you persevere in hearing the whole concert you will have more patience and less inclination to wince from the discords of a heart out of tune from vanity than I had. I felicitate upon your prospect of drinking-in for two days the music of the charnel house. By the bye, there is one inference worth drawing from the book. Whoever dethrones God, and sneers at Christ, must end in some such worship as the idolatry of Mr. Mesmerist Atkinson. CVI. June, 1851. In a letter I have just read of H. Martineau's, she says that her life was a series of abject discipleships till now, when she is ́independent.' I am glad you dislike the book. It is the most offensive I have read for a long time—not because of its atheism, naked as that is, but because of the impertinent assumption of superiority which characterises the letters of these inspired two. I can conceive a severe science compelling a mind step by step to the atheistic conclusions; and that mind, loyal to truth, refusing to ignore the conclusions or to hide them. But then I can only conceive this done in a noble sadness, and a kind of Divine infinite pity towards the race which are so bereft of their best hopes; and have no patience with a self-complacent smirk which says, 'Shut up the prophets; read Martineau and Atkinson. Friendship, Patriotism, are mesmerised brain; Faith a mistake of the stomach; Love a titillatory movement occurring in the upper part of the nape of the neck; Immortality the craving of dyspepsia; God a fancy produced by a certain pressure upon the grey parts of the hasty-pudding within the skull ; Shakspeare, Plato, Hannibal, and all they did and wrote, weighed by an extra ounce or two of said pudding.' It is the flippant tone in which the most solemn hopes of the noblest humanity are disposed of that disgusts me. Besides, the angelic pair have deduced from their premises a conclusion of disproved, instead of not proven, which is all that science can ever pretend to show. She is inexcusable for saying that her limited capacities are to be the measure of all that is knowable. If there be a cause in this universe the effect of which she cannot perceive, that cause may be God, which simple possibility is quite sufficient to upset all she advances. CVII. June, 1851. I send you the article on Carlyle. Pray read it. It contains some truth and much falsehood-the truth itself so torn from coherence with other parts of Carlyle's meaning as to be false. For instance, in column 2 he says that Carlyle reckons Christianity the most palpable sham and cobweb that ever superstition and hypocrisy invented; which is simply a slander and a lie, as he might have seen by a quotation he makes himself in column 3; 'Sterling read a great deal; earnest books-the Bible, most earnest of books, and his chief favourite.' Lie the second may be found where he says that the only persons for whom Carlyle's heart seems to beat with congenial sympathy are the anarchists of Europe, &c. This after reading Carlyle's 'French Revolution' (if he did). Of course the critique contains truth. Carlyle does cry out too much, in a way that has now become cant, against cant and shams, never even hinting a remedy; but this reviewer has never got into the atmosphere which he breathes, nor attempted to master his meaning and objects, without which thorough comprehension no one has a right to criticise. CVIII. June, 1851. Thanks for 'Owen.' I fear I shall have no time to read him, but I will try. The necessarian scheme is intellectually impregnable; prac tically, an enormous falsehood; and in matters practical pop lar ideas are right, just as they are in metaphysical. There ca be no Matter, metaphysics say, and say, it seems to me, irre fragably; but the popular conception is practically the true one and the very highest philosophy, when it has completed th circle, gets back to that again. So of the necessarian scheme. It is a half-truth, and w shall flounder away into fearful self-correction if we take the 'Constitution of Man' instead of the prophets, economic wellbeing instead of the Gospel, and pet vice and crime as amiable diseases. I am still, in many cases, for the Christian virtue of an English oak-stick, with an English hand to lay it on, and show mercy when you have done justice. Nevertheless, even this one-sided scheme contains a truth. It is quite true that poverty comes from crime; but it is also true that crime is often the result of poverty. Craniology, education, circumstances, &c., are causes, and must not be ignored. But they are not the only causes, and there is a something which can rise above all nobly. Else I think the defence of the prisoner to his judge, when tried for stealing, was unanswerable: Mais, mon Dieu, monsieur, il faut vivre. In my humble opinion the judge's reply, however, on necessarian principles, was quite as philosophical when he said, Je n'en vois pas la nécessité, and sentenced the thief to death. I was well aware of the fact about the invisibility of the sunbeam till it impinges on earthly particles. Therefore I hold this visible universe to be the word of expression of God, who is visible thereby. I do not hold 'material manifestations insufficient for spirituality,' and only interrogate each such manifestation, 'Of what art thou a manifestation?' For instance, a Lord Mayor's feast is a manifestation, and a very material one, of large resources, great contrivance, and vast aldermanic intellect. I acknowledge that I find it insufficient to prove great spirituality, though it is to a Greenlander's train-oil feast what the Exhibition is to his canoe. Multiply the alderman's paradise by the accumulated science of a thousand years, and I do not think it proves us a bit nearer the conversion of this earth into a kingdom of God. I will accept, however, a dish of un-crimped cod on a Christian's table, if you can find it, as such an evidence; or a soup-kitchen, or a ducal suggestion of curry-powder for starving people, provided it comes off his own plate. But the invention of piquant sauces, luxurious furniture, tasteful jewellery, &c. &c. &c. I humbly decline to accept as proofs of anything beyond the fact that man is a very sagacious and surprising beaver. A spirit? Non, mille fois non, unless he can show something more than this. Poor Robert Owen's book, right or wrong, raises Humanity, in my eyes, above a thousand Exhibitions. Cheops and Cephrenes built great pyramids; so did Rhamsinitus, a brick one, very marvellous in its day—a new era in building, they say, as when glass superseded brick. The spirituality of those 'material manifestations?' Mummy of the sacred cat! whose dry carcase has rested there these three thousand years at the expense of the life and breath of the myriad wretches who toiled for their pay of a few onions—say how we shall unswathe the spirituality of that most manifest materialism out of thy most holy cerements. And yet I fancy the progress of the race was made thereby 'patent to the masses,' by a very royal 'patent! I grant the grandeur of the understanding and 'beaverism.' I only say that I measure the spirituality of the grandest undertaking by the degrees of its unselfishness. Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow : CIX. June, 1851. I have been reading some of Leigh Hunt's works lately, the "Indicator,' 'A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla,' and am surprised at the freshness, and sweetness, and Christian, not lax, spirit of human benevolence and toleration which existed in the heart of one who was the contemporary, and even colleague, of Byron. The 'Indicator,' a series of papers like the 'Spectator,' &c., is a most refreshing collection of ancient. stories and kindhearted literary gossip. The Jar of Honey is, in fact, nothing |