whoever sold by false weights, from those who altered a balance to those who falsified the Bible, from the bad merchant to the bad priest, from those who swindled by figures to those who made money by miracles;-all, from a certain Jewish banker, who fancied himself a little of a Catholic, to a certain Catholic bishop, who became a little of a Jew, -all the men of the past turned their heads toward each other and trembled. That grave which was yawning for them, and into which were to fall all those fictions which have weighed upon mankind for so many ages, they resolved to close. They resolved to wall it up, to fill it with stones and with rubbish, and to erect upon that pile a gibbet, and to crucify upon that gibbet, warm and bleeding, that grand criminal, the truth. They resolved to make an end, once for all, of the spirit of freedom and emancipation, and to arrest and turn back for ever the ascending force of humanity. Providence conducts to maturity, by the law of universal life, men, things, and events. It suffices, in order that an old world may disappear, that civilization, ascending continually towards its meridian, should shine upon old institutions, old prejudices, old laws, old customs. That radiance burns up and devours the past. At its influence, slowly, and without shock, what ought to decay, decays; what ought to decline, declines; the wrinkles of age grow over all doomed things,-over castes, codes, institutions, religions. This work of decrepitude goes on, in some sort of itself. Yet it is a fruitful decrepitude, under which shoots the germ of the new life. Little by little the ruin is prepared; deep, invisible cracks spread here and there in the darkness, and crumble to dust from below that venerable pile which still stands secure above: and behold, some fine day, all at once, that assem-gious inquiry, philosophic inquiry, universal blage of worm-eaten facts, of which decaying societies are composed, becomes rotten; the edifice is shaken, loosened, and leans over. Then all goes for nothing henceforward. Let there arrive one of those giants peculiar to revolutions, let but the giant raise his hand, and all is over. There is an hour in history when a hunch of the elbow of a Danton may overthrow Europe. The enterprise was formidable;-to undo the labor of twenty generations; to strangle in the nineteenth century, seizing them by the throat, three centuries, the sixteenth, the seventeenth, and the eighteenth, that is to say, Luther, Descartes, and Voltaire,-reli inquiry: to crush throughout Europe that immense vegetation of free thought, springing up here like a huge oak, there like a blade of grass; to marry the knout and the crosier; to diffuse more of Spain in the South, and more of Russia in the North; to revive all that they could of the Inquisition, and to extinguish all that they could of intelligence; to stultify the youth, in other words, to bru1848 was one of those hours:-old feu-talize the future; to cause the world to assist dal, monarchical, and papal Europe, plastered up so fatally by France in 1815, began to totBut a Danton was wanting. The overthrow did not come. Men have often said, in the hackneyed phraseology applied to such events, that 1848 had opened a gulf in human affairs. No. The corpse of the past hung like a dead weight upon Europe; 1848 opened a grave in which to inter that corpse. It is that grave which men mistook for a gulf. ter. In 1848, everything which held by the past, -all that survived of that corpse, met before that grave, not only kings on their thrones, cardinals under their hats, judges under the shadow of the guillotine, captains on their warhorses, were moved; but whoever had an interest of whatever sort in that which was about to disappear; whoever cultivated to his profit a social fiction, or had an abuse to lease or to hire; whoever was keeper of a lie, guardfan of a prejudice, or farmer of a superstition; whoever robbed, extorted, oppressed, lied; at the auto da fé of ideas; to overthrow the tribunes; to suppress the journal, the handbill, the book, the speech, the cry, the murmur, the whisper; to enforce silence; to prosecute thought, in the case of the printer, in the composing-stick, in the type, in the stereotype, in the lithograph, in the picture, in the theatre, on the platform, in the book of the schoolmaster, in the pack of the colporteur; to give to every man, for faith, for law, for aim, and for God,-material interest; to say to the people, Eat, and think not'; to take away from man the brain, and leave him only the belly; to extinguish individual enterprise, local life, national enthusiasm, all those profound instincts which impel men toward the right; to annihilate that personality of the nations, which men call country; to destroy nationality among scattered and dismembered people, the constitution in constitutional states, the republic in France, liberty everywhere; to set foot in every di rection upon human effort;-in a word, to close that gulf which is called Progress. | bardy, by the sabre; in Naples, by the galleys; in Hungary, by the gibbet. To restrain intelligence,-to put the chain upon intellects, their fugitive slaves,-to prevent the past from disappearing, to prevent the future from being born,-to continue themselves kings, princes, nobles, privileged classes, everything became good, everything Such was the vast, enormous, European plan, which no one conceived, for none of those men of the Old World had the genius for that, but which all pursued. As to the plan in itself, as to that gigantic idea of universal oppression, whence came it? Who can tell? Men saw it in the air. It ap-just; all was legitimate. They organized peared on the side of the past. It enlightened certain minds. It pointed out certain modes of action. It was a kind of glimmer issuing from the tomb of Machiavelli. At certain moments in human history, at some things that are plotted, at some things that are done, it seems as if all the old demons of humanity-Louis XI., Philip II., Catherine de' Medici, the Duke of Alba, Torquemada—were gathered apart in a corner, seated around a table, and holding council. We look, we regard them, and instead of these colossals, we find only abortions. We expected the Duke of Alba, we find Schwartzenberg; we looked for Torquemada, and behold Veuillot. The old European despotism continues its march, under the lead of these little men, and goes always on. It is like the Czar Peter in his travels. "We made relays of whatever we found," writes he; "when we could get no more Tartar horses, we took up with asses." To attain that end, the subjection of all men and all things, it was necessary to enter upon a path, obscure, tortuous, steep, difficult; they did enter it. Some of those who entered it knew what they were doing. Parties live upon words; those men whom 1848 had frightened and rallied together have found their catchwords,-religion, family, property. They attacked, with that vulgar address which suffices when men speak to fear, certain obscure quarters of what is called socialism. The struggle was to save religion, property, and family. "Follow your banners!" cried they. The herd of frightened interests rushed after them. They coalesced, they made front, they gathered a party. They had a crowd around them. That crowd was composed of divers elements. The landholder joined it because his rents had come down; the peasant, because he had paid the forty-five centimes; the man who did not believe in God thought it was necessary to save religion, because he had been forced to sell his horses. They separated from this crowd the force which it contained, and availed themselves of it. They enforced the system of oppression by every means, by the law, by the vote, by the legislature, by the tribune, by the jury, by the magistracy, by the police; in Lom for the necessities of the struggle, and spread abroad in the world, a kind of moral ambuscade against freedom, which Ferdinand put in action at Palermo, Antonelli at Rome, Schwartzenberg at Milan and at Pesth, and still later, the men of December, those wolves of the state, at Paris. **** Formerly the world was a place where men walked with slow steps, with backs bent, faces lowered; where the Count de Gouvion was waited upon at table by JeanJacques (Rousseau); where the Chevalier de Rohan beat Voltaire with blows of a cudgel; where they set Daniel De Foe in the pillory; where a city like Dijon was separated from a city like Paris by a will to be made, by robbers at all the corners of the woods, and by ten days of coach: where a book was a kind of infamy and rubbish which the executioner burned on the steps of the Hall of Justice; where superstition and ferocity joined hand in hand; where the pope said to the emperor: Jungamus dexteras, gladium gladio copulemus; where one encountered at every step crosses on which were hung amulets, and gibbets on which were hung men; where there were heretics, Jews, lepers; where the houses had battlements and loopholes; where they shut up the streets with a chain, the rivers with a chain, the cities with walls, the kingdoms with prohibitions and penalties; where, except authority and force, which were closely banded, all was penned up, doled out, cut up, divided, parcelled, hated and hating, scattered and dead; men but dust-power, the king Log. Now, there is a world in which all is alive, united, combined, related, mingled together; a world where reign thought, commerce, and industry; where politics, continually more settled, tends to associate itself with science; a world where the last scaffolds and the last cannon are hastening to cut off their last heads, and to vomit their last shells; a world where the day grows with each minute; a world in which distance has disappeared, where Constantinople is nearer to Paris than Lyons was a century ago, where America and Europe throb with the same pulsation of the heart; a world all circulation and all affection, whose brain is France, whose arteries are railways, and whose fibres are the electric Let us proclaim it firmly, proclaim it even in fall and in defeat, this age is the grandest of all ages; and do you know wherefore? Because it is the most benignant. This age, the immediate issue of the French Revolution, and its first-born, enfranchises the slave in America, uplifts the pariah in Asia, destroys the suttee in India, and extinguishes in Europe the last brands of the stake, civilizes Turkey, penetrates the Koran with the Gospel, dignifies woman, subordinates the right of the strongest to the right of the most just, suppresses pirates, ameliorates penal laws, purifies the galleys, throws the bloody sword in the gutter, condemns the death penalty, takes the chain and ball from the foot of the convict, abolishes torture, degrades and stigmatizes war, weakens the dukes of Alba and the Charles Ninths, plucks out the fangs from tyrants. This age proclaims the sovereignty of the citizen, and the inviolability of life; it crowns the people and consecrates man. In art, it possesses every kind of genius: writers, orators, poets, historians, publicists, philosophers, painters, sculptors, musicians; majesty, grace, power, figure, splendor, depth, color, form, style; it reinforces itself at once in the real and in the ideal, and carries in its hand those two thunderbolts, the true and the beautiful. In science it works all miracles; it makes saltpetre out of cotton, a horse out of steam, a laborer out of the voltaic pile, a courier out of the electric fluid, and a painter of the sun; it bathes itself in the subterranean waters, while it is warmed with the central fires; it opens upon the two infinites those two windows, the telescope on the infinitely great, the microscope on the infinitely little, and it finds in the first abyss the stars of heaven, and in the second abyss the insects which prove the existence of a God. It annihilates time, it annihilates distance, it annihilates suffering; it writes a letter from Paris to London, and has the answer back in ten minutes; it cuts off the leg of a man— the man sings and smiles. It has only to realize-and it already touches it a progress which is nothing by the side of the other miracles which it has already achieved: it has only to find the means of directing in a body of air a bubble of air still lighter; it has already found the bubble of air, it holds it imprisoned, it has yet only to find the impulsive force, only to create the vacuum before the balloon, for example, only to heat the air before the aeronaut, as the rocket does before it; it has only to solve in some manner this problemand it will be solved. And do you know what will happen then? On the very instant, frontiers will disappear, barriers will vanish away. All that is thrown like a Chinese wall around thought, around commerce, around industry, around nationality, around progress, will crumble; in spite of censorships, in spite of the index expurgatorius, it will rain books and journals everywhere; Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau will fall in showers on Rome, on Naples, on Vienna, on St. Petersburg; the human Word becomes manna, and the serf gathers it in the furrow; fanaticisms die; oppression becomes impossible; man no longer crawls upon the earth, he escapes from it; civilization takes to itself the wings of birds, and flies and whirls and alights joyously on all parts of the globe at once: hold! see there-it passes; point your cannon, ye old despotisms, it disdains you; you are but the cannon ball, it is the flash of lightning: no more hatreds, no more interests devouring one another, no more wars; a kind of new life, made up of concord and of light, surrounds and soothes the world; the brotherhood of nations crosses the bounds of space and mingles in the eternal blue; men fraternize in the heavens. No! stand to your glasses steady; The thoughtless are here the wise, A cup to the dead already— Hurrah for the next that dies! There's many a hand that's shaking, There's many a cheek that's sunk; But soon, though our hearts are breaking, They'll burn with the wine we have drunk. So stand to your glasses steady"Tis here the revival lies; A cup to the dead already— And hurrah for the next that dies! Who dreads to the dust returning? Cut off from the land that bore us, A cup to the dead already— And hurrah for the next that dies! RAB AND HIS FRIENDS. Four-and-thirty years ago, Bob Ainslie and I were coming up Infirmary Street from the Edinburgh High School, our heads together, and our arms intertwisted, as only lovers and boys know how, or why. When we got to the top of the street, and turned north, we espied a crowd at the Tron Church. "A dog-fight!" shouted Bob, and was off; and so was I, both of us all but praying that it might not be over before we got up! And is not this boy-nature? and human nature too? and don't we all wish a house on fire not to be out before we see it? Dogs like fighting; old Isaac says they "delight" in it, and for the best of all reasons; and boys are not cruel because they like to see the fight. They see three of the great cardinal virtues of dog or man-courage, endurance, and skill-in intense action. This is very different from a love of making dogs fight, and enjoying, and aggravating, and making gain by their pluck. A boy, be he ever so fond himself of fighting, if he be a good boy, hates and despises all this, but he would have run off with Bob and me fast enough it is a natural, and a not wicked interest, that all boys and men have in witnessing intense energy in action. Does any curious and finely ignorant woman wish to know how Bob's eye at a glance announced a dog-fight to his brain? He did not, he could not see the dogs fighting; it was a flash of an inference, a rapid induction. The crowd round a couple of dogs fighting is a crowd masculine mainly, with an occasional active, compassionate woman, fluttering wildly round the outside, and using her tongue and her hands freely upon the men, as so many "brutes;" it is a crowd annular, compact, and mobile; a crowd centripetal, having its eyes and its heads all bent downwards and inwards, to one common focus. Well, Bob and I are up, and find it is not over: a small, thoroughbred, white bullterrier is busy throttling a large shepherd's dog, unaccustomed to war, but not to be trifled with. They are hard at it; the scientific little fellow doing his work in great style, his pastoral enemy fighting wildly, but with the sharpest of teeth and a great courage. Science and breeding, however, soon had their own; the Game Chicken, as the premature Bob called him, working his way up, took his final grip of poor Yarrow's throat,and he lay gasping and done for. His master, a brown, handsome, big young shepherd from Tweedsmuir, would have liked to have knocked down any man, would "drink up Esil, or eat a crocodile," for that part, if he had a chance: it was no use kicking the little dog; that would only make him hold the closer. Many were the means shouted out in mouthfuls, of the best possible ways of ending it. "Water!" but there was none near, and many cried for it who might have got it from the well at Blackfriars Wynd. "Bite the tail!" and a large, vague, benevolent, middleaged man, more desirous than wise, with some struggle got the bushy end of Yarrow's tail into his ample mouth, and bit it with all his might. This was more than enough for the much-enduring, much-perspiring shepherd, who, with a gleam of joy over his broad visage, delivered a terrific facer upon our large, vague, benevolent, middle-aged friend,-who went down like a shot. Still the Chicken holds; death not far off. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" observed a calm, highly dressed young buck, with an eye-glass in his eye. Snuff, indeed!" growled the angry crowd, affronted and glaring. "Snuff! a pinch of snuff!" again observes the buck, but with more urgency; whereon were produced several open boxes, and from a mull which may have been at Culloden, he took a pinch, knelt down, and presented it to the nose of the Chicken. The laws of physiology | after the mastiff. He made up the Cowgate and of snuff take their course; the Chicken sneezes, and Yarrow is free! The young pastoral giant stalks off with Yarrow in his arms,-comforting him. But the Bull Terrier's blood is up, and his soul unsatisfied; he grips the first dog he meets, and discovering she is not a dog, in Homeric phrase, he makes a brief sort of amende, and is off. The boys, with Bob and me at their head, are after him: down Niddry Street he goes bent on mischief; up the Cowgate like an arrow,-Bob and I, and our small men, panting behind. There, under the single arch of the South Bridge, is a huge mastiff, sauntering down the middle of the causeway, as if with his hands in his pockets: he is old, gray, brindled, as big as a little Highland bull, and has the Shakespearian dewlaps shaking as he goes. The Chicken makes straight at him, and fastens on his throat. To our astonishment, the great creature does nothing but stand still, hold himself up, and roar,-yes, roar; a long, serious, remonstrative roar. How is this? Bob and I are up to them. He is muzzled! The bailies had proclaimed a general muzzling, and his master, studying strength and economy mainly, had encompassed his huge jaws in a home-made apparatus, constructed out of the leather of some ancient breechin. His mouth was open as far as it could be; his lips curled up in rage,-a sort of terrible grin; his teeth gleaming, ready, from out the darkness; the strap across his mouth tense as a bowstring; his whole frame stiff with indignation and surprise; his roar asking us all round, "Did you ever see the like of this?" He looked a statue of anger and astonishment, done in Aberdeen granite. We soon had a crowd: the Chicken held on. "A knife!" cried Bob; and a cobbler gave him his knife; you know the kind of knife, worn away obliquely to a point, and always keen. I put its edge to the tense leather; it ran before it; and then!- -one sudden jerk of that enormous head, a sort of dirty mist about his mouth, no noise,-and the bright and fierce little fellow is dropped, limp and dead. A solemn pause; this was more than any of us had bargained for. I turned the little fellow over, and saw he was quite dead; the mastiff had taken him by the small of the back like a rat, and broken it. He looked down at his victim appeased, ashamed, and amazed; snuffed him all over, stared at him, and taking a sudden thought, turned round and trotted off. Bob took the dead dog up, and said, "John, we'll bury him after tea." "Yes," said I, and was off at a rapid swing; he had forgotten some engagement. He turned up the Candlemaker Row, and stopped at the Harrow Inn. There was a carrier's cart ready to start, and a keen, thin, impatient, black-a-vised little man, his hand at his gray horse's bead, looking about angrily for something. "Rab, ye thief!" said he, aiming a kick at my great friend, who drew cringing up, and avoiding the heavy shoe with more agility than dignity, and watching his master's eye, slunk dismayed under the cart, his ears down, and as much as he had of tail down too. What a man this must be,-thought I,-to whom my tremendous hero turns tail! The carrier saw the muzzle hanging, cut and useless, from his neck, and I eagerly told him the story, which Bob and I always thought, and still think, Homer, or King David, or Sir Walter alone were worthy to rehearse. The severe little man was mitigated, and condescended to say, " Rab, my man, puir Rabbie," whereupon the stump of a tail rose up, the ears were cocked, the eyes filled, and were comforted; the two friends were reconciled. Hupp!" and a stroke of the whip were given to Jess; and off went the three. ་་ Bob and I buried the Game Chicken that night (we had not much of a tea) in the backgreen of his house in Melville Street, No. 17, with considerable gravity and silence; and being at the time in the Iliad, and, like all boys, Trojans, we called him Hector, of course. Six years have passed,-a long time for a boy and a dog: Bob Ainslie is off to the wars; I am a medical student, and clerk at Minto House Hospital. Rab I saw almost every week, on the Wednesday; and we had much pleasant intimacy. I found the way to his heart by frequent scratching of his huge head, and an occasional bone. When I did not notice him he would plant himself straight before me, and stand wagging that bud of a tail, and looking up, with his head a little to the one side. His master I occasionally saw; he used to call me "Maister John," but was laconic as any Spartan. One fine October afternoon, I was leaving the hospital, when I saw the large gate open and in walked Rab, with that great and easy saunter of his. He looked as if taking general possession of the place; like the Duke of Wellington entering a subdued city, satiated with victory and peace. After him came Jess, now white with age, with her cart; and in it a woman, carefully wrapped up,—the carrier leading the horse anxiously, and looking |