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round the trade. Vanity Fair' was rejected by a magazine. We need not wonder, therefore, that no one would undertake Robinson Crusoe.' It was at last bought for a mere trifle by an obscure bookseller; while, if De Foe could have published it at his own risk, it would have made his fortune.

Who does not wish that he still had to read this extraordinary work for the first time? It is one of the eras in a boy's life when he gets this book. Full of life and incident, it enchains the attention from first to last, while the wisdom contained in it, and the depth of religious colouring with which it is pervaded, endear it to the heart, as long as truth and beauty have a place there. The style is plain and matter of fact, but no one notices the style while reading it. All is so natural, and unaffected, and real, that its truth seems beyond question, and on putting it down, the universal wish is, with Dr. Johnson, that it was longer.

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His subsequent fictions, if not equal to Robinson Crusoe, are extraordinary in their degree, from the same causes. We can only name them: The Dumb Philosopher,' Captain Singleton,' 'Duncan Campbell,' Colonel Jacque,'' Memoirs of a Cavalier.' The last named is, perhaps, superior in genius to all the rest. Then came the Memoirs of the Plague, which is full of pathos and exciting interest and truthfulness. Its reality is in fact intense; we become spectators of the scenes in the grassgrown streets; we hear the bellmen cry, Bring out your dead,' and see the dead-carts wending to the pits and emptying their fearful burdens. The subject is, indeed, revolting; yet the treatment of it is so impressive, as well as interesting, that the reader is compelled to finish the book when he has once begun it.

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Besides all these, our wonderfully fecund_author-who we think must have exceeded Voltaire, or even Lope de Vega, in quantity as much as he did in quality, wrote three long works (two of them novels) on subjects which we shall not further name, not being in accordance with the better morality of our time. Our knowledge of them is from secondhand, but we believe they did not at all derogate from his own character.

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Then followed Religious Courtship,' A Tour through Great Britain,' 'New Voyage round the World,' 'Essay on Apparitions,' System of Magic,' Political History of the Devil,' Compleat Tradesman, 'Captain Carleton,' with numerous tracts, chiefly on social subjects. Amongst these was one 'Augusta Triumphans,' which contained a project for a London University and for a Foundling Hospital, both of which we have seen carried out in our days. These, as

well as his poetical works Caledonia' and 'Jure Divino,' deserve elaborate criticism, but we must be content with naming them.

He was now (1730) an old man of seventy, afflicted with both gout and stone. He seems to have borne these sufferings with equanimity, looking forward in religious confidence, as he had done from his youth, to that time when he should drop his pains for ever in the grave. His circumstances appear to have become once more somewhat easy, and he might fairly have expected to close his eyes in peace. But the world he had done so much to improve, harassed him to the last.

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Some creditor came on him this year, as it seems from sheer malice. He was imprisoned for a short time, and then released. To save what money he had for his children, from an enemy whom he describes as perjured, he made it over to one of his sons, in trust for two unmarried daughters and his aged wife. But his son proved worthless. I depended upon him; I trusted him,' he writes to his son-in-law; I gave up my two dear unprovided children into his hands. But he has no compassion, and suffers them and their poor dying mother to beg their bread at his door, and to crave, as if it were an alms, what he is bound, under hand and seal, beside the most sacred promises, to supply them with; himself, at the same time, living in a profusion of plenty. It is too much for me.' Yes, the brave heart that had showed an undaunted front to all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,' could not bear up under this dreadful treachery. Committing the desolate ones to this sonin-law's protection when he should be gone away, 'I would say,' he added of himself, and I hope with comfort, that 'tis yet well. I am near my journey's end, and am hastening to the place where the weary are at rest, and the wicked cease to trouble; be it that the passage is rough and the day stormy, by what way soever He please to bring me to the end of it, I desire to finish life with this temper of soul in all cases, Te Deum laudamus. It adds to my grief,' he concluded, that I must never see the pledge of your mutual love, my little grandson. Give him my blessing, and may he be to you both your joy in youth and your comfort in age, and never add a sigh to your sorrow. But alas! that is not to be expected. Kiss my dear Sophy once more for me; and if I must see her no more, tell her this is from a father that loved her above all his comforts to his last breath.' His last breath was not far off; in a few weeks the hand of death came mercifully upon him, and his toils, and sufferings, and sorrows, were for ever over.

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In summing up his character we must notice the two great features of it; his intense sincerity, and his no less intense

determination that, as far as possible, it should be sincerity about the truth. Always looking to another tribunal than that of man, he passed unwavering on his wonderful career. Living in a troubled time, he took his side, and having taken it, stood fast. He dared to be moral in an age of vice, and to be personally pious in an age of formalism. We have abundance of sentimentalists about us in the matters of religion, and so had he. But he dared to speak openly about Him in whom he trusted; in his tracts, and histories, and novels-in the greater part of these two hundred works which have come down to us, we find him, whenever there is a suitable occasion, speaking of the great truths of revelation. And though many of his faults, and they are all on the surface, are such as we cannot now palliate, they were mostly those of a heated and controversial age, and never those of an evil heart; in Mr. Wilson's words, Religion was uppermost in his mind; and he reaped its consolations'-may we not hopefully add, 'its exceeding great reward also.'

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ART. IV.-The Architecture of the Heavens. By J. P. Nichol, LL.D., Professor of Practical Astronomy in the University of Glasgow. With Poetic Illustrations, by the late David Scott. 1850.

THE spectacle of the heavens, even when unaccompanied by any scientific insight into the organism of that divine display, is sufficient for the highest moral and spiritual purposes in the soul of man. This important proposition is luminously exemplified in and by the inspired penmen of the Hebrews; who have certainly given an expression to the religious teaching of nature, so original that every other attempt has been only an echo or imitation of it, and so searching and conclusive that it can never be excelled. The new results of science were not necessary to the right reading of the world-old ethics and theology of creation; and, in point of fact, the spirit, which has accompanied the scientific victories of recent ages, has frequently gravitated towards exceedingly low views of nature and of man; views against which the Bible-poets would have lifted up their voices, with even more amazement than indignation. At the best, the modern writer on such a topic as astronomy, when well-nigh lifted out of himself by the greatness of his theme, and unable to put forth any more words of his own for the conveyance of his emotion or his thought, is

fain to cry out,' O altitudo,' and to round his loftiest periods with Scripture texts,

'those jewels five-words-long,

That sparkle on the forefinger of time!'

Yet science is fraught with its peculiar burden of feelings, longings, ethical complacencies, spiritual delights, thoughts too deep for words or tears; and that by no means only in and for the explorers and prophets of this new and illustrious, though secondary and inferior dispensation of God's providence, but also for the whole world. Each separate science, indeed, carries its proper emotional atmosphere; the emotional history of the sciences, treated in all its variety of details, would constitute a new and interesting chapter of modern literature; and astronomy should certainly receive the largest share of exposition in such a narrative. What doubts, what questionings, what inward contentions have arisen in thousands of bosoms under the bare enunciation and conception of the Copernican astronomy! How many have made shipwreck of their faith and hope upon the plurality of worlds! What contempt of old convictions, and also what haste in the adoption of new opinions, have been brought about by the mere perception of the simple and glorious fact that the earth is but a speck of dust in the awful system of creation, and we its seeming parasites !

Apart, however, from all sinister or perilous effects of the contemplation of astronomical phenomena, as represented in the true system of the heavens, it is evident that the modern conception of the stellar universe cannot be without its influence on the whole mind of modern times. Nor can there be any doubt that the spirit-quelling views of the sublimities of astronomy which Chalmers, Herschel, Mary Somerville, Dr. Dick, and especially Professor Nichol, have successively held up before the public eye, have done the reading classes a world of good. Such studies lift the spirit away from what is accidental, local, and deciduous in earthly life; and that might be a questionable benefit, perhaps, if they did not unfailingly bring the thoughtful mind home again to the essential, universal, and everlasting elements of human existence. The vast spaces, the enormous magnitudes, the surpassing effulgencies, the mild splendours, the unimaginable velocities, the amazing diversities and complexity, together with the still more worshipful unity and simplicity of astronomy, unite to communicate an expansive impulse to the soul, the joy of which is near akin to pain, the solemnity of which is almost adoration, the euthanasy of which is little short of the nature of religion. When the imagination, the heart, and the conscience really accompany the understanding in its

scientific journey through the heavens, this visible universe becomes a dreadful and a holy place; and the whole man is fain, for very self-conservation, to melt into a spiritual swoon of wonder and love. But our affections are dull, our imagination is heavy, and this is a rare result. A chemist once stood with an astronomer upon his watch-tower; the eye of a telescope was bent upon a double star, a system of two suns of differentcoloured radiances, and we know not how many planets apiece, revolving round one another; the light by which the friends beheld those sun-stars had taken at least thirty years to come to the earth; it had been coming, and that at the rate of 195,000 miles in a second, while they had been growing from childhood to manhood; and now their conversation was all about the celestial organism, of which it was a single pulse. If I truly and presently believed all we have been saying,' said the chemist, I should surely die where I stand, and pass away to God by exolution.' 'Ah!' exclaimed the master of the observatory, "we know these things, but we can hardly be said to believe them; I have believed them only in some moments of my life, and these but few and far between.'

It is, therefore, important that the books intended for the instruction and edification of the public by means of science be well fitted to accomplish their design. The general reader does not want either the multiplicity or the coldness of exclusively technical detail. He wants prominent facts, grand views, and the enthusiasm of the subject; and the last of these-namely, the proper feeling of the science under exposition, is by no means the least important. It cannot be given, however, without the chosen facts and generalizations of the department, for it is the flower and aroma of these. But no non-technical work on science can possibly be popular without it. It is the possession of it in a quite peculiar manner and degree, that renders the works of Dr. Nichol so successful and so great. Full of knowledge, and of the latest knowledge, they avoid the excess of technicality with consummate skill. While they are clear, sufficient, and eloquent expositions of the things to be taught, there is another charm about them, which is not so easily defined as recognised. They are suffused with a nameless sense of vastitude, speed, splendour, power, life, growth, beauty, worship, and even mystery. The very faults of the author's style, namely a certain grandiosity and distension, accompanied by an ever-recurring width of sweep, which is more suitable to the orator than the penman, are favourable to his purpose. An orator by nature, a poet by sympathy, and a man of science by culture, Professor Nichol satisfies the understanding of his reader with abundance of the clearest information, carries his imagination into the thick

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