so many hundred years a central land power, we can hardly see. Why Prussia should indulge herself in the slaughter of hundreds of brave Danes for the nominal advantage of securing a separate government for certain half-bred Germans, is perhaps beyond us quiet English to comprehend. Her energetic desires that way will probably drive Europe into war. There is more reason in France wishing to make the Rhine her natural boundary; there is more reason in Russia wishing to descend from her frozen regions: but each and all of these powers would do well if they were to cultivate what they possess, rather than covet the possessions of their neighbours; and their rulers would be wise to add to their virtues that crowning one, both in people and kings, true temperance.

ON LOOKING BACK IN THE WORLD.

HERE are many nice old gentlemen, and perhaps as many nice young gentlemen, who are always ready to praise times past. Nothing with them is so good as it was. There existed until lately, when it was killed by the weight of scientific proof, a party of men who declared that long ago men were bigger and finer, and altogether stronger than they are now; that there were giants in by-gone days-not single giants, but a nation of giants; whereas there existed no such thing. Our ordinary five foot eight man is altogether too well grown to go comfortably inside the largest of the suits of armour worn by the men of valour in the days of our Edwards and Henrys. A combination of many circumstances has led to this, but it is chiefly to be attributed to good beef and good mutton; and of these, in Great Britain and Ireland, we may for money get the best in the world. The middle-class Great Briton is now about the best-fed man in "all creation." He is, if a sensible man, not too well fed: he does not pasture on made dishes, and lap, like a lady's pet dog, till he is full of soups and ragoûts. He takes his quantum of good bread, whole

some solids, and vegetables ; drinks water or sound beer; sleeps well, rises early, and is the weightiest and strongest average man to be met with. It is true that he does more work than his predecessors, but then he has more to do it on; he has plenty of fibrine and carbon in the most digestible state to "keep up the steam," and he therefore is what he is. But the Briton was not always what he is now. His state may be reckoned as a modern improvement.

The same individual, whether he be Scotch, Irish, or English, is, not unreasonably, fond of his country, and is apt to brag about it, and exalt himself over others who are not so well off. This vaunting is not always seasonable, nor is it very graceful; but the Briton speaks out of the fulness of his heart; and, when he contrasts his own prosperity and stability with that of others, he is not unreasonably proud; yet he should beware of being puffed up. In the southern part of this island, some hundred years ago, but not long enough to be forgotten, some of our ancestors, of good blood too, may · have worn collars round their necks as Saxon thralls. It is true that North Britain was often overrun, but never held down; not because her people were braver than the southern men, as was often proved in battle, but simply because she was so poor that no invading army could well subsist. Famine killed many hundreds of persons every year. The poor fellows on the Borders were so harried, both by South and North, that a belt of land, of many miles wide, was a debatable ground, a no-man's land, over which travellers hastened in fear and trembling. Those were no "good old times" for the weak

and ailing many a woman and child was lost on the moors, and perished in the cold, just as they would now perish in the steppes of Tartary or the Kasan. Even the baron's castle, with all the outside grandeur with which we associate it, was but a filthy, sorry place; men and women servants herding together; chambers, certainly, for the lord and the lady, but strewn with rushes, and hung with mouldy tapestry, which let in cold and damp, and shook and flapped in the constant draughts of air.

If the lower classes, by continued industry, aided by deep thinkers and inventors from the class just above them, have done good for themselves in these modern times, they have done much more good to the lords. Living, if powerful, in constant fear of his jealous suzerain, subject to constant service in battle, with hardly any political power, and yet plenty of political duties, with the baron to be great and conspicuous was to be in danger. Poverty and meanness were his only safeguards. Few lived long, and few races ever lasted. Our old nobility is almost a fiction. The Wars of the Roses destroyed most of them, and our hereditary legislators date chiefly from George III. Apart from political evils, the social evils were so enormous that it is almost impossible to realize them. Mercury and opium-two essential remedies were undiscovered; the smallest ailments were fatal plagues, which slew whole peoples; vermin fed upon the living, for want of proper cleanliness and soap; scurvy ate them up, since the potato was unknown, the cabbage unimported and uncultivated; and woeful skin-diseases made

them swollen and discoloured, until the very image of the Almighty seemed stamped and trodden out of man, till the horrid dreams of German painters of those ugly saints and distorted caricatures of man seemed to walk in real flesh and bone about the world.

Let us now look to the world of mind in those “good old times." Perhaps mind does not trouble some people much; yet it moves the mass, and it plays an important part in the history of the world. With what strange dreams and terrors were the minds of men held down in those "excellent" old times! The priest on one side, a very little less ignorant than the man he tyrannized over, told absurd stories of patron saint and ministering spirit, until the real heaven was shut out, and a grotesquely painted curtain hung before it. In the dim twilight of silly, inconclusive legends of priest's story or poet's theme, the scholar who tried to emerge into light groped about without knowing whither he tended. His great lights were men of absurd pretensions, swollen bladders of learning, as light and impalpable as gas : once grasped and reached, they shrivelled down to nothing. Duns Scotus, Avicenna, Nostradamus, Jerome Cardan, Paracelsus; what teach they? and what residuum remained when the poor scholar had run down, within the alembic of his brain, the huge volumes of their teaching? Hating the priests, as the tales of the day which remain to us will testify, he could only escape from their teaching by taking refuge with empirics and quacks who led him nowhere. If he dissented from the majority, he had best have kept quiet, or he stood a good