the Lord to deliver us "in all time of our wealth"; but how few of us are sincere in deprecating such a calamity! And he refers to Massinger's Luke, and Ben Jonson's Epicure Mammon, and Pope's Sir Balaam, and our own daily observation, to prove that the devil " now tempts by making rich, not making poor." But the tempter can tempt either way; and from either kind of temptation it was that Agur prayed to be delivered; prayed, not to be led into that temptation, but to be delivered from either evil. That God would therefore vouchsafe to give him day by day his daily bread, was in effect another clause in his petition to be fed with food convenient for him. When Rasselas and the princess his sister divide between them the work of observation they have agreed upon, his part it is to try what is to be found in the splendour of courts, and hers to range the shades of humbler life. "Perhaps," surmises Nekayah, "command and authority may be the supreme bless ings, as they afford most opportunities of doing good; or, perhaps, what this world can give may be found in the modest habitations of middle fortune; too low for great designs, and too high for penury and distress." Horace might not have discouraged such a quest, but he would have been prompt to affirm the issue : "Auream quisquis mediocritatem Sordibus tecti; caret invidendâ Sobrius aulâ." It was in the neighbourhood of Vevey and Clarens that Hazlitt, on his Alpine tour, penned this passage of an optative mood: "This kind of retreat, where there is nothing to surprise, nothing to disgust, uniting the advantages of society and solitude, of simplicity and elegance, is the only one which I should never feel a wish to quit. The golden mean is, indeed, an exact description of the mode of life I should like to lead," and, he adds, "of the style I should like to write; but alas! I am afraid I shall never succeed in either object of my ambition." Some one has said of Beckford-whose coffers were as overflowing as Hazlitt's were empty (if at least Hazlitt could be supposed to have had coffers)-that he was the victim of riches, from the day when Chatham's proxy stood for him at the font till the day when he was laid in his pink granite sarcophagus; and that, had this victim of riches had only £5000 a year, and been sent to Eton, he might have been one of the foremost men of his time, and have been as useful in his generation as, under his unhappy circumstances, he was useless. M. Guizot, in his idea of the requisites to form an impartial historian, assigns the first place to a passionless temperament, habits of moderation, and "that middle station in life, where ambition is dormant and the pressure of want unknown.” In this point of view none could be better fitted for the office than Gibbon. Gibbon says, in his Autobiography, "My lot might have been that of a slave, a savage, or a peasant; nor can I reflect without pleasure [he does not say, thankfulness] on the bounty of nature [he does not say, God], which cast my birth in a free and civilized country, in an age of science and philosophy, in a family of honourable rank, and decently endowed with the gifts of fortune." The aurea mediocritas, the golden mean, of that fortune was happiness to him, since he was placed by it in the circumstances most favourable, on M. Guizot's showing, for acquiring a noble fame. "My spirit," he said, "would have been broken by poverty and contempt, and my industry might have been relaxed," as Beckford's was, "in the labour and luxury of a superfluous fortune." To be the son of a peer whose prosperity, as Southey puts it, had found many admirers but few parallels, and not to be his eldest son, was to "the excellent Mr. Boyle" a happiness that he used to mention with great expressions of gratitude; his birth, he said, "so suiting his inclinations and designs, that, had he been permitted an election, his choice would scarce. have altered God's judgment. For as, on the one side, a lower birth would have too much exposed him to the inconveniences of a mean descent, so, on the other side, the being heir to a great family is but a glittering kind of slavery, while obliging him to a public entangled course of life," etc. According to George the Third, the happiest condition in which an Englishman could be placed was just below that wherein it would have been necessary for him to act as a justice of the peace, and above that which would have rendered him liable to parochial duties. When Lord Shelburne asked Mrs. Priestley, after her return from a brief experience of high life under circumstances of excitement, how she enjoyed it, "Indeed, my lord," she replied, "I find the conduct of the upper so exactly like that of the lowest classes, that I am thankful I was born in middle life." Mr. de Quincey congratulated himself on standing, as regards his personal household, on the very happiest tier in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur was, he expressly says, realised for him, his brothers, and sisters: "that blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low."1 Grateful, to the hour of inditing his Autobiographic Sketches, he declared himself to be, that, amid luxuries in all things else, they were trained to a Spartan simplicity of diet, that they fared in fact very much less sumptuously than the servants. "And if, (after the model of the emperor Marcus Aurelius,) I should return thanks to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration-that I lived in a rustic solitude, that this solitude was in England, that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and that I and they were dutiful and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church." With this compare,-not to say contrast,—a parallel passage (for antagonistic it is not) from a discourse of Edward Irving's; where he avers that, if called upon to fix on the con Not 1 "High enough we were to see models of good manners, of self respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with extra means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we knew nothing of its social distinctions. depressed by the consciousness of privations too sordid, not tempted into restlessness by the consciousness of privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for pride." De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches, vol. i., p. 5. dition, in the moral map of the world, from the king of England downwards, in which he would prefer to be born, for the intellectual, moral, and spiritual advantages thereof, he would say: "Let me be born in Scotland, with the rank of the farmer, and take my place with the multitude, and my chance with the multitude. For I should find there industry and economy, patience under privations, a greater desire of helping than of being helped, the fear of God, and the reverence of His ordinances; a well ordered household, affectionate and faithful parents, and strongly cemented brotherhood." Scotland where it did? Stands Quaintly suggestive is what an old writer says, that a flat sole walks more surely than a high heeled shoe, though it takes from the gracefulness of the wearer; "yet, being too low, it is apt to bemire the foot. A little elevation is the best mediocrity; it is both raised from the earth, and sure." The old Scottish toast is conceived in the same spirit: "May poortith ne'er throw us in the dirt, nor gould into the high saddle." In medio tutissimus ibis. "TH EXPRESSIVE SILENCE. HABAKKUK ii. 22. HE Lord is in His holy temple: let all the earth keep silence before Him." Come then, expressive silence, muse His praise. When the seventh apocalyptic seal was opened, there was silence in heaven about the space of half an hour all the more impressive that silence to a listener who heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder; and heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps. Addison professes to have been wonderfully delighted with a masterpiece of music, when in the very tumult and ferment of their harmony all the voices and instruments have stopped short on a sudden, and after a little pause recovered themselves again as it were, and renewed the concert in all its parts. Methought this short interval of silence has had more music in it than any one same space of time before or after it." And he goes on to cite from Homer and from Virgil two instances of silence, "which have something in them as sublime as any of the speeches in their whole works." The praise of silence has, in this talkative age, its preeminent advocate in Mr. Carlyle. No one else has composed so many variations on the theme of speech being silvern, silence golden. An altar might, he declares-were this an altar building timebe raised to Silence, for universal worship. Silence he calls the element in which great things fashion themselves together. "Nay, in thy own mean perplexities, do thou thyself but hold thy tongue for one day: on the morrow, how much clearer are thy purposes and duties; what wreck and rubbish have those mute workmen within thee swept away, when intrusive noises were shut out!" That is in Sartor Resartus. So in Heroes and Hero-worship he bids us, looking round on the noisy inanity of the world, words with little meaning, actions with little worth, reflect on the great empire of Silence: "higher than the stars; deeper than the kingdoms of death. It alone is great; all else is small. I hope we English will long maintain our grand talent pour le silence." That hope is repeated in his Past and Present, with a tribute of homage to the ancient Romans, who excelled in the same "grand gift"; and with an assertion that, in these loud babbling days, "even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent," is greatly more respectable. A contemporary poet says, for his part And born, these mighty things are best appreciated by the silent regard of devout students, stirred though be the "tranquil deeps" of their minds the while. In Racine's words :"Il faut, pour en bien révérer Les augustes merveilles, |