like European literature, I should say they are not above par; but the above peculiarity makes all that comes from the New World interesting. How devoutly it is to be hoped that, in the coming conflict of the nations, America and England will stand side by side, instead of opposite; for, if not, it will be all over with the cause of liberty, for some centuries at least. The conqueror in the strife will be then a military power, and must perforce crush the peoples under a tyranny. And as to a universal war, that is inevitable, and in every direction men's minds are foreboding it—a very strange symptom of the times to be so prevalent long before a single casus belli has made its appearance. It is one of those mysterious phenomena which plunge you into the deep question of Prophecy-what it is in our human nature, and how and why it works. At present this anticipation resembles the inexplicable awe and sense of coming danger which makes the dumb unreasoning cattle restless at the approach of a thunder-storm. I am told that the Ministry are full of apprehensions, and that even the late Cabinet would have taken much more decisive measures but for their fear of that infatuated Manchester Peace school. Strange, that people with so much to lose in case of war should be so blindly unwilling to pay in the present for the means of peace!

I mean to work very hard soon at Wordsworth, his life, principles, and poetry—a large subject.

Another most strange thing: a young man has been longing only to live until my return. 'When will Mr. Robertson be back? I must hear his voice again.' He is dying; and a lady has been waiting in the same way—a Mrs. 9 A.M. yesterday, and died at six. I must not, and ought not, to regret that I did not stay.

CXLII.

saw me at

There is an old friend of mine whose income does not exceed 2,000l., and whose charities are at least 1,200l. annually. Certainly, with examples such as hers, and comparing what most of us spend upon ourselves, it does seem the very acme of

effrontery and impudence to call ourselves Christians. A young gentleman's cigars, or a young lady's ribands, would save a human creature's life, and make ten happy. I am tempted sometimes to resolve I will never again suffer the word Selfsacrifice to pass my lips, which now so often and so smoothly runs from them, and that I will not suffer it to fall unchallenged from the lips of others. In Christ's day people used similar unmeaning sentimentalisms, but He always took them up, as it were, and forced them to weigh the meaning of their words : as, for instance, to the woman who came out with a fine piece of sentiment, ‘Blessed is the womb that bare Thee,' He replied, 'Yea, rather, blessed are they who know the word of God and keep it;' and to the man who said, 'Blessed is he that shall eat meat in the kingdom of God,' He spoke forthwith the Parable of the Wedding Guest Expelled, with the obvious application— 'Yes, true enough, but do you know how true what you say is “Blessed,” for many shall not eat bread in that kingdom?’

CXLIII.

There are some persons whose language respecting Ireland is positively unchristian, and only to be paralleled by the tone used of the canaille by the French nobles just before the terrible retribution of the Revolution. Women are taught history in a way that is utterly useless and unpractical, else the past wrongs of Ireland would for ever haunt them, and the present squalidness, beggary, and demoralisation would conjure up a hideous picture of the past, and, reminding of the law of retribution, tie the tongue when it was inclined to abuse. What are the antecedents of the present state of things? At whose door must the guilt lie, but at that of the ancestors of those who now inherit the soil? But French revolutions teach nobody! And the study of the history of bees and ants would do people, I verily believe, as much good as the study of human history. So with the Jews of old: they were very weather-wise, but could not read 'the signs of the times.' Jewish ladies were a good deal surprised when they found themselves sold as slaves to

Romish voluptuaries; and Parisian ladies were equally astonished when, having spent such enormous sums on their coiffures and ribbons, they one fine day found their head dress arraigned for them at the national expense, à la guillotine. Jewish prophets reminded people pretty clearly of what had been, and Isaiah went somewhat minutely into the expenditure of the Jewish ladies on their pretty persons, while the cause of the widow and fatherless was uncared for; but they laughed at him till he became importunate, and then they thought it un peu trop fort, and poor Isaiah was sawn in two, and he bothered them no longer about their 'chains,' and their 'bracelets, and their 'mufflers,' their 'changeable suits of apparel,' the 'glasses' and the 'fine linens,' the 'hoods' and the 'veils.' I wonder what they thought when Nebuchadnezzar invaded the country and their own canaille betrayed them to the conqueror! Do not give way to impatience about poor Ireland; likely enough Mr. C may have failed partially. Why, God's own Son failed-and if, after His failures with you and me, He were to give us up as incorrigible, I wonder where we should be tomorrow. And yet we think a few charitable efforts are to succeed at once, and undo the accumulated vice of years. knew a young lady whose views on this subject were the most naïves I ever heard. She went down once to and lectured the poor wretches upon their dirt and uncomfortable habits and houses, and hear it, earth and heaven!—they did not repent them of their evil ways, and reform at the voice of that angelic visitation. It is just possible that, never having seen cleanliness or comfort, they did not know what she wanted them to aim at, or how to begin. Mrs. Fry would have bought them a bit of soap, and washed a child's fingers with her own hands as a specimen, and drawn out a little set of rules, and paraded the family once a week, half in fun and good-humouredly, to see that her orders were obeyed; and she would have gone on for a year, and if at the end of a year she saw a little dawn of improvement, she would have thanked God and taken courage. But fine young ladies think that an eloquent cut of a riding-whip through the air in the last Belgravian fashion is to electrify a

I

Celtic village, and convert a whole population of savages to civilised tastes and English habits.

The patient drudgery of love which does God's work, however, is not learned in Belgravia. Well, the aristocracy of the next world will be the Frys, and the Chisholms, and the people who do not care for being smart, and are not afraid, like their Master, 'to lay their hands' upon the wretches whom they would rescue. I do not know that anything in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' struck me so much as that remark !—it was one of those which are suggestive of worlds of thought, and send a whole flood of light into a subject.

Mr. C, you say, has spent his life on his property, trying to ameliorate, &c., and he has failed. 'Well,' as Lord Carlisle said, ‘Heaven is for those who have failed on earth'-failed so. Is Mr. C—, disgusted with ingratitude, going to throw up all, and give himself up to a life of pleasure? Well, quote to him, ‘Look to yourselves, that we lose not the things that we have wrought, but that we receive a full reward.' Quote to him, 'Servant of God, well done; well hast thou fought the better fight, who singly hast maintained.' Quote to him, ‘Into whatever house ye enter, salute that house; and if the son of peace be there, your blessing shall remain; if not, it shall return to you again.'

In the moments when life presents itself to me in its true solemn aspect, I feel that I would rather be the author of such a failure than of all the success and glory of Wellington; and I suspect one or two more will think so in the Day of Judg

ment.

You wonder at my wish to go to the war at the Cape. I think it is because my feeling of life is antagonism rather than tenderness. I suppose to see, in visible flesh and blood, that which I might legitimately call my foe, would be a relief from that vague sense of invisible opposition with which my life is encompassed. No doubt the true end to which this feeling is meant to conduct is hostility to Evil; but Evil in the abstract is so hard to hate that we are for ever identifying it with the concrete, and longing to grapple with it in a form. Such, I suppose, is the true inter

pretation of the Psalms, where so much hatred is expended on God's enemies-meaning men—and which modern writers have rightly spiritualised, though on most loose and inconsistent principles. They take Moab and Ammon and Babylon to mean certain modern persons or principles, feeling that, taken literally, the spirit of denunciation is irreligious. But the Psalmists did not mean this. David and others meant Moab, &c.; but that which was true in their feeling was the human indignation against the Evil in Moab and Ammon, which they could not separate in idea from them. It is this, stripped of the local, transitory, and Jewish form in which it appears, which is everlastingly true in other words, the prophetic spirit. And as such, to say that, transferred to our times, our Babylon, our Ammon, are such-and-such evils, is perfectly true, and to hate them is the real essence of the lesson of those Psalms, and is that which is true and eternal in them. All this out of my instinctive love of war!

I sat with the S- s for half an hour two days ago, just after the sublimest and most wonderful sunset I ever saw in my life. S. T. quite agreed that it was so. A mighty mass of blood-red crimson, mottled richly with gold, spread over the whole west, miles broad and many degrees high. In this were lakes of purest green, like that of the lakes of Switzerland. It was startling from its mass and majesty. Turning a corner, I came on it suddenly, and absolutely gasped for a moment.

CXLIV.

To-morrow is the funeral of the Great Duke. I do not think I shall go up, though I am tempted by the thought that it might be an impression for life for Charlie. Old England has departed for once from her habit of unostentatious funerals, and I am not one who think that in this case she has done unwisely to bury the Duke as common greatness is buried would be out of place. Such men take a century to grow, and we cannot have another such in this generation. If you could find a man equal in