at a certain time next year, or in fifty years, or in a hundred years, there will be an eclipse, and are absolutely beginning to calculate the return of storms, and to foretell the weather with some certainty, then astronomy and meteorology may be called sciences; but history puzzles us. Here is the French people, once the most loyal and patient of peoples, a byword and a scorn for the Hogarthian John Bull : then it takes to be a revolutionary, king-slaying people; then a conquering, overrunning people. What will it take to next? It is now quiet, and thinks more of speculation, railways, and the state of the Bourse, than of glory. But the next generation may be different. Gibbon believed that the era of conquerors was at an end; and we, too, in 1851, we ardent youths, full of large ideas of the congress of the nations and the palace of peace, what did we believe? We thought that war should be no more. We were to have the peaceful rivalry of trade : nation was to vie with nation only by underselling it, and working the harder. What a wonder it was that we did not spike all our guns! When an old warrior, with grey hair and dried laurels of Waterloo on his head, said we had better look after our fortifications, we laughed him to scorn. Napoleon III., that acute monarch, took his tone from the temper of the times, and called himself the "Napoleon of Peace," which he proved by enlarging his armies and fighting battles; and our peaceable youths of 1851 grew up to men and jumped into volunteer uniforms, and became a nation of riflemen.

Even

Well may Froude say, "The temper of each generation is a

continual surprise. The Fates delight to contradict our most confident expectations." What next, and next? "The most reasonable anticipations fail us; antecedents the most apposite mislead us; because the conditions of human problems never repeat themselves." We cannot be too certain about this, and we can hardly reiterate the assertion too frequently. "We live,” repeated Mr. Froude, in his lecture at the Royal Institution, "in times of change, and none can say what will be after us. What opinions, what convictions, the infant of to-day will find prevailing on the earth if he and it live out together to the middle of another century, only a very bold man would undertake to conjecture."

We ourselves are not bold enough to conjecture. We cannot say whether we shall find faith or not. We seem now turning towards unfaith; yet there are signs that the present great stirrings up of creeds will, like most of its preceding movements, only result in a stronger faith. The times succeeding infidel times have always been full of faith. Whether they will be so now again it is impossible to say. We have no science of history to guide us. Dr. Cumming, we believe, preaches up the fall of the Pope, and the great rejoicing of the nations, about the year 1868, or it may be some four years later; but a much more thoughtful man than he thought otherwise. "The time will come,” said Lichtenberg, “when the belief in God will be as a tale with which old women frighten children; when the world will be a machine, the ether a gas, and God will be a FORCE!"

Should those days come, uncomfortable and discomforting

days, when there will be no law, no conscience, no God, and only expediency and self-interest shall sit crowned, ruling over mortals as selfish as they may be scientific, we at least shall not be alive to see it. But should it happen, or should the often foretold, and much misunderstood millennium happen, of one thing we are certain, that the present race of boys and young men differs very much from the boys and young men of our own time-of 1848 and 1851. This is natural enough. The England of Sir Walter Scott and George the Fourth was a very different nation from that of George the Second, Fielding, Richardson, and Hogarth. After Scott's days came the England of Theodore Hook, young Bulwer, young Disraeli, Lord George Manners, and the Eglinton Tournament, days which in regular gradation differed from each other as these differ from them. It would be impossible to recall them, as it would be impossible to recall and to resuscitate the days of monasteries and nunneries, of conventual gloom and ascetic devotion. What is past is past for ever. History does not repeat itself in modes of thought, although the occurrences of one century may resemble those of another. People make what they like out of it, but it varies. "It often seems to me," said Froude— and the officers of the Record Office and Miss Agnes Strickland will say that he himself is an adept at the art

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as if history was like a child's box of letters, with which we can spell out any word we please. We have only to pick out such letters as we want, and arrange them as we like, and say nothing about those which do not suit our purpose."

But the progress of the ages forbids a servile copy. We could not now again, since we have invented six-shooting revolvers, wear thin rapiers, nor, since our muddy streets are so much thronged, walk about in thin silk stockings and redheeled shoes. Nor could we, like Brummel, set the whole world dressing after us, and spend before our glasses three mortal hours, until we got our white cravat, wrapped half a dozen times round our neck, into a perfect tie. Those days are gone by. We have seen that women, following the dictates of milliners, dress themselves in improved hoops. And there is a modern fashion of brushing the hair up to the centre of the head, and wearing upon it a bow of ribbon, which may "eventuate," as the Yankees would say, in the drum or muff head-dress of 1770. We cannot, dare not, say that women will remain sensible, and wear their own hair naturally; we dress our children now à la Gainsborough and Vandyke, and ladies follow the children: but at present we write for men. With them the age of Brummel is gone. Gone, too, the age of Scott and resuscitated chivalry; of James, his imitator, who told very pretty stories about knights and nobles, bold cavaliers, and beautiful ladies. These creations did much good. We fancied ourselves, as boys, preux chevaliers, knightly men, who held ladies in high courtesy, and who swore by the Queen of Beauty and the Soul of Honour. This age culminated in a romantic Scotch nobleman half ruining his estates in holding a grand tournament, whereat Chesterfield, and Waterford, and other fast young noblemen, many now old men, and many dead,

put on real armour purchased from the Jews, and fought in the lists, jousted, and tourneyed, and had their fool, with his bauble, mounted on an ass, and full of quip and crank. It was an expected but curious phase that not one of the young noblemen, who were ready enough to be grand knights and puissant barons, dared to be the fool. An artist, who was admitted to their revels, took upon himself that part; and, amidst the groans of Wardour Street curiosity-dealers and the laughter of the world, a week of rainy days extinguished the Eglinton Tournament, in which, after all, there were some sparks of a romantic ideal not wholly to be sneered at.

Our young men of to-day would sooner set out in balloons bound for the deserts of Arabia, than undertake that tournament business; but the fathers of our "curled darlings" had their youthful dreams. When Tennyson was a young man at college, and wrote stirring poetry; when we believed in the forward march of all the ages, and that we were heirs to them; when we sung about brotherhood, and universal liberty and equality; they were glorious times. What a stir and ring were in that song, written in 1848 by E. L. Blanchard for the Puppet Show, a show long since closed :—

"We want no flag, no flaunting rag, for LIBERTY to fight; We want no blaze of murderous guns to struggle for the right : Our spears and swords are printed words, the mind our battle plain;

We've won such victories before, and so we will again!"

Will we indeed? What say our young brothers? What do we say now? Why, we do not exactly believe in the force

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