The great discoveries of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which opened one world after another to men's eyes, and taught them at length to know the nature and compass of the earth and of the heavens, might indeed have awakened presumptuous thoughts. But Luther at the same time threw open the Bible to them. He opened their eyes to look into the moral and the spiritual world, and to see more clearly than before, how the whole head was sick, and the whole heart faint. The revival of letters too, while it opened the ancient world to them, almost compelled them to acknowledge that in intellectual culture they were mere barbarians in comparison with the Greeks and Romans: and for a long time men's judgements were spellbound, as Dante's was by Virgil, so that they vailed their heads, as before their masters, even when their genius was mounting above them. Hence the belief that mankind had degenerated became so prevalent, that Hakewill, in the first half of the seventeenth century, deemed it necessary to establish by a long and elaborate induction that it was without any substantial ground.

As he wrote early in Charles the First's reign, before the close of the most powerful and brilliant age in the history of the human mind, one might have thought he would have found no difficulty in convincing the contemporaries of Shakspeare and Bacon, that men's wits had not shrunk or weakened. But a genial age, like a genial individual,

is unconscious of its own excellence. For the element and lifeblood of genius is admiration and love. This is the source and spring of its power, its magic, beautifying wand: and it finds so much to admire and love in the various worlds which compass it around, it cannot narrow its thoughts or shrivel up its feelings to a paralytic worship of itself. Hakewill begins his Apology with declaring, that "the opinion of the world's decay is so generally received, not only among the vulgar, but by the learned, both divines and others, that its very commonness makes it current with many, without any further examination." In his preface he speaks of himself as "walking in an untrodden path, where he cannot trace the prints of any footsteps that have gone before him;" and, to excuse the length of his book, he pleads his having "to grapple with such a giant-like monster." Nor does even he venture beyond denying the decay of mankind. He is far from asserting that there is any improvement; only that there is a vicissitude, an alternation and revolution" (p. 332), that, “what is lost to one part, is gained to another, and what is lost at one time, is recovered at another; and so the balance, by the divine providence overruling all, is kept upright." "As the heavens remain unchangeable, (he says in his preface,) so doth the Church triumphant in heaven: and as all things under the cope of heaven vary and change, so doth the militant here on earth. It hath its times and

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turns, sometimes flowing, and again ebbing with the sea, sometimes waxing, and again waning with the moon; which great light, it seems, the Almighty therefore set the lowest in the heavens, and nearest the earth, that it might daily put us in mind of the constancy of the one, and the inconstancy of the other; herself in some sort partaking of both, though in a different manner,of the one in her substance, of the other in the copy of her visage." He also acknowledges the important truth, that, if there be any deterioration, it has a moral cause. But the conception of a melioration, of an advance, seems never to have entered his head.

It is sometimes worth while to shew how recent is the origin of opinions, which are now regarded as incontestable and almost self-evident truths. The writer of a letter publisht by Coleridge in the Friend says (Vol. iii. p. 13): "The faith in the perpetual progression of human nature. toward perfection-will, in some shape, always be the creed of virtue." Wordsworth too, in the beautiful answer in which he prunes off some of the excrescences of this notion, still gives his sanction to the general assertion : "Let us allow and believe that there is a progress in the species toward unattainable perfection; or, whether this be so or not, that it is a necessity of a good and greatly gifted nature to believe it." A necessity it is indeed for a good and highly gifted nature to believe that something may be done for the

bettering of mankind, and for the removal of the evils weighing upon them. Else enterprise would flag and faint; which is never vigorous and strenuous, unless it breathe the mountain-air of hope. It must have something to aim at, some prize to press forward to. But when we look on the state of the world around us, there is so much to depress and breed despondence, so much of the good of former times has past away, so much fresh evil has rusht in,-that no thoughtful man will hastily pronounce his own age to be on the whole better than foregoing ones. Rather, as almost every example shews, from meditating on the evils he has to contend against,- -on their number, their diffusion, their tenacity, and their power, will he incline to deem it worse. And so far is the perfectibility of man from forming an essential article of his creed, that I doubt whether such a notion was ever entertained, as a thing to be realized here on earth, till about the middle of the last century.

Even Bacon, the great prophet of science, who among all the sons of men seems to have lived the most in the future, who acknowledged that his words required an age, saeculum forte integrum ad probandum, complura autem saecula ad perficiendum, and who was so imprest with this belief, that in his will he left "his name and memory to forein nations and to the next ages,"—even he, in his anticipations of the increase of knowledge, which was to ensue upon

the adoption of his new method, hardly goes beyond the declaration in the book of Daniel, that many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increast. Let me quote the noble passage in which, just before the close of his Advancement of Learning, he gives utterance to his hopes. 'Being now at some pause, looking back into that I have past through, this writing seemeth to me, as far as a man can judge of his own work, not much better than that noise or sound which musicians make while they are tuning their instruments; which is nothing pleasant to hear, yet is a cause why the music is sweeter afterward: so have I been content to tune the instruments of the muses, that they may play who have better hands. And surely, when I set before me the condition of these times, in which Learning hath made her third visitation or circuit, in all the qualities thereof,-as the excellency and vivacity of the wits of this age; the noble helps and lights which we have by the travails of ancient writers; the art of printing, which communicateth books to men of all fortunes; the openness of the world by navigation, which hath disclosed multitudes of experiments and a mass of natural history; the leisure wherewith these times abound, not employing men so generally in civil business, as the states of Greece did in respect of their popularity, and the state of Rome in respect of the greatness of her monarchy; the present disposition of these times to peace; and the