to be the great truths of his own age and he almost seems to have fancied that the human mind had been heaving and panting and toiling from the beginning, and ransacking the quarries of nature, and building up the mighty pyramid of thought, in order that Reid should lay on the headstone, and take his stand on the summit. Hereby a method, which is solely applicable to the history of science, is transferred to that of philosophy. Whereas the worth of a philosophical system is only to be appreciated in its unity and integrity, not from two or three casual remarks; which are a still more fallacious criterion, than detacht passages are of the merit of a poem. For the power of drawing inferences from observation is totally distinct from that of discerning elementary ideas, and is often found without a particle of it; for instance in those who by way of eminence are termed men of practical minds. U.

I have been trying to shew that the belief in the perfectibility, or even in the progressiveness of mankind, is a late growth in the world of thought, —to explain how and under what form it originated, and how much of errour has been mixt up with it. Are we then to cast away the idea of perfectibility, as an idle, baseless, delusive, vainglorious phantom? God forbid ! And in truth he has forbidden it. He forbad it, when he set his own absolute perfection as the aim of our endeavour before us, by that blessed command,

1

-Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.

To deny the perfectibility of mankind is to charge these words with pompous inanity. They declare that the perfect renewal of God's image in man is not a presumptuous vision, not like a madman's attempt to clutch a handful of stars, but an object of righteous enterprise, which we may and ought to long for and to strive after. And as God's commands always imply the possibility of their fulfilment, and impart the power of fulfilling them to those who seek it, this, which was designed for all mankind, was accompanied by another, providing that all mankind should be called to aspire to that sublime perfection, should be taught by what steps they are to mount to it, and should receive help mighty enough to nerve their souls for the work. A body of men was instituted for the express purpose of teaching all nations to do all the things that Christ had commanded, and of baptizing them in the name of Him who alone can give man the power of subduing whatever there is of evil in his nature, and of maturing whatever there is of good.

Be ye perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect. This is the angel-trumpet which summons man to the warfare of duty. This, and nothing less than this, is the glorious prize set before him. Do our hearts swell with pride at the thought that this is what we ought to be, what we might be? A single glance at the state

of the world, at what we ourselves are, must quench that pride, and turn it into shame.

U.

When quoting Dryden's epigram on Milton, some pages back, I called it stupid. Is this an indecorous expression to apply to anything that comes from so renowned a writer? I would not willingly fail in due respect to any man of genius, who has exercised his genius worthily: but I cannot feel much respect for the author of Limberham, who turned Milton's Eve into a vulgar coquette, and who defiled Shakspeare's State of Innocence by introducing the rottenhearted carnalities of Charles the Second's age into the Tempest. As to his epigram on Milton, it seems to me nearly impossible to pack a greater number of blundering thoughts into so small a space, than are crowded into its last four lines. Does the reader remember it?

Three poets, in three distant ages born,
Greece, Italy, and England did adorn.
The first in loftiness of thought surpast;
The next in majesty; in both the last.
The force of Nature could no further go :

To make a third, she joined the former two.

As these lines are on the author of Paradise Lost, we know who must be the other poets spoken of else we should hardly divine it from the descriptions given of them; which would fit any other writers nearly as well. For what feature of the Homeric poems is designated by "loftiness of thought?" what feature of Virgil by "majesty,"

-majesty contradistinguisht from loftiness of thought? What is loftiness of thought in a poet, as existing without majesty? what majesty, without loftiness of thought? unless it be the majesty of Lewis the Fourteenth's full-bottomed wig, or of one of Dryden's own stage-kings. For, if there be not something incongruous in these two qualities, if they had already coexisted in Homer and Virgil, what is the prodigy of their union in Milton? How totally are the characters of the two poets mist in these words! They give no notion, or a most erroneous one, of Homer; and a very inadequate one of Virgil. Milton however is so highly favoured, that he unites both qualities. His "majesty" is not, like Virgil's, without "loftiness of thought;" nor his "loftiness of thought," like Homer's, without "majesty."

And the combination of these two elements, which are almost identical, exhausts the powers of Nature! This is one of the blustering pieces of bombast thrown out by those who neither know nor think what they are talking of. Eschylus, and Sophocles, and Pindar, and Aristophanes, and Dante, and Cervantes, and Shakspeare had lived,

every one of them having more in common with Homer, than Milton had yet a man dares say, that the power of God has been worn out by creating Homer and Virgil! and that he could do nothing after, except by strapping them together.

Nor can there well be more complete ignorance

But genius is star, it dwells

of the characteristics of genius. Secondary men, men of talents, may be mixt up, like an apothecary's prescription, of so many grains of one quality, and so many of another. one, individual, indivisible: like a alone. That which is essential in a man of genius, his central spirit, shews itself once, and passes away, never to return: and in few men is this more conspicuous than in Milton, in whom there is nothing Homeric, and hardly anything Virgilian. In sooth, one might as accurately describe the elephant, as being made up of the force of the lion, and the strength of the tiger.

The

A like inauspicious star has presided at the birth of many of the epigrams on great men. authors of them, in their desire to say something very grand and striking, have been regardless of truth and propriety. What can be more turgid and extravagant than Pope's celebrated epitaph on Newton? in which he audaciously blots out all the knowledge of former ages, that he may give his hero a dark ground to stand out from; forgetting that in the intellectual world also the process of Nature is not by fits and starts, but gradually,— that the highest mountains do not spring up out of the plain, but are approacht by lower ranges,and that no sun ever rises without a preluding twilight.

The best parallel to Pope's couplet, for it is scarcely a parody, is Nicolai's silly one on Mendelsohn: