Ex Libris C. K. OGDEN ,,- _ - /rssj^r, r./ y/i GUESSES AT TRUTH TWO BROTHERS. FIRST SERIES. LONDON : PRINTED BY SAMUEL BENTLEY, Dorset Street, Fleet Street. GUESSES AT TH TWO BROTHERS. SECOND EDITION. FIRST SERIES. Mavris ft apicrros ocrrir eiKa^ LONDON: PRINTED FOR TAYLOR AND WALTON, BOOKSELLERS AND PUBLISHERS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, UPPER GOWER STREET. 1838. Xpvcrw ol ir)fj.fvoi, fyrjcrlv 'HpaK\fiTos, yrjv iro\\rjv opvcrcrovcn, KOL fvplcrnovcnv oKiyov. Clem. Alex. Strom. IV. 2. p. 565. As young men, when they knit and shape perfectly, do seldom grow to a further stature ; so knowledge, while it is in aphorisms and observations, it is in growth ; but when it once is comprehended in exact methods, it may perchance be further polished and illustrated, and accommodated for use and practice ; but it increaseth no more in bulk and substance. Bacon, Advancement of Learning, B. 1. f^ri'", n ?v5 AC? < T > 3 n i ; ic. IN Ac:. I f- .; \'.r>r > Staefc AnmR TO WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. MY HONOURED FRIEND. The favour I have always experienced from you emboldens me to address you publicly by this name. For more than twenty years I have cherisht the wish of offering some testimony of my gratitude to him by whom my eyes were opened to see and enjoy the world of poetry in nature and in books. In this feeling he, who shared all my feelings, fully partook. You knew my brother ; and though he was less fortunate than I have been, in having fewer opportunities of learning from your living discourse, you could not deny him that esteem and affection, with which all delighted to regard him. Your writings were among those he prized the most : and unless this little work had appeared anonymously when it VI first came out, he would have united with me in dedicating it to you. Then too would another name have been asso- ciated with yours, the name of one to whom we felt an equal and like obligation, a name which, I trust, will ever be coupled with yours in the admiration and love of Englishmen, the name of Coleridge. You and he came forward toge- ther in a shallow, hard, and worldly age, an age alien and almost averse from the higher and more strenuous exercises of imagination and thought, as the purifiers and regenerators of poetry and philosophy. It was a great aim ; and greatly have you both wrought for its accomplishment. Many, among those who are now England's best hope and stay, will respond to my thankful ac- knowledgement of the benefits my heart and mind have received from you both. Many will echo my wish, for the benefit of my country, that your influence and his may be more and more widely Vll diffused. Many will join in my prayer, that health and strength of body and mind may be granted to you, to complete the noble works which you have still in store, so that men may learn more worthily to understand and appreciate what a glorious gift God bestows on a nation, when he gives them a poet. Had this work been dedicated to you then, it might have pleased you more to see your great friend's name beside your own. The proof of my brother's regard too would have endeared the offering. Then, if you will allow me to quote a poem, which, from its faithful expression of fraternal love, has always sound- ed to me like the voice of my own heart, " There were two springs which bubbled side by side, As if they had been made that they might be Companions for each other." But now for a while that blessed companionship has been inter- rupted : " One has disappeared ; The other, left Vlll behind, is flowing still." Yet, small as the tribute is, and although it must come before you without these recommendations, may you still accept it in consideration of the reverence which brings it; and may you continue to think with your wonted kindness Of your affectionate Servant JULIUS CHARLES HAKE. Herstmonceux. TO THE READER. I HERE present you with a few suggestions, the fruits, alas ! of much idleness. Such of them as are distinguisht by some capital letter, I have borrowed from my acuter friends. My own are little more than glimmerings, I had almost said dreams, of thought : not a word in them is to be taken on trust. If then I am addressing one of that numerous class, who read to be told what to think, let me advise you to meddle with the book no fur- ther. You wish to buy a house ready furnisht : do not come to look for it in a stonequarry. But if you are building up your opinions for yourself, and only want to be provided with materials, you may meet with many things in these pages to suit you. Do not despise them for their want of name and show. Remember what the old author says, that ' ' even to such a one as I am, an idiota or common person, no great things, melancholizing in woods and quiet places by rivers, the Goddesse herself Truth has oftentimes appeared." Reader, if you weigh me at all, weigh me pa- tiently ; judge rne candidly ; and may you find half the satisfaction in examining my Guesses, that I have myself had in making them. Authors usually do not think about writing a preface, until they have reacht the conclusion ; and with reason. For few have such stedfast- ness of purpose, and such definiteness and clear foresight of understanding, as to know, when they take up their pen, how soon they shall lay it down again. The foregoing paragraphs were written some months ago : since that time this little book has increast to more than four times the bulk then contemplated ; and withal has ac- quired two fathers instead of one. The tempta- tions held out by the freedom and pliant aptness XI of the plan ; the thoughtful excitement of lonely rambles, of gardening, and of other like occu- pations, in which the mind has leisure to muse during the healthful activity of the body, with the fresh wakeful breezes blowing round it ; above all, intercourse and converse with those, every hour in whose society is rich in the blossoms of present enjoyment, and in the seeds of future meditation, in whom too the imagination delightedly recog- nizes living realities goodlier and fairer than her fairest and goodliest visions, so that pleasure kindles a desire in her of portraying what she cannot hope to surpass ; these causes, happening to meet together, have occasioned my becoming a principal in a work, wherein I had only lookt forward to being a subordinate auxiliary. The letter u, with which my earlier contributions were markt, has for distinction's sake continued to be affixt to them. As our minds have grown up together, have been nourisht in great measure by the same food, have sympathized in their affec- tions and their aversions, and been shaped reci- procally by the assimilating influences of brotherly Xll communion, a family likeness will, I trust, be perceivable throughout these volumes, although perhaps with such differences as it is not dis- pleasing to behold in the children of the same parents. And thus I commit this book to the world, with a prayer that He to whom so much of it, if I may not say the whole, is devoted, will, if he think it worthy to be employed in his service, render it an instrument of good to some of his children. May it awaken some one to the knowledge of himself. May it induce some one to think more kindly of his neighbour. May it enlighten some one to behold the footsteps of God in the creation. u. May llth, 1827. In this new edition the few remarks found among my brother's papers, suitable to the work, have been, or will be incorporated. Unfortunately for the work they are but few. Soon after the publication of the first edition, he gave up guessing at Truth, for the higher office of preaching Truth. How faithfully he discharged that office, may be xm seen in the two volumes of his Sermons. And now he has been raised from the earth to the full fruition of that Truth, of which he had first been the earnest seeker, and then the dutiful servant and herald. My own portion of the work has been a good deal enlarged. On looking it over for the press, I found much that was inaccurate, more that was unsatisfactory. Many thoughts seemed to need being more fully developt. Ten years cannot pass over one's head, least of all in these event- ful times, without modifying sundry opinions. A change of position too brings a new horizon, and new points of view. And when old thoughts are awakened, it is as with old recollections : a long train of associations start up ; nor is it easy to withstand the pleasure of following them out. Various however as are the matters discust or toucht on in the following pages, I would fain hope that one spirit will be felt to breathe through them. It would be a delightful reward, if they may help some of the young, in this age of the Con- fusion of Thoughts, to discern some of those XIV principles which infuse strength and order into men's hearts and minds. Above all would I desire to suggest to my readers, how in all things, small as well as great, profane as well as sacred, it behoves us to keep our eyes fixt on the star which led the wise men of old, and by which alone can any wisdom be guided, from what- soever part of the intellectual globe, to a place where it may rejoice with exceeding great joy. J. C. H. January Qth, 1838. Some persons may possibly be offended by certain unusual modes of spelling in these pages. An opportunity of saying a few words on this subject will perhaps occur in the next volume. For the present 1 will merely observe, lest they should be regarded as capricious innovations, that the principles of orthography here followed have been explained and vindicated in the first volume of the Philological Museum, GUESSES AT TRUTH. GUESSES AT TRUTH. THE virtue of Paganism was strength : the vir- tue of Christianity is obedience. Man without religion is the creature of circum- stances: Religion is above all circumstances, and will lift him up above them. Moral prejudices are the stopgaps of virtue : and, as with other stopgaps, it is often more difficult to get either out or in through them, than through any other part of the fence. A mother should give her children a super- abundance of enthusiasm ; that, after they have lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world, enough may still remain to prompt and sup- port them through great actions. A cloak should be of three-pile, to keep its gloss in wear. The heart has often been compared to the needle for its constancy : has it ever been so for its vari- ations ? Yet were any man to keep minutes of B 2 GUESSES AT TRUTH. his feelings from youth to age, what a table of variations would they present ! how numerous ! how diverse ! and how strange ! This is just what we find in the writings of Horace. If we consider his occasional effusions, and such they almost all are, as merely expressing the piety, or the passion, the seriousness, or the levity, of the moment, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for those discrepancies in their features, which have so much puzzled professional commentators. Their very contradictions prove their truth. Or could the face even of Ninon de 1'Enclos at seventy be exactly what it was at seventeen ? Nay, was Cleopatra before Augustus the same as Cleopatra with Antony ? or Cleopatra with Antony the same as with the great Julius ? The teachers of youth in a free country should select those books for their chief study, so far, I mean, as this world is concerned, which are best adapted to foster a spirit of manly freedom. The duty of preserving the liberty, which our ancestors, through God's blessing, won, establisht, and handed down to us, is no less imperative than any com- mandment in the second table ; if it be not the concentration of the whole. And is this duty to be learnt from scientific investigations ? Is it to be pickt up in the crucible ? or extracted from the occult properties of lines and numbers ? I fear, there is a moment of broken lights in the intellec- tual day of civilized countries, when, among the GUESSES AT TRUTH. 3 manifold refractions of knowledge, wisdom is al- most lost sight of. Society in time breeds a number of mouths, which will not consent to be enter- tained without a corresponding variety of dishes, so that unity is left alone as an inhospitable sin- gularity; and many things are got at any way, rather than a few in the right way. But however these things may be in men's corrupted fancies and opinions, would we imbibe the feelings, the senti- ments, and the principles, which become the inhe- ritors of England's name and glory, we must abide by the springs of which our ancestors drank. Like them, we must nourish our minds by contemplating the unbending strength of purpose and uncalculating self-devotion, which nerved and animated the phi- losophic and heroic patriots of the heathen world : and we shall then blush, should Christianity, with all her additional incentives, have shone on our hearts without kindling a zeal as steady and as pure. " Is not our mistress, fair Religion, As worthy of all our heart's devotion, As Virtue was to that first blinded age ? As we do them in means, shall they surpass Us in the end 1" Donne's Satires, iii. 5. The threatenings of Christianity are material and tangible. They speak of and to the senses ; because they speak of and to the sensual and earthly, in character, intellect, and pursuits. The promises of Christianity on the other hand are addrest to a different class of persons ; to those 4 GUESSES AT TRUTH. who love, which cometh after fear ; to those who have begun to advance in goodness ; to those who are already in some degree delivered from the thraldom of the body. But being spoken of hea- ven to the heavenly-minded, how could they be other than heavenly ? The fact then, that there is nothing definite, and little inviting or attractive, except to the eye of faith, in the Christian representation of future bliss, instead of being a reasonable objection to its truth, is rather a confirmation of it. And so per- haps thought Sfclden, who says in his Table-Talk : " The Turks tell their people of a heaven where there is sensible pleasure, but of a hell where they shall suffer they don't know what. The Christians quite invert this order : they tell us of a hell where we shall feel sensible pain, but of a heaven where we shall enjoy we can't tell what." L. Many persons, however ambitious to be great in great things, have been well content to be little in little things. Jupiter Scapin was a happy name : but he for whom it was invented, was only one of a very large family. A. Why should not distant parishes interchange their apprentices ? so that the lads on their re- turn home might bring back such improvements in agriculture and the mechanical arts, as they may have observed or been taught during their absence. E. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 5 A practice of the sort was usual two centuries ago ; and still exists in Germany, and other parts of the Continent. The first thing we leam is Meum, the last Tuum. None can have lived with children with- out noticing the former fact ; few have associated with men and not remarkt the latter. To address the prejudices of our hearers is to argue in short-hand with them. But it is also more: it is to invest our opinion with the pro- bability of prescription, and through the under- standing, which we occupy, to attack the heart. The ancients dreaded death : the Christian only fears dying. A person should go out upon the water on a fine day to a short distance from a beautiful coast, if he would see nature really smile. Never does she look so joyous, as when the sun is brightly re- flected by the water, while the waves are rippling gently, and the scene receives life and animation here and there from the glancing transit of a row- boat, and the quieter motion of a few small vessels. But the land must be well in sight ; not only for its own sake, but because the vastness and awful- ness of a mere sea-view would ill sort with the other parts of the gay and glittering prospect. 6 GUESSES AT TRUTH. The second Punic war was a struggle between Hannibal and the Roman people. Its event proved that the good sense of a nation, when duly em- bodied and exerted, must ultimately exhaust and overpower the resources of a single mind, however excellent in genius and prowess. The war of Sertorius, the Roman Hannibal, is of the same kind, and teaches the same lesson. Nothing short of extreme necessity will induce a wise man to change all his servants at once. A new set, coming together fortuitously, are sure to cross and jostle . . like the Epicurean atoms, I was going to say ; but no, unlike the silent atoms, they have the faculty of claiming and complain- ing ; and they exert it, until the family is distract- ed with disputes about the limits of their several offices. But after a household has once been set in order, there is little or no evil to apprehend from minor changes in it. A new servant on arriving finds himself in the middle of a system : his place is markt out and assigned ; the course of his busi- ness lies before him ; and he falls into it as readily as a new wheel-horse to a mail, when his collar is to the pole, and the coach has started. It is the same with those great families, which we call nations. To remould a government and form a constitution anew are works of the greatest difficulty and hazard. The attempt is likely to fail altogether, and cannot succeed thoroughly GUESSES AT TRUTH. 7 under very many years. It is the last desperate resource of a ruined people, a staking double or quits with evil, and giving it, I much fear, the first game. But still it is a resource. We make use of cataplasms to restore suspended animation ; and Burke himself might have tried Medea's kettle on a carcass. Be that however as it may, from judicious subordinate reforms good, and good only, is to be lookt for. Nor are their benefits limited to the removal of the abuse, which their author may have designed to correct. No perpetual motion, God be praised ! has yet been discovered for free govern- ments. For the impulse which keeps them going, they are indebted mainly to subordinate reforms ; now, by the exposure of a particular delinquency, spreading salutary vigilance through a whole ad- ministration ; now, by the origination of some popular improvement from without, leading, if there be any certainty in party motives, any such things in ambitious men as policy and emulation, to the counter-adoption of numerous meliora- tions from within, which would else have been only dreamt of as impossible. As a little girl was playing round me one day with her white frock over her head, I laughingly called her Pishashee, the name which the Indians give to their white devil. The child was de- lighted with so fine a name, and ran about the house crying out to every one she met, I am the 8 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Pishashee, I am the Pishashee. Would she have done so, had she been wrapt in black, and called witch or devil instead ? No : for, as usual, the re- ality was nothing, the sound and colour every- thing. But how many grown-up persons are running about the world, quite as anxious as the little girl was to get the name of Pishashees ! Only she did not understand it. True modesty consists, not in an ignorance of our merits, but. in a due estimation of them. Modesty then is only another name for self-know- ledge ; that is, for the absence of ignorance on the one subject which we ought best to understand, as well from its vast importance to us, as from our continual opportunities of studying it. And yet it is a virtue. But what, on second thoughts, are these merits ? Jeremy Taylor tells us, in his Life of Christ: " Nothing but the innumerable sins which we have added to what we have received. For we can call nothing ours, but such things as we are ashamed to own, and such things as are apt to ruin us. Everything besides is the gift of God ; and for a man to exalt himself thereon is just as if a wall on which the sun reflects, should boast itself against another that stands in the shadow." Considerations upon Christ's Sermon on Humility. After casting a glance at our own weaknesses, GUESSES AT TRUTH. how eagerly does our vanity console itself with pitying the infirmities of our friends ! T. It is as hard to know when one is in Paris, as when one is out of London. R. The first is the city of a great king ; the latter, of a great people. M. When the moon, after covering herself with darkness as in sorrow, at last throws off the gar- ments of her widowhood, she does not at once expose her beauty barefacedly to the eye of man, but veils herself for a time in a transparent cloud, till by degrees she gains courage to endure the gaze and admiration of beholders. To those whose God is honour, disgrace alone is sin. Some people carry their hearts in their heads: very many carry their heads in their hearts. The difficulty is to keep them apart, and yet both ac- tively working together. A. Life may be defined to be the power of self- augmentation or assimilation, not of self-nurture ; for then a steam-engine over a coalpit might be made to live. Philosophy, like everything else, in a Christian country should be Christian. We throw away the better half of our means, when we neglect to 1 GUESSES AT TRUTH. avail ourselves of the advantages which starting in the right road gives us. It is idle to urge, that, unless we do this, antichristians will deride us. Curs bark at gentlemen on horseback : but who, except a hypochondriac, ever gave up riding on that account ? In man's original state, before his soul had been stupefied by the Fall, his moral sensitiveness was probably as acute as his physical sensitiveness is now ; so that an evil action, from its irreconcilable- ness with his nature, would have inflicted as much pain on the mind, as a blow causes to the body. By the Fall, this fineness of moral tact was lost ; conscience, the voice of God within us, is at once its relic and its evidence ; and we were left to ourselves to discover what is good ; though we still retain the desire of good, when we have made out what it consists in. They who disbelieve in virtue, because man has never been found perfect, might as reasonably deny the sun, because it is not always noon. Two persons can hardly set up their booths in the same quarter of Vanity Fair, without inter- fering with, and therefore disliking each other. B. Fickleness in women of the world is the fault most likely to result from their condition in so- ciety. The knowing both what weaknesses are GUESSES AT TRUTH. 11 the most severely condemned, and what good qualities the most highly prized, in the female character, by our sex as well as their own, must needs render them desirous of pleasing generally, to the exclusion, so far as nature will permit, of strong and lasting affection for individuals. Well ! we deserve no better of them. And after all, the flame is only smothered by society, not extinguisht. Give it free air, and it will blaze. The following sentence is translated from D'Alem- bert by Dugald Stewart : " The truth is, that no relation whatever can be discovered between a sen- sation in the mind and the object by which it is occasioned, or at least to which we refer it : it does not appear possible to trace, by dint of reasoning, any practicable passage from the one to the other." If this be so, if there be no necessary connexion between the reception of an object into the senses, and its impression on the mind, what ground have we for supposing the organs of sense to be more than machinery for the uses of the body only ? The body may indeed be said to see through the eye : but how, if we can trace no nearer con- nexion between the mind and an object painted on the retina, than between it and the object itself, how can it be asserted, that the mind needs the eye to see with ? Most idle then are all disquisitions on the in- termediate state, founded on the assumption that 12 GUESSES AT TRUTH. the soul, when out of the body, has no percep- tions. Waller's couplet, " The soul's dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new lights through chinks that Time has made," may be, perhaps is, no less true in fact, than pretty in fancy. Spirits may acquire new modes of communication on losing their mouths and ears, just as a bird gets its feathers on bursting from the shell. Our own experience furnishes a similar analogy. As the unborn infant possesses dormant senses, which it puts forth on coming into this world ; so may our still embryo soul perhaps have latent senses, living inlets shall I call them, or capacities, of spiritual vision and communion ? to be exercised hereafter for its improvement and delight, when it issues from its present womb, the body. But here a dreadful supposition crosses me. What if sin, which so enfeebles the understanding, and dulls the conscience, should also clog and ul- timately stifle these undevelopt powers and facul- ties, so as to render spiritual communion after death impossible to the wicked? What if the imbruted soul make its own prison, shut itself up from God, and exclude everything but the memory of its crimes, evil desires " baying body," and the dread of intolerable, unavoidable, momentarily ap- proaching punishment ? At least it is debarred from repentance : this one thought is terrible enough. Though Jesus called poor men to be the com- GUESSES AT TRUTH. 13 panions of his life, he chose a well-educated and distinguish! man to be the chief preacher of la's religion. Such a man, as well from his station, as from his acuteness, and the natural pride of a powerful and cultivated intellect, was the last per- son to become the dupe of credulous enthusiasts ; especially when they were lowborn and illiterate. From such an appointment may also be drawn an inference in favour of a learned ministry. If some of the apostles had no other human instruc- tor than the best master that ever lived, Jesus Christ; the one most immediately and superna- turally called by him to preach the Gospel, was full of sacred and profane learning. It was a practice worthy of our worthy ances- tors, to fill their houses at Christmas with their relations and friends ; that, when nature was frozen and dreary out of doors, something might be found within doors " to keep the pulses of their hearts in proper motion." The custom however is only appropriate among people who happen to have a heart. It is bad taste to retain it in these days, when everybody worth hanging oublie sa mere, Et par bon ton se defend d'etre pere. . especially in Doctors Commons, and before a ma- gistrate. It is evident, that most people have life granted to them for their own sake : but not a few seem 14 GUESSES AT TRUTH. sent into the world chiefly for the sake of others. How many infants every year come and go like apparitions ! This remark too, if true in any de- gree, holds good much further. A critic should be a pair of snuffers. He is oftener an extinguisher ; and not seldom a thief, u. The intellect of the wise is like glass : it admits the light of heaven, and reflects it. They who have to educate children, should keep in mind that boys are to be men, and that girls are to be women. The neglect of this momentous consideration gives us a race of moral herma- phrodites. A. Poetry is to philosophy what the sabbath is to the rest of the week. The ideal incentives to virtuous energy are a sort of moon to the moral world. Their borrowed light is but a dimmer substitute for the lifegiving rays of religion ; replacing those rays, when hidden or obscured, and evidencing their existence, when they are unseen in the heavens. To exclaim then, during the blaze of devotional enthusiasm, against the beauty and usefulness of such auxiliary motives, is fond. To shut the eye against their luminous aid, when religion does not enlighten our path, is lunatic. To understand their GUESSES AT TRUTH. 15 comparative worthlessness, feel their positive value, and turn them, as occasion arises, to account, is the part of the truly wise. I have called these incentives a sort of moon. Had the image occurred to one of those old writers, who took such pleasure in tracing out recondite analogies, he would scarcely have omitted to re- mark, that, in the conjunctions of these two ima- ginary bodies, the moral moon is never eclipst, except at the full, nor ever eclipses, but when it is in the wane. " Love," says our greatest living prose-writer, in one of his wisest and happiest moods, " is a secondary passion in those who love most, a primary in those who love least. He who is inspired by it in a great degree, is inspired by honour in a greater."* So is it with honour and religion. Before me were the two Monte Cavallo statues, towering gigantically above the pygmies of the pre- sent day, and looking like Titans in the act of threatening heaven. Over my head the stars were just beginning to look out, and might well have been taken for guardian angels keeping watch over the temples below. Behind, and on my left, were palaces ; on my right, gardens, and hills beyond, * Imaginary Conversations, vol. ii. p. 79. The passage is all the better for its accidental coincidence with those two noble lines by Lovelace : " I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not iionour more." 16 GUESSES AT TRUTH. with the orange tints of sunset over them still glowing in the distance. Within a stone's throw of me, in the midst of objects thus glorious in themselves,, and thus in harmony with each other, was stuck an unplaned post, on which glimmered a paper lantern. Such is Rome. So great enormities have been committed within the memory of living men by privateers, as may be seen in the Journal of Alexander Davidson, in the Edinburgh Annual Register, vol. iii. p. 2, that it seems advisable that, on board every such ship, except perhaps in the four seas, there should be a superintending national officer, to keep a pub- lic journal, and to prevent crimes. If the officer die on the cruise, the privateer should be bound to make the nearest friendly port, unless she meet with a national ship-of-war that can spare her a superintendent out of its crew. A privateer not conforming to the regulations on these points should be deemed a pirate. Unless some such provisions are adopted, the States now springing up in America will one day send forth a swarm of piratical privateers, cruel as the Buccaneers, and more unprincipled. A statesman may do much for commerce, most by leaving it alone. A river never flows so smoothly, as when it follows its own course, with- out either aid or check. Let it make its own bed : it will do so better than you can. A. GUESSES AT TRUTH. , 17 Anguish is so alien to man's spirit, that perhaps nothing is more difficult to will than contrition. God therefore is good enough to afflict us ; that our hearts, being brought low enough to feed on sorrow, may the more easily sorrow for sin unto repentance. In most ruins we behold what Time has spared. Ancient Rome appears to have defied him ; and in its present remains we see the limbs, which he has rent and scattered in the struggle. T. How melancholy are all memorials ! T. Were we merely the creatures of outward im- pulses, what would faces of joy be but so many glaciers, on which the seeming smile of happiness at sunrise is only a flinging back of the rays they appear to be greeting, from frozen and impassive heads ? It is with flowers, as with moral qualities : the bright are sometimes poisonous; but, I believe, never the sweet. Picturesqueness is that quality in objects which fits them for making a good picture ; and it refers to the appearances of things in form and colour, more than to their' accidental associations. Rem- brandt would have been right in painting turbans and Spanish cloaks, though the Cid had been a 18 GUESSES AT TRUTH. scrivener, Cortez had sold sugar, and Mahomet had been notorious for setting up a drug-shop instead of a religion. It is a proof of our natural bias to evil, that gain is slower and harder than loss, in all things good : but in all things bad, getting is quicker and easier than getting rid of; especially in those very bad things, habits, and mistresses, and their chil- dren. Would you cure or kill an evil prejudice ? Manage it as you would a pulling horse; tickle it as you would a trout ; treat it as you would the most headstrong thing in the world, and the readiest to take alarm, the likeliest to slip through your fingers at the moment you think you have got it safe, and are just about to make an end of it. Three reasons occur to me for thinking bodily sins more curable than mental ones : In the first place, they are more easily ascer- tained to be sins ; since they clothe themselves in outward acts, which admit neither of denial, nor, except in way of excuse, of self-deception. Nobody, the morning after he has been drunk, can be ignorant that he went to bed not sober : his nerves and stomach assure him of the fact. But the same man might be long in finding out that he thinks more highly of himself than he GUESSES AT TRUTH. 19 ought to think ; from having no palpable standard to convince him of it. Secondly, bodily sins do not so immediately af- fect the reason, but that we still possess an un- corrapted judge within us, to discover and proclaim their criminality. Whereas mental sins corrupt the faculty appointed to determine on their guilt, and darken the light which should shew their darkness. In the third place, bodily sins must be connected with certain times and places. Consequently, by a new arrangement of his hours, and by abstaining, so far as may be, from the places which have ministered opportunities to any bodily vice, a man may in some degree disable himself for committing it. This in most vices of the kind is easy, in sloth not; which is therefore the most dangerous of them, or at least the hardest to be cured. The mind on the other hand is its own place, and does not depend on contingencies of season and situation for the power of indulging its follies or its passions. Still it must be remembered that bodily sins breed mental ones, thus leaving, after they are stifled or extinct, an evil and vivacious brood behind them. " Nothing grows weak with age, (says South,) but that which will at length die with age; which sin never does. The longer the blot continues, the deeper it sinks. Vice, in re- treating from the practice of men, retires into their fancy" . . . and from such a stronghold what shall drive it ? 20 GUESSES AT TRUTH. 'Twas a night clear and cloudless, and the sight, Swifter than heaven-commissioned cherubim, Soaring above the moon, glancing beyond The stars, was lost in heaven's abysmal blue. There are things the knowledge of which proves their revelation. The mind can no more penetrate into the secrets of heaven, than the eye can force a way through the clouds of heaven. It is only when they are withdrawn by a mightier hand,, that the sight can rise beyond the moon, and ascending to the stars, repose on the unfathomable ether; that emblem of omnipresent Deity, which, every- where enfolding and supporting man, yet baffles his senses, and is unperceived, except when he looks upward and contemplates it above him. It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what most mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable for years. Happy the boy whose mother is tired of talking nonsense to him, before he is old enough to know the sense of it! By a man's earnest attempts to convince others, he convinces us that he is convinced himself. B. It has been objected to the Reformers, that they dwelt too much on the great corruption of our na- ture. But surely, if our strength is to be perfected, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 21 it can only be, like the Apostle's, in weakness. He who feels his fall from Paradise the most sorely, will also be the most grateful for the offer of re- turning thither on the wings of the Redeemer's love. Written on Whitsunday. Who has not seen the sun on a fine spring morning pouring his rays through a transparent white cloud, filling all places with the purity of his presence, and kindling the birds into joy and song ? Such, I conceive, would be the constant effects of the Holy Spirit on the soul, were there no evil in the world. As it is, the moral sun, like the natural, though " it always makes a day," is often clouded over. It is only under a com- bination of peculiarly happy circumstances, that the heart suffers this sweet violence perceptibly, and feels and enjoys the ecstasy of being borne along by overpowering unresisted influxes of good. To most, I fear, this happens only during the spring of life : but some hearts keep young, even at eighty. After listening to very fine music, it appears one of the hardest problems, how the delights of heaven can be so attempered to man, as to become endura- ble for their pain. A speech, being a matter of adaptation, and having to win opinions, should contain a little for the few, and a great deal for the many. Burke 22 GUESSES AT TRUTH. injured his oratory by neglecting the latter half of this rule ; as Sheridan must have spoilt his by his carelessness about the former. But the many will always carry it for the moment against the few : though Burke was allowed to be the greater man, Sheridan drew most hearers. " I am convinced that jokes are often accidental. A man in the course of conversation throws out a remark at random, and is as much surprised as any of the company, on hearing it, to find it witty." For the substance of this observation I am in- debted to one of the pleasantest men I ever knew, who doubtless gave his own experience in it. He might have carried it some steps further with ease and profit. It would have done our pride no harm to be reminded, how few of our best and wisest, and even of our newest thoughts, do really and wholly originate in ourselves ; how few of them are voluntary, or at least intentional. Take from them all that has been suggested or improved by the hints and remarks of others, all that has fallen from us accidentally, all that has been struck out of us by collision, all that has been prompted by a sudden impulse, or has occurred to us when least looking for it ; and the remainder, which can alone be claimed as the fruit of study and forethought, will in every man form a small portion of his store, and in most men will be little worth preserving. We can no more make thoughts than seeds. How GUESSES AT TRUTH. 23 absurd then for a man to call himself a poet, or maker! The ablest writer is only a gardener first, and then a cook. His tasks are, carefully to select and cultivate his strongest and most nutri- tive thoughts ; and when they are ripe, to dress them, wholesomely, yet so that they may have a relish. To return to my friend's remark : let me strengthen it with the authority of one of the wittiest men that ever lived ; who might assured- ly have boasted, if any man ever could, that his wit was not a foundling. "As the repute of wisdom, (says South, Sermon viii,) so that of wit also, is very casual. Sometimes a lucky say- ing, or a pertinent reply, has procured an esteem of wit to persons otherwise very shallow ; so that if such a one should have the ill hap to strike a man dead with a smart saying, it ought in all reason and conscience to be judged but a chance-medley. Nay, even when there is a real stock of wit, yet the wittiest sayings and sen- tences will be found in a great measure the issues of chance, and nothing else but so many lucky hits of a roving fancy. For, consult the acutest poets and speakers, and they will confess that their quickest and most admired conceptions were such as darted into their minds like sudden flashes of lightning, they knew not how nor whence ; and not by any certain consequence or dependence of one thought upon another." If any further con- firmation were needed, the poet of our age has 24 GUESSES AT TRUTH. been heard to declare, that once in his life he fancied he had hit upon an original thought, but that after a while he met with it in so common an author as Boyle. Whoever wishes to see an emblem of political unions and enmities, should walk, when the sun shines, in a shrubbery. So long as the air is quite still, the shadows combine to form a very pretty trellice-work, which looks as if it would be lasting. But the wind is sometimes perverse enough to blow ; and then to pieces goes the trellice-work in an instant ; and the shadows, which before were so quiet and distinct, cross and intermingle con- fusedly. It seems impossible they should ever re- unite : yet the moment the wind subsides, they dovetail into each other as closely as before. Before I travelled, I had no notion that moun- tain scenery was so unreal. Beside the strange- ness of finding common objects on new levels, and hence in new points of view, you have only to get into a retired nook, and you hear water and catch a glimpse of the tops of trees, but see nothing dis- tinctly except the corner of rock where you are standing. You are surrounded by a number of well-known effects, so completely severed to the eye and imagination from their equally well-known and usually accompanying causes, that you cannot tell what to make of them. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 25 All things here are strange ! Rocks scarred like rough-hewn wood ! Ice brown as sand Wet by the tide, and cleft, with depths between, And streams outgushing from its frozen feet ! Snow-bridges arching over headlong torrents ! And then the sightless sounds, and noiseless motions, Which hover round us ! I should dream I dreamt, But for those looks of kindness still unchanged. these mob torrents ! here, with show of fury, Rushing submissive to an arch of snow, That frailest fancy-work of Nature's idlesse ; There threatening rocks, and rending ancient firs, The soverains of the wood, yet overwhelmed And dasht to the earth with hooting violence. Many actions, like the Rhone, have two sources, -one pure, the other impure. It is with great men as with great mountains. They oppress us with awe when we stand under them : they disappoint our insatiable imaginations when we are nigh, but not quite close to them : and then the further we recede from them, the more astonishing they appear ; until, their bases being concealed by intervening objects, they at one moment seem miraculously lifted above the earth, and the next strike our fancies as let down from heaven. The apparent and the real progress of human affairs are both well illustrated in a waterfall ; where the same noisy bubbling eddies continue for 26 GUESSES AT TRUTH. months and years, though the water which froths in them changes every moment. But as every drop in its passage tends to loosen and detach some particle of the channel, the stream is working a change all the time in the appearance of the fall, by altering its bed, and so subjecting the river during its descent to a new set of percussions and reverberations. And what, when at last effected, is the conse- quence of this change ? The foam breaks into shapes somewhat different : but the noise, the bubbling, and the eddies are still as violent as before. A little management may often evade resistence, which a vast force might strive in vain to over- come. A. Leaves are light, and useless, and idle, and wavering, and changeable : they even dance : yet God in his wisdom has made them part of the oak. In so doing he has given us a lesson, not to deny the stout-heartedness within, because we see the lightsomeness without. How disproportionate are the projects and the means of men ! To raise a single church to a single apostle, the monuments of antiquity were ransackt, and forgiveness of sins was doled out at a price. Yet its principal gate has been left un- fmisht; and its holy of holies is encrusted with stucco. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 27 On entering St Peter's, my first impulse was to throw myself on my knees ; and but for the fear of being observed by my companions, I must have bowed my face to the ground, and kist the pave- ment. I moved slowly up the nave, opprest by my own littleness ; and when at last I reacht the brazen canopy, and my spirit sank within me beneath the sublimity of the dome, I felt that, as the ancient Romans could not condemn Manlius within sight of the Capitol, so it would be im- possible for an Italian of the present day to re- nounce Popery under the dome of St Peter's. The germ of idolatry is contained in the prone- ness of man's feelings and imagination to take their impressions from outward objects, rather than from the dictates of reason ; under the controll of which they can scarcely be brought, without a great impairing of their energies. It may possibly have been in part from a mer- ciful indulgence to this principle of our nature, that God vouchsafed to shew himself in the flesh. At least one may discern traces which seem to favour such a belief, both in the Jewish scheme and in the Christian. In both God revealed him- self palpably to the outward senses of Jris people : in both he addrest himself personally by acts of loving kindness to their affections. It is not mere- ly for being redeemed, that we are called on to feel thankful ; but for being redeemed by the blood of the God-man Jesus Christ, which he poured out for 28 GUESSES AT TRUTH. us upon the cross. So it was not simply as God, that Jehovah was to be worshipt by the Jews ; but as the God of their fathers, who had brought them out of the house of bondage, whose voice they had heard and lived, who had chosen them to be his people, and had given them his laws, and a land flowing with milk and honey. The last sentence has suggested a query of some importance. Out of the house of bondage : what says the advocate of colonial slavery to this ? that the bondage was no evil ? that the deliverance of a people from personal slavery was not a work befitting God's right hand ? Or will he tell us that the cases differ ? that the animal wants of the Israelites were ill attended to ? that they were ill-fed ? This at least will not serve his purpose ; for the fleshpots of Egypt are proverbial. What will serve it, I leave him to discover ; only recom- mending him to beware of relying much on the order to expose the Hebrew children. If he does, it will give way under him. Meanwhile to those religious men who are labouring for the emanicipa- tion of the Negroes, amid the various doubts and difficulties with which every great political mea- sure is beset, it must needs be an inspiring thought, that to rescue a race of men from personal slavery, and raise them to the rank and self-respect of in- dependent beings, is, in the truest sense of the word, a godlike task; inasmuch as it is a task which, God's book tells us, God himself has ac- complisht. But these things, as St Paul says, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 29 expressly speaking of the Pentateuch, happened for ensamples, and were written for our admonition. Often would, the lad Watch with sad fixedness the summer sun I n bloodred blaze sink hero-like to rest. Then, to set like thee ! but I, alas ! Am weak, a poor unheeded shepherd boy.* T'was that a las undid him. His ambition, Once the vague instinct of his nobleness, Thus tempered in the glowing furnace-heat Of lone repinings and aye-present aims, Brightened to hope, and hardened to resolve. To hope ! What hope is that, whose clearest ray Is drencht with mothers tears ! what that resolve, Whose strength is crime, whose instrument is death ! There is something melancholy and painful in the entire abandonment of any institution designed for good. It is too plain a confession of intellectual weakness, too manifest a receding before the brute power of outward things. Any one can amputate : the difficulty and the object is to restore. To reani- mate lifeless forms, to catch their departed spirit, and embody it in another shape, in the room of institutions grown obsolete, to substitute such new ones as will mould, sway, and propell the exist- ing mass of thought and character, and thus do for the present age, what the old in their vigour did for * Since these lines were written, a fine passage, expressing the feelings with which an ambitious lad sits watching the setting sun, has been pointed out to me in Schiller's Robbers. 30 GUESSES AT TRUTH. the past, these are things worth living a politi- cian's life for, with all its labours and disgusts. Did that alone suffice, who would live any other ? But to accomplish these things, the most dextrous mastery of the art is requisite, guided by the bright- est illuminations of the science : and who is gifted with both these, when so few have either ? Quicquid credam valde credo, must be the motto of every true poet. His belief is of the heart, not of the head ; and springs from himself, much more than from the object. It is curious that we express personality and unity by the same symbol. Is there any country in which polygamy is more frequent than in England ? In some cases the mistress has been so much a wife, it only remains for the wife to be a mis- tress. Yet, strictly speaking, it is just as impossible for any but a wife to be a wife, as for any but a wife to be a mother. And as Wisdom cries, through the lips of a great French philosopher, " N'en croyez pas les romans : il faut etre epouse pour etre mere." Bonald, Pensees, p. 97. Xerxes promist a great reward to the inventor of a new pleasure. What would he not promise, GUESSES AT TRUTH. 31 in our days, to the inventor of a new incident ? Fancy and chance have long since come to an end, the one of its combinations, the other of its leger- demain. " Now the huge book of faery-land lies closed, And those strong brazen clasps will yield no more." But since the fictitious sources of poetry are thus as it were drunk up, is poetry to fail with them ? If not, from whence is it to be supplied ? From the inexhaustible springs of truth and feeling, which are ever gurgling and boiling up in the caverns of the human heart. It is an uncharitable errour to ascribe the delight, with which unpoetical persons often speak of a mountain-tour, to affectation. The delight is as real as mutton and beef, with which it has a closer connexion than the travelers themselves suspect; arising in great measure from the good effects of mountain air, regular exercise, and wholesome diet, upon the spirits. This is sensual indeed, though not improperly so : but it is no concession to the materialist. I do not deny that my neigh- bour has a soul, by referring a particular pleasure in him to the body. Poetry should be an alterative: modern play- wrights have converted it into a sedative ; which they administer in such unseasonable quantities, that, like an overdose of opium, it makes one sick. 32 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Time is no agent, as some people appear to think it, that it should accomplish anything of it- self. Looking at a heap of stones for a thousand years will do no more toward building a house of them, than looking at them for a moment. For time, when applied to works of any kind, being only a succession of relevant acts, each furthering the work, it is clear that even an infinite succession of irrelevant and therefore inefficient acts would no more achieve or forward the completion, than an infinite number of jumps on the same spot would advance a man toward his journey's end. For there is a motion without progress, in time as well as in space ; where a thing has often remained stationary, which appeared to us, while we were leaving it behind, to have receded. There is a sort of ostracism continually going on against the best, both of men and measures. Hence the good are fain to purchase the acquies- cence of the bad, by consenting to be satisfied with the second, third, or even fourth best, ac- cording as they can make their bargain. Courage, when it is not heroic self-sacrifice, is sometimes a modification, and sometimes a result of faith. How vast a field then is opened to man, by establishing faith and its modifications upon the power and truth of God ! Had this great Gospel virtue (which, as the New Testament philosophi- cally affirms, has power to remove mountains) GUESSES AT TRUTH. 33 been really and extensively operative, what highth of perfection might we not have reacht ? As the apparent impossibilities, which check man's exer- tions, receded, his views would have enlarged in proportion : so that, considering how the re- moval of a single obstacle will often disclose un- imagined paths, and open the way to undreamt- of advances, our wishes might perhaps afford a surer measure even than our hopes, for calculating the progress of man under the impulse of this master principle. Who, notwithstanding the Vicar of Wakefield, twenty years ago thought that prac- ticable, which Mrs. Fry has shewn to be almost easy ? From a narrow notion of human duty, men imagine that the devout and social affections are the only qualities stunted by want of faith. Were it so, we should not have to deplore that narrow sphere of knowledge, that dearth of heroic enter- prise, that scarcity of landmarks and pinnacles in virtue, for which cowardly man has to thank his distrust of what he can accomplish, God assisting. We could in no wise have had more than one dis- coverer of America : but we should then have been blest with many Columbuses. So Bacon teaches in his Essay on Atheism : " Take an example of a dog, and mark what a generosity and courage he '.rill put on, when he finds himself maintained by a man, who to him is instead of a god, or melior natura ; which courage is manifestly such, as that creature, without that confidence of a better nature D 34 GUESSES AT TRUTH. than his own, could never attain. So man, when he resteth and assureth himself upon divine protection and favour, gathereth a force and faith, which human nature in itself could not obtain. There- fore, as atheism is in all respects hateful, so it is especially in this, that it destroys magnanimity, and depriveth human nature of the means to exalt itself above human frailty." But I may be told perhaps that, although this is spoken most truly against atheism, no such thing as atheism is to be found now ; and I may be askt, Who are atheists? I answer, with sorrow and awe, Practically every man is an atheist, who lices without God in the world. Friendship is love with jewels on, but without either flowers or veil. Juliet's flow of feeling is a proof of her purity. As oftentimes, when walking in a wood near sunset, though the sun himself be hidden by the highth and bushiness of the tree.s around, yet we know that he is still above the horizon, from see- ing his beams in the open glades before us, illu- minating a thousand leaves, the several brightnesses of which are so many evidences of his presence ; thus is it with the Holy Spirit. He works in secret ; but his work is manifest in the lives of all true Christians. Lamps so heavenly must have been lighted from on high. GUESSES AT TRUTH. 35 As the Epicureans had a Deism without a God, so the Unitarians have a Christianity without a Christ, and a Jesus but no Saviour. Christian prudence passes for a want of worldly courage ; just as Christian courage is taken for a want of worldly prudence. But the two qualities are easily reconciled. When we have outward circumstances to contend with, what need we fear, God being with us ? When we have sin and temptation to contend with, what should we not fear ? God leaving our defense to our own hearts, which at the first attack will surrender to the enemy, and go over at the first solicitation. Of Christian courage I have just spoken. On Christian prudence it is well said, that he who loves danger shall perish by it. " He who will fight the devil at his own weapon, must not won- der if he finds him an overmatch." South, Ser- mon Ixv. Mark how the moon athwart yon snowy waste An instant glares on us ! then hides her head, Curtained in thickest clouds, while half her orb Hangs on the horizon like an urn of fire. That too diminishes, drawn up toward heaven By some invisible hand : and now 'tis gone : And nought remains to man, but anxious thoughts, Why one so beautiful should frown on him ; With painful longings for a gift resumed, And the aching sense that something has been lost. 36 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Light may blind a man : darkness never can. What then ! are we to pray to be left in dark- ness ? no ! but beware, ye who walk in the light, lest ye turn your light into a curse. A. Plan for the Alleviation of the Poor-rates, written in 1826. I entreat every one who does not see the griev- ous evil of the Poorlaws as now administered, or who doubts the necessity of applying some strong remedy, to read the article on those laws in the GGth number of the Quarterly Review. It is written professedly in their defense : yet, un- less with Malachi Malagrowther I called them a cancer, I could say nothing severer than is there said against their present administration, and its effects and tendencies ; which the writer refers to the act passed in 1795, "enabling overseers to relieve poor persons at their own homes" For nearly a century before, the poor-rates had fluc- tuated but little. In the thirty-one years since, they have risen from two to six millions ; and if no measures are taken to stop the evil, they must still go on increasing. " Yet (as the Reviewer says) the direct savings which would accrue from a better system of supporting the poor, are not worth con- sideration, when contrasted with the indirect ad- vantages, from the melioration of the character and habits of the agricultural labourer." Almost every man in England is affected by GUESSES AT TRUTH. 37 this evil system : almost every man, except the farmers, who are the loudest in their complaints, is directly injured by it ; the poor most. Let them then, to use their own phrase, know the rights of the matter. Shew them how great, how important a part of the system, as it now exists, is quite new. Appeal to their own experience, whether it is not most pernicious. Half the diffi- culty which impedes an alteration of the Poorlaws, will be at an end. The repeal of the Act of 1795 may do a good deal, especially for the payers of poor-rates. But I am disposed to go much fur- ther ; not from hardheartedness, or a disregard for the happiness and welfare of the honest and indus- trious poor of this land ; but from a belief that, after a few years, when the evil effects of the pre- sent system are worn out of the character and habits of the English labourer, his condition would be improved by a complete change in our system of legal charity. Old age is the only period of a poor man's life, when, if honest and industri- ous, he would not be sorry to owe his regular support to any hands except his own. Now in old age his comforts would be augmented, and, what is of still more consequence to him, his re- spectability would be increast, he would be a richer man, a more independent man, a man of greater consequence in the village, from the adop- tion of some such regulations as the following. Let a fund be establish! for the benefit of the poor, to be called the National Poor-fund. Out 38 GUESSES AT TRUTH. of this fund, every labourer (paying the sum of weekly, from the time he is sixteen till he is ,) shall at the age of sixty-five be entitled to receive the third of a hale labourer's average wages. That third at the end of four years is to be doubled ; and at the end of eight years tripled. Thus at seventy-three the labourer, if he live so long, will be entitled of right to re- ceive the full amount of a healthy labourer's wages. The poor of large towns and manufacturers, I conceive, are shorter-lived than peasants. If so, they should be entitled to the benefits of the National Poor-fund earlier. The trifle to be paid weekly both by them and by the agricultural labourers should be less, perhaps considerably less, than what would be demanded by an Insurance- office guaranteeing the same prospective advan- tages. Occasional distress may safely be left to private charity. Consequently there need not be any temporary relief: nor should there, as that would reopen a door to all the present evils. There should also be but few poor-houses. Orphans, and occasionally the aged, in country parishes might be boarded out, (as is, or was, the custom at Lyons with the foundlings, who, instead of being reared in the hospital, were put out to nurse,) due care being taken to place the orphans with cottagers of good repute. But a subscriber to the fund, if disabled by an accident, might at GUESSES AT TRUTH. 39 any age claim relief from it apportioned to his maimedness. Persons who had not contributed to the fund in their youth, would receive no relief from it in old age. Contributions for less than years should be forfeited: but every man, paying his dues for that number of years, and then discontinuing his contribution, should be entitled to relief pro- portionate. Whether he should begin to receive at sixty-five, only receiving less weekly, or should begin to receive aid later, is a question I am not prepared to answer. Perhaps the latter would be the better plan in most cases. Of women I say nothing : but it would be easy to form a liberal scale, and liberal it should be, for them. Only I would allow contributors, who die without benefiting by the fund, to bequeathe to women who are, or to female infants provided they become, contributors, the amount of one year's con- tribution for every during which the testator may have contributed ; such amount being carried to the account of the legatee, exactly as if she had paid it herself. To increase this Poor-fund, either a parliamen- tary grant should be voted yearly, or, what would be far better, and should therefore be tried in tne first instance, the rich should come for- ward as honorary subscribers. Nay, every one without exception should belong to it, either as subscriber or contributor. It is the littles of the little which make the mickle. 40 GUESSES AT TRUTH. Of the contributors I have spoken already. For subscribers., the following yearly proportion, or something like it, would suffice : one pound for all who in any way have sixty pounds a year ; two for all who have a hundred; and so on. Only there should be a maximum, and that not a large one ; so that in rich families the wife might subscribe as well as the husband. All persons now liable to be rated should put in a trifle for every child above six or seven years old ; this in the case of the wealthy should be as much, or nearly so, as they put in for themselves. More- over all masters should take care that their ser- vants are subscribers, making them an allowance on purpose. In return for this they should be admitted to relief in old age, as they would now be, on making out a case of necessity. But only bona,-fi' a\os TrdXirjs opowv (Trl ou/twra TTOVTOV. The epithet ou>07ra, denoting the dark gloom, perhaps the purple grape- colour of the distant sea, while it was dashing and foaming at his feet, brings it into harmony and sympathy with Achilles. A bright blue sea would have been out of keeping here. Or take a cou- ple of similies. When Apollo comes down from Olympus to avenge his insulted priest, he conies oiKus. When Thetis rises from the sea GUESSES AT TRUTH. 53 to listen to the complaint of her son, she rises TJVT o/ii'xA?;. Parallels to these two similies may be found in two of our own greatest poets. Milton tells us that Pandemonium, " Rose like an exhala- tion from the earth." Coleridge's Ancient Ma- riner says of himself, that he passes " like night from land to land." Milton's image is a fine one. Coleridge's appears to me, to adopt the ex- pression he himself makes use of, when speaking of Wordsworth's faults, " too great for the subject," a piece of " mental bombast." Be this however as it may, how inferior are they both, in grandeur, in simplicity, in beauty, in grace, to the Homeric ! which moreover have better caught the spirit and sentiment of the natural appearances. For Apollo does come with all the power and majesty, and with all the terrours of night ; and the soft waviness of an exhalation images the rising of the goddess much better than the massiness and hard stiff outline of a building. In Homer's landscapes, it is true, there is a want, or, I would rather say, an absence of those ornamental picturesque epithets with which Pope has bedizened his translation. This however only shews that the objects he speaks of " had no need of a remoter charm, By thought supplied, or any interest Unborrowed from the eye." Such as they are, he loves them for their own sake. In his vivid transparent verse, egeffravev Tra. He had the two great stimulants to enterprise before him. The voice of the mountains, and the voice of the sea, " each a mighty voice," were ever rousing and stirring and prompting him; each moreover checking the hurtful effects of the other. The sea enlarged the range and scope of his thoughts, which the mountains might have penned in: thus it saved him from the "homely wits," which Shakspeare ascribes to " home-keeping youth." The mountains on the other hand coun- teracted that homelessness, which a mere sea-life is apt to breed, except in those in whom there is a living consciousness that on the sea as on the shore they are equally in the hand of God: to which homelessness, and want of a solid ground to strike root in, it is mainly owing that neither Tyre nor Carthage, notwithstanding all their power and wealth, occupies any place in the in- tellectual history of mankind. To the Greeks however, as to us, who have a country and a home upon the land, the sea was an inexhaustible mine of intellectual riches. Nor is it without a prophetic symbolicalness that the sea fills so important a part in both the Homeric poems. The amphibious character of the Greeks was al- 84 GUESSES AT TRUTH. ready determined : they were to be lords of land and sea. Both these voices too, " liberty's chosen music/' as Wordsworth terms them in his glorious sonnet, called the Greeks to freedom : and nobly did they answer the call, when the sound of the mighty Pan was glowing in their ears, at Mara- thon and Thermopylae, at Salamis and Platea. Freedom moreover, and the free forms of their constitutions, brought numerous opportunities and demands for outward activity. The Greek poets and historians were also soldiers and statesmen. They had to deal with men, to act with them, and by them, and upon them, in the forum, and in the field. Their converse was with men in the con- crete, as living agents, not with the abstraction man, nor with the shadowy self-reflecting visions of the imagination. Even at the present day, though our habits and education are so efficacious in reducing all men to the same level, there is a clearly perceptible difference between those au- thors who have taken an active part in public life, and those who have been mere men of letters. The former, though they may often be deficient in speculative power, and unskilled in the forms of literature, have a knowledge of the practical springs of action, and a temperance of judgement, which is seldom found in a recluse, unaccustomed to meet with resistance among his own thoughts, or apt to slip away from it when he does, and therefore unpractist in bearing or dealing with it. That mystic seclusion, so common in modern GUESSES AT TRUTH. 85 times, as it has always been in Asia, was scarcely known in Greece. Even the want of books, and the consequent necessity of going to things themselves for the knowledge of them, sharpened the eyes of the Greeks, and gave them livelier and clearer perceptions: while our eyes are dimmed by poring over the records of what others have seen and thought ; and the impressions we thus obtain are much less vivid and true. Added to all this, their anthropomorphic reli- gion, which sprang in the first instance out of these very tendencies of the Greek mind, reacted powerfully upon them, as the free exercise of every faculty is wont to do, and exerted a great influence in keeping the Greeks within the sphere which nature seemed to assign to them, by pre- venting their thinking or desiring to venture out of that sphere, and by teaching them to find con- tentment and every enjoyment they could imagine within it. For it was by abiding within it that they were as gods. The feeling exprest in the speech of Achilles in Hades was one in which the whole people partook : [3ov\oip.T]v K firdpovpos ea>v 6rjrfV(fJifv aXAw, 77 Tracrii/ i/eKveoxri Ka.Ta(f)difj.fvoirriv dvacrcreti/. Through the combined operation of these causes the Greeks acquired a clearness of vision for all the workings of life, and all the manifestations of beauty, far beyond that of any other people. Whatever they saw, they saw thoroughly, and 86 GUESSES AT TRUTH. almost palpably, with a sharpness almost incom- prehensible in our land of books and mists. To mention a couple of instances: the anatomy of the older Greek statues is so perfect, that Mr Haydon, whose scattered dissertations on ques- tions of art, rich as they often are in genius and thought, well deserve to be collected and pre- served from a newspaper grave, in his remarks on the Elgin marbles, pledges himself that, if any one were to break off a toe from one of these mar- bles, he would prove " the great consequences of vitality, as it acts externally, to exist in that toe." Yet it is very doubtful whether the Greeks ever anatomized human bodies, at all events they knew hardly anything of anatomy scientifically, from an examination of the internal structure, before the Alexandrian age. Now even with the help of the scientific knowledge, it is a rarity in modern art to find figures of which the anatomy is not in some respect faulty ; at least where the body is not either almost entirely concealed by dra- pery, or cased, like the yolk of an egg, in the soft albumen of a pseudo-ideal. When it is otherwise, as in the works of Michael Angelo and Annibal Caracci, we too often see studies, rather than works of art, and muscular contortions and con- volutions, instead of the gentle play and flow of life. Mr Haydon indeed contends that the Greek sculptors must have been good anatomists : but all historical evidence is against such a supposition. The truth is, that, as such wonderful stories are GUESSES AT TRUTH. 87 told of the keen eyes which the wild Indians have for all manner of tracks in their forests, so the Greeks had a clear and keen-sightedness in ano- ther direction, which to us, all whose perceptions are mixt up with such a bundle of multifarious notions, and who see so many things in every- thing, beside what we really do see, appears quite inconceivable. They studied life, not, as we do, in death, but in life; and that not in the stiff, crampt, inanimate life of a model, but in the fresh, buoyant, energetic life, which was called forth in the gymnasia. Another striking example of the accuracy of the Greek eye is afforded by a remark of Spurzheim's, that the heads of all the old Greek statues are in perfect accordance with his system, and betoken the very intellectual and moral qualities which the character was meant to be endowed with : although in few modern statues or busts is any correspondence discoverable between the character and the shape of the head. For groundless and erroneous as may be the psychological, or, as the authors themselves term them, the phrenological views, which have lately been set forth as the scientific anatomy of the human mind, it can hardly be questioned that there is a great deal of truth in what has been called the gnomonic part of the system, or that Gall was an acute and accurate observer of those conformations of the scull, which are the ordinary accompaniments, if not the infallible indications, of the various intellectual powers. But in these 88 GUESSES AT TRUTH. very observations he had been anticipated above two thousand years ago by the unerring eye of the Greek sculptors. In like manner do the Greeks seem by a kind of intuition to have at once discerned the true prin- ciples of proportion and harmony and grace and beauty in all things, in the human figure, in architecture, in style, in all the forms and modes of composition. These principles, which they dis- cerned from the first, and which other nations have hardly known anything of, except as prima- rily derivative from them, they exemplified in that wonderful series of masterpieces, from Homer down to Plato and Aristotle and Demosthenes ; a series of which we see only the fragments, but the very fragments of which the rest of the world would vainly strive to match. Rome may have more regal majesty ; modern Europe may be superior in wisdom, especially in that wisdom of which the owl may serve as the emblem : but in the con- test of beauty no one could hesitate; the apple must be awarded to Greece. This is what I meant by speaking of the a