do with such Collection. Nevertheless, search- | said, from of old, by the opposite party: 'All ing for some fit Capital of the composite men are liars?' Do they not (and this nowise order, to adorn adequately the now finished'in haste') whimperingly talk of 'one just singular Pillar of our Narrative, what can suit us better than the following, so far as we know, yet unedited, Occasional Discourse, by Count Alessandro Cagliostro, Thaumaturgist, Prophet, and Arch-Quack; delivered in the Bastille: Year of Lucifer, 5789; of the Hegira Mohammedan, ( from Mecca,) 1201; of the Hegira Cagliostric, (from Palermo,) 24; of the Vulgar Era, 1785. person,' (as they call him,) and of the remaining thousand save one that take part with us? So decided is our majority."-(Applause.) "Of the Scarlet Woman,-yes, Monseigneur, without offence,-of the Scarlet Woman that sits on Seven Hills, and her Black Jesuit Militia, out foraging from Pole to Pole, I speak not; for the story is too trite: nay, the Militia itself, as I see, begins to be disbanded, and invalided, for a second treachery; treachery to herself! Nor yet of Governments; for a like "Fellow Scoundrels,-An unspeakable Inreason. Ambassadors, said an English-puntrigue, spun from the soul of that Circe-Me- ster, lie abroad for their masters. Their masgæra, by our voluntary or involuntary help, ters, we answer, lie, at home, for themselves. has assembled us all, if not under one roof-Not of all this, nor of Courtship, (with its so tree, yet within one grim iron-bound ring-wall. For an appointed number of months, in the ever-rolling flow of Time, we, being gathered from the four winds, did by Destiny work together in body corporate; and, joint labourers in a Transaction already famed over the Globe, obtain unity of Name, (like the Argonauts of universal Lovers' vows,) nor Courtiership, nor old,) as Conquerors of the Diamond Necklace. Erelosophy itself, both pract swer!-No: Phi long it is done, (for ring-walls hold not captive the free Scoundrel for ever;) and we disperse again, over wide terrestrial Space; some of us, it may be, over the very marches of Space. Our Act hangs indissoluble together; floats wondrous in the older and older memory of men: while we, little band of Scoundrels, who saw each other, now hover so far asunder, to see each other no more, if not once more only on the universal Doomsday, the last of the Days! "In such interesting moments, while we stand within the verge of parting, and have not yet parted, methinks it were well here, in these sequestered Spaces, to institute a few general reflections. Me, as a public speaker, the Spirit of Masonry, of Philosophy, and Philanthropy, and even of Prophecy (blowing mysterious from the Land of Dreams) impels to do it. Give ear, O Fellow Scoundrels, to what the Spirit utters; treasure it in your hearts, practise it in your lives. "Sitting here, penned up in this which (with a slight metaphor) I call the Central Cloaca of Nature, where a tyrannical De Launay can forbid the bodily eye frée vision, you with the mental eye see but the better. This Central Cloaca, is it not rather a Heart, into which, from all regions, mysterious conduits introduce, and forcibly inject, whatsoever is choicest in the Scoundrelism of the Earth; there to be absorbed, or again (by the other auricle) ejected into new circulation? Let the eye of the mind run along this immeasurable venousarterial system; and astound itself with the magnificent extent of Scoundreldom; the deep, I may say, unfathomable, significance of Scoundrelism. “Yes, brethren, wide as the Sun's range is our Empire; wider than old Rome's in its palmiest era. I have in my time been far; in frozen Muscovy, in hot Calabria, east, west, wheresoever the sky overarches civilized man: and never hitherto saw I myself an alien; out of Scoundreldom I never was. Is it not even lative, has, at length (after shamefullest gropand even specuing) stumbled on the plain conclusion that Sham is indispensable to Reality, as Lying to Living; that without Lying the whole busiselling of tapes, must explode into anarchic ness of the world, from swaying of senates to discords, and so a speedy conclusion ensue. "But the grand problem, Fellow Scoundrels, as you well know, is the marrying of Truth and Sham; so that they become one flesh, man and wife, and generate these three: Profit, Pudding, and Respectability that always keeps her Gig. Wondrously, indeed, do Truth and Delusion play into one another: Reality rests on Dream. Truth is but the skin of the bot tomless Untrue: and ever, from time to time, the Untrue shed's it; is clear again; and the superannuated True itself becomes a Fable. Thus do all hostile things crumble back into our Empire; and of its increase there is no end. "O brothers, to think of the Speech without meaning, (which is mostly ours,) and of the Speech with contrary meaning, (which is wholly ours,) manufactured by the organs of Mankind in one solar day! Or call it a day of Jubilee, when public Dinners are given, and Dinner-orations are delivered: or say, a Neighbouring Island in time of General Election! O ye immortal gods! The mind is lost; can only admire great Nature's plenteousness with a kind of sacred wonder. "For, tell me, What is the chief end of man? To glorify God,' said the old Christian Sect, now happily extinct. To eat 'and find eatables by the readiest method,' answers sound Philosophy, discarding whims. If the readier method (than this of persuasive-attraction) is discovered,-point it out.-Brethren, I said the old Christian Sect was happily extinct: as,indeed, in Rome itself, there goes the wonderfullest traditionary Prophecy,* of that Nazareth Christ coming back, and being crucified a second time there; which truly I see not in the * Goethe mentions it (Italianische Reise.) least how he could fail to be. Nevertheless, | bly-Jock!) The Arch-Quack, whose eyes were that old Christian whim, of an actual living turned inwards as in rapt contemplation, and ruling God, and some sacred covenant started at the titter and mutter: his eyes flashed binding all men in Him, with much other mys- outwards with dilated pupil; his nostrils tic stuff, does, under new or old shape, linger opened wide; his very hair seemed to stir in with a few. From these few, keep yourselves its long twisted pigtails, (his fashion of curl;) for ever far! They must even be left to their and as Indignation is said to make Poetry, it whim, which is not like to prove infectious. here made Prophecy, or what sounded as such. With terrible, working features, and gesticulation not recommended in any Book of Gesture, the Arch-Quack, in voice supernally discordant (like Lions worrying Bulls of Bashan) began: "Sniff not, Dame de Lamotte; tremble, thou foul Circe-Megara: thy day of desolation is at hand! Behold ye the Sanhedrim of Judges, with their fanners (of written Parchment) loud-rustling, as they winnow all her chaff, and "But neither are we, my Fellow Scoundrels, without our Religion, our Worship; which, like the oldest, and all true Worships, is one of Fear. The Christians have their Cross, the Moslem their Cresent: but have not we, too, our-Gallows? Yes, infinitely terrible is the Gallows; bestrides, with its patibulary fork, the Pit of bottomless Terror. No Manicheans are we; our God is One. Great, exceeding great, I say, is the Gallows; of old, even from the beginning, in this world; know-down-plumage, and she stands there naked ing neither variableness nor decadence; for ever, for ever, over the wreck of ages, and all civic and ecclesiastic convulsions, meal-mobs, revolutions, the Gallows with front serenely terrible towers aloft. Fellow Scoundrels, fear the Gallows, and have no other fear! This is the Law and the Prophets. Fear every emanation of the Gallows. And what is every buffet, with the fist, or even with the tongue, of one having authority, but some such emanation. And what is Force of Public Opinion but the infinitude of such emanations,-rush-pêtrière !-Weep, daughter of the high and ing combined on you like a mighty stormwind? Fear the Gallows, I say! O when, with its long black arm, it has clutched a man, what avail him all terrestrial things? These pass away, with horrid nameless dinning in his ears; and the ill-starred Scoundrel pendulates between Heaven and Earth, a thing rejected of both.”—(Profound sensation.) and mean?-Villette, Oliva, do ye blab secrets? Ye have no pity of her extreme need; she none of yours. Is thy light-giggling, untamable heart at last heavy? Hark ye! Shrieks of one cast out; whom they brand on both shoulders with iron stamp; the red hot "V," thou Voleuse, hath it entered thy soul? Weep, Circe de Lamotte; wail there in truckle bed, and hysterically gnash thy teeth: nay, do, smother thyself in thy door-mat coverlid; thou hast found thy mates; thou art in the Sal puissant Sans-inexpressibles! Buzz of Parisian Gossipry is about thee; but not to help thee: no, to eat before thy time. What shall a King's Court do with thee, thou unclean thing, while thou yet livest? Escape! Flee to utmost countries; hide there, if thou canst, thy mark of Cain!-In the Babylon of Fogland! Ha! is that my London? See I Judas "Such, so wide in compass, high, gallows- Iscariot Egalité? Print, yea print abundantly high in dignity, is the Scoundrel Empire; and the abominations of your two hearts: breath for depth, it is deeper than the Foundations of of rattlesnakes can bedim the steel mirror, but the World. For what was Creation itself only for a time. And there! Ay, there at wholly (according to the best Philosophers) last! Tumblest thou from the lofty leads, but a Divulsion by the TIME-SPIRIT, (or Devil poverty-stricken, O thriftless daughter of the so-called ;) a forceful Interruption, or breaking high and puissant, escaping bailiffs? Desasunder, of the old Quiescence of Eternity?cendest thou precipitate, in dead night, from It was Lucifer that fell, and made this lordly window in the third story: hurled forth by. World arise. Deep? It is bottomless-deep; Bacchanals, to whom thy shrill tongue had the very Thought, diving, bobs up from it grown unbearable ?* Yea, through the smoke baffled. Is not this that they call Vice of Ly- of that new Babylon thou fallest headlong; ing the Adum-Kadmon, or primeval Rude-Ele-one long scream of screams makes night ment, old as Chaos mother's-womb of Death | hideous: thou liest there, shattered like addle and Hell; whereon their thin film of Virtue, egg, 'nigh to the Temple of Flora! O LaTruth, and the like, poorly wavers-for a day? motte, has thy Hypocrisia ended, then? Thy All Virtue, what is it, even by their own show- many characters were all acted. Here at last ing, but Vice transformed, that is, manufac- thou actest not, but art what thou seemest: a tured, rendered artificial? 'Man's Vices are mangled squelch of gore, confusion, and the roots from which his Virtues grow out and abomination; which men huddle underground, see the light,' says one: 'Yes,' add I, and with no burial stone. Thou gallows-carthanklessly steal their nourishment!' Were rion !"it not for the nine hundred ninety and nine unacknowledged (perhaps martyred and calumniated) Scoundrels, how were their single Just Person (with a murrain on him!) so much as possible?-Oh, it is high, high: these things are too great for me; Intellect, Imagination, flags her tired wings; the soul lost, baffled" -Here the prophet turned up his nose, (the broadest of the eighteenth century,) and opened * The English Translator of Lamotte's Life says, she fell from the leads of her house, nigh the Temple of Flora, endeavouring to escape seizure for debt; and was taken up so much hurt that she died in consequence, Another report runs that she was flung out of window, -Here Dame de Lamotte tittered audibly, as in the Cagliostric text. One way or other she did and muttered, Coq-d'-Inde, (which, being inter-die, on the 23d of August, 1791 (Biographie Universelle, Xxx. 287.) Where the Where the "Temple of Flora" was, or is, preted into the Scottish tongue, signifies Bub-one knows not. wide his nostrils with such a greatness of dis- | POSTURE waver? Burst there, in starry sheen, updarting, Light-rays from out its dark foundations; as it rocks and heaves, not in travailthroes, but in death-throes? Yea, Light-rays, piercing, clear, that salute the Heavens,-lo, they kindle it; their starry clearness becomes as red Hellfire! IMPOSTURE is burnt up; one Redsea of Fire, wild-billowing enwraps the World; with its fire-tongue licks at the Stars. Thrones are hurled into it, and Dubois Mitres, and Prebendal Stalls that drop fatness, and-ha! what see I-all the Gigs of Creation: all, all! Wo is me! Never since Pharaoh's Chariots, in the Red-sea of water, was there wreck of Wheel-vehicles like this in the Sea of Fire. Desolate, as ashes, as gases, shall they wander in the wind. "Higher, higher, yet flames the Fire-Sea; “Villette-de-Retaux! Have the catchpoles trepanned thee, by sham of battle, in thy Tavern, from the sacred Republican soil.* * It is thou that wert the hired Forger of Hand-crackling with new dislocated timber; hissing writings? Thou wilt confess it? Depart, unwhipt, yet accursed.-Ha! The dread Symbol of our Faith? Swings aloft, on the Castle of St. Angelo, a Pendulous Mass, which I think I discern to be the body of Villette! There let him end; the sweet morsel of our Juggernaut. Nay, weep not thou, disconsolate Oliva; blear not thy bright blue eyes, daughter of the shady Garden! Thee shall the Sanhedrim not harm; this Cloaca of Nature emits thee; as notablest of unfortunate-females, thou shalt have choice of husbands not without capital; and accept one.† Know this, for the vision of it is true, with leather and prunella. The metal Images are molten; the marble Images become mortar-lime; the stone Mountains sulkily explode. RESPECTABILITY, with all her collected Gigs inflamed for funeral pyre, wailing, leaves the Earth, to return under new Avatar. Imposture, how it burns, through generations: how it is burnt up-for a time. The World is black ashes; which-when will they grow green? The Images all run into amorphous Corinthian brass; all Dwellings of men destroyed; the very mountains peeled and riven, the valleys black and dead: it is an empty World! Wo to them that shall be born then! A King, a Queen, (ah me!) were hurled in; did rustle once; flew aloft, crackling, like paper-scroll. Oliva's Husband was hurled in; Iscariot Ega "But the Anointed Majesty whom ye profaned? Blow, spirit of Egyptian Masonry, blow aside the thick curtains of Space! Lolité; thou grim De Launay, with thy grim Basyou, her eyes are red with their first tears of pure bitterness; not with their last. Tirewoman Campan is choosing, from the Printshops of the Quais, the reputed-best among the hundred likenesses of Circe de Lamotte: a Queen shall consider if the basest of women ever, by any accident, darkened daylight or candle-light for the highest. The Portrait answers: 'Never!'-(Sensation in the audience.) tille; whole kindreds and peoples; five millions of mutually destroying Men. For it is the End of the Dominion of IMPOSTURE (which is Darkness and opaque Firedamp; and the burning up, with unquenchable fire, of all the Gigs that are in the Earth!"-Here the Prophet paused, fetching a deep sigh; and the Cardinal uttered a kind of faint, tremulous Hem! "Mourn not, O Monseigneur, spite of thy nephritic cholic, and many infirmities. For "-Ha! What is this? Angels, Uriel, Ana- thee mercifully it was not unto death.* O chiel, and the other Five; Pentagon of Re- Monseigneur, (for thou hadst a touch of goodjuvenescene; Power that destroyed Originalness,) who would not weep over. thee, if he Sin; Earth, Heaven, and thou Outer Limbo, which men name Hell! Does the EMPIRE OF IM also laughed? Behold! The not too judicious Historian, that long years hence, amid remotest wilderness, writes thy Life, and names thee Mud-volcano; even he shall reflect that it was whole Eternity; which thou (poor gambler) hast expended so: and, even over his hard heart, a breath of dewy pity for thee shall blow.-O Monseigneur, thou wert not all ignoble: thy Mud-volcano was but strength dislocated, fire misapplied. Thou wentest ravening through the world; no Life-elixir or Stone of the Wise could we two (for want of funds) discover: a foulest Circe undertook to fatten thee; and thou hadst to fill thy belly with the east wind. And burst? By the Masonry of * See Georgel, and Villette's Mémoire. † Affaire du Collier is this MS. Note: "Gay d'Oliva, athy Life this same; thy only chance through common-girl of the Palais-Royal, who was chosen to play a part in this Business, got married, some years afterwards, to one Beausire, an Ex-Noble, formerly attached to the d'Artois Household. In 1790, he was Captain of the National Guard Company of the Temple. He then retired to Choisy, and managed to be named Procureur of that Commune: he finally employed himself in drawing up Lists of Proscription in the Luxembourg Prison, when he played the part of informer, (mouton.) See Tableau des Prisons de Paris sous Robes pierre." These details are correct. In the Mémoires sur les Prisons, (new Title of the Book just referred to,) ii. 171, we find this: "The second Denouncer was Beausire, an Ex-Noble, known under the old government for his intrigues. To give an idea of him, it is enough to say that he married the d'Oliva," &c., as in the MS. Note already given. Finally is added: "He was the main spy of Boyenval; who, however, said that be made use of him; but that Fouquier-Tinville did not like him, and would have him guillotined in good time." 1 See Campan. * Rohan was elected of the Constituent Assembly; and even got a compliment or two in it, as Court-victim, from here and there a man of weak judgment. He was one of the first who, recalcitrating against "Civil Constitution of the Clergy," &c., took himself across the Rhine. Enoch. No! Behold has not thy Jesuit Familiar his Scouts dim-flying over the deep of human things? Cleared art thou of crime, save that, of fixed-idea; weepest, a repentant exile, in the Mountains of Auvergne. Neither shall the Red Fire-sea itself consume thee; only consume thy Gig, and, instead of Gig (0 rich exchange!) restore thy Self. Safe beyond the Rhine-stream, thou livest peaceful days; savest many from the fire, and anointest their smarting burns. Sleep finally, in thy mother's bosom, in a good old age!"-The Cardinal gave a sort of guttural murmur, or gurgle, which ended in a long sigh. whither? By-standers wag their heads, and say; "The Brow of Brass, behold how it has got all unlackered; these Pinchbeck lips can lie no more! Eheu! Ohoo!"-and he burst into unstanchable blubbering of tears; and sobbing out the moanfullest broken howl, sank down in swoon; to be put to bed by De Launay and others. Thus spoke (or thus might have spoken) and prophesied, the Arch-quack Cagliostro; and truly much better than he ever else did: for not a jot or tittle of it (save only that of our promised Interview with Nestor de Lamotte, which looks unlikelier than ever, for we have not heard of him, dead or living, since 1826,) but he has turned out to be literally true. As, indeed, in all his History, one jot or title of untruth, that we could render true, is, perhaps, not discoverable; much as the distrustful reader may have disbelieved. "O Horrors, as ye shall be called," again burst forth the Quack, "why have ye missed | the Sieur de Lamotte; why not of him, too, made gallows-carrion? Will spear, or swordstick, thrust at him, (or supposed to be thrust,) through window of hackney-coach, in Piccadilly of the Babylon of Fog, where he jolts Here, then, our little labour ends. The Neckdisconsolate, not let out the imprisoned animal lace was, and is no more: the stones of it again existence? Is he poisoned, too?"* Poison"circulate in commerce" (some of them perwill not kill the Sieur Lamotte; nor steel, nor massacres. Let him drag his utterly superfluous life to a second and a third generation; and even admit the not too judicious Historian to see his face before he die. haps, in Rundle's at this hour;) may give rise to what other Histories we know not. The Conquerors of it, every one that trafficked in it, have they not all had their due, which was Death? This little Business, like a little cloud, bodied itself forth in skies clear to the unobservant: but with such hues of deep-tinted villany, dissoluteness, and general delirium, as to the observant, betokened it electric; and wise men (a Goethe, for example) boded But, ha!" cried he, and stood wide-staring, horror struck, as if some Cribb's fist had knocked the wind out of him: "O horror of horrors! Is it not Myself I see? Roman Inquisition! Long months of cruel baiting! Life of Giuseppe Balsamo! Cagliostro's Body still lying in St. Leo Castle, his Self fled-Earthquakes. Has not the Earthquakes come? MEMOIRS OF MIRABEAU.* [LONDON AND WESTMINSTER REVIEW, 1837. A PROVERB says, "The house that is abuilding looks not as the house that is built," Environed with rubbish and mortar-heaps with scaffold-poles, hodmen, dust-clouds, some rudiments only of that thing that is to be, can, to the most observant, disclose themselves through the mean tumult of the thing that hitherto is. How true is this same with regard to all works and facts whatsoever in our world; emphatically true in regard to the highest fact and * See Lamotte's Narrative, (Mémoires Justificatifs.) + Lamotte, after his wife's death, had returned to Paris; and been arrested-not for building churches. The Sentence of the old Parlement against him, in regard to the Necklace business, he gets annulled by the new Courts; but is, nevertheless, "retained in confinement," (Moniteur Newspaper, 7th August, 1782.) He was still in Prison at the time the September Massacre broke out. From Maton de la Varenne we cite the foliowing grim passage': Maton is in La Force Prison. "At one in the morning," (of Monday, September 3,) writes Maton, "the grate that led to our quarter was again opened. Four men in uniform, holding each a naked sabre and blazing torch, mounted to our corridor; a turnkey showing the way; and entered a room close on ours, to investigate a box, which they broke open. This done, they halted in the gallery; and began interrogating one Cuissa, to know where Lamotte was; who, they said, under a pretext of finding a treasure, | which they should share in, had swindled one of them work which our world witnesses,-the Life of what we call an Original Man. Such a man is one not made altogether by the common pattern; one whose phases and goings forth cannot be prophesied of, even approximately; though, indeed, by their very newness and strangeness they most of all provoke prophecy. A man of this kind, while he lives on earth, is unfolding himself out of nothing into something," surely under very complex conditions : out of 300 livres, having asked him to dinner for that purpose. The wretched Cuissa, whom they had in their power, and who lost his life that night, answered, all trembling, that he remembered the fact well, but could not say what had become of the prisoner. Resolute to find this Lamotte and confront him with Cuissa, they ascended into other rooms, and made further rummaging there; but apparently without effect, for I heard them say to one another: Come, search among the corpses, then for, Nom de Dieu! we must know what is become of him." (Ma Resurrection, par Maton de la Varenne; reprinted in the Histoire Parlementaire, xviii. 142.)-Lamotte lay in the Bicêtre Prison; but had got out, precisely in the nick of time,---and dived beyond soundings. Mémoires biographiques, littéraires, et politiques, de Mirabeau; écrits par lui-même, par son Père Oncle, et son Fils Adoptif (Memoirs, biographical, literary, and politi cal, of Mirabeau: written by himself, by his Father, his Uncle, and his Adopted Son.) 8vols. 8vo, Paris, 1834-36. he is drawing continually towards him, in con- | the sum of its strength, its sacred "property tinual succession and variation, the materials for ever," whereby it upholds itself, and steers of his structure, nay, his very plan of it, from forward better or worse, through the yet undisthe whole realm of accident, you may say, and covered deep of Time. All knowledge, all art, from the whole realm of free-will: he is build- all beautiful or precious possession of exist ing his life together in this manner; a guess ence, is, in the long run, this, or connected with and a problem as yet, not to others only but to this. Science itself, is it not, under one of its himself. Hence such criticism by the by- most interesting aspects, Biography; is it not standers; loud no-knowledge, loud misknow- the Record of the Work which an original man, ledge! It is like the opening of the Fisher- still named by us, or not now named, was man's Casket in the Arabian Tale, this begin- blessed by the heavens to do? That Spherening and growing-up of a life: vague smoke and-cylinder is the monument and abbreviated wavering hither and thither; some features of history of the man Archimedes; not to be fora Genie looming through; of the ultimate gotten, probably, till the world itself vanish. shape of which no fisherman or man can judge. Of Poets, and what they have done, and how And yet, as we say, men do judge, and pass the world loves them, let us, in these days, very provisional sentence, being forced to it; you singular in respect of that Art, say nothing, or can predict with what accuracy! "Look at next to nothing. The greatest modern of the the audience in a theatre," says one: "the life poetic guild has already said: "Nay if thou of a man is there compressed within five hours' wilt have it, who but the poet first formed gods duration; is transacted on an open stage, with for us, brought them down to us, raised us up lighted lamps, and what the fittest words and to them?" art of genius can do to make the spirit of it Another remark, on a lower scale, not unclear; yet listen, when the curtain falls, what worthy of notice, is by Jean Paul: that, "as in a discerning public will say of that! And now, art, so in conduct, or what we call morals, beif the drama extended over three-score and ten fore there can be an Aristotle, with his critical years; and were enacted, not with a view to canons, there must be a Homer, many Homers clearness, but rather indeed with a view to with their heroic performances." In plainer concealment, often in the deepest attainable words, the original man is the true creator (or involution of obscurity; and your discerning call him revealer) of Morals too: it is from his public occupied otherwise, cast its eye on the example that precepts enough are derived, business now here for a moment, and then there and written down in books and systems: he profor a moment?" Wo to him, answer we, who perly is the Thing; all that follows after is has no court of appeal against the world's judg- but talk about the thing, better or worse inter- . ment! He is a doomed man: doomed by con-pretation of it, more or less wearisome and inviction to hard penalties; nay, purchasing ac-effectual discourse of logic on it. A remark, quittal (too probably) by a still harder penalty, that of being a trivialty, superficialty, self-advertiser, and partial or total quack, which is the hardest penalty of all. But suppose farther, that the man, as we said, was an original man; that his life-drama would not and could not be measured by the three unities alone, but partly by a rule of its own too: still farther, that the transactions he had mingled in were great and world-dividing; that of all his judges there were not one who had not something to love him for unduly, to hate him for unduly! Alas! is it not precisely in this case, where the whole world is promptest to judge, that the whole world is likeliest to be wrong: natural opacity being so doubly and trebly darkened by accidental difficulty and perversion? The crabbed moralist had some show of reason who said: "To judge of an original contemporary man, you must, in general, reverse the world's judgment about him; the world is not only wrong on that matter, but cannot on any such matter be right." One comfort is, that the world is ever working itself righter and righter on such matters; that a continual revisal and rectification of the world's first judgment on them is inevitably going on. For, after all, the world loves its original men, and can in no wise forget them; not till after a long while; sometimes not till after thousands of years. Forgetting them, what indeed, should it remember? The world's wealth is its original men; by these and their works it is a world and not a waste: the memory and record of what MEN it bore-this is this of Jean Paul's which, well meditated, may seem one of the most pregnant lately written on these matters. If any man had the ambition of building a new system of morals, (not a promising enterprise, at this time of day,) there is no remark known to us which might better serve him as a chief corner-stone, whereon to found, and to build, high enough, nothing doubting;-high, for instance, as the Christian Gospel itself. And to whatever other heights man's destiny may yet carry him! Consider whether it was not, from the first, by example, or say rather by human exemplars, and such reverent imitation or abhorrent aversion and avoidance as these gave rise to, that man's duties were made indubitable to him? Also, if it is not yet, in these last days, by very much the same means, (example, precept, prohibition, "force of public opinion," and other forcings and inducings,) that the like result is brought about; and, from the Woolsack down to the Treadmill, from Almack's to Chalk Farm and the west-end of Newgate, the incongruous whirlpool of life is forced and induced to whirl with some attempt at regularity? The two Mosaic Tables were of simple limited stone; no logic appended to them: we, in our days, are privileged with Logic-Systems of Morals, Professors of Moral Philosophy, Theories of Moral Sentiment, Utilities, Sympathies, Moral Senses, not a few; useful for those that feel comfort in them. But to the observant eye, is it not still plain that the rule of man's life rests not very steadily on logic (rather carries logic unsteadily resting on it, as an excuse, an ex |