from Erasmus. The only fit commentator on Paul was Luther not by any means such a gentleman as the Apostle, but almost as great a genius. JUNE 17, 1833. Negro Emancipation. HAVE you been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling with a dread of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large? Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped, when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith-the only miraculous agent among men—is not invoked or regarded! and that most unblest phrasethe Dissenting interest-enters into the question! JUNE 22, 1833. Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams.—Charles I.-Manners under Edward III., Richard II., and Henry VIII. WHAT a delightful and instructive book Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period. Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour. I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evaporated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry. JUNE 29, 1833. Hypothesis.-Suffiction.—Theory.—Lyell's Geology.-Light.*—Gothic Architecture.-Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster" and Titian's "Venus." -Sir J. Scarlett. IT seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. It is a mere suffiction. Newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies. But your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing. Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the vis inertiæ; whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass. The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question; it is a collected view, Oɛwpia, of all he yet knows in one. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory, therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in chemistry or geology is altogether accurate, is absurd :-it cannot be true. Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true; and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory motion of light;-I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the laws by which they are regulated. Those who deny light to be matter do not, therefore, deny its corporeity. The principle of the Gothic architecture is infinity made imaginable. It is, no doubt, a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity and transcendent beauty of King's College Chapel.1 It is quite unparalleled. 1 Mr. Coleridge visited Cambridge upon the occasion of the scientific meeting there in June, 1833.—" My emotions," he said, "at revisiting the university were at first overwhelming. I could not speak for an hour; yet my feelings were upon the whole very pleasurable, and I have not passed, of late years, at least, three days of such great enjoyment and healthful excitement of mind and body. The bed on which I slept --and slept soundly too-was, as near as I can describe it, a couple of sacks full of potatoes tied together. I understand the young men think it hardens them. Truly I lay down at night a man, and arose in the morning a bruise." He told me " that the men were much amused at his saying that the fine old Quaker philosopher Dalton's face was like All Souls' College." The two persons of whom he spoke with the greatest interest were Mr. Faraday and Mr. Thirlwall; saying of the former, "that he seemed to have the true temperament of genius, that carrying-on of the spring and freshness of youthful, nay, boyish feelings, into the matured strength of manhood!" For, as Mr. Coleridge had long before expressed the same thought,-" To find no contradiction in the union of old and new; to contemplate the Ancient of Days and all His works with feelings as fresh as if all had then sprung forth at the first creative fiat, this characterises the mind that feels the riddle of the world, and may help to unravel it. To carry on the feelings of childhood into the powers of manhood; to combine the child's sense of wonder and novelty with the appearances which every day for perhaps forty years had rendered familiar 'With sun and moon and stars throughout the year, And man and woman;' this is the character and privilege of genius, and one of the marks which distinguish genius from talent. And therefore is it the prime merit of genius, and its most unequivocal mode of manifestation, so to represent I think Gerard Douw's "Schoolmaster," in the Fitzwilliam Museum, the finest thing of the sort I ever saw;whether you look at it at the common distance, or examine it with a glass, the wonder is equal. And that glorious picture of the Venus-so perfectly beautiful and perfectly innocent---as if beauty and innocence could not be dissociated! The French thing below is a curious instance of the inherent grossness of the French taste. Titian's picture is made quite bestial. I think Sir James Scarlett's speech for the defendant, in the late action of Cobbett v. The Times, for a libel, worthy of the best ages of Greece or Rome; though, to be sure, some of his remarks could not have been very palatable to his clients. I am glad you came in to punctuate my discourse, which I fear has gone on for an hour without any stop at all. JULY 1, 1833. Mandeville's Fable of the Bees-Bestial Theory-Character of Bertram.Beaumont and Fletcher's Dramas.-Eschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.— Milton. IF F I could ever believe that Mandeville really meant anything more by his Fable of the Bees than a bonne bouche of solemn raillery, I should like to ask those manshaped apes who have taken up his suggestions in earnest, and seriously maintained them as bases for a rational account of man and the world-how they explain the very familiar objects as to awaken in the minds of others a kindred feeling concerning them, and that freshness of sensation which is the constant accompaniment of mental, no less than of bodily, convalescence. Who has not a thousand times seen snow fall on water? Who has not watched it with a new feeling, from the time that he has read Burns's comparison of sensual pleasure— 'To snow that falls upon a river, A moment white-then gone for ever!"" Biog. Lit. vol. i. p. 85.-H. N. C. Any one who has perused Coleridge's "Lectures and Notes on Shakspere," will be fairly familiar with this last quotation. For "to" read ❝like." existence of those dexterous cheats, those superior charlatans, the legislators and philosophers, who have known how to play so well upon the peacock-like vanity and follies of their fellow-mortals. By the by, I wonder some of you lawyers (sub rosa, of course) have not quoted the pithy lines in Mandeville upon this registration question : "The lawyers, of whose art the basis Might make more work with dipt estates; To see where best they may break through." There is great Hudibrastic vigour in these lines; and those on the doctors are also very terse. 2 Look at that head of Cline,' by Chantrey! Is that forehead, that nose, those temples and that chin, akin to the monkey tribe? No, no. To a man of sensibility no argument could disprove the bestial theory so convincingly as a quiet contemplation of that fine bust. I cannot agree with the solemn abuse which the critics have poured out upon Bertram, in " All's Well that ends Well." He was a young nobleman in feudal times, just bursting into manhood, with all the feelings of pride of birth and appetite for pleasure and liberty natural to such a character so circumstanced. Of course, he had never regarded Helena otherwise than as a dependant in the family; and of all that which she possessed of goodness and fidelity and courage, which might atone for her inferiority in other respects, Bertram was necessarily in a Chantrey exhibited his bust of Cline, executed for "the Royal College of Surgeons," in 1813. 2 Rather read "are". |