for bearing with his diurnal incalculableness, and could fix my gratitude as by strong staple to that unvarying monumental service. Unhappily, Touchwood's great powers have been only so far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated. Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do would be done in a firstrate manner. Is it his love of disappointing complacent expectancy, which has gone so far as to keep up this lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive work which he would have written if nobody had expected it of him?

One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public man, and take to frequent speaking on platforms or from his seat in the House, it would hardly be possible for him to maintain much integrity of opinion, or to avoid courses of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would stamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the purest honesty, it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mysterious, Protean, bad temper. There would be the fatal public necessity of justifying oratorical temper, which had got on its legs in its bitter mood and made insulting imputations, or of keeping up some decent show of consistency with opinions vented out of temper's contradictoriness. And words would have to be followed up by acts of adhesion.

Certainly, if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds, for a human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in its windings, but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken the form of principles or laws, habitually, if not perfectly, obeyed.

If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behavior or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make amends by labored agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to "temper." Especially I object to the assumption, that his having a fundamentally good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad behavior. If his temper yesterday made him lash the horses, upset the curricle, and cause a breakage in my rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he will drive me anywhere, in the gentlest manner, any day, as long as he lives. Yesterday was what it was,- my rib is paining me; it is not a main object of my life to be driven by Touchwood, and I have no confidence in his life-long gentleness. The utmost form of placability I am capable of is to try and remember his better deeds already performed, and, mindful of my own offence, to bear him no malice. But I cannot accept his amends.

If the bad-tempered man wants to apologize, he had need to do it on a large public scale, — make some beneficent discovery, produce some stimulating work of genius, invent some powerful process, ― prove himself such a good to contemporary multitudes and future generations as to make the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanishing quality, a trifle even in their own estimate.

THE

A POLITICAL MOLECULE.

HE most arrant denier must admit that a man often fur thers larger ends than he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particular affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves an economy larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily not dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already endowed with comprehensive sympathy. Any molecule of the body politic, working toward his own interest in an orderly way, gets his understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is included in that of a large number. I have watched several political molecules being educated in this way, by the nature of things, into a faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am think. ing of Spike, an elector who voted on the side of Progress, though he was not inwardly attached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having many specific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a multitude of devout servants, who care no more for them under their highest titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forcible brevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, asked what Posterity had done for him that he should care for Posterity? To many minds, even among the ancients (thought by some to have been invariably poetical), the goddess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as the patroness of spinning and weaving. Now spinning and weaving, from a manufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief form under which Spike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee of Progress.

He was a political molecule of the most gentleman-like appearance, not less than six feet high, and showing the utmost nicety in the care of his person and equipment. His umbrella was especially remarkable for its neatness, though perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was seen to great advantage in a hat and great-coat- garments frequently fatal to the impressiveness of shorter figures; but when he was uncovered in the drawing-room, it was impossible not to observe that his head shelved off too rapidly from the eyebrows toward the crown, and that his length of limb seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an air of abstraction from conversational topics. He appeared, indeed, to be preoccupied with a sense of his exquisite cleanliness, clapped his hands together and rubbed them, frequently straightened his back, and even opened his mouth and closed it again with a slight snap, apparently for no other purpose than the confirmation to himself of his own powers in that line. These are innocent exercises, but they are not such as give weight to a man's personality. Sometimes Spike's mind, emerging from its preoccupation, burst forth in a remark delivered with smiling zest - as, that he did like to see gravelwalks well rolled, or that a lady should always wear the best jewelry, or that a bride was a most interesting object; but finding these ideas received rather coldly, he would relapse into abstraction, draw up his back, wrinkle his brows longitudinally, and seem to regard society, even including gravelwalks, jewelry, and brides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed, his habit of mind was desponding, and he took melancholy views as to the possible extent of human pleasure and the value of existence; especially after he had made his fortune in the cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chief object of his ambition-the object which had engaged his talent for order and persevering application- for his easy leisure caused him much ennui. He was abstemious, and had none of those temptations to sensual excess which fill up a man's time, first with indulgence, and then with the process

of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, ex hausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions of human pleasure were narrowed by his want of appetite; for, though he seemed rather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was a Catholic, or that, apart from the Ten Commandments, any conception of moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further inquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded as intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the shelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone in the same room with them. But some minds seem well glaced by nature against the admission of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It was not, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had had a strong opinion about the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large trading-towns ought to send members. Portraits of the Reform heroes hung framed and glazed in his library; he prided himself on being a Liberal. In this last particular, as well as in not giving benefactions, and not making loans without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. On the Repeal of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. His mind was expansive toward foreign markets, and his imagination could see that the people from whom we took corn might be able to take the cotton goods which they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in these political concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as a woman who belonged to a family with a title in it, and who had condescended in marrying him, could gain no hold; she had to blush a little at what was called her husband's "radicalism," -an epithet which was a very unfair impeachment of Spike, who never went to the root of anything. But he understood his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine, constant political element. If he had been born a little later he could have been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had belonged to a high family he might have done for a member of the Government. Perhaps his