in which the English mind, if candid, will confess that it has found of knowable (meaning even conceivable), of loveable, or memorable-next to nothing. As if we had done no brave thing at all in this Earth ;-as if not Men but Nightmares had written of our History! The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a People as their neighbors; perhaps, for Valor of Action and true hard labor in this Earth, since brave Peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver anywhere or anywhen but also, it must be owned, in Stupidity of Speech they have no fellow! What can poor English Heroisms do in such case, but fall torpid into the domain of the Nightmares? For of a truth, Stupidity is strong, most strong: as the poet Schiller sings, "Against Stupidity the very gods fight unvictorious:" there is in it a placid inexhaustibility, a calm viscous infinitude, which will baffle even the gods,-which will say calmly, "Try all your lightnings here; see whether I cannot quench them!"

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."'

Has our friend forgotten that it is Destiny withal as well as Stupidity;" that such is the case more or less with Human History always! By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History; an abatis of trees and brushwood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of Today, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years. You will find them in all stages of decay and preservation; down deep to the beginnings of the History of Man. Think where our Alphabetic Letters came from, where our Speech itself came from; the Cookeries we live by, the Masonries we lodge under! You will find fibrous roots of this day's Occurrences among the dust of Cadmus and Trismegistus, of Tubalcain and Triptolemus ; the tap roots of them are with Father Adam himself and the cinders of Eve's first fire! At bottom, there is no perfect History; there is none such conceivable.

All past Centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet, even as that Seventeenth is now threatening to do. Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul! For the leafy blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable, so confusedly as we say :—and truly the Art of History, the grand difference between a Dryasdust and a sacred Poet, is very much even this: To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more of the former we shall rejoice to hear; to hear of the latter will be an affliction to us; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous male factors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion: it lies all there! Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past: when both are foolish, and the general soul is overclouded with confusions, with unveracities and discords, there is a Rushworthian chaos.'. Let Dryasdust be blamed, beaten with stripes if you will; but let it be with pity, with blame to Fate chiefly. Alas, when sacred Priests are arguing about 'black and white surplices;' and sacred Poets have long professedly deserted Truth, and gone a wool-gathering after Ideals' and such like, what can you expect of poor secular Pedants? The labyrinth of History must grow ever darker, more intricate and dismal; vacant cargoes of 'Ideals' will arrive yearly, to be cast into the oven; and noble Heroisms of Fact, given up to Dryasdust, will be buried in a very disastrous manner!—

But the thing we had to say and repeat was this, That Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth; that the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast-day Sermons of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb! In long rows of little dumpy quartos, gathered from the bookstalls, they indeed stand here bodily before us: by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered.

We forget them as soon

in which the English mind, if candid, will confess that it has found of knowable (meaning even conceivable), of loveable, or memorable-next to nothing. As if we had done no brave thing at all in this Earth ;-as if not Men but Nightmares had written of our History! The English, one can discern withal, have been perhaps as brave a People as their neighbors; perhaps, for Valor of Action and true hard labor in this Earth, since brave Peoples were first made in it, there has been none braver anywhere or anywhen but also, it must be owned, in Stupidity of Speech they have no fellow! What can poor English Heroisms do in such case, but fall torpid into the domain of the Nightmares? For of a truth, Stupidity is strong, most strong: as the poet Schiller sings," Against Stupidity the very gods fight unvictorious:" there is in it a placid inexhaustibility, a calm viscous infinitude, which will baffle even the gods,-which will say calmly, "Try all your lightnings here; see whether I cannot quench them!"

"Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens."'

Has our friend forgotten that it is Destiny withal as well as 'Stupidity;" that such is the case more or less with Human History always! By very nature it is a labyrinth and chaos, this that we call Human History; an abatis of trees and brushwood, a world-wide jungle, at once growing and dying. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of Today, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years. You will find them in all stages of decay and preservation; down deep to the beginnings of the History of Man. Think where our Alphabetic Letters came from, where our Speech itself came from; the Cookeries we live by, the Masonries we lodge under! You will find fibrous roots of this day's Occurrences among the dust of Cadmus and Trismegistus, of Tubalcain and Triptolemus ; the tap roots of them are with Father Adam himself and the cinders of Eve's first fire! At bottom, there is no perfect History; there is none such conceivable.

All past Centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet, even as that Seventeenth is now threatening to do. Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul! For the leafy blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable, so confusedly as we say :—and truly the Art of History, the grand difference between a Dryasdust and a sacred Poet, is very much even this: To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more of the former we shall rejoice to hear; to hear of the latter will be an affliction to us; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous male factors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion: it lies all there! Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past: when both are foolish, and the general soul is overclouded with confusions, with unveracities and discords, there is a Rushworthian chaos.'. Let Dryasdust be blamed, beaten with stripes if you will; but let it be with pity, with blame to Fate chiefly. Alas, when sacred Priests are arguing about 'black and white surplices;' and sacred Poets have long professedly deserted Truth, and gone a wool-gathering after 'Ideals' and such like, what can you expect of poor secular Pedants? The labyrinth of History must grow ever darker, more intricate and dismal; vacant cargoes of Ideals' will arrive yearly, to be cast into the oven; and noble Heroisms of Fact, given up to Dryasdust, will be buried in a very disastrous manner!—

But the thing we had to say and repeat was this, That Puritanism is not of the Nineteenth Century, but of the Seventeenth; that the grand unintelligibility for us lies there. The Fast-day Sermons of St. Margaret's Church, Westminster, in spite of printers, are all grown dumb! In long rows of little dumpy quartos, gathered from the bookstalls, they indeed stand here bodily before us: by human volition they can be read, but not by any human memory remembered. We forget them as soon

6

as read; they have become a weariness to the soul of man. They are dead and gone, they and what they shadowed; the human soul, got into other latitudes, cannot now give harbor to them. Alas, and did not the honorable Houses of Parliament listen to them with rapt earnestness, as to an indisputable message from Heaven itself? Learned and painful Dr. Owen, learned and painful Dr. Burgess; Stephen Marshall, Mr. Spurstow, Adoniram Byfield, Hugh Peters, Philip Nye: the Printer has done for them what he could, and Mr. Speaker gave them the thanks of the House ;—and no most astonishing Review. Article of our day can have half such brilliancy,' such potency, half such virtue for producing belief as these their poor little dumpy quartos once had. And behold, they are become inarticulate men; spectral; and instead of speaking, do not screech and gibber! All Puritanism has grown inarticulate; its fervent preachings, prayings, pamphleteerings are sunk into one indiscriminate moaning hum, mournful as the voice of subterranean winds. So much falls silent: human Speech, unless by rare chance it touch on the Eternal Melodies,' and harmonize with them; human Action, Interest, if divorced from the Eternal Melodies, sinks all silent. The fashion of this world passeth away.

The Age of the Puritans is not extinct only and gone away from us, but it is as if fallen beyond the capabilities of Memory herself; it is grown unintelligible, what we may call incredible. Its earnest Purport awakens now no resonance in our frivolous hearts. We understand not even in imagination, one of a thousand of us, what it ever could have meant. It seems delirious, delusive; the sound of it has become tedious as a tale of past stupidities. Not the body of heroic Puritanism only, which was bound to die, but the soul of it also, which was and should have been, and yet shall be immortal, has for the present passed away. As Harrison said of his Banner and Lion of the Tribe of Judah: "Who shall rouse him up ?"

For indisputably,' exclaims the above-cited Author in his vehement way, 'this too was a Heroism; and the soul of it remains part of the eternal soul of things! Here, of our own land and lineage, in practical English shape, were Heroes on the Earth