another place he elaborates the thesis, that whatever things have order, have unity of design, and concur in one, and are parts constituent of one whole-just as a symphony is a certain system of proportioned sounds. It is noteworthy that Pythagoras deduced his celebrated theory of the music of the spheres from his assumption that everything in the great arrangement (Kóσuos) which he called the world must be harmoniously arranged (and that, accordingly, the planets were at the same relative distance as the divisions of the monochord, etc.) Divine as the philosophy of Plato is commonly esteemed, there are, on the other hand, occasional glimpses in it of what one of his commentators calls the "appalling doctrine" that God alternately governs and forsakes the world-the world when he forsakes it, suddenly changing its orbit, so that all things are in disorder, and mundane existence is totally disarranged: "only after some time do things settle down to a sort of order, though of a very imperfect kind." Spinoza takes order to be a thing of the imagination, as also he does right and wrong, useful and hurtful these being merely such, he argues, in relation to us. But this would not prevent him, from his stand-point, assenting to the ethical import of order-as expounded for instance by the Shakspearian Ulysses:

"The heavens themselves, the planets, and this centre,
Observe degree, priority, and place,

Office, and custom, in all line of order.

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark, what discord follows! each thing meets
In mere oppugnancy."

Order, writes Southey, is the sanity of the mind, the health of the body, the peace of the city, the security of the State. Diogenes held with the Dorian lawgivers, that order (kóσμos) is the basis of civil government. As the beams to a house, it has been said, as the bones to the microcosm of man, so is order to all things. Balzac is treating of harmonie politique when he says that harmony is the poetry of order, and that "the peoples" have a keen need of order. The racy author of the "Biglow Papers" discourses in his shrewd, homely style, on

the indispensableness (not that he uses such a word) of orderly established law :—

"Onsettle that, an' all the world goes whiz,

A screw is loose in everything there is."

Mr. Carlyle, in his apology for Knox in the act of pulling down cathedrals—as if he were a seditious rioting demagogueurges that he was precisely the reverse of that. Knox, he maintains, wanted no pulling down of stone edifices, but wanted leprosy and darkness to be thrown out of the lives of men. "Tumult was not his element; it was the tragic feature of his life that he was forced to dwell so much on that." Every such man, on Mr. Carlyle's showing, is the born enemy of disorder— hates to be in it; but what then? "Smooth falsehood is not order; it is the general sum total of disorder. Order is trutheach thing standing on the basis that belongs to it. Order and falsehood cannot subsist together." And it is in treating of another of his heroes elect, that the same philosopher contends on behalf of such others of them as seem to have worked as revolutionary men, that nevertheless every great man, every genuine man, is by the nature of him a son of order, not of disorder a seeming anarchist, yet to his whole soul anarchy ïs hostile, hateful. "His mission is Order; every man's is. He is here to make what was disorderly, chaotic, into a thing ruled, regular. He is the missionary of Order." Is not all work of man in this world, we are emphatically asked, a making of Order?

The Abbé Duval, writing to Mme. Récamier, as her spiritual counsellor, bids her engrave this elementary truth on her heart of hearts: "Gravez au-dedans de vous-même cette première vérité que la religion veut l'ordre avant tout." Whatsoever doth make manifest is light, and it is light that reveals a cosmos where before, in the words of Thomson, a formless grey confusion covered all :

"As when of old (so sung the Hebrew bard)
Light, uncollected, through the chaos urged
Its infant way; nor Order yet had drawn
His lovely train from out the dubious gloom.”

That a scrupulous regard for order, in some sort, is nevertheless compatible with a very low standard of moral worth, is recognised and illustrated by poet Crabbe-prose-poet the good parson was, not quite in the accepted sense-in a series of pithy, if not pungent rhymes:

"The love of order-I the thing receive

From reverend men, and I in part believe-
Shows a clear mind and clean, and whoso needs
This love, but seldom in the world succeeds;
And yet with this some other love must be,
Ere I can fully to the fact agree;

Valour and study may by order gain,

By order sovereigns hold more steady reign;
Through all the tribes of nature order runs,
And rules around in systems and in suns :

Still has the love of order found a place

With all that's low, degrading, mean, and base,

With all that merits scorn, and all that meets disgrace :

In the cold miser, of all change afraid,

In pompous men in public seats obeyed;

In humble placemen, heralds, solemn drones;

Order to these is armour and defence,

And love of method serves in lack of sense."

Exceptions allowed for, as in every rule, yet is the rule sufficiently approved, that order is heaven's first law. The poet of "The Angel in the House" in style, and spirit, and sentiment, how salient a contrast to Crabbe, utters the conceit (poeticè) in one of his tender preludes, that—

"Sweet Order has its draught of bliss

Graced with the pearl of God's consent,"

a conceit that allows of wide application, as do many of those of so suggestive a writer.

But to conclude. When the judicious Hooker-to call him by his conventional epithet-lay a-dying, he expressed his joy at the near prospect of entering a World of Order. The author of "The Book of the Church" emphasises the import of holy Richard's "placid and profound contentment," by reminding us that because he had been employed in ecclesiastical polemics,

and because his life had been passed under the perpetual discomfort of domestic discord, the happiness of heaven must have seemed in Hooker's estimation, to consist primarily in Order, as, indeed, in all human societies this is the first thing needful.

SWEET SLEEP, AND ITS FORFEITURE.
PROVERBS iii. 24.

O him that keepeth sound wisdom and instruction is the promise given, not only that he shall walk in his way safely, and his foot shall not stumble,—this for daytime and its activities,—but further, as regards night-time and its contingencies, that when he lies down he shall not be afraid; yea, he shall lie down, and his sleep shall be sweet. So He giveth His beloved sleep, of whom the Psalmist said, "I laid me down and slept; I awaked; for the Lord sustained me." Surely, in order that one may pray with full purpose of heart the prayer, Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his one should live the life that may warrant the nightly petition, Let me sleep the sleep of the just, and let mine eyes close quietly in slumber even as his.

Macbeth, within this minute a murderer, ipso facto realizes the appalling truth, that between him and placid sleep there is, from henceforth and for evermore, a great gulf fixed, as impassable as abysmal.

"Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep;
Sleep, that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,

Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast,—'

Mach. Still it cried, 'Sleep no more!' to all the house : 'Glamis hath murder'd sleep; and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep no more. Macbeth shall sleep no more!'"

How sleeps Lady Macbeth after that night? Ask her physician

and waiting-woman, and watch with them the sleep-walking scene. "To bed, to bed, to bed." But what avails that to the somnambulist, ever in semblance washing her hands, and complaining of the smell of blood upon them still, and that all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten them? Now and then one meets with a sceptic as to lost sleep being the inevitable sequent upon crime; and no doubt there are exceptions. Mr. G. Wingrove Cooke, in his letters from Chinese waters, thus describes the captive Mandarin, Yeh, whose fellow-passenger to Calcutta he was: "He goes to bed at eight o'clock, and while we are reading or writing or playing chess, he sleeps the sleep of infancy-an unbroken slumber, apparently undisturbed by visions of widowed women and wailing orphans. This mankiller, after slaying his hundred thousand human beings, enjoys sweeter sleep than an innocent London alderman after a turtle dinner." Perhaps that is not saying much,-considering what a turtle dinner comprehends and superinduces. But the next sentence says a good deal; it is to be hoped, a great deal too much: "So false are traditions; so false are the remorseful scenes of Greek and English tragedies." One would be sorry, for the dignity of human nature, to believe that all is fiction the poets tell us of cases in which non avium citharæque cantus, or any other aids and appliances, somnum reducent. "Wherefore to me," asks Clytemnestra,—

"is solacing sleep denied?

And honourable rest, the right of all?
So that no medicine of the slumbrous shell,
Brimmed with divinest draughts of melody,
Nor silence under dreamful canopies,
Nor purple cushions of the lofty couch,
May lull this fever for a little while."

Impressive in history, not romance, as Plutarch tells it, is the story of Pausanius as a haunted man, from the hour that Cleonice fell dead at his feet, pierced by his sword. “From that hour he could rest no more." Her spectre perturbed him every night. Henceforth, nor poppy, nor mandragora, nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, could ever medicine him to