necticut transplanted Yorkshireman, and well he knew that if the Puritans got into power in England there would be no more play-houses, no sale for his "Merry Wives of Windsor," and his occupation and livelihood would be gone. Shakespeare had a grudge against Puritans and dogs. Possibly in the mad days of his youth, when he went poaching, he acquired his poor opinion of dogs; and as for the Puritanhe was a standing menace to his purse. We who live now would doubtless find the Puritan tiresome company. A very good man is seldom interesting. He is all one color. There is no contrast-no black and white. Let us grant that the Puritans did not know how to make the best of this world, and that they would weary and irritate the enervated and revived Pompeiian instinct, so strong in this generation. Well, he was not pleasant to live with, this old Puritan, from our point of view. Our tastes do not run in his direction nowadays. We go with the Cavaliers in taste; but our principles are still with the Roundheads and oldfashioned men of God. We like pleasure, but we reverence virtue. We are fond of a good fellow, but we admire and esteem only the strong man-the heroic soul-the servant of duty and God. And we cannot get on long in this world without him, without an occasional uprising of the Puritan to set things right; society would not hold together, but would rot in incurable selfishness and sensuality and fall to pieces. Man is neither all senses nor all soul, but both, a complicated creature played upon by the motion of two contradictory natures.

And since we can live without pleasure or beauty, but must perish without righteousness and truth, then the palm of preference, the verdict of superiority, the highest meed of admiration and praise must be given to Moses, Socrates, Paul, Milton, and not to Alexander, Epicurus, Napoleon, or Shakespeare. For men of the spirit, who hearken for the voice of Duty, keep the body under, side with conscience against convenience, prefer death with truth to life with lies. These men have created all the decency and order there is

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in the world, and they alone can preserve them. This world, with all its heroism and splendor and sublimation of daring and deed, achievement and character, has never surpassed and rarely equalled the genuine old Puritan. At a feast, on pleasure bent, we do not care to have his company. But if a State is to be founded, a society organized, a battle fought against Xerxes or the devil, then we want a Puritan, a man of iron and blood, who has abandoned the flesh, whose soul has no room in it except for the idea of God and conscience, who is strong in duty, who enthrones worship on the domestic hearth, truth before the tribunals, honesty in the counting-house, labor in the workshop, and puts conscience and truth into everything he does. He sniggled his Psalms, but he never counted the odds against him in any battle. He wrestled all night in prayer to ring from God the assent that his name was down in the roll of the elect; but next morning he sent a messenger to Italy commanding a Pope "to let my brethren in Christ alone," or the Ironsides would scale the walls of San Angelo and sack the Vatican.*

The Puritan was one gigantic, colossal man-fire, force, feeling, conviction; and conviction and force conquer and dominate. An age of culture can never be an age of martyrdom. Pessimism will never lead a forlorn hope. Agnosticism will never build a Pantheon. And science, by putting out the old stars, by silencing the authoritative voice of command, by advocating a gospel of dirt and protoplasm, has rendered it impossible, and made the Pilgrim Father a venerable name, a glorious memory, but no longer a present fact or a contemporary force. When shall we see his like again?—that Corporal Valley-of-Dry-Bones haranguing a regiment, exhorting his colonel to greater zeal and reproving his major for lukewarmness; weeping and wailing like a lost soul over his sin; then rising up to pick his flint, dry his powder, rush upon the enemy with irresistible volume-at last to put his foot on a king's neck.

* This selection may end here, and the remainder used separately under the title, "Puritanism."

The world is still in deep debt to Plymouth Rock. Chivalry refined manners; Puritanism created manliness and fortified the soul in virtue. Chivalry feared dishonor; Puritanism feared only to do evil. Chivalry advanced life; Puritanism quickened life, renewing conscience, truth, duty, and God. Chivalry died for a lady's glove, a stolen kiss, a night intrigue; Puritanism died for human rights, justice, freedom, and truth. Let us bless God that so much stern, unbending righteousness as he exhibited has been lived out in our land for our encouragement in well-doing. He was not nice. He had no amicable pleasantness, except Holland gin. He never suspended discipline even long enough to laugh at the pranks of a monkey, or to steal a kiss from his sweetheart before marriage. He was an angular, grim, unjoyous man; persecution pursued him, even in Zion. He never opened the shutter on his soul. He had no summer in his religious year. His mind had no southern slope to it; his nature no Greek element to it. He lived for duty and abandoned the flesh; he was as strong as a Roman hero, and to him we owe the genius of our institutions and the greatness and glory of the Republic.

JOHN R. PAXTON.

Note 34.

THE BACONIAN PHILOSOPHY.

(Abridged.)

SUPPOSE that Justinian, when he closed the schools of Athens, had called on the last few sages who still haunted the Portico, and lingered round the ancient plane-trees, to show their title to public veneration. Suppose that he had said: "A thousand years have elapsed since, in this famous city, Socrates posed Protagoras and Hippias: during those thousand years a large proportion of the ablest men of every generation has been employed in constant efforts to bring to perfection the philosophy which you teach: that philos

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ophy has been munificently patronized by the powerful: its professors have been held in high esteem by the public: it has drawn to itself almost all the sap and vigor of the human intellect and what has it effected? What profitable truth has it taught us which we should not equally have known without it? Such questions we suspect would have puzzled Simplicius and Isidore. Ask a follower of Bacon what the new philosophy, as it was called in the time of Charles the Second, has effected for mankind and his answer is ready.

We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written in which a disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be introduced as fellow travellers. They come to a village where the small-pox has just begun to rage, and find houses shut up, intercourse suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in terror over their children. The stoic assures the dismayed population that there is nothing bad in the small-pox, and that to a wise man disease, deformity, death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian takes out a lancet and begins to vaccinate. They find a body of miners in great dismay. An explosion of noisome gas has just killed many of those who were at work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the cavern. The stoic assures them that such an accident is nothing but a mere apoproaymenon. The Baconian, who has no such fine word at his command, contents himself with devising a safety-lamp. They find a shipwrecked merchant wringing his hands on the shore; his vessel and cargo have gone down, and he is reduced in a moment from opulence to beggary; the stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness in things which lie without himself, and repeats a whole chapter of Epictetus. The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down in it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck. This is the difference between the philosophy of thorns and the philosophy of fruit, the philosophy of words and the philosophy of works.

MACAULAY.

Note 35.

ONLY A STIRRUP-CUP.

"FILL up! One glass before you go! The moon is young, the night is keen, The creek-ford lies half hid between

The drifting ice and whirling snows,
And the wind is as fierce as a Russian knout ;
But here is a draught that will keep it out.
Drain it, and feel how your heart will glow!"

"Only a stirrup-cup now. Good-night! Here's to good-luck, till we see you again! The mare only waits for the loosening rein;

She'll make you five miles with the speed of a kite. Good-bye!" And the horse and his rider were gone; But the revelers stayed till the faint winter dawn Touched the world with its finger of light.

Some miles away, in the morning gray, A wife looked out o'er the sheeted world, Weary with heaping the hearthstone old,

Weary with watching from dark to day, With hushing the children, who cried in their sleep : "Listen for father! The snow is so deep,

And he comes through the dark and cold."

When the clock in the corner chimed slowly for three, And the windows all creaked in the grip of the blast, A sound like the neigh of a horse went past,

And a faint, faint voice, as of dread or dree.

But fiercely the wind wrenched the door from her hold,
And all she could hear were its tones manifold,
And naught but the snow could she see.

Night melted away in the cup of the sun,
The joy of the day made forebodings seem vain,
The tea-kettle bubbled and sung on the crane.

The heart may be heavy, but tasks must be done;