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powers. Every resource that nature contains has been investigated and applied, till the land has become one vast manufactory; the sea one broad highway of nations; every nook is the domain of labor, and every shore an emporium. The mind of man is given up to these things and production, and accumulation, have become the vocation of the world. Literature, too, partakes of this character: and the research for truth is no longer considered important, except inasmuch as it conducts to profit. We crowd to the temple, not that we may listen to the oracles, or kneel before the altar; but to barter our souls at the tables of the money-changers. The therefore, which smote Heliodorus in the midst of his sacrilege, the same shall fall on us.

curse,

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The world is sure enough to pay attention to its worldly wants. The necessities which we have in common with the beasts, will always be of at least sufficient importance in ordinary eyes. It should be the business of literature to preserve and disseminate truth, with regard to those subjects which belong peculiarly to man, which constitute our essential humanity. To the philosopher is committed this task of teaching his age that there are many faculties in the mind besides those which are needful for the support of the body that each has its peculiar object, beauty, morality, religion, truth; that to resolve any one into the other, is to destroy so much of man's inheritance; and yet that, if any one be cultivated exclusively, instead of independently, of the rest, the whole will necessarily be ruined. Not only for the purpose of enforcing these truths is the philosopher appointed, but also for keeping alive on earth the conviction that, in the consciousness of these truths, and in devotion to them, resides the genuine hope and glory of human nature: not for teaching religion, and religion in its highest and most perfect form, Christianity, as a thing totally cut off from our daily feeling and habitual conduct, but as including every de

partment of thought, and all our duties, and those especially which are the laws of our most precious powers, and which flow from our relation to God.

A philosopher, in this sense of the word, Mr. Mill is not. He does not profess to love wisdom, but the consequences to which wisdom leads; and is, therefore, no more a philosopher than he who weds for money is a lover. The only wisdom which is of any value contains, in itself, the means of moral as well as intellectual excellence. It is essentially different from prudence; and an extended prudence is all which can be learned from the writings of this author, or is ever inculcated in them. At the same time, he is often an acute and a laborious authority; and the range of his general acquirements appears to be highly respectable, while his benevolence is obvious and delightful, and evidently proceeds from a higher source, and is supported by a stronger sanction than the author himself would be willing to recognise. His works, so far at least as is commonly known, are a volume of "The Elements of Political Economy," a " History of British India," and several Essays on Government and Legislation, in the Supplement to the "Encyclopædia Britannica." If the author has produced any other works than these, it should be remembered that by these alone he is here judged.

As mere compositions, they are marked by a niggard and dreary style, such that even the laurels of his fame will not suffice to conceal from a single eye the baldness they encircle. It seems to be the author's main effort to separate his subject into as many atoms as possible, and to put each of these into a sentence which will exactly hold it; and he takes a sedulous and perverse care to divest his little, lifeless, shapeless, fragmentary propositions, of every accompaniment of sympathy or association, even the most completely justified by what goes before; so as to secure the want of all unity of impression from the

whole. This is a great defect; and akin to it is another: Mr. Mill never brings before us his view of any point by an image; which may at once make the subject plainer than whole pages of mere argumentation, and by remaining fixed in the mind, may for ever serve to recal the reason which it has originally illustrated. Does Mr. Mill really believe that the column is the weaker or the less majestic, because the primroses grow around its base; that the armor is the more frail, because it is embossed with gold; or, that the Damascus sabre will smite the less surely, for its flowery fragrance? Like the fountain, which nourishes the roots of the oak, a feeling lies deep and fresh at the root of all valuable moral truths. It goes along with them in all their progress; and, if we find that which professes to be such a truth, unaccompanied by this inward life, we may be sure that it is either an error, or the produce of some other mind than that which presented it to us; even as if we saw a tree on a dry spot of the desert, we might be certain that it either was utterly useless, or had been brought thither from some more generous soil. In ethics, love accompanies intelligence; and when a man is writ ing on these subjects, affection will show itself, now in tracing out a thousand analogies; now in bringing rapidly together many particulars, all welded into one by the fervor of the soul; and, again, by perpetually recurring from the individual proposition to the general feeling which alone gives it importance. It is easy to say that all this is so much injury done to the logical excellence of the style: but to harmonise logical perfection with strength of sentiment, is the task and the prerogative of philosophers, and men of genius; and, moreover, if part of a composition brings every one, whose sympathies are healthy, into a certain state of consciousness,

with which the tone of the remainder of the author's speculations is totally at variance, however fitted it may be to any arbitrary canons of the schools, human nature will trample on schools and scholars, and proclaim that the logic of rhetoricians* is very different from the logic of the mind.

Such seem to us the radical defects of Mr. Mill's style. On the whole, it wants both ease and strength. It is, as nearly as possible, the style of "Euclid's Elements," adapted to subjects for which Euclid never would have used it. Dry, harsh, and prickly, it would be utterly unendurable, but there is enough of real information conveyed in it to compensate for much annoyance. Grapes do sometimes grow on thorns, and figs on thistles; though now and then the grapes are sour, and the figs, like those sold in the streets of Constantinople, are cried with rather excessive ostentation.† There would, nevertheless, be something manly and simple in this writer's compositions, but for the affectation which is exhibited in many occasional phrases, a sort of Utilitarian coxcombry, and professorial pretension. Such modes of speech as "the matter of evil," and " portion of discourse;" and the formulas, (they occur in every page of Mr. Mill's writings,) "either a thing is white, or it is black. If white, then, &c., if black, then something else," and so forth; all these are mere pedantries, worthy only of a school-boy, in the lowest class of Utilitarian Philosophy,-a Neophyte in the outer court of the Temple of the Economic Goddess. Yet we believe these absurdities may help to win admirers and proselytes. For when the merely getting by rote a few simple phrases and sentences of this kind, and the employment of them in all companies, will gain for any one the reputation of profoundness, it would be strange indeed if many did not avail them

selves of so easy a "Gradus ad Philosophiam."

It has been said already, that Mr. Mill has knowledge sufficient to make him-in spite of these drawbacks-a valuable author. If we did not think him an influential writer, we should not now be examining the character of his works. But it is observable, that little of his knowledge is his own. He is not, indeed, one of the pedants who put their minds into their books, instead of putting their books into their minds. But neither is he one of the thinkers who, instead of keeping books in their minds as they came from their authors, recompose them there with a thousand new illustrations, strong connections, and nice dependencies. Take the system of the human mind of Locke, the theory of religion of Hume, the principles of government and legislation of Bentham, and the political economy of Ricardo; deprive these of all which made them peculiarly the property of their inventors, of all their air of originality, of all their individual lineaments, and join them together in one mass, and you have the creed of the Historian of British India. But many of the doctrines which he holds have undoubtedly been stated by him more clearly than by any one else and in his great work he has applied them to a wide range of subjects, and supported them in appearance by such a multiplicity of facts, that it certainly deserves to be held among the oracular books of the sect.

The History of British India is clearly distinguishable, though not divisible, into two parts. The one relates to England and Englishmen, the other to India and its Natives. Of the former of these portions we need say but little. It is in general executed with ability and knowledge. For the author's system of human nature, though professing to be universal, is drawn from the circumstances of modern Europe; and the vesture fits tolerably well the form for which it was intended,-infinitely better at least than it would adapt itself to any other. His

observations on commercial questions are commonly excellent and his mode of analysing the different measures and institutions of British statesmanship is full of acuteness. Even in these we could have wished for some more earnest enforcing of national duty, some stronger evidences of faith in the possibility of human virtue. But if there is any subject in discussing which the want of that faith is excusable, it is undoubtedly the recent history of English Parliaments and Ministers.

His scalpel is practised in the laying open men's motives; and if he is too much predisposed to find the parts diseased, he is, at all events, an unsparing operator when they really are so. We should probably not be inclined to make the same use of Mr. Mill's political discoveries and demonstrations as he would do. But they are curious and valuable to every benevolent reformer who has accustomed his mind to trace and to lament the influence of bad institutions on national well-being.

But with regard to that more difficult division of this writer's labors which refers to Hindoostan, we can give no such applause. It seems to us that his views on this subject are fundamentally and desperately wrong. He has, in no one instance, made the slightest approach to understanding of the Hindoo Polity. To comprehend the principles and mode of thought which prevail among any people, it is necessary to seize the idea on which their social system is founded. In every community which has antiquity and a national life of its own, such an idea has existed, the mould for the mind of the society, sometimes partially realised in institutions, sometimes partially manifested in great changes, sometimes lost for a period amid internal tumults, or, perhaps, destroyed for ever by subjection to foreigners. But to grasp this is to hold the clue which alone can guide us to full intelligence of the religion, the laws, the literature, the primary institutions of a people. To select some of its results, and to judge them