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BLACKWOOD’S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
No. CCCCLXVIII.      OCTOBER, 1854.      Vol. LXXVI.

CONTENTS.

EDINBURGH:

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,

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SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.

BLACKWOOD’S

EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.

No. CCCCLXVIII.      OCTOBER, 1854.      Vol. LXXVI.

SPECULATORS AMONG THE STARS.[^[1]]

PART II.

Whatever we talk, Things are as they are—not as we grant, dispute, or hope; depending on neither our affirmative nor negative.[^[2]]—Jeremy Taylor.

Let us bear in mind the above passage, pregnant with solemnising reflection, while dealing with the question before us; always remembering that it is one purely speculative, however interesting, however exciting, to imaginative persons; but to weak and superficial ones—to those of unsettled opinions—capable of becoming mischievous.

The state of that question is exactly this: The heavenly bodies around us, some or all of them, are, or are not, in point of fact, the abodes of intellectual and moral beings like ourselves—that is, be it observed, consisting of body and soul. That there are other and higher orders of intelligent existence, both the Christian and the mere philosopher may, and the former must, admit as an article of his “creed;” but what may be the mode of that existence, and its relations to that physical world of which we are sensible, we know not, and conjecture would be idle. That beings like ourselves exist elsewhere than here, is not revealed in Scripture; and the question, consequently, for us to concern ourselves with is, whether there nevertheless exist rational grounds for believing the fact to be so. The accomplished and eminent person who has so suddenly started this discussion, has, since his Essay appeared,[^[3]] and in strict consistency with it, emphatically declared—“I do not pretend to disprove a plurality of worlds; but I ask in vain for any argument which makes the doctrine probable. And as I conceive the unity of the world to be the result of its being the work of one Divine Mind, exercising creative power according to His own Ideas; so it seems to me not unreasonable to suppose that man, the being which can apprehend, in some degree, those Ideas, is a creature unique in the creation.” But what says Sir David Brewster, speaking of the greatest known member of our planetary system, Jupiter?

“With so many striking points of resemblance between the Earth and Jupiter, the unprejudiced mind cannot resist the conclusion, that Jupiter has been created, like the Earth, for the express purpose of being the seat of animal and intellectual life. The Atheist and the Infidel, the Christian and the Mahommedan, men of all creeds, nations, and tongues, the philosopher and the unlettered peasant, have all rejoiced in this universal truth; and we do not believe that any individual who confides in the facts of astronomy seriously rejects it. If such a person exists, we would gravely ask him, for what purpose could so gigantic a world have been framed?”[^[4]]

I am such a person, would say Dr Whewell, and I declare that I cannot tell why Jupiter was created. “I do not pretend to know for what purpose the stars were made, any more than the flowers, or the crystalline gems, or other innumerable beautiful objects.... No doubt the Creator might make creatures fitted to live in the stars, or in the small planetoids, or in the clouds, or on meteoric stones; but we cannot believe that he has done this, without further evidence.”[^[5]] And as to the “facts of astronomy,” let me patiently examine them, and the inferences you seek to deduce from them. Besides which, I will bring forward certain facts of which you seem to have taken no account.

As we foresaw, Dr Whewell’s Essay is attracting increased attention in all directions; and, as far as we can ascertain the scope of contemporaneous criticism hitherto pronounced, it is hostile to his views, while uniformly recognising the power and scientific knowledge with which they are enforced. “We scarcely expected,” observes an accomplished diurnal London reviewer,[^[6]] “that in the middle of the nineteenth century, a serious attempt would have been made to restore the exploded ideas of man’s supremacy over all other creatures in the universe; and still less that such an attempt would have been made by any one whose mind was stored with scientific truths. Nevertheless a champion has actually appeared, who boldly dares to combat against all the rational inhabitants of other spheres; and though as yet he wears his vizor down, his dominant bearing, and the peculiar dexterity and power with which he wields his arms, indicate that this knight-errant of nursery notions can be no other than the Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.” The reviewer falls, it appears to us, into a serious error as to the sentiments of Dr Whewell, when charging him with requiring us “to assume that, in the creation of intelligent beings, Omnipotence must be limited, in its operations, to the ideas which human faculties can conceive of them: that such beings must be men like ourselves, with similar powers, and have had their faculties developed by like means.” In the very passage cited to support this charge, Dr Whewell will be found thus exactly limiting his proposition so as to exclude so impious and absurd a supposition:—“In order to conceive, on the Moon, or on Jupiter, a race of beings intelligent like man, we must conceive there colonies of men, with histories resembling, more or less, the histories of human colonies: and, indeed, resembling the history of those nations whose knowledge we inherit, far more closely than the history of any other terrestrial nation resembles that part of terrestrial history.”[^[7]] In the passage which we have quoted in the preceding column, Dr Whewell expressly declares, as of course he could not help declaring, that the Creator no doubt might make creatures fitted to live on the stars, or anywhere; but the passage misunderstood by the reviewer, appears to us possessed of an extensive significance, of which he has hastily lost sight, but which is closely connected with that portion of the author’s speculations with which we briefly dealt in our last number, especially that which regards Man as a being of progressive[^[8]] development. To this we shall hereafter return, reminding the reader of the course of Dr Whewell’s argument as thus far disclosed—namely, that man’s intellectual, moral, religious, and spiritual nature, is of so peculiar and high an order, as to warrant our regarding him as a special and unique existence, worthy of the station here assigned him in creation. Intellectually considered, man “has an element of community with God: whereupon it is so far conceivable that man should be, in a special manner, the object of God’s care and favour. The human mind, with its wonderful and perhaps illimitable powers, is something of which we can believe God to be mindful:”[^[9]] that He may very reasonably be thus mindful of a being whom he has vouchsafed to make in his own Image, after His likeness—the image and likeness of the awful Creator of all things.

“The privileges of man,” observes Dr Whewell, in a passage essential to be considered by those who would follow his argument,[^[10]] “which make the difficulty in assigning him his place in the Vast Scheme of the universe, we have described as consisting in his being an Intellectual, Moral, and Religious creature. Perhaps the privileges implied in the last term, and their place in our argument, may justify a word more of explanation.... We are now called upon,” proceeds the Essayist, after a striking sketch of the character and capacity of man, especially as a spiritual creature, “to proceed to exhibit the Answer which a somewhat different view of modern science suggests to this difficulty or objection.”

—“The difficulty[^[11]] appears great either way of considering it. Can the earth alone be the theatre of such intelligent, moral, religious, and spiritual action? Or can we conceive such action to go on in the other bodies of the universe?... Between these two difficulties the choice is embarrassing, and the decision must be unsatisfactory, except we can find some further ground of judgment. But this, perhaps, is not hopeless. We have hitherto referred to the evidence and analogies supplied by one science, namely, Astronomy. But there are other sciences which give us information concerning the nature and history of the Earth. From some of these we may perhaps obtain some knowledge of the place of the Earth in the scheme of creation; how far it is, in its present condition, a thing unique, or only one thing among many like it. Any science which supplies us with evidence or information on this head, will give us aid in forming a judgment upon the question under our consideration.”

Thus the Essayist reaches the second stage of his inquiry, entering on the splendid domain of Geology. To this great but recently consolidated science Dr Chalmers made no allusion in his celebrated “Discourses on the Christian Revelation, viewed in connection with the Modern Astronomy,”[^[12]] which were delivered in the year 1817, nearly thirty-seven years ago: and then he spoke, in his first Discourse, of Astronomy as “the most certain and best established of the sciences.” Dr Whewell, however, vindicates the claims of Geology, in respect of both the certainty and vastness of her discoveries, in a passage so just and admirable, that we must lay it before our readers.

“As to the vastness of astronomical discoveries, we must observe that those of Geology are no less vast: they extend through time, as those of Astronomy do through space; they carry us through millions of years—that is, of the earth’s revolutions—as those of Astronomy through millions of the earth’s diameters, or of diameters of the earth’s orbit. Geology fills the regions of duration with events, as Astronomy the regions of the universe with objects. She carries us backwards by the relation of cause and effect, as Astronomy carries us upwards by the relations of geometry. As Astronomy steps on from point to point of the universe by a chain of triangles, so Geology steps from epoch to epoch of the earth’s history by a chain of mechanical and organical laws. If the one depends on the axioms of geometry, the other depends on the axioms of causation.... But in truth, in such speculations, Geology has an immeasurable superiority. She has the command of an implement, in addition to all that Astronomy can use; and one, for the purpose of such speculations, adapted far beyond any astronomical element of discovery. She has, for one of her studies,—one of her means of dealing with her problems,—the knowledge of life, animal and vegetable. Vital organisation is a subject of attention which has, in modern times, been forced upon her. It is now one of the main parts of her discipline. The geologist must study the traces of life in every form—must learn to decipher its faintest indications and its fullest development. On the question, then, whether there be, in this or that quarter, evidence of life, he can speak with the confidence derived from familiar knowledge; while the astronomer, to whom such studies are utterly foreign, because he has no facts which bear upon them, can offer, on such questions, only the loosest and most arbitrary conjectures, which, as we have had to remark, have been rebuked by eminent men as being altogether inconsistent with the acknowledged maxims of his science.”[^[13]]

Before we proceed to state the singular and suggestive argument derived from this splendid science,[^[14]] we may apprise the reader that Dr Whewell’s primary object is to show, that even “supposing the other bodies of the universe to resemble the earth, so far as to seem, by their materials, forms, and motions, no less fitted than she is to be the abodes of life, yet that, knowing what we know of Man, we can believe the earth to be tenanted by a race who are the special objects of God’s care.”[^[15]] The grounds for entertaining, or rather impugning, that supposition he subsequently deals with after his own fashion in Chapters VII., VIII., IX., X.; but the two with which we are at present concerned are the fifth and sixth, respectively entitled, as we intimated in our last Number, “Geology,” and “The Argument from Geology.”

The exact object at which this leading section of the Essay is aimed is, in the Essayist’s words, this:—“A complete reply to the difficulty which astronomical discoveries appeared to place in the way of religion:—the difficulty of the opinion that Man, occupying this speck of earth but as an atom in the universe, surrounded by millions of other globes larger, and to all appearance nobler, than that which he inhabits, should be the object of the peculiar care and guardianship of the favour and government of the Creator of All, in the way in which religion teaches us that he is.”[^[16]]

What is that “complete reply?” The following passage contains a key to the entire speculation of the Essayist, and deserves a thoughtful perusal:—

“That the scale of man’s insignificance is of the same order in reference to time as to space. That Man—the Human Race from its origin till now—has occupied but an atom of time as he has occupied but an atom of space.”... “If the earth, as the habitation of Man, is a speck in the midst of an infinity of space, the Earth, as the habitation of Man, is also a speck at the end of an infinity of time. If we are as nothing in the surrounding universe, we are as nothing in the elapsed eternity; or rather in the elapsed organic antiquity during which the Earth has existed, and been the abode of life. If Man is but one small family in the midst of innumerable possible households, he is also but one small family, the successor of innumerable tribes of animals, not possible only, but actual. If the planets may be the seats of life, we know that the seas, which have given birth to our mountains, were so. If the stars may have hundreds of systems of tenanted planets rolling round them, we know that the secondary group of rocks does contain hundreds of tenanted beds, witnessing of as many systems of organic creation. If the Nebulæ may be planetary systems in the course of formation, we know that the primary and transition rocks either show us the earth in the course of formation, as the future seat of life, or exhibit such life as already begun.

“How far that which Astronomy thus asserts as possible, is probable—what is the value of these possibilities of life in distant regions of the universe, we shall hereafter consider; but in what Geology asserts, the case is clear. It is no possibility, but a certainty. No one will now doubt that shells and skeletons, trunks and leaves, prove animal and vegetable life to have existed. Even, therefore, if Astronomy could demonstrate all that her most fanciful disciples assume, Geology would still have a complete right to claim an equal hearing—to insist on having her analogies regarded. She would have a right to answer the questions of Astronomy, when she asks, How can we believe this? And to have her answer accepted.”[^[17]]

We regret that our space prevents our laying before the reader the masterly and deeply interesting epitome of geological discoveries contained in these two chapters. The stupendous series of these revelations may be thus briefly indicated:—That countless tribes of animals tenanted the earth for countless ages before Man’s advent; that former ocean-beds now constitute the centres of our loftiest mountains, as the results of changes gradual, successive, and long continued; that these vast masses of sedimentary strata present themselves to our notice in a strangely disordered state; that each of these rocky layers contains a vast profusion of the remains of marine animals, intermingled with a great series of fresh-water and land animals and plants endlessly varied—all these being different, not only in species, but in kind!—and each of these separate beds must have lasted as long, or perhaps longer, than that during which the dry land has had its present form.

The careful prosecution of their researches has forced on the minds of geologists and naturalists “the general impression that, as we descend in this long staircase of natural steps, we are brought in view of a state of the earth in which life was scantily manifested, so as to be near its earliest stages.”[^[18]]

In the opinion of the most eminent geologists, some of these epochs of organic transition were also those of mechanical violence, on a vast and wonderful scale—as it were, a vast series of successive periods of alternate violence and repose. The general nature of such change is vividly sketched by the Essayist, in a passage to which we must refer the reader.[^[19]] When, continues the Essayist, we find strata bearing evidence of such a mode of deposit, and piled up to the height of thousands and tens of thousands of feet, we are naturally led to regard them as the production of myriads of years; and to add new myriads, as often as we are brought to new masses of strata of the like kind; and again to interpolate new periods of the same order, to allow for the transition from one group to another.[^[20]]

The best geologists and naturalists are utterly at fault, in attempting to account for the successive introduction of these numerous new species, at these immense intervals of time, except by referring them to the exercise of a series of distinct Acts of Creation. The chimerical notion of some natural cause effecting a transmutation of one series of organic forms into another, has been long exploded, as totally destitute of proof: and “the doctrine of the successive CREATION of species,” says the Essayist, “remains firmly established among geologists.”[^[21]] There is nothing known of the cosmical conditions of our globe, to contradict the terrestrial evidence for its vast antiquity as the seat of organic life,[^[22]] says Dr Whewell: and then proceeds thus, in a passage which is well worth the reader’s attention, and has excited the ire of Sir David Brewster:—

“If, for the sake of giving definiteness to our notions, we were to assume that the numbers which express the antiquity of these four periods—the present organic condition of the earth; the tertiary period of geologists which preceded that; the secondary period which was anterior to that; and the primary period which preceded the secondary—were on the same scale as the numbers which express these four magnitudes:—The magnitude of the earth; that of the solar system compared with the earth; the distance of the nearest fixed stars compared with the solar system; and the distance of the most remote nebulæ compared with the nearest fixed stars,—there is, in the evidence which geological science offers, nothing to contradict such an assumption. And as the infinite extent which we necessarily ascribe to space allows us to find room, without any mental difficulty, for the vast distances which astronomy reveals, and even leaves us rather embarrassed with the infinite extent which lies beyond our furthest explorations; so the infinite duration which we, in like manner, necessarily ascribe to past time, makes it easy for us, so far as our powers of intellect are concerned, to go millions of millions of years backwards, in order to trace the beginning of the earth’s existence—the first step of terrestrial creation.”

To return, however, to the course of the argument. We hear the oppressed observer asking, as he reascends this “long staircase of natural steps” which had brought time down to the mystic origin of animal existence; his eye dimmed with its efforts to “decipher,” in the picturesque language of Sir David Brewster, “downwards, the pale and perishing alphabet[^[23]] of the Chronology of Life”—where, all this while, was Man?

Were Europe at this moment to be submerged beneath the ocean, or placed under a vast rocky stratum, what countless proofs would present themselves to the exploring eyes of remote future geologists, of the existence of both Man and his handiwork!—of his own skeleton, of the products of his ingenuity and power, and the various implements and instruments with which he had effected them!

The rudest conceivable work of human art would carry us to any extent backward, but it is not to be found! Man’s existence and history incontestably belong to the existing condition of the earth; and the Essayist now addresses himself to the two following propositions:—

First, That the existence and history of man are facts of an Entirely Different Order from any which existed in any of the previous states of the earth.

Secondly, That his history has occupied a series of years which, compared with geological periods, may be regarded as very brief and limited.

Here opens the “Argument from Geology”—and with it Chapter VI.

That the existence of man upon the earth is an event of an order quite different from any previous part of the earth’s history; and that there is no transition from animals to MAN, in even his most degraded, barbarian, and brutish condition, the Essayist demonstrates, with affecting eloquence, and with great argumentative power. No doubt there are kinds of animals very intelligent and sagacious, and exceedingly disposed and adapted to companionship with man; but by elevating the intelligence of the brute, we do not make it become that of the man; nor by making man barbarous, do we make him cease to be man. He has a capacity, not for becoming sagacious, but rational,—or rather he has a capacity for PROGRESS, in virtue of his being rational.

After adverting to Language, as an awful and mysterious evidence of his exalted endowments, and felicitously distinguishing instinct from reason, the Essayist observes that we need not be disturbed in our conclusions by observing the condition of savage and uncultivated tribes, ancient or modern—the Scythians and Barbarians, the Australians and Negroes. The history of man, in the earliest times, is as truly a history of a wonderful, intellectual, social, political, spiritual creature, as it is at present.[^[24]] The savage and ignorant state is not the state of nature out of which civilised life has everywhere emerged: their savage condition is one rather of civilisation degraded and lost, than of civilisation incipient and prospective. And even were it to be assumed to be otherwise, that man, naturally savage, had a tendency to become civilised, that TENDENCY is an endowment no less wonderful than those endowments which civilisation exhibits.

When, however, we know not only what man is, but what he may become, both intellectually and morally, as we have already seen; when we cast our mind’s eye over the history of the civilised section of our race, wherever authentic records of their sayings and doings exist, we find repeated and radiant instances of intellectual and moral greatness, rising into sublimity—such as compel us to admit that man is incomparably the most perfect and highly endowed creature which appears to have ever existed on the earth.

“How far previous periods of animal existence were a necessary preparation of the earth as the habitation of man, or a gradual progression towards the existence of man, we need not now inquire. But this, at least, we may say, that man, now that he is here, forms a climax to all that has preceded—a term incomparably exceeding in value all the previous parts of the series—a complex and ornate capital to the subjacent column—a personage of vastly greater dignity and importance than all the preceding line of the procession.”[^[25]]

If we are thus to regard man as the climax of the creation in space, as in time, “can we point out any characters,” finally asks the Essayist, “which may tend to make it conceivable that the Creator should thus distinguish him, and care for him—should prepare his habitation, if it be so, by ages of chaotic and rudimentary life, and by accompanying orbs of brute and barren matter? If man be thus the head, the crowned head, of the creation, is he worthy to be thus elevated? Has he any qualities which make it conceivable that, with such an array of preparation and accompaniment”—the reader will note the sudden introduction of these elements of the question, the “accompanying orbs!”—“he should be placed upon the earth, his throne? Does any answer now occur to us, after the views which have been presented to us? That answer,” continues the Essayist, “is the one which has been already given:” “the transcendent intellectual, moral, and religious character of man—such as warrants him in believing that God, in very deed, is not only mindful of him, but visits him.”[^[26]]

This may be, the objector is conceived to say; but my difficulty haunts and harasses me: that, while man’s residence is, with reference to the countless glistening orbs revealed by Astronomy, scarcely in the proportion of a single grain of sand to the entire terraqueous structure of our globe, I am required to believe that the Almighty has dealt with him, and with the speck in which he resides, in the awfully exceptional manner asserted in the Scriptures. Let us here remind the reader of a coarser, and an insolent and blasphemous, expression of this “difficulty,” by Thomas Paine, already quoted:—[^[27]]

“The system of a plurality of worlds renders the Christian faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air: the two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind.” With such an opponent Dr Whewell expressly states that he has no concern; he deals with a “‘difficulty’ felt by a friend:” wishing “rather to examine how to quiet the troubled and perplexed believer, than how to triumph over the dogmatical and self-satisfied unbeliever.”

“Let the difficulty,” he says, “be put in any way the objector pleases.”

I. Is it that it is unworthy of the greatness and majesty of God, according to our conception of Him, to bestow such peculiar care on so SMALL A PART of His creation?[^[28]]

But a narrow inspection of the atom of space assigned to man, proves that He has done so. He has made the period of mankind, though only a moment in the ages of animal life, the only period of Intelligence, Morality, Religion. If it be contrary to OUR! conception of Him, to suppose Him to have done so, it is plain that these conceptions are wrong. God has not judged as to what is worthy of Him, as we have presumed to judge. He has deemed it worthy of Himself to bestow upon man this special care, though he occupy so small a portion of TIME:—why not, then, though he occupy so small a portion of SPACE?

II. Is the difficulty this:—That supposing the earth, alone, to be occupied by inhabitants, all the other globes of the universe are WASTED?—turned to NO PURPOSE?[^[29]]

Is “waste” of this kind to be considered unsuited to the character of our Creator? But here again we have the like “waste” in the occupation of this earth! All its previous ages, its seas and its continents, have been “wasted” upon mere brute life: often, apparently, on the lowest, the least conscious forms of life:—upon sponges, coral, shell-fish. Why, then, should not the seas and continents of other planets be occupied with life of this order, or with no life at all? Who shall tell how many ages elapsed before this earth was tenanted by life at all? Will the occupation of a spot of land, or a little water, by the life of a sponge, a coral, or an oyster, save it from being “wasted”? If a spot of rock or water be sufficiently employed by its being the mere seat of organisation, of however low and simple a type,—why not, by its being the mere seat of attraction? cohesion? crystalline power? All parts of the universe appear pervaded by attraction, by forces of aggregation and atomic relation, by light and heat: why may not these be sufficient, in the eyes of the Creator, to prevent the space from being “wasted,” as, during a great part of the earth’s past history, and over vast portions of its mass in its present form, they are actually held by Him to be sufficient? since these powers, or forces, are all that occupy such portions. This notion, therefore, of the improbability of there being in the universe so vast an amount of “waste” spaces, or “waste” bodies, as is implied in the notion that the earth alone is the seat of life, or of intelligence, is confuted by matter-of-fact, existing, in respect of vast spaces, waste districts, and especially waste times, upon our own earth. The avoidance of such “waste,” according to our notions of waste, is no part of the economy of creation, so far as we can discern that economy in its most certain exemplification.

III. Is the difficulty this:—That giving such a peculiar dignity and importance to the earth is contrary to the Analogy of Creation?[^[30]]

This objection, be it observed, assumes that there are so many globes similar to the earth, and like her revolving,—some accompanied as she is, by satellites,—on their axis, and that therefore it is reasonable to suppose the destination and office of all, the same;—that there are so many stars, each, like our sun, a source of light, probably also of heat; and that it is consequently reasonable to suppose their light and heat, like his, imparted, as from so many centres of systems, to uphold life;—and that all this affords strong ground for believing all such planets, as well those of our own as of other systems, inhabited like our planet.

But the Essayist again directs the eye of the questioner to the state of our own planet, as demonstrated by Geology, in order to show the precariousness, if not futility, of supposing such an analogy to exist. It would lead us to a palpably false conclusion—viz., that during all the vast successive periods of the Earth’s history, that Earth was occupied with life of the same order—nay, even, that since the Earth is now the seat of an intelligent population, it must have been so in all its former conditions. For it was then able, and adapted, to support animal life, and that of creatures pretty closely resembling man[^[31]] in physical structure. Nevertheless, if evidence go for anything, the Earth did not do so! “Even,” says Dr Whewell, “those geologists who have dwelt most on the discovery of fossil monkeys, and other animals nearest to man, have not dreamed that there existed, before him, a race of rational, intelligent, and progressive creatures.”[^[32]] Here, however, he is mistaken, as we shall presently see Sir David Brewster revelling in such a dream. As, then, the notion that one period of time in the Earth’s history must resemble another in the character of its population, because it resembles it in physical conditions, is negatived by the history of the Earth itself; so the notion that one part of the universe must resemble another in its population, because it has a resemblance in physical conditions, is negatived, as a law of creation. Analogy really affords no support to such a notion.

IV. Nay, continues Dr Whewell,[^[33]] we may go further: instead of the analogy of creation pointing to such entire resemblance of similar parts, it points in the opposite direction: it is not entire resemblance, but universal difference, that we discover: not the repetition of exactly similar cases, but a series of cases perpetually dissimilar, presents itself: not constancy, but change—perhaps advance; not one permanent and pervading scheme, but preparation, and completion of successive schemes:—not uniformity, and a fixed type of existences, but progression and a climax.

Viewing the advent of Man, and what preceded it, it seems the analogy of nature that there should be inferior, as well as superior, provinces in the universe, and that the inferior may occupy an immensely larger portion of Time than the superior. Why not, then, of Space?

“The earth was brute and inert, compared with its present condition; dark and chaotic, so far as the light of reason and intelligence are concerned, for countless centuries before man was created. Why then may not other parts of creation be still in this brute and inert and chaotic state, while the earth is under the influence of a higher exercise of creative power? If the earth was for ages a turbid abyss of lava and of mud, why may not Mars or Saturn be so still?... The possibility that the planets are such rude masses, is quite as tenable, on astronomical grounds, as the possibility that the planets resemble the earth, in matters of which astronomy can tell us nothing. We say, therefore, that the example of geology refutes the argument drawn from the supposed analogy of one part of the universe with another; and suggests a strong suspicion that the force of analogy, better known, may tend in the opposite direction.”[^[34]]

We have now gone through a large portion, embracing two of the three sections into which we had divided this startling Essay; presenting as full and fair an account of it as is consistent with our limits. Though the author professes that he “does not pretend to disprove the Plurality of Worlds, but to deny the existence of arguments making the doctrine probable,” his undisguised object is to assign cogent reasons for holding the opposite to be the true doctrine—the Unity of the World. What has gone before is, moreover, on the assumption that the other bodies of the universe are fitted, equally with the Earth, to be the abodes of life. Before passing on, however, to the remaining section of the Essay, which is decidedly hostile to that assumption, let us here introduce on the scene Dr Whewell’s only hitherto avowed antagonist, Sir David Brewster.

Though it is impossible to treat otherwise than with much consideration, whatever is published by this gentleman, we must express our regret that he did not more deliberately approach so formidable an opponent as Dr Whewell, and, as we are compelled to add, in a more calm and courteous spirit. We never read a performance less calculated than this Essay, from its modesty and moderation of tone, and the high and abstract nature of the topics which it discusses with such powerful logic, and such a profusion of knowledge of every kind, to provoke an acrimonious answer. It is happily rare, in recent times, for one of two philosophic disputants, to speak of the other’s “exhibiting an amount of knowledge so massive as occasionally to smother his reason;”[^[35]] “ascribing his sentiments only to some morbid condition of the mental powers, which feeds upon paradox, and delights in doing violence to sentiments deeply cherished, and to opinions universally believed;”[^[36]] characterising some of his reasonings as “dialectics in which a large dose of banter and ridicule is seasoned with a little condiment of science;”[^[37]] and an elaborate argument, of great strength and originality, whether sound or not, as “the most ingenious, though shallow piece of sophistry, which we! (Sir David Brewster) have encountered in modern times;”[^[38]] referring his “theories and speculations to no better a feeling than a love of notoriety.”[^[39]] It is not to be supposed that Sir David was not perfectly aware who his opponent was,[^[40]] which occasions extreme surprise at the tone adopted throughout More Worlds than One. In his preface, he explains as a cause of his anger, that he found that “the author” of the Essay, “under a title calculated to mislead the public, had made an elaborate attack upon opinions consecrated, as Sir David had thought, by reason and revelation,”—that the author had not only adopted a theory (the Nebular) so universally condemned as a dangerous speculation, “but had taken a view of the condition of the solar system calculated to disparage the science of astronomy, and throw a doubt over the noblest of its truths.” We dismiss this topic with a repetition of our regret, that so splendid a subject was not approached in a serener spirit; that greater respect was not shown by one of his contemporaries for one of the most eminent men of the age; and that sufficient time was not taken, in order to avoid divers surprising maculæ occurring in even the composition, and certain rash and unguarded expressions and speculations.

If Dr Whewell may be regarded as (pace tanti viri!) a sort of Star-Smasher, his opponent is in very truth a Star-Peopler. Though he admits that “there are some difficulties to be removed, and some additional analogies to be adduced, before the mind can admit the startling proposition[^[41]] that the Sun, Moon, and all the satellites, are inhabited spheres”—yet he believes that they are:[^[42]] that all the planets of their respective systems are so; as well as all the single stars, double stars, and nebulæ, with all planets and satellites circling about them!—though “our faltering reason utterly fails us!” he owns,[^[43]] “when called on to believe that even the Nebulæ must be surrendered to life and reason! Wherever there is matter there must be life!” One can by this time almost pardon the excitement, the alarm rather, and anger, with which Sir David ruefully beheld Dr Whewell go forth on his exterminating expedition through Infinitude! It was like a father gazing on the ruthless slaughter of his offspring. Planet after planet, satellite after satellite, star after star, sun after sun, single suns and double suns, system after system, nebula after nebula, all disappeared before this sidereal Quixote! As for Jupiter and Saturn, the pet planets of Sir David, they were dealt with in a way perfectly shocking. The former turned out, to the disordered optics and unsteady brain of the Essayist, to be a sphere of water, with perhaps a few cinders at the centre, and peopled “with cartilaginous and glutinous monsters—boneless, watery, pulpy creatures, floating in the fluid;” while poor Saturn may be supposed turning aghast on hearing that, for all his grand appearance, he was little else than a sphere of vapour, with a little water, tenanted, if at all, by “aqueous, gelatinous creatures—too sluggish almost to be deemed alive—floating in their ice-cold waters, shrowded for ever by their humid skies!” But talk after this of the pensive Moon! “She is a mere cinder! a collection of sheets of rigid slag, and inactive craters!” This could be borne no longer; so thus Sir David pours forth the grief and indignation of the Soul Astronomic, in a passage fraught with the spirit, and embodying the results, of his whole book, and which we give, as evidently laboured by the author with peculiar care.

“Those ungenial minds that can be brought to believe that the earth is the only inhabited body in the universe, will have no difficulty in conceiving that it also might have been without inhabitants. Nay, if such minds are imbued with geological truth, they must admit that for millions of years the earth was without inhabitants; and hence we are led to the extraordinary result, that for millions of years there was not an intelligent creature in the vast dominions of the universal King; and that before the formation of the protozoic strata, there was neither a plant nor an animal throughout the infinity of space! During this long period of universal death, when Nature herself was asleep—the sun, with his magnificent attendants—the planets, with their faithful satellites—the stars in the binary systems—the solar system itself, were performing their daily, their annual, and their secular movements unseen, unheeded, and fulfilling no purpose that human reason can conceive; lamps lighting nothing—fires heating nothing—waters quenching nothing—clouds screening nothing—breezes fanning nothing—and everything around, mountain and valley, hill and dale, earth and ocean, all meaning nothing.

‘The stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space.’

To our apprehension, such a condition of the earth, of the solar system, and of the sidereal universe, would be the same as that of our own globe if all its vessels of war and of commerce were traversing its seas with empty cabins and freightless holds; as if all the railways on its surface were in full activity without passengers and goods; and all our machinery beating the air and gnashing their iron teeth without work performed. A house without tenants, a city without citizens, present to our minds the same idea as a planet without life, and a universe without inhabitants. Why the house was built, why the city was founded, why the planet was made, and why the universe was created, it would be difficult even to conjecture. Equally great would be the difficulty were the planets shapeless lumps of matter, poised in ether, and still and motionless as the grave. But when we consider them as chiselled spheres, and teeming with inorganic beauty, and in full mechanical activity, performing their appointed motions with such miraculous precision that their days and their years never err a second of time in hundreds of centuries, the difficulty of believing them to be without life is, if possible, immeasurably increased. To conceive any one material globe, whether a gigantic clod slumbering in space, or a noble planet equipped like our own, and duly performing its appointed task, to have no living occupants, or not in a state of preparation to receive them, seems to us one of those notions which could be harboured only in an ill-educated and ill-regulated mind—a mind without faith and without hope: but to conceive a whole universe of moving and revolving worlds in such a category, indicates, in our apprehension, a mind dead to feeling and shorn of reason.”[^[44]]

“It is doubtless possible,” observes Sir David, however, a little further on,[^[45]] as if with a twinge of misgiving, “that the Mighty Architect of the universe may have had other objects in view, incomprehensible by us, than that of supporting animal and vegetable life in these magnificent spheres.” Would that Sir David Brewster would allow himself to be largely influenced by this rational and devout sentiment! His book is, on the contrary, crammed with assertions from beginning to end, and of a peremptory and intolerant character unknown to the spirit of genuine philosophy.

The Essayist, however, is not incapable of quiet humour: and the following pregnant passage is at least worthy to stand side by side with that which we have just quoted from his indignant and eloquent opponent:—

“Undoubtedly, all true astronomers, taught caution and temperance of thought by the discipline of their magnificent science, abstain from founding such assumptions upon their discoveries. They know how necessary it is to be upon their guard against the tricks which fancy plays with the senses; and if they see appearances of which they cannot interpret the meaning, they are content that they should have no meaning for them, till the due explanation comes. We have innumerable examples of this wise and cautious temper in all periods of astronomy. One has occurred lately. Several careful astronomers, observing the stars by day, had been surprised to see globes of light glide across the field of view of their telescopes, often in rapid succession, and in great numbers. They did not, as may be supposed, rush to the assumption that these globes were celestial bodies of a new kind, before unseen, and that, from the peculiarity of their appearance and movement, they were probably inhabited by beings of a peculiar kind. They proceeded differently. They altered the focus of their telescopes, looked with other glasses, made various changes and trials; and finally discovered that these globes of light were the winged seeds of certain plants, which were wafted through the air, and which, illuminated by the sun, were made globular by being at distances unsuited to the focus of the telescopes!”[^[46]]

Before proceeding to give our readers some idea of the mode in which Sir David Brewster encounters Dr Whewell, let us offer a general observation concerning both these eminent gentlemen. While the latter exhibits throughout his Essay a spirit of candour and modesty, without one harsh expression or uncharitable insinuation with reference to the holder of doctrines which he is bent upon impugning with all his mental power and multifarious resources; the former, as we have seen, uses language at once heated, uncourteous, and unjustifiable: especially where he more than insinuates that his opponent, whose great knowledge and ability he admits, either deliberately countenances doctrines tending really to Atheism, or may be believed “ignorant of their tendency, and to have forgotten the truths of Inspiration, and even those of Natural Religion.”[^[47]] To venture, however circuitously, to hint such imputations upon an opponent whom he had the slightest reason to suspect being one of such high and responsible academic position, is an offence equally against personal courtesy and public propriety; as we think Sir David Brewster would, on reflection, acknowledge. Both Dr Whewell and Sir David Brewster must excuse us, if, scanning both through the cold medium of impartial criticism, their speculations, questions, or assertions appear to us disturbed and deflected by a leading prepossession or foregone conclusion, which we shall indicate in the words of each.

Dr Whewell.—“The Earth is really the largest Planetary body in the Solar system; its domestic hearth, and the Only World [i. e. collection of intelligent creatures] in the Universe.”[^[48]]

Sir David Brewster.—“Life is almost a property of matter.... Wherever there is Matter, there must be Life:—Life physical, to enjoy its beauties; Life Moral, to worship its Maker; and Life Intellectual, to proclaim His wisdom and His power.... Universal Life upon Universal matter, is an idea to which the mind instinctively clings.... Every star in the Heavens, and every point in a nebula which the most powerful telescope has not separated from its neighbour, is a sun surrounded by inhabited planets like our own.... In peopling such worlds with life and intelligence, we assign the cause of their existence; and when the mind is once alive to this great Truth, it cannot fail to realise the grand combination of infinity of life with infinity of matter.”[^[49]]

The composition of Sir David Brewster, though occasionally too declamatory and rhetorical, and so far lacking the dignified simplicity befitting the subjects with which he deals, has much merit. It is easy, vivid, and vigorous, but will bear retrenchment, and lowering of tone. As to the substantial texture of his work, we think it betrays, in almost every page, haste and impetuosity, and evidence that the writer has sadly under-estimated the strength of his opponent. Another feature of More Worlds than One, is a manifest desire provocare ad populum—a greater anxiety, in the first instance, to catch the ear of the million, than to convince the “fit audience, though few.” Now, however, to his work; and, as we have already said, on him lies the labouring oar of proof. All that his opponent professes to do, is to ask for arguments “rendering probable” that “doctrine” which Sir David pledges himself to demonstrate to be not only the “hope” of the Christian, but the creed of the philosopher: as much, that is, an article of his belief, as the doctrines of attraction and gravitation, or the existence of demonstrable astronomical facts.

He commences with a brief introduction, sketching the growth of the belief in a plurality of worlds—one steadily and firmly increasing in strength, till it encountered the rude shock of the Essayist, whose “very remarkable work” is “ably written,” and who “defends ingeniously his novel and extraordinary views:” “the direct tendency of which is to ridicule and bring into contempt the grand discoveries in sidereal astronomy by which the last century has been distinguished.” In his next chapter, Sir David discusses “the religious aspect of the question,” representing man, especially the philosopher, as always having pined after a knowledge of the scene of his future being. He declares that neither the Old nor the New Testament contains “a single expression incompatible with the great truth that there are other worlds than our own which are the seats of life and intelligence;” but, on the contrary, there are “other passages which are inexplicable without admitting it to be true.” He regards, as we have seen, the noble exclamation of the Psalmist, “What is man,” as “a positive argument for a plurality of worlds;” and “cannot doubt” that he was gifted with a plenary knowledge of the starry system, inhabited as Sir David would have it to be! Dr Chalmers, let us remark, in passing, expressed himself differently, and with a more becoming reserve: “It is not for us to say whether inspiration revealed to the Psalmist the wonders of the modern astronomy,” but “even though the mind be a perfect stranger to the science of these enlightened times, the heavens present a great and an elevating spectacle, the contemplation of which awakened the piety of the Psalmist”—a view in which Dr Whewell concurs. Sir David then comes to consider the doctrine of “Man, in his future state of existence, consisting, as at present, of a spiritual nature residing in a corporeal frame.” We must, therefore, find for the race of Adam, “if not for the races which preceded him!”[^[50]] “a material home upon which he may reside, or from which he may travel to other localities in the universe.” That house, he says, cannot be the earth, for it will not be big enough—there will be such a “population as the habitable parts of our globe could not possibly accommodate;” wherefore, “we can scarcely doubt that their future abode must be on some of the primary or secondary planets of the solar system, whose inhabitants have ceased to exist, like those on the earth; or on planets which have long been in a state of preparation, as our earth was, for the advent of intellectual life.” Here, then, is “the creed of the philosopher,” as well as “the hope of the Christian.” Passing, according to the order adopted in this paper, from the first chapter (“Religious Aspect of the Question”), we alight on the seventh, entitled “Religious Difficulties.” We entertain too much consideration for Sir David Brewster to speak harshly of anything falling from his pen; but we think ourselves justified in questioning whether this chapter—dealing with speculations of an awful nature, among which the greatest religious and philosophical intellects tremble as they “go sounding on their dim and perilous way”—shows him equal to cope with his experienced opponent, whom every page devoted to such topics shows to have fixed the Difficulty with which he proposed to deal, fully and steadily before his eyes, in all its moral, metaphysical, and philosophical bearings, and to have discussed it cautiously and reverently. We shall content ourselves with briefly indicating the course of observation on that “difficulty” adopted by Sir David Brewster, and leaving it to the discreet reader to form his own judgment whether Sir David has left the difficulty where he found it, or removed, lessened, or enhanced it.

Dr Whewell, in his Dialogue, thus temperately and effectively deals with this section of his opponent’s lucubrations:—

“His own solution of the question concerning the redemption of other worlds appears to be this, that the provision made for the redemption of man by what took place upon earth eighteen hundred years ago, may have extended its influence to other worlds.

“In reply to which astronomico-theological hypothesis three remarks offer themselves: In the first place, the hypothesis is entirely without warrant or countenance in the revelation from which all our knowledge of the scheme of redemption is derived; in the second place, the events which took place upon earth eighteen hundred years ago, were connected with a train of events in the history of man, which had begun at the creation of man, and extended through all the intervening ages; and the bearing of this whole series of events upon the condition of the inhabitants of other worlds must be so different from its bearing on the condition of man, that the hypothesis needs a dozen other auxiliary hypotheses to make it intelligible; and, in the third place, this hypothesis, making the earth, insignificant as it seems to be in the astronomical scheme, the centre of the theological scheme, ascribes to the earth a peculiar distinction, quite as much at variance with the analogies of the planets to one another, as the supposition that the earth alone is inhabited; to say nothing of the bearing of the critic’s hypothesis on the other systems that encircle other suns.”[^[51]]

“In freely discussing the subject of a Plurality of Worlds,” says Sir David, “there can be no collision between Reason and Revelation.” He regrets the extravagant conclusion of some, that the inhabitants of all planets but our own, “are sinless and immortal beings that never broke the Divine Law, and enjoying that perfect felicity reserved for only a few of the less favoured occupants of earth. Thus chained to a planet, the lowest and most unfortunate in the universe, the philosopher, with all his analogies broken down, may justly renounce his faith in a Plurality of Worlds, and rejoice in the more limited but safer creed of the anti-Pluralist author, who makes the earth the only world in the universe, and the special object of God’s paternal care.”[^[52]] He proceeds, in accordance with “men of lofty minds and undoubted piety,” to regard the existence of moral evil as a necessary part of the general scheme of the universe, and consequently affecting all its Rational Inhabitants.[^[53]] He “rejects the idea that the inhabitants of the planets do not require a Saviour; and maintains the more rational opinion, that they stand in the same moral relation to their Maker as the inhabitants of the earth; and seeks for a solution of the difficulty—how can there be inhabitants in the planets, when God had but One Son, whom He could send to save them? If we can give a satisfactory answer to this question, it may destroy the objections of the Infidel, while it relieves the Christian from his difficulties.”[^[54]]... “When our Saviour died, the influence of His death extended backward, in the Past, to millions who never heard His name; in the Future, to millions who never will hear it ... a Force which did not vary with any function of the distance.[^[55]]... Emanating from the middle planet of the system.”

——The earth the middle planet of the system? How is this? In an earlier portion of his book (p. 56), Sir David had demonstrated that “our earth is neither the middle [his own italics] planet, nor the planet nearest the sun, nor the planet furthest from that luminary: that therefore the earth, as a planet, has no pre-eminence in the solar system, to induce us to believe that it is the only inhabited world.... Jupiter is the middle planet (p. 55), and is otherwise highly distinguished!” How is this? Can the two passages containing such direct contradictions have emanated from the same scientific controversialist?—To resume, however:

—“Emanating from the middle planet of the system, why may it not have extended to them all, ... to the Planetary Races in the Past, and to the Planetary Races in the Future?... But to bring our argument more within the reach of an ordinary understanding”—he supposes our earth split into two parts! the old world and the new (as Biela’s comet is supposed to have been divided in 1846), at the beginning of the Christian era![^[56]]—“would not both fragments have shared in the beneficence of the Cross—the penitent on the shores of the Mississippi, as richly as the pilgrim on the banks of the Jordan?... Should this view prove unsatisfactory to the anxious inquirer, we may suggest another sentiment, even though we ourselves may not admit it into our creed.... May not the Divine Nature, which can neither suffer, nor die, and which, in our planet, once only clothed itself in humanity, resume elsewhere a physical form, and expiate the guilt of unnumbered worlds?”[^[57]]

We repeat, that we abstain from offering any of the stern strictures which these passages almost extort from us.

He proceeds to declare himself incompetent to comprehend the Difficulty “put in a form so unintelligible” by the Essayist—that of a kind of existence, similar to that of men, in respect of their intellectual, moral, and spiritual character, and its progressive development, existing in any region occupied by other beings than man. He denies that Progression has been the character of the history of man,[^[58]] but rather frequent and vast retrogressions ever since the Fall; and asks “which of these ever-changing conditions of humanity is the unique condition of the Essayist—incapable of repetition in the scheme of the Universe?”[^[59]] Why may there not be an intermediate race between that of man and the angelic beings of Scripture, where human reason shall pass into the highest form of created mind, and human affections into their noblest development?—

“Why may not the intelligence of the spheres be ordained for the study of regions and objects unstudied and unknown on earth? Why may not labour have a better commission than to earn its bread by the sweat of its brow? Why may it not pluck its loaf from the bread-fruit tree, or gather its manna from the ground, or draw its wine from the bleeding vessels of the vine, or inhale its anodyne breath from the paradise gas of its atmosphere?”[^[60]]

And Sir David thus concludes the chapter:—

“The difficulties we have been considering, in so far as they are of a religious character, have been very unwisely introduced into the question of a Plurality of Worlds. We are not entitled to remonstrate with the sceptic, but we venture to doubt the soundness of that philosopher’s judgment who thinks that the truths of natural religion are affected by a belief in planetary races, and the reality of that Christian’s faith who considers it to be endangered by a belief that there are other Worlds than his own.”

This last paragraph induces us to go so far as to doubt whether Sir David Brewster has addressed his understanding deliberately, to the subject to which so large a portion of the most elaborate reasonings of Dr Whewell have been directed.

Sir David does not quarrel with the Essayist’s account of the constitution of man; and we must now see how he deals with the Essayist’s arguments drawn from Geology.

Sir David “is not disposed to grudge the geologist even periods so marvellous” as “millions of years required for the formation of strata, provided they be considered as merely hypothetical;” and admits that “our seas and continents have nearly the same locality, and cover nearly the same area, as they did at the creation of Adam;” but demurs to the conclusion that the earth was prepared for man by causes operating so gradually as the diurnal change going on around us. “Why may not the Almighty have deposited the earth’s strata, during the whole period of its formation, by a rapid precipitation of their atoms from the waters which suspended them, so as to reduce the period of the earth’s formation to little more than the united generations of the different orders of plants and animals constituting its organic remains? Why not still further shorten the period, by supposing that plants and animals, requiring, in our day, a century for their development, may in primitive times have shot up in rank luxuriance, and been ready, in a few days! or months! or years, for the great purpose of exhibiting, by their geological distribution, the progressive formation of the earth?”[^[61]]

These questions, of which a myriad similar ones might be asked by any one, we leave to our geological readers; and hasten to inform them, that in involuntary homage to the powerful reasonings of his opponent, Sir David Brewster is fain to question the “inference that man did not exist during the period of the earth’s formation;”[^[62]] and to suggest that “there may have existed intellectual races in present unexplored continental localities, or the immense regions of the earth now under water!”—“The future of geology may be pregnant with startling discoveries of the remains of intellectual races, even beneath the primitive Azoic[^[63]] formations of the earth!... Who can tell what sleeps beyond? Another creation may be beneath! more glorious creatures may be entombed there! the mortal coils of beings more lovely, more pure, more divine than man, may yet read to us the unexpected lesson that we have not been the first, and may not be the last of the intellectual race!”[^[64]] Is he who can entertain and publish conjectures like these, entitled to stigmatise so severely those of other speculators—as “inconceivable absurdities, which no sane mind can cherish—suppositions too ridiculous even for a writer of romance!” This wild license given to the fancy may not be amiss in a poet, whose privilege it is that his “eye in a fine phrenzy rolling” may “give to airy nothing a local habitation, and a name:”—but when set in the scale against the solemnly magnificent array of facts in the earth’s history established by Geology, may be summarily discarded by sober and grave inquirers.

The Essayist’s suggested analogy between man’s relation to time and to space appears to us not understood, in either its scope or nature, by Sir David Brewster. At this we are as much surprised, as at the roughness with which he characterises the argument, as “the most ingenious though shallow piece of sophistry he has ever encountered in modern dialectics.” The Essayist suggests a comparison between the numbers expressing the four magnitudes and distances,—of the earth, the solar system, the fixed stars, and the nebulæ—and the numbers expressing the antiquity of the four geological periods “for the sake of giving definiteness to our notions.” Sir David abstains from quoting these last expressions, and alleges that the Essayist, “quitting the ground of analogy,” founds an elaborate argument on the mutual relation of an atom of time and an atom of space. The “argument” Sir David thus presents to his readers, the capital and italic letters being his own: “That is, the earth, the ATOM OF SPACE, is the only one of the planetary and sidereal worlds that is inhabited, because it was so long without inhabitants, and has been occupied only an ATOM OF TIME.”[^[65]] “If any of our readers,” he adds, “see the force of this argument, they must possess an acuteness of perception to which we lay no claim. To us, it is not only illogical; it is a mere sound in the ear, without any sense in the brain.” This is the language possibly befitting an irritated Professor towards an ignorant and conceited student, but hardly suitable when Sir David Brewster is speaking of such an antagonist as he cannot but know he has to deal with. It does not appear to us the Essayist’s attempt, or purpose, to establish any arbitrary absolute relation between time and space, or definite proportions of either, as concurring or alternative elements for determining the probability of a plurality of worlds. But he says to the dogmatic astronomical objector to Christianity, Such arguments as you have hitherto derived from your consideration of SPACE, MULTITUDE, and MAGNITUDE, for the purpose of depressing man into a being beneath his Maker’s special notice, I encounter by arguments derived from recent disclosures concerning another condition of existence—DURATION, or TIME. Protesting that neither Time nor Space has any true connection with the subject, nevertheless I will turn your own weapons against yourself. My argument from Time shall at least neutralise yours from Space: mine shall involve the conditions of yours, fraught with their supposed irresistible force, and falsify them in fact, as forming premises whence may be deduced derogatory inferences concerning man. The Essayist’s ingenious and suggestive argument is intended not to prove an opinion, but to remove an objection; which, according to the profound thinker, Bishop Butler, is the proper office of analogy. It is asked, for instance, how can you suppose that man, such as he is represented to be, occupies only an immeasurably minute fraction of existing matter? and it is answered, I find that man occupies only an immeasurably minute fraction of elapsed time: and this is, to me, an answer to the “How,” as concluding improbability. How is balanced against How: Difficulty against difficulty: they neutralise each other, and leave the great question, the great reality, standing as it did before either was suggested, to be dealt with according to such evidence as God has vouchsafed us. We, therefore, do not see that the Essayist is driven to say, as Sir David Brewster alleges he is, either that because man has occupied only an atom of space, he must live only an atom of time on the earth;[^[66]] or that because he has lived only an atom of time, he must occupy but an atom of space. In dismissing this leading portion of the Essayist’s reasonings, we shall say only that we consider it worthy of the attention of all persons occupied in speculations of this nature, as calculated to suggest trains of novel, profitable, and deeply interesting reflection.

Thus far the Essayist, as followed by his opponent, on the assumption that the other bodies of the universe are fitted, equally with the earth, to be the abodes of life. But are they? Here we are brought to the last stage of the Essayist’s speculations—What physical EVIDENCE have we that the other bodies of the Solar System, besides the Earth, the Fixed Stars, and the Nebulæ, are structures capable of supporting human life, of being inhabited by Rational and Moral Beings?

The great question, in its physical aspect, is now fully before us: Is there that analogy on which the pluralist relies?

For the existence of Life several conditions must concur; and any of these failing, life, so far as we know anything about it, is impossible. Not air, only, and moisture, but a certain temperature, neither too hot nor too cold, and a certain consistence, on which the living frame can rest. Without the other conditions, an atmosphere alone does not make life possible; still less, prove its existence. A globe of red-hot metal, or of solid ice, however well provided with an atmosphere, could not be inhabited, so far as we can conceive. The old maxim of the logicians is true: that it requires all the conditions to establish the affirmative, but that the negative of any one proves the negative.

First, as to the smallest tenants of our system, the thirty[^[67]] planetoids, some of which are certainly no larger than Mont Blanc.

Sir David Brewster dare not venture to suggest that they are inhabited, or in any condition to become so, any more than meteoric stones, which modern science regards as masses of matter, moving, like the planets, in the celestial spaces, subject to the gravitating attraction of the Sun; the Earth encountering them occasionally, either striking directly upon them, or approaching to them so closely that they are drawn by the terrestrial attraction, first within the atmosphere, and afterwards to the earth’s surface.[^[68]] Here our Essayist gives a thrust at his Pluralist opponent not to be parried, asking him why he shrunk from asserting the planetoids and meteoric stones to be inhabited? If it be because of their being found to be uninhabited, or of their smallness, then “the argument that they are inhabited because they are planets fails him.”[^[69]]

“There is, then,” says elsewhere the wary Essayist,[^[70]] “a degree of smallness which makes you reject the supposition of inhabitants. But where does that degree of smallness begin? The surface of Mars is only one-fourth that of the Earth. Moreover, if you allow all the planetoids to be uninhabited, those planets which you acknowledge to be probably uninhabited far outnumber those with regard to which even the most resolute Pluralist holds to be inhabited. The majority swells every year; the planetoids are now thirty. The fact of a planet being inhabited, then, is, at any rate, rather the exception than the rule; and therefore must be proved, in each case, by special evidence. Of such evidence I know not a trace!”

We may add, also, that Dr Lardner, vouched by Sir David Brewster, as we shall soon see, to be a thoroughly competent witness, gives up the planetoids as seats of habitation for animal life.[^[71]]

Let us now, would say our Essayist, proceed on our negative tour, so to speak, and hasten to pay our respects to the Moon, our nearest neighbour, and whose distance from the Sun is admitted to adapt her, so far, for habitation.[^[72]] If it appear, by strong evidence, that the Moon is not inhabited, then there is an end of the general principle, that all the bodies of the solar system are inhabited, and that we must begin our speculation about each with this assumption. If the Moon be not inhabited, then, it would seem, the belief that each special body in the system is inhabited, must depend upon reasons specially belonging to that body, and cannot be taken for granted without these reasons.[^[73]] Now, as to the Moon, we have latterly acquired the means of making such exact and minute inquiries, that at the meeting of the British Association at Hull last year, Mr Phillips, an eminent geologist, stated that astronomers can discern the shape of a spot on the Moon’s surface, only a few hundred feet in breadth. Passing by, however, the Essayist’s brief but able account of the physical condition of this satellite of ours, we will cite the recent testimony of one accredited by Sir David Brewster[^[74]] as “a mathematician and a natural philosopher, who has studied, more than any preceding writer, the analogies between the Earth and the other planets”—Dr Lardner, who, in the third volume (published since our last Number appeared) of the work placed at the head of this article, thus concludes his elaborate account of the Moon, as now regarded by the most enlightened astronomers—after proving it to be “as exempt from an atmosphere as is the utterly exhausted receiver of a good air-pump!”

“In fine, the entire geographical character of the moon, thus ascertained by long-continued and exact telescopic surveys, leads to the conclusion, that no analogy exists between it and the earth which could confer any probability on the conjecture that it fulfils the same purposes in the economy of the universe; and we must infer, that whatever be its uses in the solar system, or in the general purposes of creation, it is not a world inhabited by organised races such as those to which the earth is appropriated.”[^[75]]

We must leave Sir David and Dr Lardner to settle their small amount of differences together; for Sir David will have it that “the moon exhibits such proofs of an atmosphere that we have a new ground from analogy for believing that she either has, or is in a state of preparation for receiving, inhabitants;”[^[76]] whom, “with monuments of their hands,” he “hopes may be discovered with some magnificent telescope which may be constructed!”[^[77]] And he is compelled to believe that “all the other unseen satellites of the solar system are homes to animal and intellectual life.”[^[78]] The Essayist would seem not to have deemed it necessary to deprive the sun of inhabitants; but our confident Pluralist will not surrender the stupendous body so easily. His friend Dr Lardner properly regards it “as a vast globular furnace, the heat emitted from each square foot of which is seven times greater than the heat issuing from a square foot of the fiercest blast-furnace: to what agency the light and heat are due, no one can do more than conjecture. According to our hypothesis, it is a great Electric Light in the centre of the system;”[^[79]] and “entirely removed from all analogy with the earth”—“utterly unsuited for the habitation of organised tribes.”[^[80]] Nevertheless Sir David believes that “the sun is richly stored with inhabitants”—the probability “being doubtless greatly increased by the simple consideration of its enormous size”—a “domain so extensive, so blessed with perpetual light;” but it would seem that “if it be inhabited,” it is probably “occupied by the highest orders of intelligence!”[^[81]] who, however, are allowed to enjoy their picturesque, and, it must be owned, somewhat peculiar, but doubtless blessed position, only by peeping every now and then through the sun’s spots, and so “seeing distinctly the planets and stars”—in fact, “large portions of the heavens!”[^[82]] Perhaps it may be thought that this is not a very handsome way of dealing with such exalted beings!

The Essayist has now our seven principal sister-planets to deal with—the two infra-terrestrial, Mercury and Venus, and the five extra-terrestrial—Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune;—and as to all these, the question continues, do they so resemble the earth in physical conditions, as to lead us safely to the conclusion that they resemble it in that other capital particular, of being the habitations of intellectual and moral beings? Here, be it observed, that every symptom of unlikeness which the Essayist can detect, greatly augments the burthen of proof incumbent upon his opponents.

When it was discovered that the old planets in certain important particulars resembled the earth, being opaque and solid bodies, having similar motions round the sun and on their own axis, some accompanied by satellites, and all having arrangements producing day and night, summer and winter, who could help wondering whether they must not also have inhabitants, reckoning and regulating their lives and employments by days, months, and years? This was, at most, however, a mere guess or conjecture; and whether it is now more probable than then, depends on the intervening progress of astronomy and science in general. Have subsequent discoveries strengthened or impugned the validity of the conjecture? The limits of our system have been since vastly extended by the discovery of Uranus and Neptune; and the planetary sisterhood has also increased in number by thirty little and very eccentric ones.

Now, as to Neptune, says the Essayist, in substance, what reason has a sensible person for believing it peopled, as the earth is, by human beings—i. e. consisting of body and soul? He is thirty times further than we are from the sun, which will appear to it a mere star—about the size of Jupiter to us; and Neptune’s light and heat will be nine hundred times less than ours![^[83]] If it, nevertheless, contain animal and intellectual life, we must try to conceive how they get on with such a modicum of those useful elements!

But have we general grounds for assuming all the planetary bodies inhabited? Beginning with the moon, we have encountered a decided negative. If any planet, however, have sufficient light, heat, clouds, winds, and a due adjustment of gravity, and the strength of the materials of which organisation consist, there may be life of some sort or other. Now we can measure and weigh the planets, exactly, by the law of gravitation, which embraces every particle of matter in our system, and find the mass of our earth to be only five times heavier than water. Comparing it with Jupiter—the bulk of which is 1331 times greater than that of the Earth—his density is, as a whole, only a quarter of that of the Earth—not greater than it would be as a sphere of water; and he is conjectured to be such, and the existence of his belts to be lines of clouds, fed with vapours raised by the sun’s action on such a watery sphere—the lines of such clouds being of so steady and determined a character, in consequence of his great rotatory velocity. Equal bulk for equal bulk, he is lighter than the Earth, but of course much heavier altogether; and as he is five times the Earth’s distance from the Sun, he must get a proportionally smaller amount of light and heat, and even that diminished by the clouds enveloping him to so great an extent. What a low degree of vitality, and what kind of organisation must animal existence possess, to suit such physical conditions, especially with reference to gravity, which, at his surface, is nearly two and a half times that on the Earth! Boneless, watery, pulpy inhabitants of the cold waters; or they may be frozen so far as to exclude the idea of animal existence; or it may be restricted to shallow parts in a planet of ice.[^[84]] But if this be so, to what end his gorgeous array of satellites?—his four moons? “Precisely the same,” answers our pertinacious Essayist, “as the use of our moon during the countless ages before man was placed on the earth; while it was tenanted by corals, madrepores, shell-fish, belemnites, the cartilaginous fishes of the old red sandstone, or the Saurian monsters of the lias. With these differences, it is asked, what becomes of analogy—of resemblances justifying our belief that Jupiter is inhabited like ourselves?”

To this answers Sir David Brewster—Jupiter’s great size “is alone a proof that it must have been made for some grand and useful purpose:” it is flattened at its poles; revolves on its axis in nearly ten hours; has different climates and seasons; and is abundantly illuminated, in the short absence of the sun, by its four moons, giving him, in fact, “perpetual moonlight.” Why does the sun give it days, nights, and years? Why do its moons irradiate its continents and seas? Its equatorial breezes blow perpetually over its plains? To what purpose could such a gigantic world have been framed, unless to supply the wants, and minister to the happiness, of living beings? Still, it is admitted,[^[85]] “that certain objections or difficulties naturally present themselves.” The distance of Jupiter from the sun precludes the possibility of sufficient light and heat from that quarter, to support either such vegetable or animal life as exists on the earth; the cold must be very intense—its rivers and seas must be tracks and fields of ice.[^[86]] But it may be answered, that the temperature of a planet depends on other causes—the condition of its atmosphere, and the internal heat of its mass—as is the case with our earth; and such “may” be the case in Jupiter; and, “if” so, may secure a temperature sufficiently genial to sustain such animal and vegetable life as ours; yet, it is owned, it cannot “increase the feeble light which Jupiter derives from the sun; but an enlargement of the pupil of the eye, and increased sensibility of the retina, would make the sun’s light as brilliant to Jovians as to us.”[^[87]] Besides, a brilliant phosphorescent light “may” be excited in the satellites by the sun’s rays. Again, the day of ten hours may be thought insufficient for physical repose; but, it is answered, five hours’ repose are sufficient for five of labour. “A difficulty of a more serious kind,[^[88]] however, is presented by the great force of gravity on so gigantic a planet as Jupiter;” but Sir David gives us curious calculations to show that a Jovian’s weight would be only double that of a man on the earth.

Struck by such a formidable array of differences, when he was in quest of resemblances only,

“Alike, but, oh! how different!”

Sir David rebukes the sceptic for forming so low an opinion of Omnipotent Wisdom, as to assume that “the inhabitants of the planets must be either men, or anything resembling them;—is it,” he asks, “necessary that an immortal soul should be hung upon a skeleton of bone, or imprisoned in a cage of cartilage and skin? Must it see with two eyes, and hear with two ears, and touch with ten fingers, and rest on a duality of limbs? May it not rest in a Polyphemus with one eyeball, or in an Argus with a hundred? May it not reign in the giant forms of the Titans, and direct the hundred hands of Briareus?[^[89]] The being of another world may have his home in subterranean cities, warmed by central fires; or in crystal caves, cooled by ocean tides; or he may float with the Nereids upon the deep; or mount upon wings as eagles; or rise upon the pinions of the dove, that he may flee away, and be at rest!”[^[90]]

Let us pause at this point, and see how the question stands on the showing of the respectively imaginative and matter-of-fact disputants themselves. Sir David Brewster, being bound to show that analogy forces us to believe Jupiter inhabited, is compelled to admit a series of signal discrepancies in physical condition; expecting his opponent, in turn, to admit such a series of essential alterations, both of inert matter and organisation, as will admit of what?—totally different modes of animal and intellectual existence—so different, as to drive a philosopher into the fantastic dreams in which we have just seen him indulging. Not so the Essayist, a master of the Inductive Philosophy. He does not presume impiously to limit Omnipotence; but reverently owns His power to create whatever forms and conditions of existence He pleases. But when it is asserted that He has, in fact, made beings wholly different from any that we see, “he cannot believe this without further evidence.”[^[91]] And on this very subject of the imaginary inhabitants of Jupiter, he says, after reading what his heated and fanciful opponent has advanced,—“You are hard,” he makes an objector say, “on our neighbours in Jupiter, when you will not allow them to be anything better than ‘boneless, watery, pulpy creatures.’” To which he answers, “I had no disposition to be hard on them when I entered upon these speculations. I drew, what appeared to me, probable conclusions from all the facts of the case. If the laws of attraction, of light, of heat, and the like, be the same there as they are here, which we believe to be certain, the laws of life must also be the same; and, if so, I can draw no other conclusions than those which I have stated.”[^[92]]

Says the Essayist, I know that my Maker can invest with the intellect of a Newton, each of

“The gay motes that people the sunbeams;”

but before I believe that he has done so, give me reasonable and adequate evidence of so wonderful and sublime a fact; or I must believe in any kind of nonsense that any one can imagine.

The planet Jupiter affords a fair sample of the procedure of the Essayist and his opponent, with reference to all the other primary planets of the Solar system. From Mercury, in red-hot contiguity to the Sun, to Neptune, which is at thirty times the Earth’s distance from it, and from which as we have seen it derives only one nine-hundredth part of the light and heat imparted to ourselves by the Sun,—Sir David Brewster will have all inhabited, and the physical condition of each correspondingly altered to admit of it: central heat, and eyes the pupils of which are sufficiently enlarged, and the retina’s sensibility sufficiently increased, to admit of seeing with nine hundred times less light than is requisite for our own organs of sight! “Uranus and Neptune,” concludes the triumphant Pluralist[^[93]]—nothing daunted by the overwhelming evidences of physical difference of condition—“are doubtless”—with the Sun—“the abodes of Life and Intelligence: the colossal temples where their Creator is recognised and worshipped—the remotest watch-towers of our system, from which his works may be better studied, and his glories more easily descried!”

Why, with such elastic principles of analogy as his, stop short of peopling the Meteoric Stones with rational inhabitants? whom, and whose doings, as in the case of the Moon, “some magnificent” instrument, yet to be constructed, may discover to us?

Thus much for the planets,—before quitting which, however, we may state that, according to Dr Lardner, about as staunch a Pluralist as his admirer Sir David Brewster, a greater rapidity of rotation, and smaller intervals of light and darkness, are among the characteristics distinguishing the group of major planets from the terrestrial group. He also adds that another “striking distinction” is the comparative lightness of the matter constituting the former. The density of Venus, Mars, and our earth, is nearly equal—about the same as that of ironstone; while the density of the thoroughly-baked planet Mercury is equal to that of gold. “Now it appears, on the contrary,” he continues, “that the density of Jupiter very little exceeds that of water; that of Uranus and Neptune is exactly that of water; while Saturn is so light, that it would float in water like a globe of pine wood.... The seas and oceans of these planets must consist of a liquid far lighter than water. It is computed that a liquid on Jupiter, which would be analogous to the terrestrial oceans, would be three times lighter than sulphuric ether, the lightest known liquid; and would be such that cork would scarcely float in it!”[^[94]]

Commending these trifling discrepancies to Sir David’s attention, while manufacturing his planetary inhabitants in conformity with them, shall we now follow his flight beyond the solar system, and get among the Fixed Stars? Here we are gazing at the Dog-Star! “I allow,” says a pensive objector to the Essayist,[^[95]] “that if you disprove the existence of inhabitants in the planets of our system, I shall not feel much real interest in the possible inhabitants of the Sirian system. Neighbourhood has its influence upon our feelings of regard,—even neighbourhood on a scale of millions of miles!”

Here our Pluralist is quite at home, and evidently in great favour. The stars twinkle and glitter with delight at his gleeful approach, to elevate them into moral and intellectual dignity, and at the same time, perhaps, select “some bright particular” one, to be hereafter distinguished as the seat of his own personal existence; whence he is to spend eternity in radiating astronomical emanations throughout infinitude.

“Then, unembodied, doth he trace,

By steps each planet’s heavenly way?

A Thing of Eyes, that all survey, ...

A Thought Unseen, yet seeing all!”[^[96]]

He stands in the starry solitude, waving his wand, and lo! he peoples each glistening speck with intellectual existence, with the highest order of intelligence, as in the case of that little star, the sun, which he has quitted. Now as to these same FIXED STARS, we can easily guess the steps of Sir David’s brief and satisfactory argument. If the stars be suns, they are inhabited like our sun; and if they be suns, each has its planets, like our sun; and if they have planets, they are inhabited like our planets; and if they have satellites like some of ours, they are also inhabited. But the stars are suns, and they all have planets, and at least some of these planets, satellites; therefore, all the fixed stars, with their respective planetary systems, are inhabited (Q. E. D.) Here are Sir David’s words:—“We are compelled to draw the conclusion that wherever there is a sun, there must be a planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary system, there must be Life and Intelligence.”[^[97]] This is the way in which, it seems, we worms of the earth feel ourselves at liberty to deal with our Almighty Creator: dogmatically insisting that every scene of existence in which He may have displayed His omnipotence, is but a repetition of that particular one in which we have our allotted place! As if He had but one pattern for Universal Creation! Only one scheme for peopling and dealing with infinitude! O, that the clay should think thus of Him that fashioneth it![^[98]] Forgetting, in an exulting moment of blindness and presumption, His own awful words, My thoughts are not as your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. For as the Heavens are higher than the Earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts![^[99]]

We are now, however, about to people the Fixed Stars. The only proof that they are the centres of planetary systems, resides in the assumption that these Stars are like the Sun; and as resembling him in their nature and qualities, so having the same offices and appendages:—independent sources of light, and thence probably of heat; therefore having attendant planets, to which they may impart such light and heat,—and these planets’ inhabitants living under and enjoying those benign influences. Everything here depends on this proposition, that the Stars are like the Sun; and it becomes essential to examine what evidence we have of the exactness of their likeness.[^[100]] In the Preface to his Second Edition, the Essayist, whose scientific knowledge few will venture to impugn, boldly asserts that “man’s knowledge of the physical properties of the luminaries which he discerns in the skies, is, even now, almost nothing;” and “such being the state of our knowledge, as bearing on the doctrine of the plurality of worlds, the time appeared to be not inopportune for a calm discussion of the question,—upon which, accordingly,” he adds, “I have ventured in the following pages.” In the same Preface he has ably condensed into a single paragraph his views on the nature and extent of our present knowledge on the subject of the Fixed Stars.[^[101]]

In the opening of the chapter devoted to this subject (ch. viii.), he admits “the special evidence,” as to the probability of these stars containing, in themselves, or in accompanying planets, inhabitants of any kind, “is, indeed, slight, either way.”

As to Clustered and Double stars, they appear to give us, he says, but little promise of inhabitants. In what degree of condensation the matter of these binary systems is, compared with that of our solar system, we have no means whatever of knowing: but even granting that each individual of the pair were a sun like ours, in the nature of its material, and its state of condensation, is it probable that it resembles our Sun also in having planets revolving about it? A system of planets revolving about, or among, a pair of Suns, which are at the same time revolving about one another, is so complex a scheme [apparently], so impossible to arrange in a stable manner, that the assumption of the existence of such schemes, without a vestige of evidence, can hardly require refutation. No doubt, if we were really required to provide such a binary system of Suns with attendant planets, this would be best done by putting the planets so near to one Sun that they should not be sensibly affected by the other; and this is accordingly what has been proposed. For, as has been well said by Sir John Herschell, of the supposed planets in making this proposal, “unless closely nestled under the protecting wing of their immediate superior, the sweep of the other Sun in his perihelion passage round their own, might carry them off, or whirl them into orbits utterly inconsistent with the existence of their inhabitants.” “To assume the existence of the inhabitants, in spite of such dangers, and to provide against the dangers by placing them so close to one Sun as to be out of the reach of the other, though the whole distance of the two may not, and as we know in some cases does not, exceed the dimensions of our solar system, is showing them all the favour which is possible. But in making this provision, it is overlooked that it may not be possible to keep them in permanent orbits so near to the selected centre. Their Sun may be a vast sphere of luminous vapour, and the planets plunged into this atmosphere may, instead of describing regular orbits, plough their way in spiral paths through the nebulous abyss of its central nucleus.”[^[102]]

In dealing with the Single Stars, which are, like the Sun, self-luminous, can they be proved, like him, to be definite dense masses? [His density is about that of water.] Or are they, or many of them, luminous masses in a far more diffused state, visually contracted to points through their immense distance? Some of those which we have the best means of examining are one-third, or even less, in mass, than he: and if Sirius, for instance, be in this diffused condition, though that would not of itself prevent his having planets, it would make him so unlike our Sun, as much to break the force of the presumption that he must have planets as he has. Again: As far back as our knowledge of our Sun extends, his has been a permanent condition of brightness: yet many of the fixed stars not only undergo changes, but periodical, and possibly progressive changes:—whence it may be inferred, perhaps, that they are not, generally, in the same permanent condition as our Sun. As to the evidence of their revolution on their axis, this has been inferred from their having periodical recurrences of fainter and brighter lustre; as if revolving orbs with one side darkened by spots. Of these, five only can be at present spoken of by astronomers[^[103]] with precision. Nothing is more probable than that these periodical changes indicate the revolution of these stellar masses on their axis—a universal law, apparently, of all the large compact masses of the Universe, but by no means inferring their being, or having accompanying planets, inhabited. The Sun’s rotation is not shown, intelligibly, connected with its having near it the inhabited Earth. In the mean time, in so far as these stars are periodical, they are proved to be, not like, but unlike our Sun. The only real point of resemblance, then, is that of being self-luminous, in the highest degree ambiguous and inconclusive, and furnishing no argument entitled to be deemed one from analogy. Humboldt deems the force of analogy to tend even in the opposite direction. “After all,” he asks,[^[104]] “is the assumption of satellites [attendant planets] to the fixed stars, so absolutely necessary? If we were to begin from the outer planets, Jupiter, &c., analogy might seem to require that all planets have satellites:—yet this is not so with Mars, Venus, Mercury;” to which may now be added the thirty Planetoids—making a much greater number of bodies that have not, than that have satellites. The assumption, then, that the fixed stars are of exactly the same nature as the Sun, was originally a bold guess; but there has not since been a vestige of any confirmatory fact:—no planet, nor anything fairly indicating the existence of one revolving round a fixed star, has ever hitherto been discerned;—and the subsequent discovery of nebulæ; binary systems; clusters of stars; periodical stars; of varied and accelerating periods of such stars,—all seem to point the other way: leaving, though possibly facts small in amount, the original assumption a mere guess, unsupported by all that three centuries of most diligent, and in other respects, successful research, have been able to bring to light. All the knowledge of times succeeding Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, (who might well believe the stars to be in every sense suns);—among other things, the disclosure of the history of our own planet, as one in which such grand changes have been constantly going on; the certainty that in by far the greatest part of the duration of its existence it has been tenanted by creatures entirely different from those which give an interest, and thence a persuasiveness, to the belief of inhabitants in worlds appended to each star; the impossibility of which appears, in the gravest consideration of transferring to other worlds such interests as belong to our race in this world;—all these considerations, it would seem, should have prevented that old and arbitrary conjecture from growing up, among a generation professing philosophical caution and scientific discipline, into a settled belief. Finally, it will be time enough to speculate about the inhabitants of the planets which belong to such systems, as soon as we shall have ascertained that there are such planets,—or that there is one such.[^[105]]

In the Dialogue, written after the first edition of the “Essay” had appeared, the Essayist greatly strengthened the position for which he had contended in it, by an important passage containing the results of the eminent astronomer M. Struve’s recent examination of double stars, and the result of his elaborate and comprehensive comparison of the whole body of facts in stellar astronomy. Among the brighter stars, he arrives at the conclusion, that every FOURTH such star is physically double; and that a completed knowledge of double stars may prove every THIRD bright star to be physically double! And in the case of stars of inferior magnitude, that the number of insulated stars, though indeed greater than that of such compound systems, is nevertheless only three times, perhaps only twice as great. Thus the loose evidence of resemblance between our Sun and the fixed stars becomes feebler the more it is examined; and the assumption of stellar planetary systems appears, when closely scrutinised, to dwindle away to nothing.[^[106]]

Now, to so much of the foregoing facts and speculations as are contained in the Essay, from which we have faithfully and carefully extracted the substance, in order that our readers may judge for themselves, Sir David Brewster answers, in effect, and generally in words, thus:—

The greatest and grandest truth in astronomy, is the motion of the solar system, advancing with all the planets and satellites in the heavens, at the rate of fifty-seven miles a second, round some distant invisible body, in an orbit of such inconceivable dimensions, that millions of years may be required for a single orbit. When we consider that this centre must be a sun with attendant planets like our own, revolving in like manner round our sun, [?] or round their common centre of gravity, the mind rejects, almost with indignation, the ignoble sentiment that Man is the only being performing this immeasurable journey—and that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, with their bright array of regal train-bearers, are but as colossal blocks of lifeless clay, encumbering the Earth as a drag, and mocking the creative majesty of Heaven. From the birth of man to the extinction of his race [!] the system to which he belongs will have described but an infinitesimal arc in that grand cosmical orbit in which it is destined to move. This affords a new argument for the plurality of worlds. Since every fixed star must have planets, the fact of our system revolving round a similar system of planets, furnishes a new argument from analogy; for as there is at least one inhabited planet in the one system, there must for the same reason be one in the other, and consequently as many as there are systems in the Universe.[^[107]] Thus our system is not absolutely fixed in space, but is connected with the other systems in the Universe.

The Fixed Stars are suns of other systems, whose planets are invisible from their distance, as are ours from the nearest fixed star. Every single star shining by its own native light is the centre of a planetary system like our own—the lamp that lights, the stove that heats, and the power that guides in their orbits, inhabited worlds like our own. Many are double, with a system of planets round each, or the centre of gravity of both. No one can believe that two suns would be placed in the heavens, for no other purpose than to revolve round their common centre of gravity. It is “highly probable,” that our Sun is one of a binary system, and has at present an unseen partner; and we are “entitled to conclude” that all the other binary systems have at least an inhabited planet: wherever there is a self-luminous fixed or movable Sun there must be a planetary system; and wherever there is a planetary system, there must be life and intelligence.[^[108]]

Apart from the assertion of his cardinal principle with which we are familiar, namely, that since our Sun has an inhabited planet, all others must; and also that all planets must be inhabited;—the argumentative value of these two chapters seems to lie in this that they annihilate one of the Essayist’s points of unlikeness between our Sun and other Fixed Stars, inasmuch as it, together with so many of them, is one of a binary system: wherefore what is true of it, is true of them, et vice versa. He bases this proposition, viz., that our Sun is one of a binary system, on “high probability,” from “the motion of our own system round a distant centre.”[^[109]] The great truth of this motion, he says the Essayist “has completely misrepresented, foreseeing its influence on the mind as an argument for more worlds than one.”[^[110]] What the Essayist had said on the subject, was this:[^[111]] he speaks of “the attempt to show that the Sun, carrying with it the whole solar system, is in motion; and the further attempt to show the direction of that motion;—and again, the hypothesis that the Sun itself revolves round some distant object in space.” These minute inquiries and bold conjectures, he says, “cannot throw any light on the question, whether any part besides the earth be inhabited: any more than the investigation of the movements of the ocean and their laws can prove or disprove the existence of marine plants and animals. They do not, on that account, cease to be important and interesting objects of speculation, but they do not belong to our subject.” As to the Sun’s motion, we are bound to say, that the Astronomer Royal has recently declared that “every astronomer who has examined the matter carefully, has come to the conclusion of Sir William Herschell, that the whole solar system is moving towards a point in the constellation Hercules.”[^[112]] Before quitting this part of the subject, we may state that the Essayist, in his second Preface,[^[113]] points out the insecure character of astronomical calculations as to the amount of absolute light ascribed to some of the fixed stars. It has been estimated that the illuminating power of Alpha Centauri is nearly double that of the Sun, placed at that distance, which is two hundred thousand times as far off as is the Sun; but Sir John Herschell will not concur in more of the calculation than attributes to the star the emission of more light than our Sun. Surely the critical and precarious character of such calculations should not be lost sight of by candid inquirers, but incline them to scan somewhat closely any pretensions tinctured by astronomic dogmatism.

One immense step more, however,—and it is our last, brings to “the outskirts of creation,” as the Essayist calls it,—the Nebulæ: and here we find him once more confronted by his indefatigable and implacable opponent. We must therefore take our biggest and best mental telescope to behold these two Specks intellectual, so far off in infinitude, wrangling about a faint cloud vastly further off than themselves. Do you see how angry one of them looks, and how provokingly stolid the other? ’Tis all about the nature of that same cloud, or Nebula; and if we could only hear what they said, we might catch a chord or two of the music of the spheres! The Essayist is required, by his brother speck, to believe that the faintly-luminous patch at which they are gazing—a thousandth part of the visible breadth of our own Sun—contains in it more life than exists in as many such systems as the unassisted eye can see stars in the heavens on the clearest winter night:—a view of the greatness of creation so stupendous, that the astounded speck, the Essayist, asks for a moment’s time to consider the matter. “We are entitled to draw the conclusion,” says the other, “that these Nebulæ are clusters of stars, at such an immense distance from our own system, that each star of which they are composed is the sun or centre of a system of planets; and that these planets are inhabited—like our Earth, the seat of vegetable, animal, and intellectual life:”[^[114]] that all the Nebulæ are resolvable into stars; and appear as Nebulæ only because they are more distant than the region in which they can appear as stars.[^[115]] The conclusion, however, at which the Essayist arrives, after an elaborate examination of evidence, and especially of the latest discoveries in this dim and distant region by Sir John Herschell and the Earl of Rosse, is—that “Nebulæ are vast masses of incoherent or gaseous matter, of immense tenuity, diffused in forms more or less irregular, but all of them destitute of any regular system of solid moving bodies.... So far, then,” he concludes, “as these Nebulæ are concerned, the improbability of their being inhabited appears to amount to the highest point that can be conceived. We may, by the indulgence of fancy, people the summer clouds, or the beams of the aurora borealis, with living beings of the same kind of substance as those bright appearances themselves; and in doing so, we are not making any bolder assertion than when we stock the Nebulæ with inhabitants, and call them, in that sense, inhabited worlds.”[^[116]] The Essayist contends that the argument for the vastness of the scheme of the Universe, suggested by the resolution of the Nebulæ, is found to be untenable:—inasmuch as the greatest astronomers now agree in believing Nebulæ to have distances of the same order as Fixed Stars. Their filmy appearance is a true indication of a highly attenuated substance: so attenuated as to destroy all probability of their being inhabited worlds. With this opinion as to the tenuity of Nebulæ agrees the absence of all observed motion among their parts; while the extraordinary spiral arrangement of many of them, prove that nevertheless many of them really have motion, and suggests modes of calculating their tenuity, and showing how extreme it is. “It is probable,” said Lord Rosse, in a paper which we ourselves heard him read not long ago, from the chair of the Royal Society, “that in the Nebular systems, motion exists. If we see a system with a distinct spiral arrangement, all analogy leads us to conclude that there has been motion; and that if there has been motion, that motion still continues.”... “Among the Nebulæ,” he says, “there are vast numbers, much too faint to be sketched or measured with any prospect of advantage: the most powerful instruments we possess showing in them nothing of an organised structure, but merely a confused mass of nebulosity, of varying brightness.”[^[117]] The Essayist makes powerful use, moreover, of Sir John Herschell’s celebrated observation of the Magellanic Clouds, lying near the South Pole; exhibiting the coexistence, in a limited compass, and in indiscriminate position, of stars, clusters of stars, nebulæ regular and irregular, and nebular streaks and patches, things different not merely to us, but in themselves: nebulæ, side by side with stars and clusters of stars; nebulous matter resolvable, close to nebulous matter irresolvable;—the last and widest step by which the dimensions of the Universe have been expanded, in the notions of eager speculators, being checked by a completer knowledge, and a sager spirit of speculation.[^[118]] In discussing such matters as these, he finely observes—“It is difficult to make men feel that so much ignorance can lie close to so much knowledge; to make them believe that they have been allowed to discover so much, and yet are not allowed to discover more.”[^[119]]

In alluding to the Nebulæ, as subjects of our most powerful telescopic observation, the Essayist speaks in a tone of sarcasm concerning the “shining dots,”—the “lumps of light” which are rendered apparent amidst them: asking, what are these lumps? (1.) How large? (2.) At what distances? (3.) Of what structure? (4.) Of what use?—adding, he must be a bold man who undertakes to answer the question, that each is a Sun, with attendant systems of planets. Sir David, exceedingly irate, says, “We accept the challenge, and appeal to our readers:”—(1.) The size of the dot, or lump, is large enough to be a Sun. (2.) He cannot answer this, for want of knowing ‘the apparent distance between the centres of the dots.’ (3.) Like our Sun—‘It will consist of a luminous envelope, enclosing a dark nucleus.’ (4.) Of no conceivable use, but to give light to planets, or to the solid nuclei of which they consist. In his turn, he asks the Essayist—what is the size, distance, structure, and use of the dots, upon his hypothesis? The Essayist, he observes, is silent;[^[120]] but in his Essay, he had said, distinctly enough, “Let us not wrangle about words. By all means let these dots be stars, if we know about what we are speaking: if a star mean, merely, a luminous dot in the sky. But that these stars shall resemble, in their nature, Stars of the First Magnitude, and that such stars shall resemble Our Sun, are surely very bold structures of assumption, to build on such a basis. Some nebulæ are resolvable into distinct points: but what would it amount to? That the substance of all nebulæ is not continuous; separate, and separable into distinct luminous elements:—nebulæ are, it would then seem, as it were of a curdled or granulated texture; they have run into lumps of light, or been formed originally of such lumps.” And then follow some very ingenious and refined speculations, into which we have not space to enter; and indeed we may be well content with what we have done, having travelled from a tolerable depth in the crust of our own little planet, past planet after planet, star after star, till we reached the nebulous “outskirts of creation;” accompanied by two Mentors of Infinitude,—whispering into our ear—one, that life, animal, intellectual, moral, was swarming around us at every step; the other, that that life ceased with our own Earth, as far as we were able to detect its existence, and giving us very solemn and mysterious reasons why it should be so.

Our Essayist, however, is not exhausted by the efforts he has made in his destructive career. If he be a “proud setter down” of cosmological systems, he determines, in turn, to be a “putter up:” and so presents us with his own Theory of the Solar System; and an explanation of the mode in which all appearances in the Universe beyond may be reconciled with it. “It may serve” he says, “to confirm his argument, if he give a description of the system which shall continue and connect his views of the constitution and peculiarities as to physical circumstances of each of the planets. It will help us in our speculation, if we can regard the planets as not only a collection, but a scheme;—if we can give not an Enunciation only, but a Theory. Now, such a Scheme, such a Theory, appears to offer itself to us.”[^[121]] The scope of this scheme, or theory, is, as we some time ago saw, to make our earth, in point of astronomical fact and reality, the largest Planetary Body in the solar system; its domestic hearth; the only part of the frame revolving round the Sun which has become a “World.” We must, however, make short work of it.

The planets exterior to Mars—especially Jupiter and Saturn—appear spheres of water, or aqueous vapour. The Earth has a considerable atmosphere of air and of vapour; while on Venus or Mercury—so close to the sun—we see nothing of a gaseous or aqueous atmosphere; they and Mars differing little in density from the earth.

The Earth’s orbit, according to the Essayist’s theory, is the Temperate Zone of the Solar System, where only the play of hot and cold, moist and dry, is possible. Water and gases, clouds and vapours, form, mainly, the planets in the outer part of the solar system; while masses, such as result from the fusion of the most solid materials, lie nearer the Sun, and are found principally within the orbit of Jupiter. After a further exposition of his “theory,” the Essayist observes that it agrees with the nebular hypothesis, SO FAR as it applies to the Solar System; exactly, and very sternly, repudiating that hypothesis as it applies to the Universe in general.[^[122]] “If we allow ourselves,” says he, “to speculate at all on physical grounds respecting the origin of the Earth, the hypothesis, that it has passed through a fluid and a gaseous condition, does not appear more extravagant than any other cosmogonical hypothesis: not even if we suppose that the other bodies of the Solar System have shared in the like changes. But, that all the stars and the nebulæ have gone, or are going through, a series of changes such as those by which the Solar System has been formed,—the nebular hypothesis, as it applies to the Universe in general, is precisely the doctrine which I here reject, giving my reasons.”[^[123]]

The whole of the Chapter devoted to “the Theory of the Solar System,” is distinguished by remarkable ingenuity and originality. It is, however, that entitled the Argument from Design, which, independently of all connection with the speculations of the author as already laid before our readers, is worthiest of consideration, by all interested in Natural Theology. It touches many topics which must have occupied the profoundest thoughts of mankind, and touches them with the utmost caution and delicacy. In the 34th Section will be found a passage of singular boldness and imaginative eloquence; but liable, in our opinion, to serious misconception, and susceptible of misrepresentation—by those, at least, who are either unable, or indisposed, to weigh the entire chapter, and ascertain its real value and tendency. Some expressions have startled us not a little, when reflecting that they relate to the possible mode of action of Omniscient Omnipotence; and we shall be gratified by seeing them vindicated or explained in the next edition of his “Essay.”

Each of our speculators closes his book with a chapter devoted to “The Future.” The ideas of Sir David concerning the duration of the human race upon the earth (which Inspiration tells us is so awfully uncertain, and will be cut short suddenly—in a moment—in the twinkling of an eye), seem to be curiously definite; for we have seen that in his sixth chapter he states that “from the birth of man to the extinction of his race, the Solar System to which he belongs will have described but an infinitesimal arc in that grand cosmical orbit in which it is destined to move.” Without pausing to ask who told him this, let us intimate, that in his final chapter he says that the scientific truths on which depends the plurality of worlds are intimately associated with the future destiny of man: he turns to the future of the sidereal systems, as the hallowed spots in which is to be spent his immortal existence. Scripture has not spoken articulately of the future locality of the blest; but Reason has combined the scattered utterances of Inspiration, and with an almost oracular voice declared that the Maker of the worlds will place in these the beings of his choice. In what region, reason does not determine; but it is impossible for man, with the light of Revelation as his guide, to doubt for a moment that on the celestial spheres his future is to be spent in lofty inquiries; social intercourse; the renewal of domestic ties; and in the service of his Almighty benefactor. The Christian’s future, not defined in his creed, enwrapt in apocalyptic mysteries, evades his grasp: it is only Astronomy that opens the mysterious expanse of the Universe to his eye, and creates an intelligible paradise in the world to come: wherefore, says Sir David, we must impregnate the popular mind with the truths of natural science; teaching them in every school, and recommending, if not illustrating, them from every pulpit: fixing in the minds and associating in the affections, alike of age and youth, the great truths in the planetary and sidereal universe, on which the doctrine of More Worlds than One must respectively rest—the philosopher scanning with a new sense the sphere in which he is to study; and the Christian the temples in which he is to worship.—Such, in his own words, is Sir David Brewster’s final and authoritative exposition of the CREED of the philosopher, and the HOPE of the Christian:—of such a nature are to be the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness; and such, henceforth, as he has indicated, becomes the duty of the Christian teacher in the Family, in the School, in the Pulpit! So absolutely and irrefragably, it seems, are demonstrated the stupendous facts of astronomical science on which this Creed and this Faith depend: so unerring are our telescopes and other instruments, that he who does not receive this “Creed” is no philosopher, nor he who rejects the “Hope” a Christian. But, in the mean time, how inconceivably embarrassing to such a philosopher, and to such a Christian, is the possibility that many, or a few years hence, such immense improvements may be made in telescopes, or in other modes of acquiring a knowledge of the celestial structures, as to demonstrate to the sense, as well as reason, of us impatient and presumptuous tenants of the earth, that the planets are not inhabited! that the fixed stars are not suns, and have not a planet a piece—no, not even a solitary planet among them! Thus rendering our astounded and dismayed philosopher homeless and creedless, and the Christian helpless and hopeless:—the former one of those who professing themselves to be wise become fools;[^[124]] the latter, likened unto a foolish man which built his house upon the sand.[^[125]]

The “Future” of the Essayist is of a different kind, and adumbrated with becoming humility and diffidence. “I did not,” he says, “venture further than to intimate, that when we are taught, that as we have borne the image of the Earthy, we shall also bear the image of the Heavenly, we may find, in even natural science, reasons for opening our minds to the reception of the cheering and elevating announcement.”[^[126]]

We have now placed before our readers the substance of the arguments for and against a plurality of worlds, so far as developed in the essays of Dr Whewell and Sir David Brewster. The former is a work so replete with subtle thought, bold speculation, and knowledge of almost every kind, used with extraordinary force and dexterity, as to challenge the patient and watchful attention of the most thoughtful reader; and that whether he be, or be not, versed in astronomical speculations. Great as are the power and resources of the author, we detect no trace of dogmatism or arrogance, but, on the contrary, a true spirit of fearless, but patient and candid, inquiry. It is a mighty problem of which he proposes a solution, and he does no more than propose it: in his Preface declaring that, to himself at least, his arguments “appear to be of no small philosophical force, though he is quite ready to weigh carefully and candidly any answer which may be offered to them.”

We feel grateful to the accomplished Essayist for the storehouse of authentic facts, and the novel combination of inferences from them, with which he has presented us; and we are not aware that he has given us just reason to regret confiding in his correctness or candour. And in travelling with him through his vast and chequered course, we feel that we have accompanied not only the philosopher and the divine, but the gentleman: one who, while manifestly knowing what is due to himself, as manifestly respects his intelligent reader. In several of his astronomical assumptions and inferences we may be unable to concur, particularly in respect of the nebulous stars. We may also well falter at expressing a decisive “Aye” or “No,” to the great question proposed by him for discussion, on scientific grounds, and independently of Scriptural Revelation; yet we acknowledge that he has sensibly shaken our opinion as to the validity of the reasons usually assigned for believing in a plurality of worlds. He remorselessly ties us down to Evidence, as he ought to do; and all the more rigorously, because the affirmative conclusion, at which many heedless persons are disposed to jump, is one which, if well founded, occasions religious difficulties of a grave character among the profoundest and perhaps even devoutest thinkers. To suppose that Omnipotence may not have peopled already, or contemplate a future peopling of the starry spheres with intelligent beings, of as different a kind and order as it is possible for our limited faculties to conceive, yet in some way involved in physical conditions, altogether inexplicable to us, would be the acme of impious presumption. When we look at Sirius, in his solitary splendour in the midnight sky, pouring forth possibly fifty times the light and heat of our sun, upon a prodigiously greater planetary system than our own, it is natural to conjecture whether, among many other possibilities, it may be the seat of intelligence, perhaps of a transcendent character. Here the imagination may disport itself as it pleases: yet we shall feel ourselves compelled—those who can think about the matter—to own, that our imaginations are, as it were, “cabined, cribbed, confined,” by the objects and associations to which we are at present restricted; and as the late eminent Prussian astronomer, Bessel, observed, those who imagine inhabitants in the moon and planets, “supposed them, in spite of all their protestations, as like to men, as one egg to another.” But when we proceed further, and insist on likening these supposed inhabitants to ourselves, intellectually and morally, then it is that both philosophy and religion concur in rebuking us, and enjoining a reverent diffidence. We have probably read as much on these subjects as many of our readers, and that with deep interest and attention; but we never met with so cogent a demonstration as is contained in this Essay, of the theological difficulties besetting the popular doctrine of a plurality of worlds. Had God vouchsafed to tell us that it was so, there would have been an end of the matter, and with it all difficulty would have disappeared, to one whose whole life, as the Christian’s ought to be, is one continued act of faith; but God has thought fit to preserve an awful silence concerning his dealings with other scenes of physical existence: while He has as distinctly revealed that of spiritual beings whose functions are vitally connected with man, as he exists upon the earth, the subject of a sublime economy, which, we are assured by Inspiration, that the angels desire to look into. The Christian implicitly believes that there IS a Heaven, where the presence of the adorable Deity constitutes happiness, to the most exalted of His ministers and servants, perfect and ineffable: happiness in which He has solemnly assured us that we may hereafter participate: for since the beginning of the world, men have not heard, nor perceived by the ear, neither hath the eye seen, O God, beside Thee, what He hath prepared for him that waiteth for Him.[^[127]] This, our Maker has told us; he has not told us the other, nor anything about it: no, not when He visited the earth, unless we can dimly see such a significance in the words, “In my Father’s house (οἰκίᾳ) are many mansions (μοναι): if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place (τόπον) for you.” The word μονη is used twice in the New Testament, and in the same chapter:[^[128]] in the verse already quoted, and in the 23d—“If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode (μονὴν) with him.” Here are the three words in the same verse, οἰκια, μονη, τοπος. In my Father’s house there are μοναὶ πολλαὶ, many places of abode. Heaven is the οικια, our common place, and it has many subdivisions, room enough for angels, as well as for the spirits of just men made perfect. It is possibly an allusion to the temple, God’s earthly house, which had many chambers in it. But who shall require us to believe that this μονη, was a star, or planet? It may be so, it may not; there can be no sin in a devout mind conjecturing on the subject; but the Essayist does not meddle with these solemn topics: confining himself to the physical reasons for conjecturing, with more or less probability, that the stars are habitations for human beings. We take our leave of him with a quotation from his Dialogue, couched in grave and dignified terms:—

“U. But your arguments are merely negative. You prove only that we do not know the planets to be inhabited.

“Z. If, when I have proved that point, men were to cease to talk as if they knew that the planets are inhabited, I should have produced a great effect.

“U. Your basis is too narrow for so vast a superstructure, as that all the rest of the universe, besides the earth, is uninhabited.

“Z. Perhaps; for my philosophical basis is only the earth—the only known habitation. But on this same narrow basis, the earth, you build up a superstructure that other bodies ARE inhabited. What I do is, to show that each part of your structure is void of tenacity, and cannot stand.

“It is probable that when we have reduced to their real value all the presumptions drawn from physical reasoning, for the opinion of planets and stars being either inhabited, or uninhabited, the face of these will be perceived to be so small, that the belief of all thoughtful persons on this subject will be determined by moral, metaphysical, and theological consideration.”[^[129]]

“More Worlds than One” will not, we are constrained to say, in our opinion, add to the well-earned reputation of Sir David Brewster. It is a hasty and slight performance, entirely of a popular character; and disfigured throughout, not only by an overweening confidence and peremptoriness of assertion, but by tinges of personality and outbursts of heat that are indeed strange disturbing forces in a philosophical discussion. Dr Whewell’s Essay is a work requiring, in a worthy answer, great consideration; and we do not think that “More Worlds than One” evidences a tithe of such consideration. Nor does Sir David show a proper respect for his opponent; nor has he taken a proper measure of his formidable proportions as a logical and scientific disputant, one who should be answered in a cold and exact spirit; or it were much better to leave him alone. Sir David must forgive us if we quote a sentence or two from devout old John Wesley, a man who had several points of greatness in him:—

“Be not so positive, especially with regard to things which are neither easy, nor necessary to be determined. When I was young, I was sure of everything. In a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as before. At present, I am hardly sure of anything, but what God has revealed to me!... Upon the whole, an ingenious man may easily flourish on this head. How much more glorious is it for the great God to have created innumerable worlds than this little globe only!... Do you ask, then, what is This Spot to the great God? Why, as much as millions of systems. Great and LITTLE have place with regard to us; but before Him, they vanish away!”[^[130]]

Fontenelle has much to answer for, if we may judge from what has been said concerning the extent and nature of the influence he has exercised on thoughtless minds. That flippant but brilliant trifler, Horace Walpole, for instance, declared that the reading Fontenelle had made him a sceptic! He maintained, on the supposition of a plurality of worlds, the impossibility of any revelation! That the reception of this opinion was sufficient, with him, to destroy the credibility of all revelation![^[131]] This ground he has, if this report be true, the honour of occupying with Thomas Paine.

Let us, however, think and speak and act differently, remembering fearfully, how often the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. Is it, indeed, consistent with even mere worldly wisdom, on the ground of an assumption with regard to inhabited planets, to reject a belief founded on direct and positive proofs, such as is the belief in the truths of Natural and Revealed Religion?

“Newton,” says Dr Chalmers, in his discourse on the Modesty of True Science, “knew the boundary which hemmed him. He knew that he had not thrown one particle of light on the moral or religious history of these planetary regions. He had not ascertained what visits of communication they received from the God who upholds them. But he knew that the fact of a Real Visit to this Planet had such evidence to rest upon that it was not to be disposted by any aerial imagination.” Let this noble and devout spirit be in us: both Faith and Reason assuring us, that we stand, in Scriptural Truth, safe and immovable, like a wise man, which built his house upon a rock.[^[132]]

KING OTHO AND HIS CLASSIC KINGDOM.

The actual condition of Greece is a disgrace to the political civilisation of Europe. There is hope for the Othoman Empire, for the Turks are sensible that they have much to learn; but for the kingdom of Greece there is no hope, unless the modern Hellenes lay aside the self-conceit which induces them to boast of their superior orthodoxy when the question relates to their practical ignorance. Englishmen and Russians, despots and demagogues, princes and people, Europeans and Americans, all agree in pronouncing King Otho’s kingdom a satire on monarchical institutions, constitutional legislation, and central administration. The valour and patriotism displayed by the Albanians of Suli and Hydra, and by the Greeks of Messolonghi and Psara, were the theme of well-merited praise, and were rewarded by liberal gifts of money and other supplies from the friends of Greece in Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and the United States of America. Greece has great obligations to the people of Western Europe, whom she now stigmatises as hostile Latins. It was the voice of the people that moved the Cabinet of London to take the initiative in the negotiations which caused the battle of Navarino, and conferred on Greece the rank of an independent kingdom by the treaty of 1832.

No political experiment during the present century—fruitful as the period has been in producing new States—excited higher expectations or warmer wishes for its success. Twenty-two years have now elapsed since Greece became a kingdom under the sceptre of Prince Otho of Bavaria. He was then a minor, and he was selected to fill the new throne more for his father’s merits than from any promise of superior talent in his own person. King Louis of Bavaria loved art, and his want of political capacity and military power removed any feelings of jealousy on the part of the greater powers in Europe to the addition thus made to the dignity of the house of Wittelsbach. King Otho was known to be a youth of very moderate attainments; but his natural deficiencies being fortunately united to an amiable disposition, it was expected that he would prove a docile monarch, and listen to good counsellors. It has proved otherwise. His limited capacity has not been more remarkable than his obstinacy and perverseness in following a line of policy which has inflicted serious injury on Greece. Notwithstanding a natural love of justice, and a good moral character, his misgovernment has degenerated into corruption, though it has not assumed a character of systematic tyranny. On the whole, his incapacity to perform the duties of his station, and his silly eagerness to assume the appearance of being a despotic sovereign, while he was unable to make any use of the greater part of the prerogatives willingly conceded to him by his subjects, have made him a very apt regal type of the anarchical and rapacious nation he rules. The result is, that the hopes of ardent Philhellenes, the expectations of enthusiastic scholars, and the wishes of cautious statesmen, have all been utterly disappointed by the government of King Otho. More than this, while the King of Greece has shown himself a bad monarch, the Greeks have displayed extreme ignorance in all their attempts to supply his deficiencies. Instead of suggesting better principles for his guidance, they have become the steady supporters of his system whenever he condescended to purchase their support by places and pensions. It seems as if the Bavarian monarchy had infused a morbid lethargy into Romaic society, so rapidly has the central administration of Athens quenched the fervour of patriotism throughout liberated Greece. The Albanian population has lost its valour and perseverance; the Greek has sunk back into that normal condition of rapacious imbecility which has characterised the Hellenic race ever since the time of Mummius.

The revolution which freed Greece from the Turkish yoke broke out early in the year 1821, so that the inhabitants of the kingdom have now enjoyed the advantages of political independence for thirty-three years. A generation has grown up to manhood in possession of a greater degree of freedom than is possessed by most of the continental nations of Europe. Municipal institutions existed, to some extent, under the Turks, and they acquired considerable importance during the revolutionary war. The fullest exercise of the liberty of the press has prevailed ever since the first year of the revolution. Nor has this liberty been greatly abused, though it has often been misused—a circumstance not to be wondered at in a country so torn by faction as Greece has been ever since she commenced her struggle for independence. This fact must be weighed against the many vices and corruptions of the Greeks which it will be our task to notice, for it affords decisive evidence that there still exists among the mass of the population a sound basis of public opinion.

The establishment of free and orthodox Greece as an independent State, under the protection of Great Britain, France, and Russia, was a conception of George Canning’s genius, and it received the sanction of the Duke of Wellington. After Canning’s death, his enemies made it a subject of reproach. It is said that, when his statue was erected in Palace Yard, a royal duke, walking beside it with the late Lord Eldon, began to pour out a diatribe of harmless accusations against the honoured dead, which he summed up, saying, “He caused the battle of Navarin, Eldon, and he was not nearly so big as that statue;” to which the great Lord Chancellor, whose patience had been long tried, expanded his bushy eyebrows, and exclaimed, “No, truly—nor so green:” the statue being then, as some of our readers may remember, more remarkable for the verdant colour of its patent verdigris than for its size. Whether the battle of Navarin was absolutely necessary to save Greece from Ibrahim Pasha and his Arabs, may still admit of dispute; but unquestionably it was the battle of Navarin which did save Greece. When, however, the business of selecting a king, and of organising the institutions of a central administration on monarchical principles came to be performed, the genius of Canning was represented by the torpor of Aberdeen, and the sagacity of Wellington by the belligerent amenity of Palmerston.

The Russian sympathies of Capodistrias succeeded in delaying the final settlement of the Greek question, with the hope of placing Greece in a state of vassalage to the Czar. Lord Aberdeen combated the policy of the Corfiote feebly and unsuccessfully. He barely succeeded in preventing the execution of the Russian schemes, when the dagger of Mavromichalis opened the way for making Greece an independent kingdom by the assassination of Capodistrias.

The only candidate worthy of the throne of Greece was Leopold of Saxe-Cobourg, the present King of Belgium. He was compelled to resign his pretensions on account of the mutilated form of the territory offered to him by Lord Aberdeen and the Duke of Wellington. Lord Palmerston improved the territorial position of Greece by giving it a better frontier than Lord Aberdeen, but it remained still a very bad one, as Colonel Leake pointed out at the time. In 1832, moreover, Lord Palmerston administered his antidote to an improved frontier, in the shape of a Bavarian prince, whom, for some years, he supported with his usual vigour and contempt of consequences. King Otho being a minor, a regency accompanied him from Bavaria to Greece in 1833, to govern in his name. This regency consisted of three statesmen of purblind views—men of the limited political intelligence which distinguishes the artistic city of Munich. Yet Lord Palmerston, in concert with the other protecting powers, consented to strangle the Greek Chambers, in order to vest unlimited power in the hands of these Bavarian regents. Count Armansperg was chosen to do the honours, M. Maurer was intrusted with the duty of organising the civil administration, and General Heideck was allowed to sketch uniforms for the Greek army, and instructed to paint pictures for the cabinet of King Louis. These three statesmen soon quarrelled among themselves, and, with Teutonic bonhomie, called in the Greeks as spectators of their contests. The foreign policy of the regency was quite as ill-judged as their domestic behaviour. M. Maurer, who got the upper hand for a year, was ultra-Gallican; Count Armansperg, who at last succeeded in getting him shipped off to Bavaria, was ultra-Anglican. The follies of the regency, however, did not prevent the three protecting powers from heaping benefits on the Greek nation. A large loan, amounting to two million four hundred thousand pounds, was placed at the disposal of the Royal government. The object which the protectors of Greece had in view, was to remove any difficulties which the finances of Greece might have offered to a reform in the general system of taxation, and at the same time to afford facilities for immediately commencing the construction of roads, and other necessary improvements. The Greek treasury was rendered completely independent of the receipts of the annual revenues for the period necessary to effect a thorough reorganisation of every branch of the public service, civil, military, naval, and judicial. Greece had everything done for her which her friends could desire. But the Greeks, instead of employing their energies, and making use of the liberty of the press to restrain the Bavarians from wasting the loan, aided them to dissipate it in every way by which they could profit. The whole force of public opinion, it is true, was employed in driving the Bavarians from profitable employments; but when success attended the clamours of the Greeks, instead of abolishing the offices which they had previously declared to be useless, they installed themselves in the vacant places, and employed the influence thus acquired to diminish even the scanty sum devoted to national improvements by the Bavarians. Accordingly, we find that the Bavarians did as much for improving Greece during their short period of power, as the Greeks during their long subsequent administration. Yet every traveller hears the Greeks constantly declaring that all the evils in the country are caused by foreign interference. The only truth in their observation is, that they were and are utterly unfit to be trusted with the administration of any money beyond what they levy on themselves in the way of taxation. Nothing, indeed, shows the moral obliquity of the Greeks more than the ingratitude with which they receive every public and private gift.

We consider that ingratitude a sufficient excuse for recapitulating some of the favours which the British Government has conferred on them since Otho the beloved ascended the Hellenic throne. Nothing but the blindest self-conceit, or the blackest ingratitude, can prevent their acknowledging that the English Cabinet has done infinitely more for advancing the commercial prosperity and extending the agricultural industry of Greece, than King Otho’s ministers or the Greek Chambers. The personal interest which several members of our Government took in the success of the kingdom they had contributed to found, induced them to conclude a reciprocity treaty with the King’s government at an early period. To the same feeling we may ascribe the early repeal of the duty on currants imported into the British dominions from the Greek kingdom. This change of duty, by placing the currants, a most important product of the Morea, on the same footing as those of Zante, was a direct boon to the currant-growers of Achaia, a bounty on the cultivation of fruit in the Greek kingdom, a premium to commerce at Patras, and a considerable gift to King Otho’s treasury. Lord Palmerston was Foreign Secretary during these changes, and we therefore request the public writers at Athens, when they think fit to reproach him for quarrelling with their beloved monarch, whom they believe is ever ready to sacrifice his throne for their orthodoxy, to bear in mind that these measures have done more for the agricultural and commercial prosperity of Greece, than any which King Otho or the Greek Chambers have adopted since they freed themselves from foreign domination.

For nearly five years—that is, from the beginning of 1833 to the end of 1837—the Bavarians continued to waste the loan granted by the three powers, partly in large salaries to themselves, and partly in creating places and jobs for the Greeks, to induce the most influential and clamorous to consent to their mode of dissipating the public money. Notwithstanding this, there can be no doubt that Greece received some permanent benefit from the regency. The Greeks were not in a condition to establish an equitable system of laws. M. Maurer endowed the country with this invaluable boon. To him Greece owes its excellent judicial organisation, and its code of civil procedure. Whatever were the defects of M. Maurer as a statesman, he was an able legislator, practically conversant with every detail of legal administration. The judicial system he planted in Greece was so complete in all its parts, that it has become an element in the political civilisation of the kingdom; and it affords the strongest grounds of hope to those who look forward to the Greek nation as the instrument for extending political civilisation in the East. Count Armansperg governed Greece much longer than M. Maurer, but his improvements were not so beneficial. He made court balls and political bribery national institutions.

During the whole of the Bavarian domination, a well-filled treasury, a number of foreign officers and native councillors of state, political sycophants, dressed in handsome uniforms and speaking good French, a hired press, and a liberal distribution of King Otho’s Order of the Redeemer of Greece, with its ribbon and star, to foreign diplomatists and English peers, concealed from Western Europe the discontent, civil wars, and brigandage that fermented in the little kingdom. The bands of robbers that infested Greece during this period became so numerous as to give their system of plunder the character of a civil war. In the year 1835, during the administration of Count Armansperg, a body of about 500 brigands remained for more than a month levying contributions under the walls of Lepanto, in which it kept the garrison blockaded until relieved by a general from Athens with a strong detachment of Bavarian and Greek regular troops. These armed bands repeatedly resisted the central government, which drew all the money of the country to the capital without making any improvements in the provinces. Several foreign officers were charged with the task of re-establishing order. Generals Schmaltz, Gordon, and Church, each made a campaign against the brigands, who rendered Messenia, Etolia, Acarnania, Doris, and Phthiotis in turns the scene of their skirmishes with King Otho’s troops. Besides this extensive system of brigandage, a regular civil war was caused in Maina by the same central rapacity and want of judgment on the part of the Regency. In Maina, the Bavarian troops were defeated, and a considerable number were compelled to lay down their arms.

During the whole of the Bavarian domination, the Greeks enjoyed the liberty of the press. M. Maurer placed the newspapers under some reasonable restraints, and Count Armansperg made one or two feeble demonstrations against them, for he was timid in everything but emptying the Greek treasury. His attacks were easily repulsed, and the Greeks have the honour of retaining the liberty of the press by their own exertions, though they have hitherto not rendered the privilege of much use to the nation. At length, in the month of December 1837, the Chevalier Rudhart, the last Bavarian prime-minister, resigned his office, and from that time King Otho has governed his kingdom with Greek or Albanian prime-ministers. This office has been more than once held by men who could hardly read or write; but the individuals have invariably been persons of some mark in the factions that divide the place-hunters of Athens. The ignorance and want of education of his ministers, which is often made a reproach to King Otho, ought to be considered as a national disgrace, for the court would never have selected men so destitute of administrative knowledge, had they not possessed considerable influence and a numerous following.

Ever since the commencement of the year 1838, the Greeks have possessed a predominant influence in King Otho’s cabinet. They are entirely responsible for the faults of his government from that time; for if the Greek ministers had used their power with a very little honesty, and one single grain of patriotism, they might have retained the direction of the internal administration in their own hands, and effected every improvement the nation could desire. Indeed, if they had ever shown a wish to improve the material condition of the population, it is probable King Otho would have given them his support in their endeavours. But when the King saw them intent only on profiting by office to enrich themselves and create places for their partisans, in order to perpetuate their tenure of office, he very naturally looked about for means to form a royal party, and thus render the court independent of the ministers. We shall soon explain to our readers how effectually his Hellenic Majesty accomplished this object. The Greek ministers never made any serious effort to diminish the weight of taxation, either by economy or by improving the barbarous manner in which the agricultural taxes are collected; they thought only of appropriating the national lands, and creating new places to reward their supporters. Instead of establishing systematic regulations for securing a respect to seniority and merit in civil, judicial, and military appointments, they destroyed the system the Bavarians had established, and disposed of the highest offices in the most arbitrary and unprincipled manner. Judges have been appointed in violation of the law, and men have been made generals who had never served in a military capacity. Worthless politicians and intriguing secretaries were decorated with military titles in order to enrich them with high pay. These men may be seen at the balls in King Otho’s palace, flaunting in vulgar embroidery, and imitating with Greek pertness the sumptuous Albanian dress and Mussulman gravity of the chiefs who filled the halls of Ali Pasha of Joannina. The Greeks alone have enjoyed the profits of the corruption which has reigned in the administration since the year 1838; they are consequently not entitled to throw the blame on foreigners.

In consequence of the misconduct of the Greek ministers and the servility of a council of state filled with official sycophants, the Greek government became such a scene of corruption that the patience of all ranks was exhausted, and an attempt was made to reform the vicious system by a revolution in the year 1843. A representative chamber and an imitation of Louis Philippe’s senate of officials, called in France a House of Peers, were constituted. The deputies were chosen by universal suffrage, but the election of the municipal authorities was left subject to the oligarchical restrictions imposed by the Regency. Ten years have now elapsed since the constitutional system was established, so that for ten years the Greeks have made their own laws and voted their own budgets. At the same time, the enjoyment of the fullest liberty of the press, and the existence of sixteen newspapers at Athens, have enabled every party and class to criticise the acts of the government with unrestrained license. If corruption and venality have been the leading features of political society in Greece during this period, it is evident that the nation has been a party to the abuses, from its refusal to punish the offenders. The mass of those whose superior knowledge and rank have obtained for them the direction of public opinion in political matters, have sacrificed the interests of the nation to advance their own personal schemes of profit. The Greeks ought not to feel surprised at the low estimation in which they are now held. It is entirely their own fault. They have hawked about their nationality at Munich, Paris, and St Petersburg, for illicit gains in a falling market at a very unpatriotic price.

Yet we collect from the newspapers published at Athens, that a considerable number of well-educated men of all parties, while they acknowledge the degraded state of their country, assert that the whole blame ought to be ascribed to the three protecting powers. Many of these patriots, it seems, are nevertheless in the receipt of large salaries from the public treasury; yet, though they feel that they are themselves destitute of the patriotism necessary to lighten the burdens of their country, they take the liberty of supposing that Lord Palmerston had the power of making all Greeks honest men by the magic of a protocol. We are not going to waste the time of our readers, as the Greek Senate and House of Representatives have wasted the resources of the country, by exposing the childishness of modern Greek political logic. If the descendants of Lucian’s contemporaries can find relief in their present degradation, by swallowing any dose of vanity they can mix for themselves, we have no wish to deprive them of the solace. But we cannot refrain from advising them to try some other remedy to remove the evils that are undermining the national strength and character. Instead of seeking for apologies to excuse their vices, they had better commence reforming their vicious habits.

Nothing has so much retarded the progress of the Greek race as the inconceivable vanity and unbounded presumption of the class who make letters a profession. Those who believe in the unmixed purity of the Hellenic blood might cite this besotted pride, after two thousand years of national degradation, as a proof that the Greeks of the present day are lineal descendants of those who sold their country to the Macedonians and the Romans, as they have lately attempted to sell it to the Russians. An admixture of foreign blood would probably have infused into the people a wish to look forward to a glorious future, instead of leaving them to gaze at a reflection of the past, distorted by their own senile visual orbits, at moments when action, not contemplation, is their business.

The strange manner in which the modern Greeks misrepresent history for the gratification of their national vanity, is well displayed in their ecclesiastical history. We will select one anecdote from the History of the Patriarchs of Constantinople, written by Malaxos, one of the Greek logiotatọi of the sixteenth century. His work was first published by Martin Crusius in his Turco-Græcia, and has lately been reprinted in the new edition of the Byzantine historians, in the course of publication at Bonn.

The Greeks are in the habit of boasting that their Church preserved their nationality under the Turks. Considering the subserviency of the great body of the Greek clergy during that period, and the readiness with which they acted as spies and policemen for the Othoman government, we own that we entertain a very different opinion. We think it would be nearer the truth to assert that the people, having perpetuated their existence by the toleration of their conquerors, preserved their nationality by their municipal organisation, and that this preservation of their nationality was the cause of their ecclesiastical establishment surviving. Mohammed II. reconstituted the patriarchate of Constantinople, after he had conquered the city, merely as a branch of the Othoman administration. Mr Masson and other enthusiasts fancy they can discern Presbyterian doctrines in the Greek Church. It may be the case. We have heard that chemists find gold in strawberries; but the gold rarely sits heavy on the stomachs of those who eat strawberries, and we opine that the Presbyterian doctrines of the Greek Church never prevent its votaries from worshipping images. So, in the anecdote we are going to extract from the Patriarchal History, we find that the Greeks regard violations of truth and honour as venial offences, if not absolutely meritorious acts, whenever they are supposed to have turned to the profit of their ecclesiastical establishment.

“During the reign of the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, when Toulphi Pasha was grand vizier,[^[133]] the attention of the Sublime Porte was called to the circumstance that the duty of the caliph of the Mohammedan faith required the destruction of all places of worship belonging to Infidels in every city which the true believers had taken with the sword. Now, as Mohammed II. had taken Constantinople by storm, it was the sultan’s duty to destroy all the Christian churches within the walls; and all the plagues and fires which had desolated the city, and which, it was observed, generally consumed more Turkish than Greek property, evidently arose from the Divine anger at the neglect of this important command of the Prophet. Sultan Suleiman was said to have consulted the mufti on the necessity of only tolerating places of worship for the Christians without the walls; and it was believed that the mufti had delivered a fetva, authorising the destruction of all the Greek churches in Constantinople. Sultan Suleiman then issued an order to his grand vizier, commanding him to carry the fetva into execution. At this time Jeremiah was patriarch of Constantinople.

“The patriarch heard the report, and, terrified at the news, mounted his mule, and hastened to the palace of the grand vizier, who received him with kindness. The two dignitaries discussed the matter of the sultan’s order, and concerted together a mode of evading its execution. A meeting of the divan was held, at which the grand vizier made a public communication of the imperial decree to the patriarch Jeremiah. But the head of the Greek Church gravely observed, that the circumstances of the mufti’s fetva were not applicable to the city of Constantinople. He declared that before Mohammed II. entered Constantinople, the Emperor Constantine, finding the place no longer tenable, had gone out of the city and presented the keys to the Sultan, who had admitted him to do homage as a subject for himself and the Greek people, before the gates were thrown open to admit the conqueror. On this ground he pleaded that all the concessions made by Mohammed II. to the patriarchs and to the Greek Church were lawful. Well might all the members of the divan wonder at this strange tale concerning the conquest of Constantinople. But many had received large presents from the patriarch, and many waited to hear the opinion of the grand vizier before pretending to doubt its accuracy. The grand vizier declared that the question was so important that it would be proper to adjourn the business to a grand divan on the following day.

“The report having spread among the whole population of Constantinople, that the Government intended to destroy all the Christian churches, every class of society was in movement. Long before the meeting of the divan, crowds of Turks, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews assembled at the Porte to hear the result of the deliberation. The whole space from the gate of the serai to the court of St Sophia’s was filled with the multitude. The Patriarch Jeremiah was waiting to be admitted to the divan, and soon after the members had taken their places he was summoned to enter. When he reached the centre of the hall, he made his prostrations to the assembled viziers, and then, standing erect, declared himself ready to answer for his church. All admired the dignity of his presence. His white beard descended on his breast, and the sweat fell in large drops from his forehead. The Greeks declared that he emulated the passion of Christ, of whose orthodox church he was the representative on earth. The archonts of the Greek nation stood trembling beside him.

“At length the grand vizier spoke. ‘Patriarch of the Greeks, a fetva of our law has been delivered, and an order of the padishah has been issued, prohibiting the existence of any church in the cities which the true believers have conquered sword in hand. This city was taken by storm by the great Sultan Mohammed the conqueror. Therefore, let your priests remove all their property from the churches in their possession, and, after shutting them up, deliver the keys to our master’s officers, that the churches may be destroyed.’ To this summons the patriarch replied in a distinct voice, ‘I cannot answer, O grand vizier! for what happened in other cities; but with regard to this city of Constantinople I can solemnly affirm that the Emperor Constantine Palaiologos, with the nobles, the clergy, and the people, surrendered it voluntarily to the Sultan Mohammed.’ The grand vizier cautioned the patriarch not to assert anything which he could not prove by the testimony of Mohammedan witnesses, who were able to certify the truth of what he said. The patriarch immediately engaged to produce witnesses, and the affair was adjourned for twenty days.

“The Greeks were in great alarm. Everybody knew that the patriarch had engaged to prove a lie; so that the only hope of safety appeared to be in the perpetual adjournment of the question. To effect this, the wealthiest Greeks—Phanariotes and merchants—offered to supply the patriarch with the sums of money necessary to bribe the grand vizier and the members of the divan.

“But the Patriarch Jeremiah and the grand vizier Toulphi did not wish to admit any strangers into the secret of their proceedings. So the patriarch sent men of experience to Adrianople, who met agents of the grand vizier, and at last two aged Mussulmans were found who were willing for a large bribe to testify that the patriarch had spoken the truth. These witnesses were conducted to Constantinople, and presented to the Patriarch Jeremiah, who embraced them, and took care that they should be well fed, lodged, clothed, and carefully watched, until they appeared before the divan. When they had rested from the fatigues of their journey, they were conducted to the grand vizier, who spoke kindly to them, told them the patriarch was his friend, and exhorted them to give their evidence without fear.

“On the day appointed to hear the evidence, the Patriarch Jeremiah presented himself before the divan. The grand vizier asked if he was prepared to produce the evidence he had promised, and the Patriarch replied that the witnesses were waiting without to be examined.

“Two aged Turks were now conducted into the hall. Their beards were white as the purest snow, red circles surrounded their eyes, from which the tears fell incessantly, while their hands and feet moved with a continual tremor. The viziers gazed at them with astonishment, for two men so far advanced in years had never been seen before on earth standing side by side. They looked like two brothers whom death had forgotten. The grand vizier asked their names, and encouraged them by making some other inquiries. They replied that they were both about eighteen years of age when Constantinople was taken by the Sultan Mohammed the victorious. Since that time they knew that eighty-four years had elapsed, and therefore they were aware that they had reached the age of a hundred and two. They then gave the following account of the conquest of Constantinople:—

“The siege was formed by land and sea, and long and bloody engagements took place, but at last several breaches were made in the walls, and it was evident that the place would soon be taken. Preparations were making for a final assault, when the Emperor of the Greeks sent a deputation of his nobles to the sultan to demand a capitulation. The sultan, wishing to save the city from destruction, and to spare the blood of the true believers, granted the infidels the following terms of capitulation, which the witnesses pretended to remember with accuracy, because a copy had been publicly signed by the sultan and read aloud to the troops: ‘I, the Sultan Mohammed, pardon the Emperor Constantine and the Greeks, and grant their petition to become my subjects, and live in peace under my protection. I allow the nobles to retain their slaves and property, and I declare that the people shall live free from all illegal exactions, and that their children shall not be taken to be enrolled in the corps of janissaries.[^[134]] This charter shall be binding on me and my successors for ever.’ With this charter the Greek deputation returned to the emperor, who came out immediately, and falling on his knees before Mohammed the Second, presented to him the keys of the city. The sultan then raised Constantine, kissed him, and made him sit down on his right hand. For three days the two princes rejoiced together, and then the emperor led the sultan into the city.

“As soon as the members of the divan heard this account of the taking of Constantinople from the two old men who had witnessed the events, they drew up a report and transmitted it to Sultan Suleiman. The sultan, convinced that everything must have happened as the old Mussulmans deposed, immediately ordered that the Christians should be allowed to retain possession of their churches, and that no man should molest the patriarch of the Greeks under any pretext.”

Now, the whole of this tale is an absurd forgery. Moreover, the ignorance of the Greeks who framed it is even more extraordinary than their utter disregard for truth. The accomplished sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, and the learned grand vizier, Loufti Pasha, are represented as stupid Turks, destitute of all knowledge of the history of the Othoman Empire. Greek vanity is flattered by an exhibition of the way in which Romaic genius nullifies the power of the padishah, by availing itself of the corruption in the Turkish administration. But the strangest feature in the fable is the moral obtuseness of the Hellenic mind, which solicits admiration for the frauds and falsehoods of their patriarch. The inventor of the tale had in all probability heard that Loufti Pasha was an Albanian by birth, but was ignorant of the fact that he was a man of learning. He could not have known that, when in exile at Demotika, Loufti wrote a history of the Othoman Empire, which is still preserved. Indeed, a comparison of the flourishing state of Turkish literature with the degraded condition of Greek literature in the sixteenth century contrasts in a singular manner with the contempt displayed by the Greeks in their illiterate records for the accomplished and warlike Othomans. But the Greeks have always viewed the history of other nations through a mist of prejudices which has bewildered themselves far more than their enemies.

This anecdote presents a faithful picture of the Hellenic mind, and of Greek political and historical knowledge, three hundred years ago. We shall now endeavour to place before our readers an equally correct picture of their mode of thinking and acting at present.

The constitutional system of government has proved as complete a failure in Greece as the absolute monarchy which terminated at the revolution of 1843. Our description of the actual condition of the country will explain the particular causes which have corrupted the representative system and the central administration. The court of King Otho is really quite as much the predominant feature in the political condition of Greece as his palace is in the landscape at Athens. Both are great deformities in scenes of great interest. There is a grotesque mimicry of royal state at the monster palace of the little capital of liberated Greece. A marshal of the palace and a master of the ceremonies, a grandmaîtresse, military and naval aides-de-camp, ordinance officers, ladies of honour, and young ladies-in-waiting, courtiers who cannot write, and courtiers who cannot ride; court carriages in a kingdom without mail-coaches; royal steam-yachts, but no packets even with oars; crosses, ribbons, and stars; salaries, places, and pensions;—everything which ruins a government, and nothing which enriches a people.

The power of the crown is great. It is supported by a civil list of one million of drachmas annually, in a state which has a net revenue of twelve. The enormous amount of this civil list may be estimated from the facts, that the salaries of the Greek ministers are only twelve thousand drachmas a year, and of the Greek senators only six thousand. Besides the influence which this exorbitant wealth confers on the monarch, he possesses still greater social influence, for the whole of the upper classes at Athens consist of paid officials, every one of whom is liable to lose his place at a word from King Otho, who, with very little exertion on the part of that royal memory on which kings pride themselves, may recollect every man who resides at his capital qualified to enter his palace. The desire of King Otho to extend his personal influence, and centralise power in his own hands, is so great, that every individual who receives a public appointment, however insignificant, whether at Athens or in the provinces, is compelled to wait on his majesty to thank him for the favour, which he naturally pretends to consider as a reward for his attachment to the royal Bavarian, not as a reward for his services to Greece. King Otho has been an apt pupil of Louis Philippe in the political corruption that renders the constitutional system subservient to the royal power in a thoroughly centralised administration.

In one branch of political corruption King Otho may boast that he has outdone all European sovereigns. It is true, he found in the Hellenic mind a rich soil, but he may claim the merit of having worked it like a first-rate farmer. The local institutions to which the friends of Greece looked for a firm basis for liberal institutions, have in his hands been rendered the instrument for converting popular elections into royal nominations. When the Bavarian regency destroyed the communal system of Greece, they replaced it by municipalities of greater extent, and rendered the local authorities dependent on the Minister of the Interior. King Otho availed himself of the central control created by the municipal law, to make the mayor and local magistrates everywhere dependent on his personal favour. The mayors are now agents and spies of the court. This is effected in the following manner: By one of those preposterous regulations, framed by statesmen to delude the people with a show of conferring on them free institutions, the nomination of the mayor is vested in the central government. An oligarchical college of electors selects three members of the municipality, and from these his majesty selects the most subservient to occupy the place. By availing himself skilfully of this absurd law, King Otho has filled the towns of Greece with magistrates entirely dependent on his will—men whom their fellow-citizens, if universal suffrage prevailed in the municipal elections of the mayors as it does in the more important elections of deputies to the legislature, would not allow to remain an hour in office. These nominees of the court are placed in possession of considerable salaries by the will of the central government, and as they are dependent on the court for their office, they act as its devoted agents. The consequence is, that King Otho is enabled to employ the funds of the Greek municipalities in maintaining a species of court policemen over the whole country. The influence thus gained may be estimated from the circumstance that upwards of two millions of drachmas are thus withdrawn from their legitimate use, in making roads and facilitating communications by land and water, and are devoted to pay a band of royal sbirri. Many persons in England have felt astonished that a man of such moderate talents as King Otho could render such effectual service to Russia, as to agitate the whole of Greece by making an invasion of Turkey appear a national movement. But the fact is, that the power possessed by the central government through the municipalities is so great, that we have to thank the extreme incapacity of King Otho and the general corruption of the instruments he employed for rendering the attack on Turkey as inefficient as it proved. The King gave the signal for a general recruiting to aid the Russian cause, but his instruments in the provinces employed the opportunity in attending to their own interests, before giving themselves much trouble about making a diversion for the profit of the Czar or the Bavarian. King Otho on this occasion paid the usual penalty of those who work by corruption.

We must not blame King Otho too severely for making use of corrupt persuasion as an instrument of parliamentary government. The proceedings of our Ministers rise up before us as an apology for the Greek monarchy. A Coalition of all the administrative talent of Britain cannot conduct the non-centralised government of the empire without a little local jobbery. Even Lord Aberdeen’s own department publicly owns the necessity of throwing a few corrupt sops to a hungry and restive body of Liberal representatives. In the Treasury report, recommending some reforms in our post-office, the following words will be found,—it seems a very plain statement of adherence to the principles on which King Otho influences the Greek municipalities: “My Lords (of the Treasury—i. e., Messrs Aberdeen & Co.) are of opinion that it is for the public interest that the appointments should be made as at present by my Lords, after consulting, through the recommendation of the members for the county or town, the convenience and wishes of the population.” Population in this sentence, we presume, means the class who usually job such matters, for we have never before heard it asserted that the mob was the best judge of administrative capacity.

The fact that a man so notoriously deficient in political wisdom as King Otho has succeeded in establishing a system, giving him a predominant influence over the Greeks, is a sad evidence of the extreme venality of Greek society; for there can hardly be a doubt that the Greeks suggested to their King the employment of the national resources in purchasing the service of individuals instead of devoting them to the improvement of the nation.

We have but few observations to make on the late treacherous attack of King Otho and his subjects on their neighbour and ally, the Sultan Abdul Medjid. There could not be an act of greater folly; and even amidst the incapable and cowardly exhibitions of modern times, it is the national movement which has been conducted in the most incapable and cowardly manner. Of the complicity of King Otho there never was a doubt, in spite of the denials of the Greek and German press. The courts of London and Paris have refrained from giving publicity to all the documents which fell into the hands of the Turks proving this complicity, as it was not their wish to increase the embarrassments of the hour by declaring the throne of Greece vacant. Regarding the attack on Turkey, however, in the light of a diversion for the advantage of Russia, it might have rendered important assistance to the Czar. Had it been conducted with energy and ability, it might have inflicted a serious blow on the Othoman Empire. When King Otho violated the treaties to which he owed his throne, and appealed to force as the arbiter of his future relations with Turkey, he expected, not without some chance of success, to become master of the line of fortresses that defend the frontiers of Turkey towards Greece. Volo, Domoko, Arta, and Prevesa, were almost without garrisons; and it was only by the extreme incapacity of the Greek leaders, and the misconduct of those who invaded Turkey, that these fortresses escaped capture. The court of Athens acted on the conviction that the Russian army would force the Balkan in a few weeks, and appear before the walls of Constantinople without encountering any serious resistance. It consequently believed that it would not be in the Sultan’s power to detach a force sufficient to protect Thessaly and Epirus. Once in possession of the fortresses which command these provinces, the King believed that England and France would be compelled to treat with him, and leave him in possession of the spoil. Fortunately for the Othoman Empire, both the Emperor Nicholas and King Otho are very bad generals. Both appear to have calculated that the armed rabble of Greeks in fustanello could perform the duties of an army. And King Otho now finds that he has sacrificed the most valuable portion of his subjects’ commerce to Russian interests, without any advantage to his cherished scheme of making himself an absolute monarch.

The political morality of King Otho, in his foreign as in his internal affairs, deserves the severest condemnation. His behaviour to Turkey has met with the most galling punishment. He retains his crown by the sufferance of those whom he has betrayed. His folly has ruined the commerce of his subjects, and transferred the neutral trade, which might have enriched the Greeks, to the ships of the Austrians, Genoese, and Neapolitans.

Let us now contrast the conduct of the Greek monarch with the behaviour of the President of the United States in a similar case. Cuba is quite as desirable a possession to the Americans as Thessaly and Epirus are to the Greeks. In both countries a large part of the population eagerly desires the conquest. There is, however, this difference: The Greeks could not make any impression on their enemy, even though they took him by surprise; but the Americans would probably soon gain possession of Cuba, if their government only winked at the enterprises of private citizens. Had the President of the United States been as impolitic and selfish as King Otho, he might have encouraged piratical attacks on Cuba. The position of General Pierce bore a strong resemblance to that of the King of Greece, but his conduct was diametrically opposite. Even though General Pierce is now engaged in demanding from Spain reparation for acts of violence committed on the property of American citizens in Cuba, and though it is possible that the disputes between the two countries may soon lead to hostilities, the President of the United States uses the following terms in his Message to the Senate:—

“The formal demand for immediate reparation (from Spain) has only served to call forth a justification of the local authorities of Cuba, which transfers the responsibility to the Spanish government.... Meanwhile information was received that preparation was making within the limits of the United States, by private individuals, under military organisation, for a descent upon the island of Cuba, with a view to wrest it from the dominion of Spain. International comity, the obligations of treaties, and the express provisions of the law, alike required, in my judgment, that all the constitutional power of the executive should be exerted to prevent the consummation of such a violation of positive law, and of that good faith on which mainly the amicable relations of neighbouring nations must depend.

“In conformity with these convictions of public duty, a proclamation was issued to warn all persons not to participate in the contemplated enterprise, and to invoke the interposition in this behalf of the proper officers of government. No provocation whatever can justify private expeditions of hostility against a country at peace with the United States.”

Contrast these words with King Otho’s declaration to the ministers of Great Britain and France, that his royal conscience would not allow him to restrain the marauding forays and piratical expeditions of his subjects against Turkey, and that rather than attempt it he would himself march at their head. International comity and the obligations of treaties now compel the two protecting powers to employ against King Otho and the Greeks that force to which they appealed as arbiter of their relations with Turkey, and they must be forcibly obliged to observe that good faith on which mainly the amicable relations of neighbouring States must depend. Unless, therefore, the Greek King and the Greek nation can give ample security that no provocation will again induce them to commence private acts of hostility against Epirus and Thessaly while the Greek kingdom is at peace with the Othoman Empire, the tranquillity of Europe requires that the independence of Greece should be suspended, and the country remain in the power of a foreign force, until a government be firmly established which will respect the principles of the law of nations as laid down by the President of the United States in his Message to the Senate.

The Greeks in general apologise for their treacherous attempt to surprise the Turks, by declaring that the liberated territory is too small to constitute an independent State. They seem to overlook the corollary which the European cabinets may be inclined to deduce from their violation of “international comity and the obligations of treaties,” and extinguish their independence rather than increase their territory. But the falsehood of the assertion is too apparent to deserve refutation. The kingdom of Greece is more thinly peopled than any other State in Europe; but this want of population is caused by its communications, both by land and sea, being in a worse state than they are in any other country. Idle clerks in public offices, and armed men who frequent coffee-houses, form a numerous section of the town population, and these men consume all the revenues of the State, which ought to be devoted to public improvements. Indeed, the financial and political condition of King Otho’s dominions is so bad, that it would be an act of inhumanity to transfer any portion of the population of the Sultan’s territory to the Greek government. If Chios or Samos were annexed to Greece tomorrow, the inhabitants would find their financial burdens greatly increased, and their trade very much diminished, without any corresponding improvement in their political condition for the present. The benefits they would acquire might nevertheless awaken hopes of a better future. They would be placed in possession of the liberty of the press, and of a good judicial system, so that when the corrupting influence of the court of Athens, of the Phanariot place-hunters, and of the palikari, ceases to exist, amendment may be expected by the enthusiastic. Judging from actual appearances, King Otho’s dominions seem to be much too large, both for the amount of the population, and for the administrative capacity of the government. Even Athens, Syra, Patras, Nauplia, and Chalcis, are little better than undrained dirty towns, destitute of proper municipal organisation and local police, while the other towns in the country are merely overgrown villages. With the exception of a few drives for the court carriages round Athens, and a road for the Austrian traffic across the isthmus of Corinth, there is not a good cart-road in the kingdom, and very few tolerable bridle-roads even from one town to another. Twenty islands of the Archipelago, each containing a town, are not visited by any regular packets, and it frequently happens that six weeks elapse without their receiving any news from the capital. It is almost needless to say that a population living in such a state of isolation must be in a stationary, if not in a declining, condition. If the numbers are kept up, the buildings of past times are allowed to fall to decay, and all the accumulated capital is rapidly deteriorating. Every traveller who has visited the islands of the Archipelago, and the towns in the interior of the Peloponnesus, must have noticed many proofs of this decay, quite independent of the dilapidation caused by the revolutionary war, or the civil broils which followed it.

Other proofs of the incapacity of the existing government of Greece to conduct the centralised system, as established in the limited territory it now rules, may be found in the civil wars already noticed, in the general anarchy and contempt for the rights of property that prevails, and in the enormous numbers of criminals in all the prisons of the kingdom. We have now before us Athenian newspapers of the month of July, filled with complaints of acts of brigandage almost within sight of King Otho’s palace. Some years ago a party of pleasure was robbed during a picnic at Kephisia; and the newspapers have frequently recorded cases of boiling oil having been poured on women to compel them to show the robbers where the family hoards were concealed. We have seen an occurrence of this kind recorded in Attica while the Chambers were in session. The inference from these facts seems to be, that King Otho, the Greek Chambers, and the existing central administration, are incompetent to establish order and security for life and property in the territory they now pretend to govern. We ask whether it is possible for Great Britain and France to entertain the question of an augmentation of such a kingdom?

We may now turn from examining the position of King Otho and the Greek government in relation to their foreign policy, and take a glance at the social and political condition of the nation. We must commence by enumerating what the people have neglected to do. This will serve to show how great the difficulties now are in the way of improving the country. During the ten years of representative government which have now elapsed, the Greek deputies have made no systematic efforts to improve the condition of the agricultural population, though three-quarters of the inhabitants of Greece are chiefly dependent on agriculture for their subsistence. No attempt has been made to reform the barbarous method of collecting the land-tax in kind, which retains the population in the stationary condition into which it fell on the decline of the Byzantine Empire. The municipalities have been allowed to become the vehicles of court corruption, and no measures have been taken to enforce regular publication of their receipts and expenditure. No criminal statistics are published. Instead of appropriating annually a sum of money for the construction of roads, bridges, quays, and ferry-boats, which are so necessary in a mountainous and insular State, the national interests are sacrificed to the gains of individual senators and deputies. New places are annually created, and the trade of Greece is transferred to Austrian and French steam-companies. The greatest commercial advantages ever placed at the disposal of any people have been neglected by the Greek nation, and perhaps completely thrown away by their late devotion to Russia. Yet the Greeks, who see the number of foreign steamers daily increasing in their ports, boast with their usual childish vanity of their superiority over every other people in naval skill. They even throw out hints in their political writings that the real cause of Lord Palmerston’s dissatisfaction with King Otho was founded on a reasonable jealousy of the Greek navy, and a patriotic fear lest the subjects of that monarch should deprive England of her commercial supremacy! Yet while boasting in this Hellenic strain, like true descendants of the contemporaries of Juvenal and Lucian, they have allowed the most profitable part of their own coasting trade to pass into the hands of the Austrian Lloyd Steam Company.

A tendency to social and political disintegration is quite as much a characteristic of the population of liberated Greece as it was of ancient Hellas. National differences, municipal distinctions, local interests, class prejudices, and individual pretensions, divide the people.

The first great social division is one of race. Only about three-quarters of the population of the Greek kingdom consists of Greeks—the other quarter is composed of Albanians. These races rarely intermarry, and few Greeks ever learn the Albanian language; yet the Albanian race is rapidly acquiring political importance in the present condition of the Othoman Empire. It enjoys two immense advantages over the Greek race. Its geographical location concentrates the population, and offers a strong barrier against any foreign conquerors; while its military habits enables it to raise far larger and more efficient armies. It is also physically as much superior to the Greek as it is intellectually inferior. The bravest men and the most beautiful women in the Greek kingdom are of the purest Albanian blood, unadulterated with any admixture with the Hellenic race. Marko Botzaris, Miaoulis, and Konduriottis were Albanians. If the Albanians should, like their fellow-citizens the Greeks, become more eager to identify their existence with an ideal past than with a promising future, there is no reason for their being behind-hand in boasting. As descendants of the Macedonians, they may proudly vaunt that they have repeatedly conquered the Hellenes; and, as a section of the great Thracian people, they trace their origin to a mightier source than the Greeks. Consequently, if race is to become a determining cause in the formation of independent States, or even national representations, within the limits of the Othoman Empire, the warlike Albanians, in their inexpugnable mountains, are likely to assume a more important position than the commercial Greeks, dispersed in exposed seaports and defenceless islands. The application of ethnology to politics, which the Greeks have strongly-advocated, is extremely likely to operate forcibly in preventing any considerable extension of their kingdom. A Greek empire would be an impossibility if a natural ethnological development were adopted as a basis for partitioning Turkey in Europe. The Vallachians, Sclavonians, and Albanians are as able and willing to arrest the progress of the Greeks to-day, as the Thracians, Macedonians, and Epirots were in ancient times.

The next strongly-marked line of separation in the population of the Greek kingdom is that between the agricultural population and the inhabitants of the towns, whether the citizens live by orchard and garden culture, or by trade and foreign commerce. About three-quarters of the inhabitants of Greece live by agriculture; yet agricultural industry remains in the rudest state. The Bavarian Regency, the Greek King, and the representative Chambers, have hitherto done nothing to improve the condition of the agricultural class, nor to increase the produce of the country. The land which maintained one family four hundred years ago, will only maintain one family at the present day; the district which supported a thousand families under the Turks, can do no more under King Otho. The absurd fiscal arrangements concerning the collection of the land-tax in kind, prevent the peasantry from planting trees; so that in the richest plains devoted to the cultivation of cereals, the agricultural class is in the most miserable condition—as in the fertile districts of Thebes and Messenia. There is also no inducement to extend cultivation, as no roads exist; and a mule would, in a large part of Greece, eat its load of barley before it reached the nearest market. The agricultural class in Greece is poor, barbarous, and industrious; the population of the towns, on the other hand, is in easy circumstances, advanced in civilisation, and extremely idle. In no other country are coffee-houses so numerous or so well filled. The great number of persons living on places and pensions conferred by the central government, or receiving pay from the municipalities with no duty to perform, fills the streets of every town in Greece with an amount of idle individuals which travellers view with wonder.

The third prominent feature in the social condition of the Greek population is the existence of a military caste called Palikars. These palikars are nothing more than the armed followers of certain military chiefs who have secured to themselves an acknowledged position and regular pay in the Greek kingdom. The palikars wear the Albanian dress, and pretend to be professional soldiers, though neither they nor their leaders know anything of military tactics or discipline. A small number only are composed of the survivors of the irregular troops of the revolutionary war. The greater part consists of idle young men who are incapable of learning a trade, and disinclined to submit to discipline. The utter uselessness of the palikars in military operations was displayed in the ease with which they were defeated and dispersed by Fuad Effendi. These armed bands, however, though they are useless against an enemy, are extremely dangerous to the native peasantry. They march about the Greek kingdom from one end to the other, living at free quarters on the villagers, and consuming annually as large a portion of the produce of the soil as is paid to the central government in the shape of land-tax. In some disturbances which took place in the island of Eubœa they were said to have consumed, in forced contributions from the agricultural population, nearly one-third of the whole annual produce of the island.

We do not intend to deny the services which the palikars rendered during the war against the Turks. In a defensive warfare against an undisciplined enemy like the Turks of 1821, or an ill-organised force like the Bavarians of 1833, they were very efficient. But against the French at Argos they were utterly useless, even though they had intrenched themselves in a manner which they fancied would give them a decided advantage over regular troops. The French carried all their positions with the bayonet, and the palikars soon fled in dismay. The revival of the system of palikarism is one of the many evils which Lord Palmerston’s knavish protégé, Count Armansperg, bequeathed to Greece. M. Maurer had broken up the hordes of these children of anarchy in a very effectual manner, though perhaps with unnecessary violence and severity.

The object of Count Armansperg in restoring palikarism was to form for himself a military party. By the formation of troops enrolled under chiefs attached to his own person, he expected to be able to keep down public opinion in the provinces; while, by a lavish distribution of money and places, he knew he could silence it at Athens. The favoured captains were allowed to collect bands of armed followers, almost without any control on the part of the minister-of-war, and without the men or the officers being subjected to any discipline. In the provinces, these captains were intrusted with extraordinary powers, which they used for party purposes; and the palikars became an organ of the government for intimidating its opponents. The consequences of Count Armansperg’s conduct were most injurious. Those captains who were unable to gain his good-will collected bands of armed men, or joined the brigands, and endeavoured to increase the number of their followers by levying black-mail on the peaceful agriculturists, in the hope that the government would eventually be compelled to purchase their services. Their calculation proved correct; and Count Armansperg ended by taking into his pay the very men against whom he had employed his generals.

King Otho adopted with delight the corrupt system of his regent, and even extended its application. He filled his palace with palikars, and neglected the regular troops. Men ignorant of all military service were intrusted with military command in the provinces, where their services were chiefly required to intimidate opposition, and secure the election of court candidates as deputies and mayors. Koletti, the favourite leader of the palikar class, became King Otho’s favourite minister; and the influence of that worthless Vallachian Aspropotamite enabled the count to nullify the constitution of 1844. By the influence of the palikars, assisted, it is true, by his own anti-constitutional love of administrative despotism, Mavrocordatos was driven from the ministry, and King Otho re-established in absolute power, by the assistance of palikarism and municipal corruption.

The late invasion of Turkey could hardly have taken place, if it had not been in King Otho’s power to launch these irregular bands against his neighbour’s frontier; for, with all his folly and imprudence, he would not have ventured to march regular troops openly against the Sultan without a declaration of war. On the other hand, it was fortunate for Europe that the utter worthlessness of these undisciplined bands for all military operations, except the defence of mountain passes, prevented their capturing the frontier fortresses of Epirus and Thessaly, and enabled Fuad Effendi to defeat their army with so much ease at Peta. Never, certainly, did any troops make a more despicable military display than the palikars of Greece in their late attack on Turkey. While these invaders made their patriotism a pretext for plundering their unfortunate countrymen who were subjects of the Othoman Empire, and devoted their chief attention to carrying off cattle and sheep belonging to Greeks and Christians, instead of attempting to storm the ill-fortified holds of the Turks, the Othoman troops displayed one of the highest characteristics in which the Greek race has always been deficient—a sense of duty. They bravely defended the posts committed to their care, and success crowned their good conduct.

We have now given an impartial account of the faults of King Otho, and of the political vices of the Greek nation; we will proceed to enumerate the virtues of the people with equal impartiality. The greatest enemies of the Greeks cannot deny that they possess a high degree of patriotism. Whatever its origin may be, and however much it may be disfigured by vanity, it is a great virtue, and produces abundant good fruit. The sums of money which have been employed by private individuals in the construction of churches and school-houses over all Greece, the liberal donations they annually remit to Athens for advancing the cause of education, the munificent presents of books, medals, and philosophical instruments to the University and to the Observatory, and the immense contributions collected to aid the late impolitic attack on Turkey, all prove that, under a better government, and with good guidance, the patriotism of the Greeks might be rendered of great use in advancing the moral improvement and material prosperity of their country. But their patriotic feelings must be directed to the improvement of morality and religion before much good can be effected. The importance of private virtue is not sufficiently appreciated by the Greeks as a guarantee for political honesty. Individual character has more influence as an element of national strength and greatness, than the statesmen at Athens are inclined to believe. Without citing historical examples, we may remind them that a dispersed nation, mingled as the Greeks are with foreign races, is much more amenable to the public opinion of other nations, than a race pressed together in close geographical contiguity, and with which foreigners rarely communicate.

The industry of the Greeks is attested by their commercial activity, and by their laborious agricultural operations. The mass of the population, it is true, derives so little benefit from their toils, that we might pardon them if they were much idler than they are. Those who are most successful in commerce are compelled to expatriate themselves, which is always a great hardship to a Greek. Those who labour at the fields and dig the vineyards are unable to live in tolerable ease; for the want of roads prevents their finding a sale for their produce, and deprives them of the power of purchasing the luxuries they most eagerly desire.

Another honourable feature in Greek society is the good feeling displayed by the classes which live beyond the sphere of court and political influence. If a Greek is neither a courtier, a government official, nor a palikar, he is generally a tolerably honest man, and by no means a bad fellow, unless he be an Ionian or a Phanariot. We may mention an anecdote, which proves strongly the existence of virtue in the great mass of the labouring classes, even on that most delicate of all subjects, honesty in paying taxes. When the Bavarians arrived in Greece, they had not time to take any strong measures for enforcing a very strict collection of the national revenues. The probable amount was estimated at four millions, but the revenues of the preceding year had not reached that sum. As it was necessary to leave much to the conscience of the people, Mr Gladstone might have been satisfied with three millions and a half, with a few five-pound notes falling in from time to time from the remorse of defaulters. But the Greeks paid down seven millions within the year; and the experience of subsequent revenue returns proves that they must have paid the full amount to which government had any claim.

The state of the legal profession at Athens impresses strangers with a favourable opinion of the educated classes, when uncorrupted by the service of a corrupted central administration. The advocates form a body of well-educated men, whose professional gains render them independent of court influence, and whose talents and character give them great power over public opinion on judicial matters. Hence they exercise a salutary control over the minister of justice and the judges. This is doubly necessary, from the circumstance that the judges hold their offices only during the pleasure of King Otho, who has frequently removed those who have displeased him from office, or sent them into a dreary exile in some distant province in an inferior charge. The power of public opinion, as exercised by the bar, is consequently of great importance to insure some degree of equity in the courts, and control the general administration of justice in civil affairs; and it has been used in a manner highly honourable both to the Greek bar and to the national character.

There is another quality which the Greeks possess in a high degree, and which, if properly directed by a good government, would aid greatly in raising them from their present state of political degradation. This is their aptitude for public discussion. Concentrated as at present on state affairs, concerning which they are naturally quite ignorant, it becomes a mere waste of words. But if employed on their local and municipal affairs, concerning every detail of which they are fully informed, it would soon become the means of checking the corruptions of the court and of the central administration. This aptitude for public business enabled them to retain a large share in the local administration of their provinces under the Turks, and to organise the communal system to which we are inclined to attribute their success in the revolutionary war. The various central governments which followed one another in succession during the war with Turkey, never displayed much talent, nor enjoyed much influence over the people. The naval force, though admirably conducted by Miaoulis, was, in spite of the gallant deeds of Kanaris, inadequate to secure a decisive victory. The military force was without organisation, powerless for attack, and extremely ill-directed. No general in Greece, native or foreigner, displayed any great military talent. In the navy, on the contrary, the name of Hastings, who first employed hot shot and shells from ship artillery, ranks justly with the glorious names of Miaoulis and Kanaris. The war on land was entirely supported by the indomitable perseverance of the people. Their political and military leaders weakened their powers of resistance by their intrigues, avarice, and incapacity, but the energy of the people never failed. Glorious examples are innumerable, though Mr Tricoupi, the Greek historian of the war, has not the judgment to select them. Lord Byron describes their behaviour, in speaking of the Spaniards—

“Back to the struggle; baffled in the strife,

War! war! was still their cry—war, even to the knife!”

Messolonghi attests its truth.

The friends of Greece,—and she has still some sincere friends, in spite of all her faults—may look forward to her communal system and local attachments as a basis on which political order and national prosperity can be firmly established. But unless the restless activity of the people be usefully occupied in the management of their local affairs, they will employ it, as at present, injuriously, in profiting by the corruption of the central government. The want of a proper sphere of energy for a large class of the population is evidently preparing Greece for a series of revolutions. A representative government and a free press, linked to a centralised administration, without the control of a municipal organisation, tends naturally to revolution. To remove a parish grievance, it becomes necessary to overthrow a minister; and a very little experience in such countries reveals the secret, that it is easier to make a revolution than obtain a reform.

Such was the state of Greece when the French and English troops landed at the Piræus in the month of June, to prevent King Otho from throwing the country into a state of complete anarchy by his insane policy of assisting Russia. The Greeks, who had invaded Turkey, were already defeated, strong garrisons were already placed in all the Turkish fortresses on the Greek frontier, and a fleet of Turkish steamers commanded the Archipelago. The war had degenerated into a series of forays by land and piratical expeditions by sea, in which the Greeks carried off the cattle, and plundered the warehouses and barns of the subjects of the Porte. On the other hand, the Othoman government, unable to guard against these attacks, threatened to invade Greece, and occupy the richest islands of the Archipelago as a material guarantee for indemnity. The interference of the Allies was quite as necessary to defend the Greek people as the Turkish provinces. A change was of course immediately effected in the government. M. Alexander Mavrocordatos, then Greek minister at Paris, was appointed Prime Minister. The name of Mavrocordatos is well known to all who are acquainted with the history of the Greek revolution. His merits and defects are correctly stated in General Gordon’s excellent work. General Kalergy, another distinguished name in Greek history, was intrusted with the war department. M. George Psyllas, who for the last ten years has stood forward as the only consistent supporter of liberal measures and communal interests in the Senate, was named Minister of Religion and Public Instruction. He is an Athenian, and represented Athens at the first National Assembly, held at the commencement of the revolution, when the constitution of Epidaurus was framed. These three men are undoubtedly the best men in Greece for the offices committed to them. But their colleagues are not so well selected. Kanaris is Minister of the Marine—no braver nor more patriotic man breathes, but he is no better suited to be a minister than an archbishop. The other ministers are positively very ill chosen. M. Anastasios Londos, whose tergiversation and folly caused the quarrel with Great Britain in 1850, and the blockade of the Piræus, is Minister of Justice. He is as deficient in knowledge of law and judicial administration, as he has shown himself ignorant of the principles of political honesty, and destitute of sound judgment. The other individuals may be left nameless.

The only question of interest in Great Britain is, whether these ministers can do anything to improve the condition of the people, to establish a greater degree of security for life and property than now prevails, open new fields for commercial and agricultural industry, and make Greece an improving and prosperous country; for these changes alone can guarantee the tranquillity of the East.

The first step to be taken must be, to abolish the existing manner of collecting the tenth of the gross produce of the land, as a land-tax. There is no other means of getting quit of the numerous fiscal regulations which deprive the agricultural classes of the power of disposing of their labour in the way most conducive to their profit. The next thing is, to restore life and energy to the municipal system, and extend the independent sphere of action of the municipal authorities. The present Minister of the Interior is perhaps as well fitted to do this as he is to swallow a camel. The Greeks generally have shown that they are deficient in the temper and capacity requisite to conduct a central government. They still want the experience necessary to give ordinary men a sense of the value of political honesty, and there is no possibility of their gaining it in any school but that of their own municipal practice. If they are incurably addicted to peculation, they had better commit their acts of dishonesty at home, where the exact amount of their frauds can easily be ascertained, and is sure to be made public. Palikarism must be utterly rooted out. General Kalergy has promptly commenced the work which no man is so well able to complete. The army and navy must be reformed. A corps of pioneers must be formed to build bridges; steam-packets, and galleys with oars, must facilitate communications.

Now, is Alexander Mavrocordatos the man to do these things? We cannot say. He has always shown himself too much the slave of bureaucratic prejudices for us to feel any very firm confidence in his political views. Nevertheless, at this moment, he is the only Greek who possesses the political honesty and diplomatic experience necessary for preserving friendly relations with the allies of Turkey, and at the same time saving the national independence of his country: he has, therefore, our best wishes for his success.

The time is one of great difficulty. A mighty revolution has commenced in the East, which the Greek race has neither the energy nor the power to direct. If well and wisely governed, it may profit by the course of events; but if its national vanity force it into collision with any of the great actors in the scene, it may be brushed rudely aside, and sink back into the insignificant position it has held ever since the Franks conquered Constantinople and founded principalities in Greece in 1204. Hellenism and orthodoxy must yield to philanthropy and Christian civilisation. To us the future is dark; but of one thing we are assured, that the occupation of Greece by the allied troops was absolutely necessary to enable any ministry to commence the task of improvement in the kingdom of Greece.

STUDENT LIFE IN SCOTLAND.

PART II.

Exemption from the authority of the ordinary legal or correctional tribunals was one of the remarkable features of the ancient universities, and the relics of it which have come down almost to the present day in Scotland are very curious. The university was a state in itself, where the administrators of the ordinary authority of the realm had no more power than in a neighbouring independent republic. So jealously was this authority watched and fenced, that usually when the dispute lay between the liegemen of the university and those of the State—between gown and town—the university haughtily arrogated the authority over both. To be sure, it was very much the practice of the age to adjust rights and privileges by balancing one against another—by letting them fight out, as it were, every question in a general contest, and produce a sort of rude justice by the antagonism and balance of forces, just as in some Oriental states at this day the strangers of each nation have the privilege of living under their native laws; a method which, by pitting privilege against privilege, and letting the stronger bear down the weaker, saves the central government much disagreeable and difficult work in the adjustment of rights and duties.

So, in the middle ages, we had the ecclesiastical competing with the baronial interests, and the burghal or corporate with both. Nay, in these last there was a subdivision of interests, various corporations of craftsmen being subject to the authority of their own syndics, deans, or mayors, and entitled to free themselves from any interference in many of their affairs by the burghal or even the royal courts. Ecclesiastical law fought with civil law, and chancery carried on a ceaseless undermining contest with common law; while over Europe there were inexhaustible varieties of palatinates, margravates, regalities, and the like, enjoying their own separate privileges and systems of jurisprudence. But over this Babel of authorities, so complexly established in France that Voltaire complained of changing laws as often as he changed horses, what is conspicuous is the homage paid by all the other exclusive privileges to those of the universities, and the separation of these grand institutions by an impassable line of venerated privileges from the rest of the vulgar world. Thus, the State conceded freely to literature those high privileges for which the Church in vain contended, from the slaughter of Becket to the fall of Wolsey. In a very few only of the States nearest to the centre of spiritual dominion, could an exclusive ecclesiastical jurisdiction extending to matters both spiritual and temporal be asserted; and France, which acknowledged the isolated authority of the universities, bade a stern defiance to the claims of the priesthood.

It can hardly be said that, invested with these high powers, the universities bore their honours meekly. Respected as they were, they were felt to be invariably a serious element of turbulence, and a source of instability to their respective governments. In the affairs of the League, the Fronde, and the various other contests which, in former days, as in the present, have kept up a perpetual succession of conflicts in turbulent Paris, the position to be taken by the students was extremely momentous, but was not easily to be calculated upon; for these gentry imbibed a great amount both of restlessness and capriciousness along with their cherished prerogatives. During the centuries in which a common spirit pervaded the whole academic body, the fame of a particular university, or of some celebrated teacher in it, had a concentrating action over the whole civilised world, which drew a certain proportion of the youth of all Europe towards the common vortex. Hence, when we know that there were frequently assembled from one to ten thousand young men, adventurous and high-spirited, contemptuous of the condition of the ordinary citizen, and bound together by common objects and high exclusive privileges—well armed, and in possession of edifices fortified according to the method of the day—we hardly require to read history to believe how formidable such bodies must have proved.

An incident in the history of a wandering Scotsman, though but a petty affair in itself, illustrates the sort of feudal power possessed by the authorities of a university. Thomas Dempster, the author of Etruria Regalis, and of a work better known than esteemed in Scottish Biography, in the course of his Continental wanderings found himself in possession of power—as sub-principal, it has been said, of the college of Beauvais, in the university of Paris. Taking umbrage at one of the students for fighting a duel—one of the enjoyments of life which Dempster desired to monopolise to himself—he caused the young gentleman’s points to be untrussed, and proceeded to exercise discipline in the primitive dorsal fashion. The aggrieved youth had powerful relations, and an armed attack was made on the college to avenge his insults. But Dempster armed his students and fortified the college walls so effectively that he was enabled, not only to hold his post, but to capture some of his assailants, and commit them as prisoners to the belfry. It appears, however, that like many other bold actions this was more immediately successful than strictly legal, and certain ugly demonstrations in the court of the Chatelain suggested to Dempster the necessity of retreating to some other establishment in the vast literary republic of which he was a distinguished ornament—welcome wherever he appeared. He had come of a race not much accustomed to fear consequences or stand in awe of the opinion of society. His elder brother had, among other ethical eccentricities—or, as they would now be justly deemed, enormities—taken unto himself for wife his father’s cast-off mistress; and when the venerable parent, old Dempster of Muiresk, intimated his disapproval of the connection, he was fiercely attacked by a band of the Gordon Highlanders, headed by his hopeful son. Defeated and put to flight with some casualties, the heir hoisted the standard of an independent adventurer in Orkney, where, setting fire to the bishop’s palace, he rendered the surrounding atmosphere too hot for him. He made his final exit in the Netherlands; and his conduct there must have been, to say the least of it, questionable, since his affectionate brother, whose conduct in Paris is the more immediate object of our notice, records that his doom was to be torn to pieces by wild horses. In such a family, flagellation would have little chance of being condemned as a degrading punishment, inconsistent with the natural dignity of man. Indeed, to admit the plain honest truth, the records of the Scottish universities prove to us that this pristine discipline was inflicted on its junior members; and it is especially assigned in Glasgow as the appropriate punishment for carrying arms. Local peculiarities of costume gave facilities for it in some instances, which were not so readily afforded by the padded trunk-hose and countless ribbon-points of the Parisian “swells” of Louis XIII.’s day. The Parisian aristocracy took serious umbrage at the conduct of Dempster; and he had to take his vast learning and his impracticable temper elsewhere.

This is a digression; but Thomas Dempster is a good type of those Scotsmen who brought over to us, from their own energetic practice, the observance of the Continental notions of the independence and power of the universities. His experience was ample and varied. He imbibed a tinge of the Anglican system at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge. Besides serving and commanding in different colleges at Paris, he held office at Louvain, Rome, Douay, Tournay, Navarre, Toulouse, Montpelier, Pisa, and Bologna. A man who has performed important functions in all these places may well be called a citizen of the world. At the same time, his connections with them were generally of a kind not likely to pass from the memory of those who came in contact with him. He was a sort of roving Bentley, who, not contented with sitting down surrounded by the hostility of nearly all the members of one university, went about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he might attack and insult, and left behind him wherever he went the open wounds of his sword, or of his scarcely less direful pen, scattered thickly around him. He was one of those who, as Anthony Arnaud said of himself, are to expect tranquillity only in a removal from that sublunary world in which, like pieces of clockwork wound up, they are doomed to a ceaseless motion during their vitality. Thomas Dempster has many sins to answer for, and at this day the most conspicuous of them is the cool impudence wherewith, in his Historia Literaria Gentis Scotorum, he makes every man whose birthplace is not notorious, and whose name gives any excuse for dubiety, a Scotsman—as, for instance, Macrobius, who is claimed in virtue of his Mac, and in forgetfulness that his is a Greek name, signifying long-lifed. Yet peace to our countryman’s long dispersed ashes. He was a fine type of the fervent, energetic, brave, enduring national character; and the ungoverned waywardness of his career was an earnest of what his countrymen might achieve when a better day should dawn upon their poor distracted land.

But to return to the exclusive judicial authority of the universities, and the relics of the system found in Scotland,—we do remember that on the occasion of one of those great snowball emeutes, which at intervals of years make the Edinburgh students frantic, the police had entered the quadrangle of the College and captured some of their sacred persons. The occurrence was improved on by the students of Aberdeen—then in possession of an organ of no despicable ability, called the Aberdeen Magazine—who maintained that their own academical edifices were sacred from civic intrusion, and pointed the finger of scorn at their southern brethren, who submitted without rebellion to invasion by a body of glazed-hatted constables, under the leadership of a superintendent of police. It was said, in retaliation, that the reason why the universities of Aberdeen were exempt from the visitations of the police was because there was no force of police constables in the northern capital; and it was maintained that whenever they should make their appearance there, they would pay no more respect to the precincts of the university than to those of the old privileged religious houses—whose boundaries, sacred some centuries ago from civic intrusion, are still set forth in the title-deeds of burghal estates. We know not how the matter may really stand, but we suspect that the broad-bonneted and broad-shouldered gentry who now make so curiously conspicuous a police in the streets of Aberdeen, are not sufficiently acquainted with the privileges of Marischal College to pay them the due deference.

Still we do find curious practical relics of the privileges of the universities. On the 19th of June 1509, a general convocation—congregatio generalis—of the University of Glasgow was held in the chapter-house of the cathedral—the now venerable University edifices had not then been built. In that assembly solemn discussion was held upon certain momentous matters, the first and most important of which was a representation by the Chancellor and temporary Rector of the University that the exclusive jurisdiction and adjudication of causes—jurisdictio, causarumque cognitio—were falling into desuetude, to the great prejudice of the University, and the no small diminution of its valuable privileges. The next notice that one finds in the Records is a few years later—28th March 1522—but it is rather a conflict between the privileges of two of the universities than between the academic and the judicial authorities. In the general convocation of the University, Peter Alderstoun is accused of having served a citation from the Conservator of the Privileges (Conservator Priviligiorum) of the University of St Andrews on a certain Mr Andrew Smyth—the aristocratic spelling is older than we thought it had been in Scotland. The breach of privilege was aggravated by its occurring in the habitation of the Reverend David Kinghorn, Pensioner of Cross Raguel. The bailiff, or whatever else he might be, pleaded ignorance of the nature of the writ; but he was obliged, barehead, to seek pardon from the injured party. We find nothing more bearing on the question of the special university privileges, until, in the year 1670, a sudden and singularly bold attempt appears to be made for their revival, a court of justiciary being held by the University, and a student put on trial on a charge of murder. The weighty matter is thus introduced:—

“Anent the indytment given in by John Cumming, wryter in Glasgow, elected to be Procurator-Fiscal of the said University; and Andrew Wright, cordoner in Glasgow, neirest of kin to umquhile Janet Wright, servetrix to Patrick Wilson, younger, gairdner there, killed by the shot of ane gun, or murdered within the said Patrick his dwelling-house, upon the first day of August instant, against Robert Bartoun, son lawful of John Bartoun, gairdner in the said burgh, and student in the said University, for being guilty of the said horrible crime upon the said umquhile Janet.”[^[135]]

A jury was impannelled to try the question. The whole affair bears a suspicious aspect of being preconcerted to enable the accused to plead the benefit of acquittal; for no objection is taken on his part to the competency of the singular tribunal before which he is to be tried for his life; on the contrary, he highly approves of them as his judges, and in the end is pronounced not guilty. The respectable burgesses who acted as jurymen had, however, as it appears, their own grave doubts about this assumption of the highest judicial functions; and we find them in this curious little document, which we offer in full, expressing themselves with that cautious and sagacious scepticism which is as much a part of the national character as its ardour and enthusiasm.

“Patrick Bryce, chancellor, and remanent persons who passed upon the said inquest, before they gave in their verdict to the said court, desired that they might be secured for the future, lest they might be quarrelled at any time hereafter for going on, and proceeding to pass on an inquest of the like nature, upon ane warning by the officer of the said University; and that in regard they declared the case to be singular, never having occurred in the age of before to their knowledge, and the rights and privileges of the University not being produced to them to clear their privilege for holding of criminal courts, and to sit and cognosce upon crimes of the like nature; whereunto it was answered by the Rector and his assessors that they opponed their being content to pass upon the said inquest in initio, and their making faith without contraverting their privilege; but notwithstanding thereof, for their satisfaction and ex abundanti gratia, they declared themselves and their successors in office enacted, bound, and obliged for their warrandice of all cost, skaith, danger, and expenses they or ane or other of them should sustain or incur through the passing upon the said inquest, or whilk could follow thereupon, through the said University their wanting of their original rights or writs for clearing to them the privilege and jurisdiction in the like cases. Whereupon the said Patrick Bryce, as Chancellor, for himself, and in name and in behalf of the haill remanent members of the said inquest, asked acts of court.”[^[136]]

Though we are not aware of any instance in Scotland where the academic tribunals have arrogated, since the Reformation, so high a power, it is not difficult to find other instances where exemption has been claimed, even at a later period, from the ordinary powers that be. Thus the Glasgow Records of the year 1721 bear that—

“The faculty, being informed that some of the magistrates of Glasgow, and particularly Bailie Robert Alexander, has examined two of the members of the University—viz., William Clark and James Macaulay, students in the Greek class—for certain crimes laid to their charge some time upon the month of February last, and proceeded to sentence against these students, contrary to and in prejudice of the University and haill members, do therefore appoint Mr Gershom Carmichael, &c., to repair to the said magistrates of Glasgow, and particularly Bailie Alexander, and demand the cancelling of the said sentence, and protest against the said practice of the said bailie or any of the magistrates for their said practice, and for remeid of law as accords.”[^[137]]

It was the principle, not the persons—the protection of their privileges, not the impunity of their students—that instigated the faculty on this occasion, since in their next minute they are found visiting William Clark and James Macaulay with punishment for heavy youthful offences. We offer no apology for quoting, on such an occasion, these scraps from technical documents. It appears to us that when they are not oppressively long, or too professional for ordinary comprehension, there is no other way of affording so distinct a notion of any very remarkable social peculiarity, such as we account the exclusive liability of the members of universities to their own separate tribunals to have been.

Although the Scottish universities never boasted of the vast concourse of young men of all peoples, nations, and languages, which sometimes flocked to the Continental schools, and thus with their great privileges created a formidable imperium in imperio—yet naturally there has existed more or less of a standing feud between the citizen class and the student class. The records before us show repeated contests by the authorities of universities, against an inveterate propensity in the students to wear arms, and to use them. The weapons prohibited by the laws of King’s College, Aberdeen, are so varied and peculiar that we cannot venture to do their Latin names into English, and can only derive, from the terms in which they are denounced, a general notion how formidable a person a student putting the law at defiance must have been. But for the difference in the Latinity, one might suppose himself reading Strada’s celebrated account of the weapons in the Spanish Armada.[^[138]]

From some incidental causes, a slight tinge of the desperado habits, indicated by such restrictions, lingered around the Scottish universities, and perhaps was most loth to depart from that northernmost institution to which the prohibitions specially applied. The main cause of their continuance may be attributed to the exigencies of the anatomical classes which gradually attached themselves to the schools of medicine. In obtaining subjects there was a perpetual contest with unmitigable prejudices; and as in the smaller university towns there were few or no people who followed systematically the trade of the resurrectionist, the students had to help themselves. It needed but the very fact of their having an occasional “subject” in the dissecting-room to expose them to an odious reputation, which no argument about the blessed results of the healing art, and the necessity of studying it in the structure of the human frame, could in the slightest degree mitigate. The feud thus caused was of a kind which widened as the progress of scientific acquirement enlarged the study of anatomy; and it seemed as if a permanent and deadly hostility against the progress of an essential science were daily deepening and widening, until public wrath, concentrated and accumulated, might be expected at last to burst on the devoted pursuit, and annihilate it. Though the students of anatomy were generally among those who had passed through the ordinary curriculum of studies, and no longer wore the distinguishing scarlet robe, yet their younger brethren were, not entirely without cause, mixed up in their misdeeds. Horrible stories of their waylaying children, and of their clapping plasters on the mouths of grown men met in lonely byways, which stopped the breath, and instantaneously extinguished life, were greedily believed, and founded tales capable of superseding Bluebeard and The One-handed Monk at the winter chimney-corner. Young lads in their early blushing scarlet were sometimes savagely assaulted, as if the poor innocents were ghouls in search of the horrible prey peculiar to their order. The public frenzy reached its climax on the revelation of the crimes of Burke and Hare. It almost as suddenly collapsed after the passing of the Anatomy Act, which removed from dissection that odium which previous legislation had factitiously imparted to it as part of the punishment of murder, and accompanied the change with special facilities for the obtainment of subjects. Hence more than twenty years have passed since the habits of our students were tainted by this incidental peculiarity, and its social effect must now be matter of tradition.

It can easily, however, be believed that the revolting preliminary which the votary of science had to undergo must have had an influence on his habits very far from propitious. The nocturnal expedition was occasionally joined by those who had not the excuse of scientific ardour, and thus the influence of the practice spread beyond the limits of the medical profession. The mysterious horrors surrounding the reputation of such a pursuit were not without a certain fascination to the young gownsmen, and some of them were supposed placidly to cultivate rather than suppress charges which would have seriously alarmed their more knowing and practical seniors. Though there was thus a good deal of exaggeration and boasting both from without and from within, yet the practice did exist among the senior students, while at the same time an occasional junior, approved for his boldness and discretion, might be admitted to act a subordinate part in a “resurrectionising affair.” Possibly he, if not the others, might find it necessary to employ some stimulant to brace his nerves for the formidable work in hand. Thus the adventure which provided the theatre of anatomy with the means of keeping a few students at hard work in one of the most important departments of human knowledge, had probably occasioned more than one night of fierce dissipation, and produced scenes which would have considerably astonished the good old aunts, deprecating the exhausting labours of their virtuous nephews in the nasty hospitals and that horrid dissecting-room.

The excesses which concentrated themselves around this solemn and cheerless pursuit, ramified themselves into others of a more fantastic and cheerful character. Probably it is all changed now; but they are not very old men who remember how the smaller university towns were subject to fantastic superficial revolutions. Trees, gates, railings, street lamps, summer-houses, shop signs, and other “accessories of the realty,” as lawyers call them, disappearing or changing places like the shifting of the side-slips in a theatre. Perhaps there may even be alive some who have witnessed or participated in such divertisements. Is there any one who will admit participation in that transmutation which scandalised the bailie, by exhibiting his suburban mansion under the auspices of the national achievement, as “licensed to sell spirits, porter, and ale,” just at the moment when the licentiate of the Red Lion was lamenting the disappearance of his insignia? Are none of those virtuous youths alive, who called next day to express their horror of the deed, and hold confidential communion with the bailie, thus obtaining access to his arsenal, and receiving the comfortable secret information—valuable for future conduct—that the blunderbuss, the musket, and the brace of pistols, were loaded with powder only, “but he wad warrant the scounrels wad get a fleg”? Who was it, we wonder, that, on the myrmidons of justice coming to his chambers, under the well-warranted suspicion that he possessed an extensive and varied collection of shop signs, had recourse to his incipient Scripture knowledge by an apt quotation in reference to those who seek what they do not succeed in obtaining? Is it probable that in any private neuks in old dwelling-houses there may exist relics of those prized museums not acquired without toil and risk—and exhibited with much caution only to trusted friends—which consisted mainly of watchmen’s rattles and battered lanterns? Lives there yet one of that laborious group, who wished to illuminate the mansion of Professor Blanc in proper style, and to that effect carried out a cluster of street lamps, and planted them all alight in his garden, so encountering labour and risk with no better reward than a reflection on the professor’s puzzled countenance when he should awaken and behold the phenomenon? N.B. Street lamps in those days were fed with oil, and were supported on wooden posts, which it was not difficult for a couple of strong youths to uproot.

But we are shocking the virtue and civilisation of the age by such queries. They hint at practices which we believe to be entirely eschewed by the superior class of young gentlemen who now frequent our universities. If we have created a throb of terror in an amiable parent’s breast, we humbly beg his pardon. He may take our word for it that his hopeful son is incapable of such pranks. This is mainly an antiquarian article, and the matter contained in it belongs more or less to the past, and is founded on document or tradition.

The semi-monastic foundations by which the students live under the discipline of colleges or halls, and assemble together at a common table, are indissolubly connected in English notions with the idea of a university. Yet the system arose as an adjunct to the original universities, and, as late inquirers have shown, the parasites have so overrun the parent stem that its original character is scarcely perceptible beneath their more luxuriant growth. The origin of these institutions is simple enough. When the great teachers brought crowds of young men together from all parts of Europe, the primary question was how they were to obtain food and shelter? and a second arose when these needs were supplied—how could any portion of the discipline of the parental home be administered to them among strangers? Certain privileges were given to the houses inhabited by the students, and streets and quarters sprung up for their accommodation, as we now see the rows of red-tiled cottages sprout forth like lichens around the tall chimney of a new manufactory. To prevent fluctuation, and preserve the academic character wherever it had once established itself, it was a frequent regulation that the houses once inhabited by students could be let to no other person so long as the rents were duly paid. We find traces of this expedient in the records of Glasgow, where there seems to have been great difficulty in accommodating the students of the infant university, on account of the extreme smallness of the town. Since the house once occupied by the student was thenceforth dedicated to his order, speculators were induced to build entirely with a view to the accommodation of a certain number of young men living in celibacy, and they naturally imitated the example set them in the construction of monasteries. The edifice and its use thus suggested something like the monastic discipline—and, indeed, an establishment filled with young men, having their separate dormitories and common table, yet without any head or system of discipline among them, would have been a social anomaly of the most formidable character. The university required to give its sanction to the well ordering of the separate institutions thus rising around it. At the same time munificent patrons of learning left behind them endowments for founding such institutions, indicating at the same time the method in which the founders desired that they should be governed, and appointing a portion of the funds to form stipendiary allowances to office-bearers. So arose those great colleges and halls which in England have buried the original constitution of the university beneath them.

In the great Continental universities which contained separate colleges, these were more strictly under the central control. In Scotland, the wealth at the disposal of the academic institutions, and the numbers attending them, were never sufficiently great to encourage the rise of separate bodies, either independent or subordinate. The system of monastic residence and a common table was adopted under the authority of the university, but it is remarkable that while so many of the fundamental features of the original institution have been preserved, this subsidiary arrangement has totally disappeared. The indications of its existence, however, as they are preserved in the records, have naturally considerable interest as vestiges of a social condition which has passed from the earth.

In the Glasgow Records we have, of date 1606, a contract with Andrew Henderson touching the Boarding of the Masters and Bursars, commencing thus: “At Glasgow, the twenty-twa day of October, the year of God J^m VJ^c and aucht yeares: it is appoyntit and aggreit betwix the pairties following, viz., Mr Patrick Schairp, Principal of the College of Glasgow, and Regentes thairof, with consent of the ordinar auditouris of the said College compts, undersubscrivand on the ane part, and Andro Hendersoun, Burges of the said burgh on the uther part, in manner following.” Having afforded this initial specimen of the document, we shall take the liberty of somewhat modifying the spelling of such parts of the “manner following,” in quoting such portions of it as seem by their curious character to demand notice; and herein we may observe that we follow the example of a judicious Quaker we had once the pleasure of being made known to, who, after a solicitous desire to know the Christian name of his new acquaintance, with a few preliminary thee’s and thou’s—as much as to say, you see the set I belong to—afterwards ran into the usual current of conversation very much like a man of this world. Well, the document, with much precision, continues to say:—

“The manner of the board shall be this: At nine hours upon the flesh days—viz., Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—the said Andrew shall prepare to the said masters, and others that pay as they pay, ane soup of fine white bread, or ane portion of cold meat, as best may be had, with some dry bread and drink. At twelve hours the said Andrew shall cover ane table in the hall of the said College, and shall serve them in brose, skink, sodden beef, and mutton, the best in the market, rosted mutton or veel, as the commodity of the season of the year shall serve, with a fowl, or the equivalent thereof, with good wheat bread, the best in the market, without scarcity, and ‘gud staill aill, aucht or ten dayis auld, that sall be bettir nor the haill aill in the town,’ and at supper suchlike. And on fish days the said Andrew shall furnish every ane in the morning ‘ane callour fresch eg, with sum cauld meit or milk and breid, and sum dry breid and drink; at noone, kaill and eggis, herring, and thrie course of fische, give thai may be had, or the equivalent thairof in breid and milk, fryouris with dry breid as of befoir,’ and at supper suchlike. The mess of the bursars, which immediately follows, must be given literatim: ‘On the fleshe dayis, in the morning, everie ane of thame, ane soup of ait breid and ane drink; at noone, broois with ane tailye of fresche beif, with sufficient breid and aill to drink; at evening, on the said manner, ane tailye of fresche beif to everie meiss. On fische dayis, breid and drink as in the flesche dayis; at disjoone, ane eg; at noone, eggis, herring, and ane uther course; at evening sicklyke.’”[^[139]]

Probably such a bill of fare may dispel some notions about the sordid living of our ancestors, and the privations especially of those who dedicated themselves to a scholastic life. The existence of meagre days—or fish days, as they are called—in the year 1608, suggests explanations which we have not to offer. It would almost appear, however, that, at least in the dietary of the superior class, a fish day was one in which fish was added to a comfortable allotment of meat, instead of being substituted for it. Another contract occurs in the year 1649, varying little from “the said Andrew’s,” except in the addition of a few luxuries. The mess to be laid in the hall for dinner is to be “broth, skink, sodden beef, and mutton, the best in the market, with roasted mutton, lamb, veal, or hudderin, as the season of the year shall serve, with wheat bread and good stale ale; and at supper suchlike, with a capon or hen, or the equivalent.” The fish days continue to be distinguished less by the diminution of flesh—since there is to be two roasts in the day—than by the addition of fish. At supper there are to be sweetmeats and “stoved plumdamas,” which may be interpreted stewed prunes. Another article there introduced is called “stamped kaile.” The application of the participle is new to us, though, as every one ought to know, kail means broth, or what the French call potage; and a critic in such matters suggests that the word stamped may refer to the mashing of the materials. In the earlier of the contracts which we have referred to, the board-money was—for the master’s table, £30 per quarter, (Scots money, of course); and for the bursars’, £16. 13s. 4d. The value of money had so far risen that in the next period the sums were respectively £46 and £24. The master’s table was frequented by the young aristocracy of Scotland, apparently in as ample a proportion as those of England are now to be found at Oxford and Cambridge. Thus, in an inventory of occupied rooms, apparently in one floor, the aristocratic element has a decided preponderance in the nomenclature: “Lord James’s chamber, Francis Montgomerie’s chamber, Kilmarnock’s chamber, Richard Elphinstone’s chamber, George Smyth’s chamber, James Fleming’s chamber, Joseph Gill’s chamber, James Simson’s chamber.”[^[140]]

It is not perhaps generally known that the practice of a common table was continued in St Andrews down to about the year 1820. In evidence before the University Commission in 1827, Dr Hunter stated that “there were two public tables; one of them, the higher table, was attended only by boarders, and by the bursars on the Ramsay mortification; the board was high, and the entertainment altogether was better: the other was the bursars’ table. The college was induced to contract with an economist or provisor to supply both tables; and if the boards fell short, or if the expense increased from the articles of subsistence being dearer than ordinary in any year, or exceeded the amount allowed by the contract, the College often compensated to him that loss.” Having thus offered some notices of the collegiate system in its full vitality, and traced it to its last lurking-place, we cannot help giving a place to the significant reflections which have occurred to the editor of the Glasgow Records on the extinction of the system.

“In all the universities in Scotland, the old collegiate life, so favourable for scholastic discipline, has been abandoned. Perhaps the increasing numbers rendered living in college under the masters’ eye inconvenient; though some modification of the systems of living in the universities and the great schools of England might meet the difficulty. The present academic life in Scotland brings the master and the student too little in contact, and does not enable the teacher to educate in that which is more important than scholastic learning, nor to study and train the temper, habits, and character. If the alternative which has been chosen inferred that the student enjoyed the benefit of parental or domestic care when out of the lecture-room, the change might be less objectionable; but when we observe the crowds of young men brought from distant homes to our universities, living at large and altogether uncontrolled, except in the classroom, we may look back with some regret to the time when the good regent of a university, living among his pupils, came in the parent’s place as well as the master’s.

“But it was not only the discipline of the university that was benefited by the collegiate life. The spirit of fellowship that existed among young men set apart for the common object of high education, was on the whole favourable, though liable to exaggeration, and often running into prejudice. Nearly all that common feeling of the youth of a great university is gone. The shreds of it that are preserved by the dress, scarcely honoured in the crowded streets of a great city, and the rare occurrence of a general meeting of students, serve only to suggest to what account it might be turned for exciting the enthusiasm and raising the standard of conduct among the youth of Scotland. If such collections as the present, in revealing the old machinery of the scholar life, tend in any degree to the renewal of the bond of common feeling among the younger students, and of sympathy with their teachers, they will not be useless.”

We were led towards the vestiges of the collegiate system by the observation, that while in England it had overshadowed and concealed the original outline of the universities, it had in Scotland disappeared, leaving the primitive institutions in their original loneliness. When we contemplate, with this recollection, the decayed remains of the older universities, it will be seen that they were not so inferior in wealth and magnificence to those of our neighbours, as the mass of collegiate institutions which these have gathered around the primitive university might lead one to suppose. Undoubtedly Christ Church and King’s Chapel are fine buildings; but the remains of the chapels of St Salvator at St Andrews, and of King’s College in Aberdeen, are not to be despised. Of the former, alas! there are little more than the truncated walls and buttresses, with here and there a decoration to show what the edifice was when it stood forth in all its symmetry. Near the end of last century a suspicion was entertained that the roof was decayed and would fall. So groundless was the supposition, that after the workmen who were removing it had gone too far to recede, they found that they could not take it to pieces, but must first weaken its connection with the wall plates, and let it fall plump down. Of course it smashed to atoms nearly every interior ornament, and it just left enough of the marble tomb of its founder, Bishop Kennedy, to let us see what a marvellous group of richly-cut Gothic work it must have originally been. Within it there were found, among other ornaments, a heavy silver mace of Parisian workmanship, wonderful as the tomb itself for the quaint intricacy of its workmanship.

The chapel of King’s College has fared better. Like a modest northern wild-flower, its beauties are hidden from the common gaze of the peering tourist, but to the adepts who examine them they are of no ordinary character. From the difficulty of working the indigenous granite, and the cost of importing freestone, the Gothic builders of this district seem to have been frugal in their stone decorations, so that the glory of King’s College consists in its interior wood-work of carved oak, worked in architectural forms, like fairy masonry. We question if there is anywhere a collection of specimens of Gothic fretwork more varied and delicate.

It is difficult to conceive anything more depictive of high and daring educational aspirations than the planting of this beautiful edifice in so distant a spot, as the place of worship of those students who were to flock to it from the wild hills and dreary moors of the north. Its founder was Bishop Elphinston, an ardent scholar, a traveller, and a frequenter of the Continental universities, who might rather have been expected, had he followed the dictates of his refined tastes instead of his conscientious convictions, and his zeal for the spread of learning, to have spent his days among the Continental scholars, than to have carried their learning across the Grampians. The character of the foundation may be derived from the following abstract of the Bull of erection of 1495, prefixed to the Spalding edition of the Fasti Aberdonienses.

“Bull of Pope Alexander VI., issued on the petition of James IV., King of Scots, which sets forth that the north parts of his kingdom were inhabited by a rude, illiterate, and savage people, and therefore erecting in the City of Old Aberdeen a ‘Studium Generale’ and University, as well for theology, canon and civil law, medicine, and the liberal arts, as for any other lawful faculty, to be there studied and taught by ecclesiastical and lay Masters and Doctors, in the same manner as in the ‘Studia Generalia’ of Paris and Bologna, and for conferring on deserving persons the degrees of Bachelor, Licentiate, Doctor, Master, and all other degrees and honourable distinctions; conferring on William, Bishop of Aberdeen, and his successors, the office of Chancellor, empowering them, or, during the vacancy of the See, the Vicar deputed by the Chapter, to confer these degrees in all the faculties on such well-behaved scholars as shall, after due examination, be deemed fit by the Rector, Regents, Masters, or Doctors of the faculty in which the degree is sought; granting to such graduates full power of teaching in this or any other studium, without any other examination; giving power to the Chancellor or his Vicar, the Rector for the time, and the resident Doctors, with the assistance of a competent number of Licentiates in each faculty, and of circumspect scholars of the said studium, and of two of the King’s Councillors at the least, to make statutes for the good government thereof; and conferring on the students and graduates thereof all the privileges and immunities of any other University. 10 February, 1494–5.”

The character of the institution, and the extent to which it embodied the matured practices of the foreign universities, will be more amply understood by a document, dated a few years later, in the shape of a collegiate endowment by the Bishop, applicable, along with the foundation of a certain Duncan Scherar, to thirty-six members.

“Of the foresaid thirty-six persons, five to be Masters of Arts and Students of Theology, exercising the functions of the priesthood, and daily acting as readers and Regents in Arts, each having a stipend of ten pounds, four of them being paid out of the lands and feu-duties assigned by the Bishop, and the fifth out of the foundation of the foresaid Duncan Scherar; thirteen to be scholars or poor clerks, fit for instruction in speculative knowledge, and whose parents cannot support them at scholastic exercises, twelve of them having each a stipend of twelve merks from the revenues of the said churches, with chambers and other college conveniences, and the thirteenth a stipend of five pounds from the foundation of the said Duncan Scherar; the five Students of Theology to be supported for seven years until they are licensed, and one of these, of sweet temper, to be selected by the Principal and Sub-principal to read and teach poetry and rhetoric to the other Students; and the Students in Arts to be supported for three years and a half until made Masters; at the end of which periods, these Students of Theology and Arts, whether graduated or not, to be removed, and others instituted in their stead; the Principal, Canonist, Civilist, Mediciner, Sub-principal, and Grammarian, to be nominated by the Bishop and his successors, Chancellors of the University; the Students of Theology to be admitted by the Chancellor, and nominated by the Rector, Dean of Faculty of the Arts, Principal and Sub-principal; and the thirteen Scholars to be admitted in like manner, and nominated by the above parties and the Regent of Arts; of the thirteen Students in Arts, the two first to be of the name of Elphinstoun, who, after being graduated in Arts, shall be admitted among the Students of Theology, and three to be from the parishes of Aberlethnot, Glenmyk, Abirgerny, and Slanis: all the members to have their residence within the College, except the Canonist, Mediciner, Grammarian, and Regent, who are to have manses without the College; the Principal and the Students of Theology, after being made Bachelors, to read Theology every reading-day, and to preach six times a year to the people; and the Students, before being made Bachelors, to preach by turns in Latin in the Chapter of the College on every Lord’s day and holiday throughout the year before all the students; the Regents in Arts to give instruction in the liberal sciences, like the Regents of the University of Paris; and the Canonist, Civilist, and Mediciner to read in proper attire every reading-day, after the manner observed in the Universities of Paris and Orleans; the Rector or (if he be a member of the College) the Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and the Official of Aberdeen, to visit the College once a year, and to mark defects in the persons and property of the College, an account of which shall be written by four persons, deputed for that effect, and presented to the Chancellor, who, with their advice, shall administer correction; a Procurator to be selected from the College by the Principal, Canonist, Civilist, Sub-principal, Cantor, and Sacrist, and to have for his pains, in addition to his stipend, five merks; eight Prebendaries and four youths, accomplished in singing, to be in the College, and to celebrate matins, vespers, and mass, in surplices and black copes, in the presence of the members of the college; the first of these Prebendaries to be called the Cantor, and the second the Sacrist, each with a stipend of twenty merks; the other prebendaries (from among whom the Chancellor must appoint one who is a proficient on the organ) having sixteen merks, and each of the youths five merks. 17 September 1505.”

It is curious to mark how distinctly the traces of its French origin have remained in the northern University. In addition to some instances in the preceding article, it is worthy of notice that the Students, and even the common people, are still familiar with such words as Bejant and Magistrand.

Can our chubby friend there, who blushes as brightly as the fresh scarlet gown in which he has gone forth to attract the gaze, more spiteful than admiring, of the untogaed schoolfellows whom he has left behind him, tell why he is called a Bejant?

Ducange tells us that Beanus means a new student who has just come to the academy, and cites the statutes of the University of Vienna, prohibiting all persons from cheating or overcharging the new-comers, who are called Beani, or assailing them with other injuries or contumelies. Lambecius, in the Epistolæ Obscurorum, finds Beanus in a monogram—“Beanus est animal nesciens vitam studiosorum.” We come nearer the mark, however, in France, the Bejauni frequently occurring in Bulleus’s massive History of the University of Paris. Thus, in the year 1314, a statute of the University is passed on the supplication of a number of the inexperienced youths, qui vulgo Bejauni appellebantur. Their complaint is an old and oft-repeated tale, common to freshmen, greenhorns, griffins, or by whatever name the inexperienced, when alighting among old stagers, are recognised. The statute of the Universitas states that a variety of predatory personages fall on the newly-arrived bejaune, demanding a bejaunica, or gratuity, to celebrate a jocundus adventus; that when it is refused, they have recourse to insults and blows; that there is brawling and bloodshed in the matter, and thus the discipline and studies of the University are disturbed by the pestiferous disease. It is thence prohibited to give any bejaunica, except to the bejaun’s companions living in the house with him, whom he may entertain if he pleases; and if any efforts are made by others to impose on him, he is solemnly enjoined to give secret information to the procurators and the deans of the faculties.[^[141]]

The etymology attributed to the word bejaune is rather curious. It is said to mean yellow neb—béc jaune—in allusion to the physical peculiarity of unfledged and inexperienced birds, to whose condition those who have just passed from the function of robbing their nests to the discipline of a university are supposed to have an obvious resemblance. “Ce mot,” says the Trevaux, “a été dit par corruption de béc jaune, per métaphore de oisons et autres oiseaux niais qui ont le béc jaune—ce qu’on a appliqué aux apprentis en tous les arts et sciences.—Rudis Tiro Imperitus.” Yet in the same dictionary there are such explanations about the use of the words begayer, to stutter, and begayement, stuttering, as might, one would think, have furnished a more obvious origin than the ornithological. “Les enfans,” we are told, “begayent en apprenant à parler. Ceux qui ont la langue grasse begayent toute leur vie. Quand un homme a bû beaucoup il commence a begayer.” But it is used also figuratively: “Des choses qu’on a peine d’expliquer, ou de faire entendre—Ce commentateur n’a fait que begayer en voulant expliquer l’Apocalypse.” Whatever were its remote origin, however, the term was in full use in the University of Paris, whence it passed to Aberdeen. We have now shown our scarlet friend the reason for his being called a Bejant, but why the word should be corrupted into Benjie, and still more why he should be called a “Buttery benjie,” are etymological problems which we no more pretend to solve, than the reason why his fellow freshman at Heidelberg is called a Leathery fox.

We could notice several other relics of ancient university phraseology still clinging round the usages of our humble institutions in Scotland. The Lauration is still preserved as the apt and classical term for the ceremony of admission to a degree; and even Dr Johnson, little as he respected any Scottish form, especially when it competed with the legitimate institutions of England, has given in his dictionary the word Laureation, with this interpretation attached thereto: “It denotes in the Scottish universities the act or state of having degrees conferred, as they have in some of them a flowery crown, in imitation of laurel among the ancients.”

Elsewhere we are honoured in the same work with a more brief but still a distinctive notice. Among the definitions of “Humanity,” after “the nature of man,” “humankind,” and “benevolence,” we have “Philology—grammatical studies; in Scotland, humaniores literæ.” The term is still as fresh at Aberdeen as when Maimbourg spoke of Calvin making his humanities at the College of La Mark. The “Professor of Humanity” has his place in the almanacs and other official lists as if there were nothing antiquated or peculiar in the term, though jocular people have been known to state to unsophisticated Cockneys and other foreign persons, that the object of the chair is to inculcate on the young mind the virtue of exercising humanity towards the lower animals; and we believe more than one stranger has conveyed away, in the title of this professorship, a standing illustration of the elaborate kindness exercised towards the lower animals in the United Kingdom, and in Scotland especially.

A curious incidental matter calls us back to King’s College and its connection with Paris. In his visit to Scotland in 1633, Charles I. observed, or learned from his adviser, Archbishop Laud, who had more prying eyes, that the ancient formalities of the Scottish universities had fallen into disuse. It appears that his hopes of a restoration were chiefly centred in Aberdeen, where he knew that the Presbyterian spirit had its loosest hold, and he resolved to commence the work there. A curious royal letter to Patrick Forbes, Bishop of Aberdeen, and Chancellor of the University, drops mysterious hints about having “observed some things which we think fit to put in better ordour, which we shall do as we shall find cause.” But in the mean time there is a very strong reprehension of the unacademic practice of sending the students “to the parish churches to service and sermon, and there sit promiscuously with the rest of the audience, which loses much of the honour and dignity of the Universities.”

The cause of University restoration, after such a kingly hint, naturally received much local support; and at a sort of convocation of the University dignitaries at the Bishop’s Palace on the 19th of December 1634, some investigations were made to obtain materials “for re-establishing of this University in her jurisdiction, conservatorie, and privileges, according to her ancient rights granted thereanent.” Among the other methods of inquiry, there is sent “a special letter to our native countryman and special good friend, Dr William Davidson, Doctor of Physic, and resident in Paris in France, requesting him to deal, in name of the said University of Aberdeen, with the rector and University of Paris, for a just and perfect written double of the rights and privileges of that University of Paris, for the better clearing and setting in good order the rights and privileges belonging to this University of Aberdeen.”[^[142]]

A letter from Archbishop Laud is read to the meeting, showing that he was in communication with the restorers. “For the business which you have recommended to me,” he says, “Dr Gordon hath been with me, and delivered me a copy of all those things which he hath to move the king. I have already spoken with his majesty about them, and shall continue to do him all the kindness I can to help on his despatch, and to show all the favour I can to the University.”[^[143]]

It would be interesting to know more than the printed documents show us of the projects then under discussion. Laud was a meddler with many things—in Scotland, unfortunately, with at least one too many. His activity in university matters is sufficiently known to fame in the Laudeian Code of Oxford. But it has been the fate of that system to be charged with a subversion of the fundamental principles of the English universities, while in Aberdeen the movement which its author seems to have directed was towards the restoration of the old Parisian model. The apparent difference, however, has been probably caused by unintended practical results in England,—the object was doubtless the same in both cases.

Among the projects of King Charles with which his adviser of course interfered, was the union of King’s and Marischal Colleges in Aberdeen. In fact, they are not only two colleges, but, in the literal sense of the term, two universities; and thus, according to the statistical distribution of these institutions, Aberdeen used to appear as well supplied with the commodity as all England. Between the two establishments, little more than a mile apart, there is, indeed, unfortunately, a gulf, wider than the mileage between Oxford and Cambridge. The one was founded before, the other after, the Reformation; and there were elements so distinct and repulsive in the spirit of the foundations, that nothing but great coercive force could bring the two into union.

King Charles, who was too apt to suppose that fundamental changes could be made by an Act of Visitation, or an Order in Council, professed to unite them, and called them, in conjunction, the Caroline University. But in reality they never were chemically fused into one. On the contrary, the documents connected with the nominal union, which at this juncture may perhaps be read with some interest, lead one to suppose that the two bodies of office-bearers could hardly have met round the same table without kicking each other’s shins. The senior institution exhibits itself as overbearing and dictatorial—the junior as sensitive to every slight. All latent hatreds seem to have sprung into vivid life on the command to be united in peace. The juveniles appear to have taken the matter up, and each college passes a law requiring that its students shall not insult the professors of the other,—apparently with the same effect, if not intention, as the Irish injunction not to duck the bailiff in the horse-pond. We wonder if the same thing is to be repeated in this day. We have heard it, indeed, maintained from a very grave authority, that nearly all things are possible save the fusion of these institutions; that it may have been easy to unite England and Scotland, or Great Britain and Ireland, but that the eternal laws of the universe show it to be impossible to unite the King’s College and University of Aberdeen with the Marischal College and University thereof.

CIVILISATION.—THE CENSUS.

My dear Eusebius,—If you wonder at the speculations with which I have amused myself and bewildered all within reach of inquiry, remember what a celebrated phrenologist said, that I should never make a philosopher: you remarked, So much the better, for that the world had too many already. I am not sure that I was not piqued; and, owing a little spite against these unapproachable superiors—philosophers—have rather encouraged a habit of posing them; and finding so many in this my experience inferior to the common-sense portion of mankind, I amuse myself with them, and treat them as monkeys, now and then throwing them a nut to crack a little too hard for them. Wry faces break no syllogisms, so we laugh, and they gravitate in philosophy. What is civilisation? Is that a nut?—a very hard one, indeed. I, at least, cannot tell what it is, in what it consists, or how this summum bonum is to be attained; but I am no philosopher. I have taken many a one by the button, and plunged him head foremost into the chaos of thought, and seen him come out flushed with the suffocation of his dark bewilderment. Less ambitious persons will scarcely stay to answer the question—What is civilisation? The careless, who cannot answer it, laugh, and think they win in the game of foolishness. Perhaps no better answer can be given, and the laughing philosopher, after all, may be as wise as the speaking one. A neighbour, who had been acquainted with the money markets, told me he did not exactly know what it was, but he thought its condition was indicated by the Three-per-cent Consols. An economist of the new school, who happened to be on a visit to him, preferred as a test “American bread-stuffs.” He argued that such stuffs were the staff of life, supported life, and were, therefore, both civilisation and the end and object of civilisation. My neighbour’s son Thomas, a precocious youth of thirteen years of age, stepped forward, and said civilisation consisted in reading, writing, and arithmetic: upon this, a parish boy, the Inspector’s pet of the National School, said with rival scorn, “You must go a great deal farther than that—it is knowledge, and knowledge is knowing the etymologies of cosmography and chronology.” I asked the red-faced plethoric Farmer Brown;—“What’s what!” quoth he, with a voice of thunder, and, like a true John Bull, stalked off in scornful ignorance. My next inquiry was of your playful little friend, flirting Fanny of the Grove, just entering her fifteenth year. “What a question!” said she, and her very eyes laughed deliciously—“the latest fashions from Paris, to be sure.” Make what you please of it, Eusebius; put all the answers into the bag of your philosophy, and shake them well together, your little friend’s will have as good a chance as any of coming up with a mark of truth upon it. The people that can afford to invent fashions must have a large freedom from cares. There must be classes who neither toil nor spin, yet emulate in grace, beauty, and ornament the lilies of the field. If you were obliged to personify civilisation, would you not, like another Pygmalion, make to yourself a feminine wonder, accumulate upon your stature every grace, vivify her wholly with every possible virtue, then throw a Parisian veil of dress over her, and—oh, the profanation of your old days!—fall down and worship her?

There is no better mark of civilisation than well-dressed feminine excellence, to which men pay obeisance. Wherever the majority do this, there is humanity best perfected. Homer teacheth that, when he exhibits the aged council of statesmen and warriors on the walls of Troy paying homage to the grace of Helen. The poet wished to show that the personages of his Epic were not barbarians, and chose this scene to dignify them. Ruminate upon the answer, “The latest fashions from Paris.” What a mass of civilising detail is contained in these few words!—the leisure to desire, the elegance to wear, the genius to invent, the benevolent employment of delicate hands, the trades encouraged, the soft influences—the very atmosphere breathes the most delicate perfume of loves. It is not to the purpose to interpose that this Paris of fashion suddenly turned savage, and revelled in brutal revolution, sparing not man nor woman. It was because, in their anti-aristocratic madness, the unhappy people threw off this reverential respect that the uncivilised portion slaughtered the civilised. It was a vile atheistical barbarism that waged war with civilisation. Think no more of that black spot in the History of Humanity—that plague-spot. Rather, Eusebius, turn your thoughts to your work, and fabricate, though it be only in your imagination, your own paradise, and she shall be named Civilisation. In case your imagination should be at this moment dull, rest satisfied with a description of an image now before me, which I think, as a personification, answers the question admirably; for supposing it to be a portrait from nature, what a civilised people must they be among whom such a wonder was born—not only born, but sweetly nurtured, and arrayed in such a glory of dress! If you think this indicates a foolish extravagant passion, know that this fair one must have “died of old age” some centuries before I was born. There she is, in all her pale loveliness, in a black japan figured frame, over the mantelpiece of my bedroom at H——, where I am now writing this letter to you. Mock not, Eusebius; she is, or rather was, Chinese. I look upon her now as giving out her answer from those finely-drawn lips—“I represent civilisation.” If I could pencil like that happy painter—happiest in having such uncommon loveliness to sit to him—I would send you another kind of sketch; it would be a failure. Be content with feeble words. First, then, for dress: She wears a brown kind of hat, or cap, the rim a little turned up, of indescribable shape and texture: the head part is blue; around it are flowers, so white and transparent, just suffused with a blush, as if instantaneously vitrified into china. Lovely are they—such as botanical impertinences never scrutinised. On the right side of this cap or hat two cock’s feathers, perfectly white, arch themselves, as if they would coquet with the fairer cheek. You see how firm they are, and would spring up strong from the touch, emblems of unyielding chastity. The hair, little of which is seen, is of a chestnut-brown; low down on the throat is a broad band of black, apparently velvet, just peeping above which is the smallest edging of white, exactly like the most modern shirt-collar, fastened above, where it is parted, by a gold clasp. The upper dress is of a pink red, such as we see in Madonna pictures; below this is a dark blue-green shirt-dress, richly flowered to look like enamel; over the shoulders a Madonna kerchief, fastened in a knot over the chest; it is of a clear brownish hue, such as we see in old pictures. The upper red dress does not meet, but terminates on each, side with a gold border, of a pattern centre, with two lines of gold. Thus a rather broad space is left across the bosom, which in modern costume is occupied by a habit-shirt; but such word would ill describe either the colour or the texture here worn; it is of a gossamer fabric, of a most delicately-greenish white, diapered and flowered all over; nothing can be conceived more exquisite than this. It would make the fortune of a modern modiste to see and to imitate it. A clasp of elegant shape fastens skirt to upper dress; the sleeve of upper dress reaches only half-way down the arm; the lower sleeve is of the rich blue-green, but altogether ample. Attitude, slightly bent forward; over the left arm, which crosses the waist, is suspended a fruit-basket of unknown material, and finely patterned, brown in colour, in which are grapes and other fruit; expression, sweetly modest; complexion—how shall it be described? Never was European like it. It is finest porcelain, variegated with that under-living immortal ichor of the old divinities. Eyes clear-cut or pencilled, rather hazel in colour; background, rockwork garden, rising to a hill, on which are trees—but such trees! Aladdin may have seen the like in his enchanted subterranean garden. Then there is a lake, and a boat on it, at a distance, with an awning. She is the goddess, or the queen, of this Elysium, which her presence makes, and has enchanted into a porcelain earth, whose flowers and trees are of its lustre.

Wherever, Eusebius, this portrait was taken, it was, and is, an epitome, an emblem of high civilisation. It speaks so plainly of all exemption from toil and care, of the unapproachableness of danger. There is living elegance in a garden of peace. It is, in fact, the type of civilisation. What! will the economist, the philosopher of our day, be ready to say,—Civilisation amongst Chinese and Tartars! and that centuries perhaps ago. Civilisation is “The Nineteenth Century!” The glory of the Nineteenth Century is the Press. We are Civilisation. Very well, gentlemen; nevertheless it would be pleasant if you could exhibit a little more peace and quietness, a little less turmoil, a little more unadulterating honesty, a little less careworn look in your streets, as the mark of your boasted civilisation. You are doing wonders, and, like Katerfelto with his hair on end, are in daily wonderment at your own wonders. You steam—annihilate space and time. You have ripped open the bowels of knowledge, and well-nigh killed her in search of her golden egg. You are full, to the throat and eyes, of sciences and arts. You are hourly astonishing yourselves and the world. Nevertheless, you have one great deficiency as to the ingredients that make up civilisation; you are decidedly too conceited; you lack charity; you count bygone times and peoples as nothing and nobodies: yet you build a great Crystal Palace, and boast of it, as if it were all your own; whereas the whole riches of it, in the elegances of all arts, are imitations of the works of those bygone times and peoples. Who is satisfied with your model-civilisation? Eusebius, is not the question yet to be asked—What is it? in what does it consist? how is it to be obtained? True civilisation has no shams—we have too many, and they arise out of our swaggering and boasting; so that we force ourselves to assume every individual virtue, though we have it not. We are contemptuous; and contempt is a burr of barbarism sticking to us still, even in this “Nineteenth Century,” a phrase in the public mouth glorifying self-esteem. I must, for the argument, go back to the Chinese lady in her narrow japanned gilt frame. As I have drawn my curtains, Eusebius, at the dawn of day, and that placid beauty (though not to be admitted in any book of that name) has smiled upon me from lips so delicate, so unvoracious—did she pick grains of rice, like Amine in the Arabian tale?—I verily thought she must have lived in as civilised an age as ours. Yes—perhaps she was not very learned, excepting in Chinese romances, and very good learning that is: but neither you nor I, Eusebius, lay very great stress upon knowledge, nor call it “Power,” nor think that happiness necessarily grows out of it. One evil of it is, that it unromances the age; and romance—why not say it?—romance is a main ingredient in true, honest, unadulterated civilisation. You would prefer being as mad as Don Quixote, and be gifted with his romance, to being the aptest of matter-of-fact economists and material philosophers. Romance, then, springs from the generous heart and mind;—methinks, Eusebius, you are progressing, and reaching one of the ingredients of this said desideratum, “Civilisation.” As a people, it may be doubted if we are quite as romantic as formerly; if so, however we may advance in knowledge and sciences, we are really retrograding from the summum bonum of social virtues. I remember once hearing a celebrated physician, who knew as much as most men of mankind, their habits and manners, speak of an American “gentleman,” adding, “and he was a savage.” You can imagine it possible, that, in the presence and impertinence of Anglo-Saxon vulgarity, the grave and courteous demeanour of a so-called barbarian would be a very conspicuous virtue. I read the other day, in Prince’s Worthies of Devon, a quaint passage to the point, which much amused me for its singular expression. It relates to Sir Francis Drake, who, touching at one of the Molucca Islands, was, as the author words it, “by the king thereof, a true gentleman pagan, most honourably entertained.” Of this “gentleman pagan” Prince adds, that he told General Drake “that they and he were all of one religion, in this respect, that they believed not in gods made of stocks and stones, as did the Portuguese; and further, at his departure he furnished him with all the necessaries that he wanted.” Yet, perhaps, some of the habits of such gentlemen pagans had been scoffed at by Europeans, and often met with worse usage than contempt. Whoever has no consideration for others, no indulgence for habits contrary to his own, though he may be born in nominally the most civilised nation under the sun, is really a barbarian. It was well said that, upon the accidental meeting of the finest drest gentleman, with a powdered head, and a tatooed Indian, he who should laugh first would be the savage. The well-known story of the horror expressed by different people at the disposal of their deceased parents is curious, showing that opposite actions arise from the same feelings. In this case it was of filial piety. One party was asked if he would bury his father in the earth? He was amazed at the question—shocked. Not for the world; as an act of piety, he would eat him. The other, asked to eat his father, was hurt and disgusted beyond measure. Let us be a little more even in our judgments, and speak somewhat kindly, if we can, of these gentlemen pagans all over the world. We may be often called upon to admire their disinterested heroism, even when lavished upon mistaken objects. Here is an example from the misnamed weaker sex—misnamed, for they are wonderfully gifted with fortitude. I have been reading of a poor young creature, widow of a chief among some cannibal race. She was to have been immolated, according to custom, at the burial of her husband. Her courage at the moment failed her: she was induced by, if I remember rightly, some good missionaries, to fly, and they protected her. In the night she repented of her irresolution, escaped, swam across a river, and presented herself for the sacrifice and the feast. Scholars, you read with love and admiration of Iphigenia at Aulis; her first reluctance; her after self-devotion: you have imagined her youth, her beauty, so vividly painted by the poet. Was Iphigenia more the heroine than this poor girl whom we are pleased to pass unhistoried as a savage? She gave herself up, not only to death, perhaps a cruel one, but with the knowledge that she would be devoured also that night. Iphigenia was certain of funeral honours, of immortal fame, and believed that her sacrifice would insure victory to her father and the Greeks. We have written exercises at school in praise of the suicide of Cato, whose act, in comparison with this poor savage’s, was cowardice;—more than that, we have been taught to mouth out with applause the blasphemy of the celebrated hexameter, “Victrix causa Diis placuit sed victa Catoni.” Why should we not be a little more even in our judgments? The poor gentlemen pagans of the islands would cut as good a figure as heathen Cato, if their names and deeds could be turned into tolerable Latin, and passed off as of the classical age. Henley, in a letter to Swift, tells the speech of a farmer, who said, “If I could but get this same breath out of my body, I’d take care, by G—, how I let it come in again!” Henley makes the pithy remark, “This, if it was put into fine Latin, I fancy would make as good a sound as any I have met with.”

I did not mean to induce a belief, Eusebius, that the Chinese excelled in the fine arts when I wrote down the description of the Chinese lady. The portrait had its peculiarities, and would not have been hung upon the line in the Royal Academy. I only chose it for its historical expression, which spoke of civilisation of manners, of security, and as containing in itself things which civilised people boast of. But there the argument is not very much in favour of this our “Nineteenth Century;” for the chiefest works of art in painting are of the cinque cents. It is not pretended that we have thrown into oblivious shade the masters of old celebrity; nor that we have made better statues than did Phidias and Praxiteles; nor excelled the Greeks in architecture; nor even the artist builders of the ages which we are pleased to style “Dark;” so that we have at least lost some marks of civilisation. Nay, to come to nearer times for comparison: It would be a hard thing for our swaggerers to find a dramatist willing to be taken by the collar, and contrasted face to face with the portraits of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, taking their plays as their representatives. There were worthies of a high romance in the civilised days of the “Glorious Gloriana.” What marks of essential civilisation are visible in the comedies of Shakespeare—what delightful mixture of the real and unreal—the mind springing from its own natural elasticity above the fogs and blight of worldly business, that ever tend to keep the spirits from rising! And why say comedies? Tragedies too. How fresh is the atmosphere mankind seem then to breathe. Humanity is made lovable or dignified. If we might judge of civilisation from the works of writers of that age, we might be justified in pronouncing it most civilised, for it was governed by a vivid and romantic spirit. Take as contrast the literature of Queen Anne’s boasted time. It is quite of another spirit. There is a descending, a degradation of the whole mind. There begins visible worldliness. We see man taking his part in the affairs of the world for what he can get as an individual. There is a prominence of the business, and less made of the enjoyments of life;—the commercial spirit predominating, which has since overwhelmed the imaginative faculties, and buried the better, the more civilised pleasures of life, under the weight of avarice. We are, my dear Eusebius, too money-loving and money-getting to deserve the name of a thoroughly civilised people. Is a true and just perception of the fine arts a sign of civilisation? What is admired—what is eagerly purchased—what intellectual food do the purchases convey? Is the mere visual organ gratified by the lowest element of the arts—imitation—or the mind’s eye enlarged to receive and love what is great and noble? In one sense, undoubtedly, the art of living is better understood, because, the romance of life fading away, personal comforts and little luxuries become exigencies, and engross the thoughts, filling up the vacancies that romance has left. Shall I shock you, my dear Eusebius, if I add my doubts if liberty is either civilisation or a sign of it? Great things have been done in the world, where there has been little of it enough, as well as where there has been much. The fine arts are certainly not much indebted to it.

There is much in the question which yet remains to be considered. The questioned may well ask, as did the heathen philosopher on one more important, and of an infinite height and depth—another day of thought to answer it, and each succeeding day another still. Is civilisation that condition in which all the human faculties may be so continually exercised, as to make the more intellectual moral and religious being? when the plant humanity, like every other plant, shall by cultivation assume a new character and even appearance? I fear this condition necessarily implies a degradation also. For as in no state do the many reach the high standard, equality must be destroyed, so that inferiority will not only have its moral mark, but also its additional toil, far above the share it would have supposing a state nearer equality.

But then, it may be answered, the question is not about the many, but regards only examples, without considering number. Human plants may be exhibited of extraordinary culture and beauty—beauty that must be seen and admired—and, if so, imitated; and this law of imitation will draw in the many, in process of time, to improvement. Very true, Eusebius; and in a race naturally energetic, this imitation—while, on the whole, it will improve general manners—creates a social vice, affectation—which is vulgarity. The example of our Anglo-Saxon race is to the point—of wondrous energy, but in no race under the sun is vulgarity so conspicuous. If, then, the condition which forces all the human faculties to exertion be that of civilising tendency, does it follow that it is one of the greatest happiness? The history of the world says manifestly that it is not one of peace, of quietness, of content, of simplicity—alas! shall we say of honesty? For it must be confessed civilisation acts upon the mixed character which every man has, and therefore gives progression both to vice and virtue. Man is only made great by trials; difficulties promote energies. It is the law of preparation for this world and for the next. Long, steep, and arduous is the way to excellence. The verse of Hesiod brings to mind a passage of greater authority. The smooth and broad way, and ever-ready way, is not so good.

“Τῆς δ’ἀρετῆς ἱδρῶτα θεοὶ προπάριοθεν ἔθηκαν.

Λθάνατοι, μακρος δὲ καὶ ὄρθιος οἷμος ἐπ’ αὺτὴν,

Kαὶ τρηχὺς πρῶτον επην δ’εἰς ἄκρον ἵκηται

Ρηἴδίη δ’ἔπειτα πέλει, χαλεπή περ ἐοῦσα.”

—Hesiod.

Here we have toil, trouble, and a rough road.

Now for a little entanglement of the subject. Who will sit for this aspirant for all the virtues—for civilisation? I look up to the portrait of the Chinese lady, who first set my thoughts upon this speculation. Surely she never got that placid do-nothing look from any long habit of toil and trouble; she never worked hard. I confess, Eusebius, as I question her, she does look a little more silly than I thought her. She never went the up-hill rough road. How should she? She was never shod for it; nay, were the truth told—for the painter has judiciously kept it out of sight—she had no proper feet to walk withal. They had been pinched to next to nothing. She never could have danced; would have been a sorry figure in a European ball-room; and in the way she must have stood, would have made but (as Goldsmith calls it) “a mutilated curtsey.” It is hard to give up a first idea. I proposed her as an emblem of civilisation—and why not? She does not represent civilisation in its progress—in its work; but in its result—its perfection. For look at her,—she stands not up with a bold impudence, like Luxury in the “Choice of Hercules,” puffed up and enlarged in the fat of pride, and redder and whiter than nature—a painted Jezebel. Quite the reverse. She is most delicately slender; her substance is of the purity of the finest China tea-cup. In fact, she seems to have been set up as the work of a whole nation’s toil,—as a sign, a model, of their civilisation. They who imagined such a creature, and set her upon her legs—yet I can hardly say that, considering the feet—must have made many after the same model, or seen many; and exquisite must have been the manners of such a piece of life-porcelain.

Indeed, Eusebius, we have greatly mistaken these people, the Chinese. I will believe their own account of themselves, and that they were a polished people when the ancient Britons went naked, and painted themselves with woad. Besides, here is another picture at hand, clearly showing them to have been, as probably they are still, a sensible people, for they evidently agree with the wisest man who said, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Here they have pictured a school, and the pedagogue is flogging a boy, and he has a very legitimate rod. If this is not a mark of civilisation—for it certainly leaves one, giving, as it were, a bottomry bond of future wisdom—I should like to know what is. Birch-buds are the smart-money of education, and wonderfully improve the memory without touching the head, but reaching the brain by a harmless and distant sympathy. I am sure the Chinese must be a people well worth studying; and, with all our national conceit, we may learn a good deal from them. If we scatter them about with our artillery, and stick them upon bayonets, and despise them because they are innocent, or have been till recently, in the arts of destruction, who are the most savage—the slaughtered or the slaughterers? Are we to call war, civilisation? Perhaps it may be the “rough way” it has to pass. Ask the Czar to answer the question. He will undoubtedly say, that it is cutting the throats of the Turks and filching their property; and he will show you one undoubted proof of the highest civilisation of modern times, consummate hypocrisy—committing murder by wholesale in the name of religion.

Shall I advance a seeming paradox? Civilisation is impeded by knowledge—that is, by the modern demand for it. The memory becomes crammed, till there be no room in the brain for legitimate thought to work in. Hence a bewilderment, a confusion of other men’s ideas, and none of our own; a general perplexity, and little agreement among people in sentiment, for they have no time left to consider upon their differences. The world is overstocked with the materials of knowledge, and yet there is ever a demand for more. The time of man’s best wisdom was when he was not overburthened with books. Happy are scholars that so many of the classics are lost. Were all that have been written extant, the youth that should graduate in honours would be the miracle of a short time, and an idiot the remainder of his life. Then our own literature: it is frightful to see the bulky monthly catalogue of publications. Had I to begin the world, I should throw down the list in despair, and prefer being a literary fool, with a little common sense. Besides, the aspirant in education must learn all modern languages also. What a quantity! I made a note from a paper published, November 1851. Here is a quotation. A letter from Leipsic says—“The catalogue for the book fair of St Michael has been just published. It results from it that during the short space of time which has elapsed since the fair of Easter last, not fewer than three thousand eight hundred and sixty new books have been published in Germany, and that one thousand one hundred and fifty others are in the press. More than one-half of these works are on scientific subjects.” Mercy on the brains of the people!—they will be inevitably addled. What with all this learning and reading, summing and analysing, and making book-shelves of themselves, they are retrograding in natural understanding, which ought to be the strong foundation of civilisation. And there is the necessity growing up of reading all the daily papers beside. Better, Eusebius, that the human plant should grow, like a cucumber, to belly, and run along the common ground, than shoot out such head-seed as is likely to come out of such a hotbed under a surfeit of dry manure. Verily it must shortly come to pass, that Ignoramus will be the wisest if not the knowingest among us. He may have common sense, a few flights of imagination unchoked with the dust of learning, or many wholesome prejudices, a great deal of honest feeling, and with these homespun materials keep his morals and religion pure, and, walking in humbleness, reach unawares the summit of civilisation. If you think him an imaginary being, wed him to the Chinese Purity in the japan frame, and no one will write the epithalamium so happily as my friend Eusebius. I might here have ended my letter, rather expecting to receive a solution to the great question than pretending to offer one. But having written so far, and about to add a concluding sentence, I received a visit from our matter-of-fact friend B., whom people hereabout call the Economist General: he is a professed statist, great in all little things. He is alway at work, volunteering unacceptable advices and schemes to boards of guardians and the Government. I told him I was writing to you, and the subject of my letter,—“Then,” said he, “I can assist you. The census newly come out is the thing. In that you will learn everything. You will, in fact, find civilisation depicted scientifically. I will send it to you.” We conversed an hour; I promised to read his census return in the course of the day. He smiled strangely, but said nothing. I soon understood what the smile meant, when I saw a labouring man take out of a little cart a huge parcel, which upon opening I found to contain the Census in nineteen volumes or books, varying in shapes and sizes, some of which being very bulky, I judged to contain heavy matter. The idea of reading over and digesting the Census in an afternoon appeared now so ridiculous that I could not refrain from laughing myself. Nineteen books to examine in an afternoon! It was evident there would be six months’ toil, and as many hands as Briareus wanted to turn over the leaves; to say nothing of the number of heads to hold the matter. What horsepower engine in the brain to work up a digested process equal to the task! I was, however, being somewhat idle, curious to see what could have made our friend such an enthusiast; I therefore looked into some of the books—became interested—read more and more, though in a desultory manner. It is wonderful to see society so daguerreotyped in all its phases. What could have given rise to so much varied ingenuity?—What schemes, what contrivances for getting at everything!—the commissioners must have been Titans in ingenuity. Was it the necessity of the case that induced so much elaboration? I have read that the cost of the Census exceeds £120,000. That accounts for it, Eusebius; such a sum is not to be clutched without some inventive powers. Our friend thinks the Census will help to solve the question of civilisation; so pray borrow the volumes of an M.P. If you cannot get at the marrow of the thing you want, you will find much for after speculation. There is something frightful, Eusebius, in the idea that no class of men, no individuals, can henceforth escape the eye of this Great Inquisitor-General—a Census commission. There is no conceivable thing belonging to man, woman, or child that may not come under the inspection, and be in the books, of this great Gargantuan Busybody. In truth, he was born a gigantic infant in 1801. Hermes, in the Homeric hymn, leaped out of his cradle upon mischievous errands almost as soon as born: so did our big Busybody. Ere he was six months old he took to knocking at people’s doors, and running[^[144]] away. He soon grew bolder, stood to his knock, and asked if Mr Thompson did not live there. Then he had the trick of getting into houses like the boy Jones, and counted the skillets in the scullery, the pap-dishes in the nursery, turned over the beds in the garrets, and booked men and maids who slept in them before they could put their clothes on. With a thirst for domestic knowledge, he insisted upon knowing who were married and who not. He would burst in upon a family at their prayers, and note what religion they were of. He would know every one’s age, condition, business, and be very particular as to sex female, why they married or why they lived single; he could tell to a day when any would lie in. The most wonderful thing was the paper case he carried with him wherever he went. It would have made Gargantua himself stare with astonishment, for it is said, upon competent authority, to have weighed “nearly forty tons.” This paper case contained particulars noted down of every one’s possible concerns. He had another at home, in which he kept circulars for distribution, demanding further information. It was said to be bigger still;[^[145]] as he grew robust and bold, of course it took more to feed Busybody. It is almost incredible what a number of the people’s loaves he ate up in one year; but that there is the baker’s bill to vouch for it, no one would believe it. The quantity of food required for himself and his numerous retainers has already made him look about with some anxiety to foist upon the country a scheme for sure agricultural statistics, to ascertain the number of loaves to the acre. It cannot be said of him, as of many, that his eye is bigger than his belly, for the former cannot as yet see “bread-stuffs” enough to fill the latter. Besides, he has quite an army to maintain of officials, enumerators, and registrars, who all, after the manner of benchers, must eat their way into the universal knowledge required of them. Such is Busybody. In my afternoon nap, I have dreamed of him, Eusebius, and offer you this description of him—his birth, life, habits, and manners—as by a dreaming intuition I received them. What think you of the monster? As perilous a beast as the Wooden Horse of Troy.

“Inspectura domos, venturaque desuper urbi.” It would not be surprising if Irish mothers, when they find that all their babes are registered, age and sex noted down, were to take into their heads that they are to be fattened; and Swift’s scheme, which a popular author has unwisely characterised as serious cannibalism, is at length to be realised, and thus Bigmouth of the old fair and puppet-show will appear as Busybody-General. Perhaps the “King of the Cannibal Islands,” since we have taught him to read and write, will avail himself of this new registration system; for with him all is alike meat in the market. I have been reading an account of such a people’s doings, and find the only difference between human and other is, that the former is sold as “long pig,” the other short pig.

I mentioned the ingenuity displayed in the Census—turn to the maps and diagrams. You will see a map of England and Wales, shaded so that the depth of colour shall denote the density of the population: there are figures also to tell the number of persons to a square mile, and towns and cities are represented by round dots, larger or smaller, according to the number of inhabitants. It is a very curious and pretty plaything; but of what imaginable use? It is like the shadowing on the maps of the moon. London looks awful—a horrible black pit—and must give children, who will be delighted with the plaything, a notion that our great metropolis must be a sink of iniquity. Cobbett’s notion of the “great wen” was by no means agreeable; to make it such a black pit of destruction is far less flattering. There are diagrams also showing, by the closeness of dots, the density of population at various periods. It was certainly a very ingenious contrivance of the inventor, for the enlargement and continuance of his work and employment; in a matter, too, where, at first view, so little was required to be done. If not more profitable, it at least provides as much amusement as Diogenes afforded when he rolled his tub about, to show that he must be busy. The inventor was, however, wiser than the philosopher; for the philosopher aimed at satire only, the inventor of the maps and diagrams at pay and profit. Everything should nowadays be turned into the channel of education; it might be suggested to the educational purveyors, and to masters and inspectors of schools, who stand a chance of wanting something to teach, to have these maps and diagrams printed cheaply on thick or board paper, that, even in their recreation hours, the scholars may learn something, and the favourite “game of goose,” of ominous name, be profitably superseded. The two diagrams of London, the one for the year 1801, the other 1851, may serve quite as well as the “Chinese puzzle” to exercise growing or dull memories, having a like advantage of not burthening the mind, already too full, with any useful knowledge whatever. For instance, it will be quite sport to learn by heart that, as to density of London in 1801, “on an average, there were nearly 394 square yards of land to every person, 2784 square yards to every inhabited house.” As to proximity in 1801, that, “on an average, the mean distance from house to house (inhabited) was nearly 57 yards; from person to person 21 yards.” That, as to density in 1851, “on an average, there were nearly 160 square yards of land to every person; 1234 square yards to every inhabited house.” As to proximity, that in 1851, “on an average, the mean distance from house to house (inhabited) was nearly 38 yards; from person to person 14 yards.” So that every person is approaching his neighbour in person, but not probably in love or liking, so rapidly, as that he has already seven yards of the area of his liberty taken from him since 1801. It will be comfortably and philosophically answered, that most of those who enjoyed that liberty in 1801, more than half a century ago, cannot complain, for they are now silent, and in less space, that of six feet by four; and that the present generation easily accommodate themselves in less space, having the better liberty of making more noise. These are the trifles, the games, and the plays that amuse children six feet high. Let them by all means roll about their tub in the streets, if they will remain contented with their sport and their wages. They have, however, we may both of us surmise and fear, done far less innocent work. It is not pleasant to know that the pure, chaste secresy of your house has been invaded, taken possession of, and is no longer exclusively yours; that you are in name or in number, as No. 1 or No. 2, put away in a pigeon-hole somewhere in that black pit you have seen in the map, to be drawn out, one of these days, at the will of any impertinent official, and further questioned, perhaps, as the phrase is, squeezed, when anything is to be got out of you. You may have a commission sent down to your house, and take possession of it, for some scrutiny or other, while you are taking your morning walk; on your return, you will find two or three commissioners have coolly taken your joint off the spit, and are politely drinking your health out of your choicest sherry; and as an excuse of extraordinary business, question you about the age and property of your great-grandmother deceased. How do you or I know what use will be made of all these registered particulars about us? It would be far pleasanter to be let alone. I have an antipathy to curious questioning people. Dr Franklin, when he came to a strange place, knowing the inquisitive disposition of the people, used to say at once, “My name is Benjamin Franklin; I come from such a place, and am going to such a place; age so and so, and on such business; and now let me have out a horse.” I should for one like to compound with this scrutinising government, on condition of exemption from place in their books, to put out weekly posted to my door the names, ages, and sex of every inmate, with a diary of their employments the six days; requesting not to be called to account for my time on the hallowed seventh. There is no chance of such a composition being accepted on their part; for you will see, Eusebius, there is nothing they are so busy about as to know what religion you are of. There is a separate book for this very purpose; nay, they go farther—they have superseded all known authorities in these matters, and have dictated what shall be your creed, giving you only a latitude of “Churches”—such they call every denomination in their Report presented to Parliament, and her Majesty, who as yet happily has recognised but one Church of England, in which matter the Report is undoubtedly at variance with the fundamental law of the Constitution, and passes a kind of insulting suggestion upon her Majesty’s highest prerogative, her very crown and dignity. This is a matter for other consideration; the religious Report must be examined; I only see at present, and note the fact, that the Church of England is put down as but one of the sects.

“Increase and multiply” was at the beginning, and from the beginning to this day is, the Divine command. Some would infer that there must be a blessing attending obedience to it, others would in part abrogate the law, and, with Malthus, admit no crowding at the bountiful table which nature supplies. The presumption fairly is, that as security to life and happiness is the main cause of increase; viewing this world only, such increase must be a great good, and it implies advancement in civilisation, which possibly may not be ill defined as the art of promoting life and happiness. It includes moral advancement. But the beneficence of our Maker allows us to look beyond this world. Hence, the awful thought, and the responsibility incurred by its increase of population, is an increase of immortal souls. There is a depth in this argument beyond my scope. It is a curious fact which this Census shows. In 1801, the population of Great Britain was 10,578,956; in 1851, it had reached 20,959,477. Thus the population has nearly doubled in fifty years. But further, “The population of the United Kingdom, including the army, navy, and merchantseamen, was 21,272,187 in 1821, and about 27,724,849 in 1851; but in the interval 2,685,747 persons emigrated, who, if simply added to the population of the United Kingdom, make the survivors and descendants of the races within the British Isles in 1821, now 30,410,595.”

Perhaps, Eusebius, you never considered that you have only right and title to a certain limited area, to live and breathe in, in this your beloved country. Your area is becoming more circumscribed every day. People are approximating fearfully. You may come to touch very disagreeable people; at present you are only a few yards apart. There are two things, according to this Census, threatening you—“density” and “proximity.” For “density” a French writer proposes “specific population after the analogy of specific gravity,” so that if there be an accelerating ratio, you may be run in upon and crushed by your neighbours, after the annihilating principle of some of our railroads. I remember when a boy hearing an old gentleman make a curious calculation, equalising rights to the air we breathe. He came to the conclusion that a man who smoked tobacco took up more room in the atmosphere than he had any right to. This, now that we are so rapidly approximating, ought, you will think, to come under the consideration of the Legislature. See your danger—“the people of England were on an average one hundred and fifty-three yards asunder in 1801, and one hundred and eight yards asunder in 1851.” Thus the regular goers, the world-walkers, are coming in upon you; but there are some as erratic as comets, whose contiguity you will dread. I say this is your danger, for you do not suppose such infinite pains would have been taken, and such vast expense incurred, merely out of idle curiosity to give you this information. Perhaps it is kindly meant to give you a hint that your room would be preferred to your company. “Tempus abire tibi est.” More than this—not only persons, but houses are encroaching upon each other. “The mean distance apart of their houses was three hundred and sixty-two yards in 1801, and two hundred and fifty-two yards in 1851.” You see, then, you must not only set yourself in order to depart, but you must “set your house in order” also. It is really astonishing that the Census Commission should have taken such a world of trouble in making calculations which, at first sight, look so puerile; we must only conclude, that somehow or other the labour is as much worth the hire, as the labourer is worthy his hire.

I dare to say, among your ignorances, you are ignorant of this, that the British Isles are at least five hundred in number. “Five hundred islands and rocks have been numbered, but inhabitants were only found and distinguished on the morning of March 31, 1851, in one hundred and seventy-five islands, or groups of islands.” I cannot very well tell what is meant by “distinguished,” but you will perceive that there is a chance, if you fear the “crushing density and proximity” of escape to one of these islands, as yet uninhabited, where you may exist without contact or contagion, as a very “distinguished” individual. You may be another Alexander Selkirk, and “monarch of all you survey,” and have the honour of a distinction, in the next census, now enjoyed by a lone lady. You will be enumerated as, and as solely taking care of, number one. There are British isles that have each but two inhabitants. “Little Papa” has but one—a woman; and “Inchcolm one solitary man.” What think you of this “last man” and this “last woman,” each upon his or her “ultima Thule?” The motherless man-hating woman, in contempt of the parental name, alone treading under foot “Little Papa.” The “solitary man,” if, as is likely he be, brutish, may live out of the fear of a recent Act of Parliament. For if he disdains the marital luxury, he cannot be punished for beating his wife.

The writer of these statistics, aware that there is a good deal of dry matter, prudently sprinkles it with a little saltwater poetry. Thus, as a kind of preface to these British islands, he says, “The Scandinavian race survives in its descendants round the coasts of the British Isles, and the soul of the old Viking still burns in the seamen of the British fleet, in the Deal boatmen, in the fishermen of the Orkneys, and in that adventurous, bold, direct, skilful, mercantile class, that has encircled the world by its peaceful conquests. What the Greeks were in the Mediterranean Sea, the Scandinavians have been in the Atlantic Ocean. A population of a race on the islands and the island coasts, impregnated with the sea, in fixing its territorial boundaries would exhibit but little sympathy with the remonstrating Roman poet, in his Sabine farm over the Mediterranean:

‘Nequidquam Deus abscidit

Prudens occano dissociabili

Feras, si tamen impiæ

Non tangenda rates trausiliunt vada.’”

A writer or compiler of statistics should ride his own hobby. Pegasus is hard-mouthed to his hand; if he attempts the use of the curb, he is thrown, and thus is sure to be run away with. So here he has got quite beyond the ground of matter-of-fact. By the Vikings’ soul in the British seamen—the burning soul too—he declares himself of the Pythagorean philosophy, quite gratuitously; and in the following sentence carries his transmigration notions to a strange but practical conclusion, for he tells us of a race “impregnated with the sea,” imaging sailors’ mothers and wives as mermaids—that is, previous to the marine and marital alliances; by which unaccountable flight of poetic diction, I presume, he means only that the sea was rather a rough nursing-mother: and how could he imagine that such an untutored race ever read, or could read, a syllable of what Horace wrote? Doubtless, he must have been weary, counting up these five hundred mostly barren islands, and, coming in the list to “Rum,” it must have made for him a comfortable suggestion; and in consequence, a pretty stiff tumbler set all his ideas at once afloat, and poetically, “half seas over” among the islands, steering, however, steadily, as he was bound towards Mull Port, and the more pleasant hospitality of its 7485 inhabitants. Having descended from this marine Pegasus, the author proceeds in his statistics.

The number of inhabited houses in Great Britain in 1801 amounted to 1,870,476; in 1851, to 3,648,347: these contained 4,312,388 families—persons, 20,816,351. Thus it is seen that the number of houses since 1801 is nearly doubled. How commonly we boast, Eusebius, of things that have passed away! You hear it now often said that an Englishman’s house is his castle, the garrison of which has been hitherto supposed to be known only to himself. There has been an idea that not only the master, but all down to the very scullion, are ready to stand with spits and skillets to keep out unwelcome invaders; whereas the truth is, as shown in this Census, that the castle has its government inspector, who notes down and registers the numbers, ages, names, sexes, and occupations of every individual the said castle contains. Houses are a very nice tangible property for the convenience of government taxation; by judicious scrutiny, of which the Census Commission provides ample means, it will be easily ascertained what each family has to live upon; or, what is quite the same thing for the getting the taxation, what on “an average” the Commissioners may think the said family ought to have to live upon; thus the income-tax is facilitated in computation and collection. These are surely encroachments, that, by little and little, are domineering over the subjects’ liberty. There are other Acts of Parliament also which affect this liberty in the “castle;” some general, some local. In few places can a man make alterations in his building, inside or out, without an application for consent, and of course a fee to some commissioner or other. If he succeeds, there is a further penalty upon his improvements, though they may have been required for the very health of his family. He has, through this Census scrutiny, to pay a tax upon his improvements, nor is he allowed any deduction for repairs. This Englishman’s castle, then, you see, is as much besieged as Bomarsund! At first it was pretty well thrown out of its own windows by the window-tax, and is always at the mercy of commissions, whether it shall or shall not be turned out of doors. Many a one is there that has a ten-pound battery playing upon it all the year round. If, weary of watching your besiegers, you turn yourself out of house, and live a rambling, roving life how you can, you will not so easily escape; you will have an inspector after you with note-book and ink-horn, and you will be booked and pigeon-holed for further use when wanted. “Finally, there is the population sleeping in barns, in tents, and in the open air, comprising, with some honest, some unfortunate people out of employment, or temporarily employed, gypsies, beggars, strollers, vagabonds, vagrants, outcasts, criminals. The enumeration of the houseless population, unsettled in families, is necessarily imperfect, and the actual number must exceed the 18,249 returned; namely, 9972 in barns, and 8277 in the open air.” The poor strollers! why should they be stigmatised and classed with vagabonds, vagrants, outcasts, and criminals? are they not following their lawful vocation, and doing something, as it is hoped they are, towards civilising the people through legitimate amusement? Is the compiler of these statistics a descendant of the old Puritans, and still retaining an unwarrantable prejudice? It were better he had the charity of the chimney-sweeper boy, who remonstrated with a brother sweep, who pointed his finger at Garrick in the streets, and said, “There be one of the player-folk.” “Don’t say so,” said the discreet one, “for thee dostn’t know what thee and I may come to.” But I know, as you rather patronise gypsies, you will be pleased to hear that one tribe of them baffled the officials. “It is mentioned in one instance that a tribe of gypsies struck their tents, and passed into another parish in order to escape enumeration.”

The great king whom we read of in history, who, in the excess of his felicity, thought it needful to have a flapper appointed to remind him every day that he was mortal, though he was made the example of many a theme in our school days, I look upon now as a very silly fellow. I have often heard you express your dislike of any impertinent memento moris—you have even thought it irreligious, and unthankful for present good; and tending to chill the life-blood, the little that is left in the old, and to throw a wet blanket over the cheerfulness of the young, out of which cheerfulness elastic manhood is to spring, and to take upon itself to do the manly responsible duties of life vigorously. I repeat that you have always maintained, that to thrust a memento mori in every man’s face, or to carve it upon his walking-stick, is irreligious, because it is essential unthankfulness.

It is not pleasant, certainly, to have one’s days numbered by other people, and sent to you in circulars. I knew one of these life-calculators; a clergyman called to condole with him on the recent death of his wife. All he could get from him was partly a submission to a necessity, and partly a congratulation that death had not taken him. “Yes, sir,” said he, “if A does not die, in all probability B will; and if neither A nor B die, C must.” You will be indignant, but your philosophy will have the pleasure of its indignation, if I pointed out to your notice Busybody’s table of mortality. When last he knocked at your door, and booked your age, did his eyebrows arch with surprise? Eusebius, that look meant to tell you that you had no right whatever at that moment to be alive. He longed to filch your name out of his pigeon-hole of life. You are a hale man, and will, I hope, doing so much good as you do, outlive a couple of censuses yet. Have your eye upon Busybody when he next appears; not like Death, with one of his warnings, but ready to receive a certificate of burial. There is a table showing how very few who were alive in 1801 are now living, and so on, at every succeeding census. “By the English Life Table it is shown that the half of a generation of men of all ages passes away in thirty years, and that more than three in every four of their number die in half a century.” But I pass by this unwelcome subject—nor will I be the one to say to you or to any man, “Proximus ardet, Ucalegon.” Let Ucalegon’s house escape if it can.

It is more agreeable to contemplate births than deaths. There is something very curious in that hidden law which evidently regulates the proportion of the sexes to each other. It has been commonly thought that the males have exceeded the females, in order to make allowance for the greater waste of life to which the males are subject by wars and the elements. But the facts show the contrary. “The number of the male population of Great Britain was 10,386,048, of the female population 10,735,919; the females exceeded the males by 349,871; and the males at home were 10,223,558; consequently the females exceeded by 512,361 the males in Great Britain. To every 100,000 females the males were 96,741, including 1538 males abroad, the exclusion of whom leaves 95,203 males at home. The excess of females over males was nearly the same proportionally in 1801 and 1851. Thus, in 1801, to every 100,000 males there were 103,353 females; in 1851, the females were 103,369 to the same number of males. The proportion in both periods was nearly 30 males to 31 females.” It may be inferred from this that there is rather a greater waste of female life than of male. It would be worth while to ascertain how long this excess has been found to have taken place; I am inclined to suspect that the unhealthy employments of young women, to so large an extent, may have been the cause; for it seems to be the law of nature to make a supply for the greater waste. Humanity requires a strict scrutiny into the healthy or deleterious employments of young women, especially in our manufacturing districts, to account for this excessive supply, that as far as is possible some remedial measures may be adopted. That all is regulated by a law of Providence, there can be no doubt in any mind. My present knowledge of the Census is entirely confined to the Report No. 1 of 1851. I shall look to the second Part for an elucidation of this problem.

It is surprising, however, on the whole, to see how evenly the sexes are balanced; it would be a speculation not uninteresting to see what causes may have induced occasional variations. Thus speaks the Report:

“The sexes have apparently increased at different rates in certain decennaries, but the average annual rates of increase through the whole period have been so nearly the same (males 1.328, females 1.329 per cent) as to cause a slight difference only in the third decimal place, and have differed little from 1⅓ annually. The decennial rates of increase were, males 14.108, females 14.111.” The “law of population,” as it relates to proportion of sexes, is a mystery. No human polity can provide for that. It is plain to see, however, that there is a wise, benevolent, superintending power which makes and maintains the law in a just equilibrium. Whether people shall marry or no may depend on human laws and civil institutions; whether due encouragement be given, or the reverse.

We learn from Herodotus that among the Sauromatæ, a people in the northern parts of Europe and Asia, the women dressed in the habits of men, and, like them, engaged in battle; that none were allowed to marry till she shall first have killed her man. Hence it happened, we are further told, that many died old maids, never having been able to fulfil the conditions. How any population could be kept up under the existence of such a law, no one now can question the historian. I suppose, from the necessity of the case, that a reform was demanded, and more peaceful marriages were the first-fruits of a free trade. It must have been an adventurous thing for a man to marry a woman who had once killed her man to obtain one husband; he might have lived in continual fear that she might kill a second man to have another husband.

It appears that marriage, though it is nominally free, is under restriction; were it otherwise, the increase of population would be far greater. “In ordinary times a large proportion of the marriageable women of every country are unmarried.” The writer might have spared his ink; but he adds: “And the most direct action on the population is produced by their entering the marriage state.” As one example may serve a general purpose, the Census gives that of the south-eastern division, comprising Surrey, Kent, Sussex, Hants, and Berks, in which “the number of women of the age of 20, and under 45, amounted at the last Census to 290,209, of whom 169,806 were wives, and 120,403 were spinsters or widows. 49,997 births were registered in the same counties during the year 1850, or 10 children were born in 1850 to every 58 women living in 1851.” It is to be presumed that among matrimonial chances every lot is a prize. The difficulty of a choice, where multitudes assemble, maintains a law of hesitation—of indecision—by which it happens that celibacy becomes wise, and is fond of repeating the philosopher’s advice as to the time to marry: if young, not yet; if middle-aged, wait; if old, never. Let us see how the reverse operates where the choice is very limited. St Kilda, in the parish of Harris, is 70 miles away from the mainland in the Western Hebrides; the population is 110—48 males, 62 females; 32 families in 32 houses. “There are 19 married couples on the island, 2 widowers, 8 widows. Five unmarried men, 5 unmarried women of the age of 20, and under 46.” One would imagine these had only to meet and to marry. Five is no great choice; the greater haste, you would suppose, to take a partner. Is the solution to be found in this extraordinary fact, that there is no clergyman to unite the couples resident on the island? The five couples must wait; and as the clergyman on the mainland may hesitate to go 140 miles to marry one couple, he is probably waiting for all five to come to a decision. It must have been some such unfortunate place as St Kilda which supplied the wit to the epigrammatist upon the question of marriages ceasing elsewhere, the priest asserting that women are not to be found there; the reply being—

“Women there are, but I’m afraid

They cannot find a priest.”