Two very remarkable letters, one from Crabb Robinson himself, the other from Robert Hall, to which we can only refer the reader, show what it was to be a Godwinist in 1796. The Jews were to have no dealings with the Samaritans. The politically just were to live as men forbid.' Godwin's speculative philosophy was identified with the very trenchant practice of the Parisian guillotine, and Robinson's opinions on the French Revolution he took no pains to conceal. But in either case-in philosophia retinuit modum:' he did not approve or adopt the more questionable theories of Godwin; he palled with the horrors of the last phase of Democracy in France. He did not indeed share in the panic of Burke, nor in the recantation of Gibbon, who 'subscribed his assent to Mr. Burke's creed on the Revolution of France, approved his politics, adored his chivalry, and could almost excuse his reverence for church establishments.' Mr. Robinson thus records his secession from the revolutionary ranks:

I formed an acquaintance with a number of French emigrants on their escape from France during the horrors of the Revolution, and my compassion for them modified my Jacobinical feelings. I was, however, a Jacobin notwithstanding, and felt great interest in one Mr. Patmore, who was indicted for selling some of Paine's works, and ultimately escaped through a defect in the indictment. But my journal records my shock at the death of the King of France. My French attachment expired with the Brissotine party, though in my occasionally pious moods I used to pray for the French.

He did not, however, as was the case with many who had exulted in the destruction of a corrupt monarchy and still more corrupt church, and who, disappointed in their hopes by the extravagance of the destroyers, rushed into admiration of a military autocrat,-regard Napoleon as the instrument of Providence, for the vindication of kings

and priests. He was too near the borders, and even the presence of war in Germany, before and after the peace of Amiens, to accept canon-salvos, and confiscation or conscription as representatives of either liberty or fraternity of nations. Of Napoleon he always writes with severe justice but without passion. He did not with Hazlitt regard him as a hero, nor with such libellers as Lewis Goldsmith and Helen Maria Williams, or with expounders of prophecy and the Quarterly Review, account him a demon let loose from the bottomless pit to chastise for a season the sins of Europe.

The time spent by Mr. Robinson in Germany, as a young man, was a turning-point in his life. He would sometimes regret not having been educated at one of the great English universities. We think the regret needless. He could never have been transmuted into the ordinary type of a college don: still less into the shepherd of a rural flock: he would soon have wearied of the combination room, the yearly audit, even recommended by its ale, and of morning and evening chapel. But after graduating, and becoming a fellow, he might very probably have gone at once to the bar, and thus have missed the interesting as well as useful career described in his journal. Even had he, like his friend Rolfe, Lord Cranworth, attained to the dignity of the woolsack, Chancellor Robinson would have been a poor exchange for the erratic, social and much-conversing Henry Crabb.

We repeat that in our opinion it was fortunate he escaped university doctrine or discipline. Let us imagine him a capped and gowned freshman or Bachelor of Arts, and then compare what he might have learned between 1794 and 1798 at Oxford or Cambridge with what he did learn from 1800 to 1805 at Weimar and Jena.

In 1794 he would have found Oxford a little in advance of the Oxford described by Gibbon, and Cambridge somewhat improved since Gray was at Peterhouse. But neither on the banks of the Isis or the Cam would he have found any philosophy worthy the name, any zeal for living literature, anything approaching the intellectual vigour and activity that he met with, and shared in Germany. The fetters of the schoolmen still hung heavily on Oxford; pure mathematics alone was in much repute at Cambridge; and in each university theologians, when not merely passively faithful, were employed in devising apologies for the Church of England or for Christianity itself. A few gleams of light only rescued each of the benign mothers from the realm of dullness as described by its poetic historiographer, Alexander Pope.

To have hinted to the heads of houses, or the masters, provosts, and principals of those days that there had been such a philosopher as Kant, or that there was such a lecturer on philosophy as Schelling, would have been lesemajesty to the names of Aristotle and Sir Isaac: to have proclaimed that Herder was a greater writer than Dr. Johnson midsummer madness to have announced that Wieland wrote better novels than Mrs. Hannah More flat burglary,' and to have put Schiller and Goethe above the heads of Goldsmith and Cowper a sign that men were living in the last days.

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Perhaps original thinking and imaginative power were never at a lower ebb in this country than during the interval between the appearance of the Task and the first publication of the Lady of the Lake and Childe Harold. In philosophy, at least in the universities, Locke and Paley were the only names of mark, and great as are the merits of the Essay on the Understanding, or the Moral Philosophy, we imagine

that no one at the present hour will put either of them on a level with the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The Lyrical Ballads indeed had been printed in 1798, but so few were the readers of them, that they cannot be said to have been in any sense published until many years later. The simplicity of their language, and the depth of their meditative power, were hidden from a generation trained in the school of Pope, and pleased with the strains of Mr. Hayley. The canons of taste then prevailing will be found in the Monthly Review and in the earlier volumes of the Edinburgh and Quarterly. History, at least on any grand scale, had been dormant since the death of Gibbon, and Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de Medici, called the Magnificent, was welcomed as a transcendent acçession to the annals of literature.

All who heard Mr. Robinson speak of his early days, and all who may read his Diary, will be aware that his early education was very imperfect. His school-masters did not possess or could not impart any sound or useful knowledge, and, for some unexplained reason, he was not sent to the Dissenters' Colleges at Warrington or Hackney, where the defects of his schooling might have been supplied. He left his tutors with little Latin and far less Greek. In the appendix we have a graphic account of one of them-'his uncle the Rev. John Judd Fenner;' for by an odd chance Mr. De Morgan himself was a pupil of that singular classical instructor;' and 'used to astonish various persons by stating that he was an old school-fellow of H. C. R., omitting the trifling addition that more than thirty years elapsed between their dates of pupilage.' The little learning that Mr. Robinson acquired at school was from his own reading, and, until he went to Germany, he might almost come under the denomination of a self-taught man,

tings generally were among the permitted and often the favourite books in Dissenters' libraries. It is certain, from sundry disclosures in his diary, that he was then and for many years later acquainted with Shakespeare only through the medium of the stage, but dramatic reading was generally regarded by the stricter sort of dissidents as nearly akin to the three great foes of mankind-the world, the flesh and the devil.' He puts on record the fact that a German gelehrter first made him aware of the merits of the Faery Queen, and we have reason to believe that he knew Chaucer only as a great name. The poets he had studied up to the year 1800 that were not mainly theological and sung in chapels, were Cowper, Akenside, Burns, and probably Thomson. But he took with him to Germany the Lyrical Ballads, published two years earlier, and these were his literary viaticum. With this signal exception his imagination, at least as depended on external aids and culture, was nearly a tabula rasa, prepared and ripe for the full influence of the Teutonic muses. In some respects there has seldom been a more pre-ordained citizen of the world than Henry Crabb Robinson. He was utterly indifferent to things which affect the majority of travellers. He could digest anything: he would wear anything: he would talk with any one: he would take his ease in any inn: he would lodge with equanimity in rooms that Eng. lish gentlemen's gentlemen would not pass a single night in with his knapsack on his back and his staff in hand, sunshine and storm were seemingly alike to him: the slowness of Post-wagens, or Diligences, packed like Sir Francis Wronghead's family coach, did not discompose him: he would scarcely have disdained Diogenes' tub, or Daniel's dinner of herbs, or any one of the inconveniences endured or paraded

by philosophers. At the time of his first residence in Germany he was passing rich with a poor hundred a year; but what mattered it to a man who paid for annual rent of his lodging seven pounds !-He went abroad indeed at a fortunate time for one so slenderly furnished with provision for the way; fifteen years afterwards even the Robinsonian philosophy would have been baffled by the expectations of German Bonifaces and lodging-keepers then enlightened on the great question of taxing Britons. Two excellent gifts indeed migrated with him -one a strong will to struggle with difficulties, the other a remarkable aptitude for acquiring languages. Mr. De Morgan is of opinion that had Mr. Robinson taken to composition in verse, he would have come nearer to Hudibras than to the Excursion. It may have been so: our impression, however, is that he was, though by no means devoid of the imaginative faculty, properly a philologist. Quick observation, a most remarkable memory, keen perception of analogies and diversities, and great accuracy are the qualities that form the philologist; and such qualities were, in abundant measure, Crabb Robinson's.

In the year 1803 he writes:

I commenced my second session at the university of Jena much more auspiciously than the first. My position was very much improved, and I was in excellent health and spirits. As to my studies, I determined to endeavour to make up for my want of an early grammar-school education. It is not without a feeling of melancholy that I recollect the that I recollect the long list of Greek and Latin authors whom I read during the next two years. That I never mastered the Greek language is certain; but I am unwilling to suppose that I did not gain some insight into the genius of Greek poetry, especially in its connection with philosophy.

To those who were intimately acquainted with Crabb Robinson, this entry will occasion surprise. Well stored as his memory was with all he had read in English and