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In the Commonplace Book, we find him brooding over a particular set of reflections, till they have almost grown into a system, and at the same time schooling himself to anticipate and disarm opposition. He is big with a great secret, which it is his mission to impart to the world. In reference to this feeling, that a mission had been entrusted to him, he writes: 'I was distrustful at eight years old, and consequently by nature disposed for these new doctrines.' In 1707, he began to feel his way to authorship, by the anonymous publication of two tracts, in Latin, on mathematical subjects. In 1709, he stepped forth under his own name with an instalment of his secret, in the shape of the celebrated Essay towards a New Theory of Vision.' But this clever and striking book was only partly original in its scope, and one of the points to be remarked about it is that it did not reveal the central thought which at the time, as we learn from the Commonplace Book, had possession of Berkeley's mind. It was but an outwork of the attack which he had been silently preparing on the scholastic notions of Matter, Space, and Time. In the following year (1710) he unmasked his batteries, by bringing out his "Treatise concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I.' Of this work, Part II.' never appeared. We can only conjecture what the unfinished design was. 'Part I.' was dropped out from the title-page of succeeding editions, and in 1713 Berkeley published the conclusions arrived at in his 'Principles,' in a more popular form, under the title of Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. The design of which is plainly to demonstrate the reality and perfection of Human Knowledge, the Incorporeal Nature of the Soul, and the immediate providence of a Deity; in opposition to Sceptics and Atheists. Also to open a Method for rendering the Sciences more easy, useful, and compendious.' How far Berkeley's arguments succeeded in realising the programme contained in this title-page may be briefly considered hereafter. The three works mentioned complete the first and indeed the chief period in his philosophical achievements. They were brought out between his twenty-fourth and twenty-ninth year. He had been precocious as a schoolboy, and he now undoubtedly showed himself precocious as a thinker. In the biographies of philosophers, he is most resembled in this respect by Hume, whose greatest work of speculation appeared when he was twenty-seven. Spinoza had his system ready at the age of thirty-five, Descartes at the age of forty, Locke and Kant not till they were each nearly sixty years old. Connected with this point there is another characteristic of Berkeley's mind, besides its precocious development, which is worthy of notice, and that is the intensity and impetuosity with which he seems

to

to have followed up the object in which for the time he was interested. It seems also as if, after a period of strenuous exertion in a particular direction, he was capable of becoming suddenly weary of the object of his pursuit, and of turning from it to pursue other objects with fresh and equally exclusive ardour. Thus, throughout his life philosophical research was only intermittent. After publishing his 'Dialogues,' his mind appears to have been satiated with speculation and argument on Matter, Space, Time, and God; and to all appearance he dropped the subject. He did not take it up again till seven years had elapsed, when (1720) being stimulated by the proposal of the Nature of Motion' as the subject for a prize-essay, by the Academy of Sciences in Paris, he set to work again from his former point of view, and composed in Latin his treatise 'De Motu,' which added an important chapter to the earlier portions of his system, in the shape of a spiritual theory of the nature of causation.

In the meanwhile (1713) he left his cloister and went out, like Dr. Faust, to see the world. His Mephistopheles, so to speak, was no other than Swift, that great, brilliant, terrible, unhappy genius, of whom Thackeray doubts whether most of us could have borne to know him: 'If you had been his inferior in parts,' says Thackeray, perhaps too bitterly, and his equal in mere social station, he would have bullied, scorned, and insulted you; if undeterred by his great reputation, you had met him like a man, he would have quailed before you, and not had the pluck to reply, and gone home, and years after written a foul epigram about you. If you had been a lord with a blue riband, who flattered his vanity, or could help his ambition, he would have been the most delightful company in the world.' But Swift was always good to Berkeley. He now received him in London, presented him at court, mentioned him to all the ministers,'' gave them some of his writings,' spoke of him as 'a very ingenious man and a great philosopher,' and seemed to find much pleasure in his society. Berkeley is several times mentioned in the 'Journal to Stella;' on one occasion he dines with Swift and Dr. Arbuthnot, on another with Swift and Parnell in an ale-house.' During the spring and summer of 1713 he remained in London, enjoying, from time to time, the society of Addison, Pope, Gay, Steele, and other wits and men of letters of the reign of Anne. Between March and August he contributed fourteen essays to Steele's new paper called the 'Guardian.' These essays are

collected by Professor Fraser among Berkeley's Miscellaneous Writings. They are against the Free-thinkers, and are chiefly directed against Collins, who had just published his Discourse of Free-thinking,' and who was reported, though it looks like

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an idle rumour, to have announced himself the discoverer of a demonstration against the existence of God. On the whole, they appear hardly worthy of Berkeley's powers; they have a very slight connection with his philosophical views; the satire in them is far from being brilliant; and they consist rather of a narrow polemic against ideal and imaginary sceptics than a real answer to the Deists of the early part of the eighteenth century. Berkeley had come to London as a clergyman, having received holy orders in 1709. And he was not the less welcome to the Tory ministry of the day, for being known to have preached in 1711, and afterwards published a 'Discourse on Passive Obedience,' and on the duty of not resisting the supreme civil power. It would be a mistake to suppose that this Discourse' consists of a vindication of the divine right' of kings. Rather it advocates submission to the government-of whatever kind it be. It is a protest against lawlessness, and may have been suggested by the temper of the public mind in Ireland. As coming from a philosopher, it bears comparison with the doctrine of Socrates, which had also reference to the restlessness of the Athenians, and their extreme tendency to assert individual rights that the whole of virtue is summed up in obedience to the laws. But Berkeley's Discourse' has only a biographical interest; it is not conceived with sufficient philosophical breadth, or from the point of view of sufficient political experience, to be available as an argument now. It was brought up against him, as evincing supposed Jacobite tendencies, in the reign of the first George, and it was only by the production of the 'Discourse itself' that Berkeley's friends were enabled to show its harmless character, and thus to prevent its being made an obstacle to his promotion.

In November, 1713, by the recommendation of Swift, Berkeley received the appointment of chaplain and secretary to the brilliant and eccentric Earl of Peterborough, who was just then starting as ambassador-extraordinary to Victor Amadeus, King of Sicily. Lord Peterborough, who, in earlier life, had been the intimate friend of Locke, was probably nothing loth to attach to his suite the rising philosopher of the day. And Berkeley was perhaps far from unwilling to be brought into personal relations with one of the most striking and remarkable of public characters-famed for war, diplomacy, scholarship, and wit; restless and full of contradictions; a man of the world and an enemy to religion, who nevertheless was said to have written sermons to rival Christian preachers.' In conformity with the statutes of Trinity College, Dublin, Berkeley obtained a Royal dispensation to travel and remain abroad during the space of

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two years, for the recovery of his health and his improvement in learning,' and this dispensation was afterwards twice renewed, so that he was at this time for more than eight years a wanderer from Ireland and the academic shades. It so turned out, however, that, except for one month, during which he halted with Lord Peterborough at Paris, he saw hardly anything of his chief. Berkeley, by his own choice, travelled with some of the suite through Savoy and over the Alps, to meet at Genoa the ambassador, who had gone by sea. And then the suite were all left at Leghorn, while Lord Peterborough, from some diplomatic motive, went on alone and incognito to Sicily, where he stayed three months, at the end of which time the death of the Queen on the 1st August, 1714, suddenly changed the whole aspect of things in England. The Tory ministry was dissolved, and Peterborough was recalled; and Berkeley immediately returned to London.

The earliest of Berkeley's letters, which have been preserved, are dated from Paris, Turin, and Leghorn, during this period of ten months, when he was Lord Peterborough's chaplain. Three are addressed to his friend Tom Prior, and one to Pope. He tells Pope that, as a poet, he ought to come for inspiration to Italy; and he adds that 'to enable a man to describe rocks and precipices, it is absolutely necessary that he pass the Alps.' In this remark there is no trace of the modern feeling for the sublimity of mountains. He seems to mean that a poet should study the horrible, and he speaks in the spirit of the Alpinas, ah! dura, nives,' of Virgil, though for other and gentler kinds of scenery Berkeley had, like Virgil, a keen sensibility. He seems to have regarded his ride through Savoy in mid-winter as a great and perilous exploit, which he would advise no one to imitate. He tells Prior that 'Savoy was a perpetual chain of rocks and mountains, almost impassable for ice and snow. And yet I rode post through it, and came off with only four falls; from which I received no other damage than the breaking my sword, my watch, and my snuff-box.' On New Year's Day he was carried in hand-chair over Mont Cenis, and seems to have been far too much occupied with the fear that his porters might slip with him, to give any appreciative attention to the grandeur of the spectacle through which he passed. He received benefit, however, to his health from the hardships he endured. He says: 'I am now hardened against wind and weather, earth and sea, frost and snow; can gallop all day long, and sleep but three or four hours at night.' When he got back to London, he seems to have been ill again, for Arbuthnot wrote to Swift: 'Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, which was very

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hard to produce in him; for he had an idea of a strange fever upon him, so strong that it was very hard to destroy it by introducing a contrary one.'

Berkeley had now tasted foreign travel, and he soon returned to it, having been almost immediately appointed to accompany Mr. Ashe, son of the Bishop of Clogher, on a continental tour. One of the first things reported of this journey is that Berkeley, while with his pupil at Paris (1715), was the occasional cause of the death of Father Malebranche, to whom he had gone to pay his respects, by drawing that aged philosopher into a controversy on some point of difference between their respective systems, at a time when he was suffering from an inflammation of the lungs. The story, however, of this meeting between the two metaphysicians, and of its tragical end, rests solely on the authority of Berkeley's early and not very careful biographers, and is not confirmed or alluded to by the biographers of Malebranche. We hear nothing more of Berkeley, even by report, except that he travelled over most parts of Europe,' till we come on his Diary in Italy, from January to June, 1717, in which he lives again in full vitality before our eyes. This document, forming part of Archdeacon Rose's collection of the Berkeley papers, is contained in four small volumes, which were evidently Berkeley's travelling companions. Notes of the works of art, libraries, and palaces of Rome; of posting stages, distances, different kinds of crops (jotted in pencil, apparently in the carriage as the travellers passed along); of towns and villages through the south of Italy, with their populations; of commercial and other statistics; of monasteries, and different orders of monks; of Catholic ceremonies, miracles, and beliefs; above all, of cases of the bite of the Tarantula, and of the treatment of the Tarantati-fill up these interesting pages. They suggest to us that with Berkeley the period of metaphysical speculation had been succeeded by a period in which external observation was paramount. Art, nature, and the life of men were now to him, for the time, more important than theories of perception and existence. Like Goethe during his Italian journeys, he was now undergoing in mature life an extended process of culture. To receive, to take in impressions, was the chief work of each day. But the Diary also bears witness to an extensive reading, though at the same time to an absence of that profound scholarship which would have enabled a Bentley or a Niebuhr to take a very different advantage of the opportunities afforded. Berkeley shows an intelligent curiosity in libraries and MSS., but no discovery appears to have resulted from it. He was an amateur traveller without a speciality, and his remarks remind us of the

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