of pure reason. All was sterling, all perfectly plain; there was no point in the diction, no illustration in the topics, no ornament of fancy in the accompaniments. The language was choice,-perfectly clear, abundantly correct, quite concise, admirably suited to the matter which the words clothed and conveyed. In so far it was felicitous, no farther; nor did it ever leave behind it any impression of the diction, but only of the things said: the words were forgotten, for they had never drawn off the attention for a moment from the things; those things were alone remembered. No speaker was more easily listened to; none so difficult to answer. Once Mr. Fox, when he was hearing him with a view to making that attempt, was irritated in a way very unwonted to his sweet temper by the conversation of some near him, even to the show of some crossness, and (after an exclamation) sharply said, "Do you think it so very pleasant a thing to have to answer a speech like that?" The two remarkable occasions on which this great reasoner was observed to be most injured by a reply, were in that of Mr. Wilberforce quoting Clarendon's remarks on the conduct of the judges in the Ship Money case, when Sir William Grant had undertaken to defend his friend Lord Melville; and in that of Lord Lansdowne (then Lord Henry Petty), three years later, when the legality of the famous Orders in Council was debated. Here, however, the speech was made on the one day, and the answer, able and triumphant as it was, followed on the next. It may safely be said that a long time will elapse before there shall arise such a light to illuminate either the senate or the bench, as the eminent person whose rare excellence we have just been pausing to contemplate. That excellence was no doubt limited in its sphere there was no imagination, no vehemence, no declamation, no wit; but the sphere was the highest, and in that highest sphere its place was lofty. The understanding alone was addressed by the understanding. The faculties that distinguish our nature were those over which the oratory of Sir William Grant asserted its control. His sway over the rational and intellectual portion of mankind was that of a more powerful reason, a more vigorous intellect, than theirs; a sway which no man had cause for being ashamed of admitting, because the victory was won by superior force of argument; a sway which the most dignified and exalted genius might hold without stooping from its highest pinnacle, and which some who might not deign to use inferior arts of persuasion could find no objection whatever to exercise. Yet in this purely intellectual picture there remains to be noted a discrepancy, a want of keeping, something more than a shade. The commanding intellect, the close reasoner, who could overpower other men's understanding by the superior force of his own, was the slave of his own prejudices to such an extent, that he could see only the perils of revolution in any reformation of our institutions, and never conceived it possible that the monarchy could be safe, or that anarchy could be warded off, unless all things were maintained upon the same footing on which they stood in early, unenlightened, and inexperienced ages of the world. The signal blunder, which Bacon long ago exposed, of confounding the youth with the age of the species, was never committed by any one more glaringly than by this great reasoner. Ile it was who first employed the well-known phrase of the “wisdom of our ancestors ;" and the menaced innovation, to stop which he applied it, was the proposal of Sir Samuel Romilly to take the step of reform, almost imperceptibly small, of subjecting men's real property to the payment of all their debts. Historical Sketches of Statesmen, etc. CONDITION OF THE CHINESE. The universal respect in which learning is held, and the privileges allowed to it, have not, however, made the Chinese carry far their cultivation of it. They afford, on the contrary, a singular instance of a nation early making some progress, and then stopping short for ages; of a people, all of whom possess the instruments of education, the ineans of acquiring knowledge, a people most of whom have actually acquired some knowledge, and yet none of whom have ever gone beyond the most elementary studies. This can only be ascribed to the absolute form of their government, and the manifest intention which the sovereigns have always had to limit the literary acquisitions of their subjects. The advantages of keeping quiet and indolent a people so numerous as to be able to crush almost any ruler, and the means of tranquillity which elementary lessons like those of Confucius and his school bestowed, if they were thoroughly learnt, and became, as it were, mixed up with the nature of the people, could not escape the Chinese monarchs. They had a people to deal with whom they found it easy to occupy with such pursuits, and with the innumerable customs and ceremonies which the sacred writings inculcate together with far better things. The occupation was more than harmless.-it was most useful in extinguishing fierce and turbulent HENRY BROUGHAM. spirits; and the lessons taught were those of absolute submission to the magistrates, though seasoned with so much other doctrine as prevented them from wearing the appearance of a mere design to secure subordination. Beyond the learning of those books, therefore, the government had no desire that Chinese education should be carried. Accordingly, true orthodoxy is closely confined to the books of Confucius and Mencius, and one or two commentators on them; and the government discountenances by every means the acquisition of any other learning. This is the main cause of the stationary knowledge of the Chinese; and one of the most powerful means used by the government to keep it thus stationary is the preventing of almost all intercourse with foreign nations. 341 now deemed most refined, made a considerable progress in knowledge, and still more in the arts, have stopped short as it were on the threshold, and never attempted the rank of a learned or even a very polished nation. Acquainted with paper-making for above seventeen centuries, with printing for more than nine, they have hardly produced a book which could fix the attention of a European reader in the present day; and yet learning is the passport to political honours, and even to power among them; and books are so highly valued that it is part of their religious observances never to suffer the treading on, or irreverent treatment of, a scrap of printed or written paper how worthless soever. Possessed of the mariner's compass twelve hundred years before it was known in Europe, they have scarcely ever put it to the use which it really can best serve, but creep along their coasts, from headland to headland, like the most ignorant of the South Sea Islanders, and rather employ it on shore, where other marks might better serve to guide them. With a kind of glass, or something as near good glass as possible, for ages, they never have yet succeeded in making that most useful and beautiful product of the arts in its transparent state and plastic fabric. Capable of copying the works of the pencil with a minuteness which seems preternatural, both as to colour and form, they are wholly without invention, and, left to themselves, can make nothing like an imitation of nature. Nor in the severer sciences have they made any progress beyond the very first elements, although they have known one or two of the fundamental truths in geometry for hundreds of years, by induction rather than demonstration, and could calculate eclipses of the heavenly bodies long before any other nation had emerged from barbarism. It is equally certain, however, that the amount of knowledge which they have so long attained, the repute in which they have been taught to hold the quiet and sedulous pursuit of it, and the de The amount of the learning contained in those writings is very moderate. Many of the maxims are admirable; some indeed closely resembling those of our own religion. Thus Confucius distinctly enjoins the duty of doing unto others as we would be done to by them; nor can anything be more urgent than his injunction to watch the secret thoughts of the heart as the fountains of evil. It is also an admirable precept of his to judge ourselves with the severity we apply to others; and to judge others as we do ourselves. But there are wicked doctrines mixed with this pure wisdom, as when men are commanded not to live under the same sky with a father's assassin, and besides, the merit of all moral maxims is much more in the acting upon them than the laying them down. Wisdom is, properly speaking, the doing what wise sayings recommend; and he has made but a small progress in philosophy-even in the philosophy of morals-who has only stored his memory with all the proverbs of Franklin and all the morals of sop. There are few men so ignorant as not to know the substance of these aphorisms, though they may never have seen them put in terse language, or illustrated by apt comparisons. The diffi-votion of their attention to it within certain culty really lies in acting up to them. Therefore the learning to which the Chinese almost entirely devote themselves is of a very trifling nature at best. Some of it indeed is positively useless. The Li-ki, or book of rites and customs, contains three thousand of these, all of which are to be learnt and to be scrupulously observed; and there is a council of state with the exclusive office of seeing that this observance is com plete, -a manifest contrivance of the government to occupy the people with frivolous and harmless studies. It thus happens that the Chinese, after having, long before any other of the nations limits, joined to the being debarred from all foreign intercourse, have produced all the effect that could be desired by their rulers: it has so far reclaimed them from the turbulent state of uncivilized tribes as to make them easily ruled, by keeping them quiet, sedentary, inactive, even pusillanimous, without unfolding their faculties or increasing their knowledge in any degree likely to endanger the security of a system founded mainly upon the permanent position of all and each of its parts. Political Philosophy, Vol. i. Ch. vi., Government of China. SIR HUMPHRY DAVY, baronet, born at Penzance, Cornwall, 1778, in 1803 became a Fellow, in 1806 Secretary, and in 1820 President, of the Royal Society; died at Geneva, 1829. He was the author of more than fifty Treatises and Lectures explaining his brilliant chemical discoveries, etc., of Six Discourses delivered before the Royal Society at their Anniversary Meetings, Lond., 1827, 4to, and of the following among other works: Salmonia, or, Days of Fly-fishing, with Some Account of the Habits of Fishes belonging to the Genus Salmo, Lond., 1828, 12mo, 2d edit., 1829, 12mo, 3d edit., 1832, 12mo, 4th edit., with Additions by his Brother, Dr. John Davy, 1851, fp. 8vo; Consolations in Travel, or, The Last Days of a Philosopher, Lond., 1830, 12mo, 5th edit., 1851, fp. 8vo. Collected Works, Edited, with Life, by his Brother, John Davy, M.D. The Life appeared separately, Lond., 1836, 2 vols. 8vo, and a Life by Dr. J. A. Paris, Lond., 1831, 2 vols. 8vo. "Mr. Davy, not yet thirty-two years of age, occupied, in the opinion of all that could judge of such labours, the first rank among the chemists of this or of any other age; it remained for him, by direct service rendered to society, to acquire a similar degree of reputation in the minds of the general public."-CUVIER: Eloge of Sir H. Davy. ON THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF IMMORTALITY. If there be (which I think cannot be doubted) a consciousness of good or evil constantly belonging to the sentient principle in man, then rewards and punishments naturally belong to acts of this consciousness, to obedience or disobedience; and the indestructibility of the sentient being is necessary to the decrees of eternal justice. On your view, even in this life, just punishments for crimes would be almost impossible; for the materials of which human beings are composed change rapidly, and in a few years probably not an atom of the primitive structure remains; yet even the materialist is obliged, in old age, to do penance for the sins of his youth, and does not complain of the injustice of his decrepit body, entirely changed and made stiff by time, and suffering for the intemperance of his youthful, flexible frame. On my idea, the conscience is the frame of the mind, fitted for its probation in mortality. And this is exact accordance with the foundations of our religion, the divine origin of which is marked no less by its history than its harmony with the principles of our nature. Obedience to its precepts not only prepares for a better state of existence in another world, but is likewise calculated to make us happy here. We are constantly taught to renounce sensual pleas The doctrine of the materialists was always, even in my youth, a cold, heavy, dull, and insupportable doctrine to me, and necessarily tending to atheism. When I had heard, with disgust, in the dissecting-rooms, the plan of the physiologist, of the gradual accretion of matter, and its becoming endowed with irritability, ripening into sensibility, and acquiring such organs as were necessary by its own inherent forces, and at walk into the green fields or woods, by the last issuing into intellectual existence, a banks of rivers, brought back my feelings from Nature to God. I saw in all the powers of matter the instruments of the Deity. The ing animation in forms prepared by divine sunbeams, the breath of the zephyr, awakenintelligence to receive it, the insensate seed, the slumbering eggs which were to be vivified, appeared, like the new-born animal, works of a divine mind; I saw love as the creative principle in the material world, and this love only as a divine attribute. Then my own mind I felt connected with new sensations and indefinite hopes-a thirst for immortality; the great names of other ages and of distant nations appeared to me to be still living around me, and even in the fancied movements of the heroic and the great I saw, as it were, the decrees of the indestructibility of mind. These feelings, though generally considered as poetical, yet, I think, offer a sound philosophical argument in favour of the immortality of the soul. In all the habits and instincts of young animals, their feelings and movements, may be traced an intimate relation to their improved perfect state; their sports have always affinities to their modes of hunting or catching their food; and young birds, even in the nests, show marks of fondness, which, when their frames are developed, become signs of actions necessary to the reproduction and preservation of the species. The desire of glory, of honour, of immortal fame, and of constant knowledge, so usual in young persons of well-constituted minds, cannot, I think, be other than symptoms of the infinite and progressive nature of the intellect,-hopes which, as they cannot be gratified here, belong to a frame of mind suited to a nobler state of existence. THOMAS BROWN. Religion, whether natural or revealed, has always the same beneficial influence on the mind. In youth, in health, and prosperity, it awakens feelings of gratitude and sublime love, and purifies at the same time that it exalts: but it is in misfortune, in sickness, in age, that its effects are most truly and beneficially felt: when submission in faith, and humble trust in the Divine will, from luties become pleasures, underlying sources of consolation: then it creates powers which were believed to be extinct, and gives a freshess to the mind which was supposed to have passed away for ever, but which is now renovated as an immortal hope. Then it is the Pharos, guiding the wave-tost mariner to his home; as the calm and beautiful still basins or fiords, surrounded by tranquil groves and pastoral meadows to the Norwegian pilot escaping from a heavy storm in the North Sea; or as the green and dewy spot, gushing with fountains, to the exhausted and thirsty traveller in the midst of the desert. Its influence outlives all earthly enjoyments, and becomes stronger as the organs decay and the frame dissolves. It appears as that evening star of light in the horizon of life, which we are sure is to become in another season a morning star ; and it throws its radiance through the gloom and shadow of death. Consolations in Travel; or, The Last Days of a Philosopher: The Proteus; or, Immortality; Fourth Dialogue. THOMAS BROWN, M.D., born at Kirkmabreck, near Dumfries, Scotland, 1778, graduated M.D. 1803, and read lectures for Dugald Stewart in the Moral Philosophy Class of the University of Edinburgh, 1808-9, and in 1810 became colleague to Stewart in the Chair of Moral Philosophy, in which capacity he gained high distinction; died 1820. He was the author of Observations on the Zoonomia of Erasmus Darwin, M.D., Edin., 1798, 8vo; Observations on the Nature and Tendency of Mr. Hume's Doctrine Concerning the Relation of Cause and Effect, Edin., 1804, 8vo, 2d edit., 1806, 8vo, 3d edit., Edin., 1818, 8vo, 4th edit., Lond., 1835, 8vo; Poems, Edin., 1804, 2 vols. 12mo; A Criticism on Charges against Mr. Leslie, 1806, 8vo; The Paradise of Coquettes, Lond., 1814, crown 8vo; The Bower of Spring, 1816; The War Fiend, 1816; The Wanderer in Norway, a Poem, 1816, 8vo; Emily and other Poems, 2d edit., 1818, 8vo; Agnes, a Poem, 1818, 8vo; Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind, Edin., 1820, 4 vols. 8vo (posthumous), with a Memoir and Index by Welsh, 1828, 343 8vo, 1844, 8vo, new edition of Lectures, 1846, 4 vols. 8vo. See Account of his Life and Writings, by Rev. D. Welsh, Edin., 1825, 8vo. See also Selections from the Correspondence of the Late Macvey Napier, Esq., Edited by his Son, Macvey Napier, London, 1879, 8vo. Index, p. 545. "The prose of Dr. Brown is brilliant to excess; it must not be denied that its beauty is sometimes womanly; that it too often melts down precision into elegance; that it buries the main idea under a load of illustration. . . . It is darkened by exover-dress; and, in the midst of its luscious sweetcessive brightness; it loses case and liveliness by ness, we wish for the striking and homely illustrations of Tucker, and for the pithy and sinewy sense of Paley, either of whom, by a single short metaphor from a familiar, perhaps a low, object, could at one blow set the two worlds of Reason and Fancy in movement."-SIR J. MACKINTOSH: Dissert, on Progress of Ethical Philosophy, prefixed to Eneye. Brit., and in his Miscell. Works, edit. 1851, 110. "The style is so captivating, the views so comprehensive, the arguments so acute, the whole thing so complete, that I was almost insensibly his eloquence. In the power of analysis he greatly borne along upon the stream of his reasoning and transcends all philosophers of the Scottish school who preceded him."-MORELL: Hist. of Modern Philosophy. DESIRE OF THE HAPPINESS OF OTHERS. It is this desire of the happiness of those whom we love which gives to the emotion of love itself its principal delight, by affording to us constant means of its gratification. He who truly wishes the happiness of any one cannot be long without discovering some mode of contributing to it. Reason itself, with all its light, is not so rapid in discoveries of this sort as simple affection, which sees means of happiness, and of important happiness, where reason scarcely could think that any happiness was to be found, and has already by many kind offices produced the happiness of hours before reason could have suspected that means so slight could have given even a moment's pleasure. It is this, indeed, which contributes in no inconsiderable degree to the perpetuity of affection. Love, the mere feeling of tender admiration, would in many cases have soon lost its power over the fickle heart, and in many other cases would have had its power greatly lessened, if the desire of giving happiness, and the innumerable little courtesies and cares to which this desire gives birth, had not thus in a great measure diffused over a single passion the variety of many emotions. The love itself seems new at every moment, because there is every moment some new wish of love that admits of being gratified; or rather it is at once, by the most delightful of all combinations, new, in the tender wishes and cares with which it occupies us, and makes familiar to us, and endeared the more by the remembrance of hours and years of well-known happiness. The desire of the happiness of others, though a desire always attendant on love, does not, however, necessarily suppose the previous existence of some one of those emotions which may strictly be termed love. This feeling is so far from arising necessarily from regard for the sufferer that it is impossible for us not to feel it when the suffering is extreme, and before our very eyes, though we may at the same time have the utmost abhorrence of him who is agonizing in our sight, and whose very look, even in its agony, still seems to speak only that atrocious spirit which could again gladly perpetrate the very horrors for which public indignation as much as public justice had doomed it to its dreadful fate. It is sufficient that extreme anguish is before us; we wish it relief before we have paused to love, or without reflecting on our causes of hatred; the wish is the direct and instant emotion of our soul in these circumstances,-an emotion which, in such peculiar circumstances, it is impossible for hatred to suppress, and which love may strengthen indeed, but is not necessary for producing. It is the same with our general desire of happiness to others. We desire, in a particular degree, the happiness of those whom we love, because we cannot think of them without tender admiration. But though we had known them for the first time simply as human beings, we should still have desired their happiness; that is to say, if no opposite interests had arisen, we should have wished them to be happy rather than to have any distress; yet there is nothing in this case which corresponds with the tender esteem that is felt in love. There is the mere wish of happiness to them,-a wish which itself, indeed, is usually denominated love, and which may without any inconvenience be so denominated in that general humanity which we call a love of mankind, but which we must always remember does not afford on analysis the same results as other affections of more cordial regard to which we give the same name. To love a friend is to wish his happiness indeed, but it is to have other emotions at the same instant, emotions without which this mere wish would be poor to constant friendship. To love the natives of Asia or Africa, of whose individual virtues or vices, talents or imbecility, wisdom or ignorance, we know nothing, is to wish their happiness; but this wish is all which constitutes the faint and feeble love. It is a wish, however, which, unless when the heart is absolutely corrupted, renders it impossible for man to be wholly indifferent to man; and this great object is that which nature had in view. She has by a provident arrangement, which we cannot but admire the more the more attentively we examine it, accommodated our emotions to our means, making our love most ardent where our wish of giving happiness might be most effectual, and less gradually and less ip proportion to our diminished means. From the affection of the mother for her new-born infant which has been rendered the strongest of all affections, because it was to arise in circumstances where affection would be most needed, to that general philanthropy which extends itself to the remotest stranger on spots of the earth which we never are to visit, and which we as little think of ever visiting as of exploring any of the distant planets of our system, there is a scale of benevolent desire which corresponds with the necessities to be relieved, and our power of relieving them, or with the happiness to be afforded, and our power of affording happiness. How many opportunities have we of giving delight to those who live in our domestic circle which would be lost before we could diffuse it to those who are distant from us! Our love, therefore, our desire of giving happiness, our pleasure in having given it, are stronger within the limits of this sphere of daily and hourly intercourse than beyond it. Of those who are beyond this sphere, the individuals most familiar to us are those whose happiness we must always know better how to promote than the happiness of strangers, with whose particular habits and inclinations we are little if at all acquainted. Our love and the desire of general happiness which attends it are therefore, by the concurrence of many constitutional tendencies of our nature in fostering the generous wish, stronger as felt for an intimate friend than for one who is scarcely known to us. If there be an exception to this gradual scale of importance according to intimacy, it must be in the case of one who is absolutely a stranger,-a foreigner who comes among a people with whose general manners he is perhaps unacquainted, and who has no friend to whose attention he can lay claim from any prior intimacy. In this case, indeed, it is evident that our benevolence might be more usefully directed to one who is absolutely unknown than to many who are better known by us, that live in our very neighbourhood in the enjoyment of domestic loves and friendships of their own. Accordingly, we find that by a provision which might be termed singular, if we did not think of the universal bounty and wisdom of God, a modification of our general regard has been prepared in the sympathetic tendencies of our nature for this case also. There is a |