in an especial way to regard collections of people as if individual units. We cannot understand that a multitude is a collection of immortal souls.

I say immortal souls; each of these multitudes, not only had when he was on earth, but has a soul which did in its own time return to God who gave it. Every one of these souls lives. They had their separate thoughts and feelings when on earth, they have them now. They had their likings and pursuits; they gained what they thought good and enjoyed it, and they still, somewhere or other, live, and what they then did in the flesh surely has its influence upon their present destiny.

GEORGE HENRY LEWES.

GEORGE HENRY LEWES, born 1817, studied for the medical profession, but gave it up for the pursuit of literature. His Life and Works of Goethe. was rapidly followed by a Biographical History of Philosophy, from which the extract is taken; Sea Studies, Physiology of Common Life, Aristotle, Foundation of a Creed, etc. He has written also one or two novels, and contributed largely to periodicals.

JOHN LOCKE.

Ir is strange that any man should have read Locke, and questioned his originality. There is scarcely a writer we could name, whose works bear such an indisputable impress of having "raised himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on scraps of begged opinions, set his own thoughts to work to find and follow truth."

It is still more strange that any man should have read Locke, and questioned his power. That patient sagacity, which, above all things, distinguishes a philosopher, is more remarkable in Locke than almost any writer. He was also largely endowed with good sense; a quality, Gibbon remarks, which is rarer than genius. In these two qualities, and in his homely, racy, masculine style, we see the type of the English mind, when at its best.

The plain directness of his manner, his curtness without fanaticism, his hearty honest love of truth, and the depth and pertinence of his thoughts, though they do not dazzle his reader, yet win his love and respect. In that volume you have the honest thoughts of a great, honest Englishman. It is the product of a manly mind; clear, truthful, direct. No vague formulas; no rhetorical flights; no base flattery of base prejudices; no assumption of oracular wisdom; no word-jugglery. There are so many writers who cover their vanity with a veil of words, who seem profound because they are obscure, that a plainness like Locke's deceives the careless reader, who is led to suppose that what is there so plain must have been obvious. Locke did not seek to dazzle; he sought Truth, and wished all men to accompany him in the search. He would exchange his opinions with ease, when he fancied that he saw their error. He readily retracted ideas which he had published in an immature form, thinking, as he himself says, more concerned to quit and renounce any opinion of my own than oppose that of another, when truth apppears against it."

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He had an analytical mind: he desired to understand and to explain things, not to write eloquently about them. There were mysteries enough which he was contented to let alone; he knew that human faculties were limited, and reverentially submitted to ignorance on things beyond his reach. But though he bowed down before that which was essentially mysterious, he was anxious not to allow that which was essentially cognisable to be enveloped in mystery. Let that which is a mystery remain undisturbed; let that which is not necessarily a mystery be brought into the light of day. Know the limits of your understanding; beyond those limits it is madness to attempt to penetrate; within those limits it is folly to let in darkness and mystery, to be incessantly wondering, and always assuming that matters cannot be so plain as they appear, and that something lying deeper courts our attention.

To minds otherwise constituted-to men who love to dwell in the regions of vague speculations and are at ease

only in an intellectual twilight, Locke is naturally a disagreeable teacher. He flatters none of their prejudices; he falls in with none of their tendencies. Mistaking obscurity for depth, they accuse him of being superficial. The owls declare the eagle is blind. They want the twilight; he "wantons in the smile of Jove."

JOHN RUSKIN.

JOHN RUSKIN, born A.D. 1819, author of Modern Painters, Seven Lamps of Architecture, Stones of Venice, Two Paths, and numerous pamphlets on artistic, economic, and ecclesiastical topics.

THE SKY.

It is a strange thing how little, in general, people know about the sky. It is the part of creation in which nature has done more for the sake of pleasing man, more for the sole and evident purpose of talking to him and teaching him, than in any other of her works; and it is just the part in which we least attend to her. There are not many of her other works in which some more material or essential purpose than the mere pleasing of man is not answered by every part of her organization; but every essential purpose of the sky might, so far as we know, be answered, if once in three days or thereabouts, a great ugly black rain-cloud were brought up over the blue, and everything well-watered, and so all left again till next time, with perhaps a film of morning and evening mist for dew. And instead of this, there is not a moment of any day of our lives when nature is not producing scene after scene, picture after picture, glory after glory, and working still upon such exquisite and constant principles of the most perfect beauty, that it is certain it is all done for us, and intended for our perpetual pleasure.

The noblest scenes of the earth can be seen and known but by few. It is not intended that man should live always in the midst of them. He injures them by his

presence; he ceases to feel them if he be always with them; but the sky is for all. Bright as it is, it is not "too bright or good, for human nature's daily food." It is fitted in all its functions for the perpetual comfort and exalting of the heart-for the soothing and purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes capricious, sometimes awful; never the same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us is as distinct as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal, is essential.

And yet we never attend to it ; we never make it a subject of thought but as it has to do with our animal sensations. If, in our moments of idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says, It has been wet; and another, It has been windy; and another, It has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south and smote upon their summits until they melted and smouldered away in a dust of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last night, and the west wind blew them away like withered leaves. All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be shaken off even for an instant, it is only by what is gross or what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire, but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature which can only be addressed through lampblack and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual: that which must be sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is under

stood; things which the angels work out for us daily and yet vary eternally; which are never wanting, and never repeated; which are to be found always, yet each found but once. It is through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and the blessing of beauty given.

JOHN HILL BURTON.

JOHN HILL BURTON is the author of the History of Scotland, from Agricola's Invasion to the Revolution in 1688, The Scot Abroad, Book Hunter, Lives of Lord Lovat, Duncan Forbes of Culloden, David Hume, etc. He was born A.D. 1809.

EXPEDITION OF SIR JOHN DE VIENNE.

WHEN the truce was expiring in 1385, the French, instead of urging its renewal, fitted out an expedition to Scotland of two thousand men, one thousand of them mounted men-at-arms. Along with these, and far more welcome, came a thousand complete stand of arms and armour, and fifty thousand pieces of gold. The expedition was commanded by a knight of renown, John de Vienne, Admiral of France.

They expected a splendid opportunity for seeing the grand game of war; for England was resolved to make one of her great efforts for the annexation of Scotland. An army, said by the more moderate of the chroniclers to be fully seventy thousand strong, marched to the border under the command of the young King Richard. The Scots doubled their usual force, and were able to muster thirty thousand.

There now arose a characteristic dispute between the strangers and the Scots leaders; Vienne was for an immediate battle; Douglas, for the Scots, proposed to follow the old established tactic of clearing the country, and fighting only when driven to the alternative of battle. The dispute waxed hot, and the impetuous Frenchman spoke scornfully of the spirit of his Scots allies. He was only silenced by an incident, which shows how