able; your children are well trained; and your little dinner-parties are unexceptionable; but how you manage to do all this, I cannot conceive. You would be surprised if I were to tell you the trouble I have with my eight servants. My fat old cook divides his time between experiments in l'art gastronomique and the billiard-table; my coachman starves the horses, and gets drunk with the money for which he sells their oats; the footman spends his time in trimming his whiskers; and the waiter loses the silver, and breaks my china;-so much for the men. With the women it is but little better: the nurse neglects my children while she flirts with the beaux who crowd to the house on Sunday, in yellow gloves and blue inexpressibles; the chamber-maid borrows my embroidered capes for her evening parties; and the prattling French governess has actually been detected in a clandestine correspondence with one of my husband's clerks, a simple boy from the country. There is no help for it; so I must shut my eyes and let matters take their course. I could not endure a life of domestic drudgery.' If she were several years transferred it to another. older, with a mind fully developed, and a strength of character fitted to endure the vicissitudes of life, she might be trusted to a fate so promising; but, at her age, she will be the mere plaything of a husband who has gained a deeper insight into the good and evil of this world's wisdom; and it will be hard for her to obtain in future the influence which a wife ought always to possess, and which is only to be gained by the unison of firm principles and perfect gentleness. He may delight in the beauty of his girlish wife, but he can scarcely be expected to respect her opinions; and woe to the woman whose husband does not regard her as his confidential friend. And now that I have finished my lecture, Susan, pay tell me when the marriage is to take place Pí 'As soon as we can complete our arrangements; probably in about a fortnight,' answered Mrs Arlington, as she rose to depart. Her sister's earnestness had startled her into more serious reflection than she usually indulged, and she bade her farewell with a saddened countenance. Mrs Hilton did not reply; she knew it was useless to But when she stepped into her carriage, and threw hertell her, that what she called drudgery was in fact the self back upon her luxurious cushions, her old habits of duty of every good wife; and that although manual labour thought returned. After all,' said she to herself, may not always be necessary, yet the constant supervisionwealth is a very desirable thing; Harriet may never of the mistress is essential to the well-being of a family. 'The eye of the master maketh a diligent servant,' is a proverb almost forgotten in these days of luxury and false refinement. Our discussion has led us far from Harriet and her fortunes,' said Mrs Hilton, after a moment's pause; I should like to know something of her intended husband; he is a very handsome man, yet there is something in the expression of his face which I do not like.' He is the son of an old friend of my husband, and, by the recent death of his father, has come into possession of a large fortune.' 'What do you know of his character and temper, Susan P 'Very little; he has spent several years in Europe, and is very well informed. He is said to be somewhat eccentric, and his manners are a little reserved.' 'How long has he known Harriet ?" 'He dined with us last year, when Harriet was little more than a pretty child, but I think he has never seen her since, until about three weeks ago, when we met him on the street; her extreme beauty seemed to attract him immediately, and he has since then been a constant visiter.' 'Does Harriet fancy she has any attachment to him? I say fancy, because it could scarcely be a genuine affection already.' 'I believe all boarding-school girls are much alike in one point, Mary; they come home with imaginations excited by novel-reading, and are ready to fall in love at a moment's warning, with any interesting youth. Harriet is like the rest; and the attentions of a man as handsome as Edward Tracy soon produce an impression. You look grave; you think me wrong in giving Harriet to one of whom I know so little.' have such another brilliant offer, and what signifies a few years more or less?-she must learn by experience instead of precept.' Alas! how little benefit from those costly lessons has that mother derived, who willingly transfers her daughter to so severe a school, when her own kind guidance might save her from its harsh discipline! On her sixteenth birthday, Harriet Arlington became the wife of the rich and handsome Edward Tracy. The wedding was unequalled in splendour; the bride looked fairy-like in her loveliness, and queenly in the richness of her apparel-what more could a fashionable mother desire ? A few weeks were devoted to festivity, and then the newly wedded pair set sail for France, where they purposed spending their first year, amid the gaieties of Paris. Among Mrs Arlington's parting lessons to her daughter, was one which Harriet vainly tried to understand. 6 Be careful, my child,' said her mother, that you never inquire into your husband's early history; there are a thousand adventures which befal a man in the course of his life to which he dislikes to recur; and it is always best for his wife to know nothing about them.” Harriet possessed a mind of perfect purity, and therefore she was utterly ignorant of the vices of society. To her, Tracy seemed all that she could desire; and she did not dream that he could have ever known evil; she would never, therefore, have thought of inquiring into his past history, simply because she was quite satisfied with him at present; and yet, her mother's words, implying that there might be something to learn respecting her husband, troubled her more than she would have liked to confess. Immediately upon their arrival in Paris, they were surrounded by Tracy's former friends, and Harriet found herself the centre of attraction to the most fashionable circle of the pleasure-loving metropolis. Her extreme youth, her exceeding beauty, her winning simplicity of manners, and frank demeanour, made her a general favourite; and Tracy had the satisfaction of knowing that the voice of fashion now ratified his own taste. 'I will be frank with you, Susan; to me the advantages of wealth and intellect are of little value, in comparison with good principles and sound morality. Edward Tracy may be the most fascinating of men, but if he lack steadiness of character, Harriet will never be happy with him. She is naturally very affectionate in her disposition, with Edward Tracy was one of the world's votaries and warm feelings, and, I should think, a strong tendency to victims. At an early age he had been sent to school in romantic sensitiveness; she will attach herself to her England, and from thence he had entered the university; husband with the most ardent tenderness; and if he be so that from his childhood he had been deprived of the a man of high-toned character and sound sense, he will advantages of home influence. His mind had been culmould her into the loveliest woman in society; but if he tivated, but his heart neglected; and the sweet charities is one of the votaries of excitement, a lover of pleasure of life, which grow up only in the quiet sunshine of domerely, then woe to her, as soon as the charm of her mestic retirement, had never diffused their perfume beauty palls upon his senses! You are giving to the hands around his boyhood. His mother had died while he was of a stranger, a cherished plant, just when it is about to an infant; and his father, immersed in the cares of busiblossom into perfect beauty; if he watch over it withness, thought that his duty was fully performed when anxious care all will be well; but if he blight it in the Edward was placed at school, and well supplied with daily bud, you will bitterly repent the haste with which you comforts. There was no home into which he could enter, to learn the happy influence of social duties; no mother to infuse a love of virtue into his soul, by her gentle precepts and example; no sisters to teach him a habitual reverence for the purity of woman's nature. His college life had been disgraced by no excesses, and to all appearance his moral character was as unimpeachable as his mental qualities were brilliant; but it was whispered that his few intimate friends could tell a different tale. In fact, Tracy was consummately selfish. For his vices had not the excuse of youthful passion, since he was actually as cold and calculating as if he had numbered fourscore winters; and for his virtues, or what passed as such, he deserved little praise, because they were the result solely of interested motives. A most ingenious sophist, he could deceive himself and others into the belief that he was actuated by the noblest principles, when he was only obeying the dictates of inclination; and, with sentiments of honour and magnanimity ever on his lips, he was seldom known to do a disinterested act. Such was the husband of the lovely and warm-hearted Harriet. Well might her worldly-minded mother dread her inquiring into his past life; but more, far more, might she have feared for his future conduct. A sudden transition from the restraints of a boardingschool to the excitements of fashionable life, might have tried the strength of a far more vigorous mind than was possessed by Mrs Tracy. Bewildered in the whirl of gaiety, and intoxicated by continued draughts of adulation, Harriet gave herself up to the full enjoyment of pleasure. But she soon learned that life's pleasures are like earth's flowers-if we are content to inhale their sweets while engaged in the exercise of active duties, they are harmless and even healthful; but if we gather them around us while we recline upon the drowsy couch of indolence and supineness, their rich perfume can only bring disease and death. her marriage. She saw a man of noble person and graceful manners, offering to her the devoted attentions of an ardent lover, and her heart sprang towards him with girlish eagerness and fondness. When a woman lives a little while in society, she learns, by sad experience, that disappointments must come, and bitter as they may be when inflicted by those she loves best, she at length learns to bear them with patience, and even to expect them. But sad is the fate of her whose first sorrow is the work of him who has sworn to love and cherish her-to whose lips the chalice of disappointment is commended by the hand which placed on hers the symbol of unbroken union. To all outward appearance, Tracy was as kind to his wife as most fashionable husbands; but poor Harriet would willingly have exchanged his cold politeness when in society, for a single look of real tenderness; while his capricious tyranny in private was such as to keep alive a constant irritation of temper on her part, which served as an excuse, though it was in fact the result, of his neglect of her feelings. Another and a still deeper fountain of bitterness, was finally opened in the heart of the young wife. In the careless freedom of conversation with her Parisian friends, she had learned some of the dark secrets of her husband's early life. To the mind of a pure-hearted girl, whose ideas of human nature have been formed after the inimitable models of the heroes of romance, nothing can give so fearful a shock, as the discovery that the object of her innocent love has ever been the votary of vicious indulgence. A woman of less feeling, placed in Harriet's situation, would, perhaps, have resigned herself quietly, and comforted herself with the external advantages of her position-for Tracy rarely interfered in his wife's pursuitsand a little management would have enabled her to avoid the frequent scenes of angry altercation which made her so very miserable. But Harriet had too much affection for her husband, too little regard for those worldly advantages which she had possessed from infancy, to be content with such a lot. Candid, even to a fault, she possessed neither the skill which enables a cunning woman to manage the inequalities of a capricious temper, nor the tact which teaches a worldly wise one to take advantage of the faintest ray of returning good feeling in her hus band. She was unhappy; she knew that her husband was the cause of her misery, and she upbraided him with his cruelty in the same manner as, but a few months before, she would have reproached a schoolfellow. A few short months sufficed for her dream of folly, and then all the allurements of society could not blind her to the fact that her husband was daily becoming neglectful in his conduct towards her. The novelty of success was over; the triumph of possessing so young and pretty a wife had ceased to interest him, and Tracy was rapidly returning to his old habits of dissipation. Wounded by his indifference, and accustomed to have every grievance redressed by her affectionate parents, as soon as made known to them, Harriet, naturally enough, adopted the same system of girlish repining in her intercourse with her husband. With the fretful manner of a petted child, she reproached him for his frequent absence, and his manifold engagements; and vainly expected that the petulance which had been indulged by her mother, would have equal influence with him. Naturally goodtempered, her fretfulness was only the result of unlimited indulgence; and judicious advice, joined with kind treat-woman's happiness consists in the exercise of her affec ment, would soon have subdued such a disposition; but Tracy was not calculated to correct faults in the characters of others, and a habit of bickering soon grew up between them which threatened to destroy all domestic comfort. Harriet, with a youthful impatience of melancholy feelings, endeavoured to lose the recollection of her discomfort, by plunging still more deeply in fashionable folly. There were many among her acquaintances, who, while they lacked her advantages in point of wealth, and youth, and beauty, were far her superiors in worldly wisdom. These persons gladly undertook her guidance through the mazes of society, and by their aid, the equipage, the dress, the entertainments of Mrs Tracy, became distinguished for their splendour and richness. But in vain the poor girl tried to cheat herself into happiness. The warmer feelings of early youth were daily withering within her bosom, and no outward show could compensate her for their loss. The romance, which belongs more or less to the nature of every woman, had not been wasted by her upon school friendships, or fancied attachments, but had at once centred upon her husband. No calculations of interest had ever been in her mind connected with Tracy looked upon his young wife as a mere child, whose happiness depended upon the gratification of her girlish whims; and so long as he allowed her to do what she pleased, he thought she ought not to complain, if he assumed the same privilege. He did not know that a tions, and that he might as well call upon a blind man to admire the beauties of nature, as expect a woman to be content with mere external advantages, when shut out from the light of love. He considered Harriet as spoiled by early indulgence; but had he ever looked into the depths of her guileless character, he would have learned that many a pearl of price lay beneath the surface of the stream of thought which his breath so often ruffled. The tale we are relating is no uncommon one. Who cannot point to some similar instance of domestic estrangement, even among their own familiar friends? The world is witness to some brilliant marriages; it beholds the newly wedded pair surrounded by affluence and luxury; it, perhaps, welcomes them to its scenes of gaiety, but no more is known, until suddenly the tie is severed!-the wife returns to the home of her childhood the husband becomes a solitary wanderer. Then come surmises and conjectures, recollections of trifling differences between the parties, and it may be, all the kind mendacity of hints,' to explain the motives of so unforeseen a separation. But who, save the sufferers themselves, can know of the causes which led to such a disruption of domestic ties? Who can trace the course of the tempest, from the cloud no bigger than a man's hand,' to the fiery thunderbolt rending the chain which bound the fettered pair? Who was allowed to hear the angry word, the hasty retort? Who beheld the cold look, the bitter sneer ? Who listened to the keen reproach of wounded affection, the scoffing reply of incipient hatred ? Alas! so frail is human nature, that our very virtues sometimes do the work of vices, and even as fanaticism may be productive of as much evil as infidelity, so our tenderest affections, when injudiciously exercised, may be as subversive of domestic happiness as aversion. 6 The two first years of married life are always the most hazardous; if we escape shipwreck then, we may hope to steer our bark safely to a haven of rest.' Such was the remark of one now in her grave, who had passed, not unscathed, through the ordeal; and daily experience proves the truth of her assertion. If it requires time and patience, in order to modulate two musical instruments to perfect harmony, how much more of both is needed to produce exact accordance between two hearts-those harps of a thousand strings'-which, when once wedded, can give forth the music of life only when they are in unison. It matters not how intimately the character of cach may have been studied by the other before marriage; the familiar intercourse of wedded life develops a thousand trifling peculiarities, and half-formed habits, which could not be discovered earlier, because there was no opportunity for their display; and, generally speaking, mutual forbearance is the first duty which we are called to exercise. At the expiration of the eventful two years, Harriet was once more an inmate of her father's house. The differences between herself and her husband had arisen to such a height, that nothing remained but a separation; and under the pretence of seeking renovated health in her native land, Mrs Tracy quitted her husband, leaving him still the ornament of the Parisian circles of fashion. Alas! the unhappy Harriet had been too early subjected to the trials which require womanly strength of character, and womanly gentleness of demeanour. The petted child, fresh from the indulgence of the nursery, with all the waywardness of a school girl yet clinging to her affectionate nature, was but little fitted to encounter the fate which awaited her. Broken in health and spirits, and suffering from a nervous irritability which threatened to destroy reason itself, she returned to the home of her happy years, the mere shadow of herself. The joyous expression of her once beautiful face had given place to a look of care and vexation; her smooth forehead bore traces of the oft-knit brow, and she seemed prematurely aged in mind as well as body. The sudden death of her infant, to whom she had looked for future solace in her loneliness of heart, completed the work which her ill-assorted marriage had begun; and while Tracy still remained amid the gaieties of Paris, his wife was fast sinking into a state of mental imbecility. She would sit for hours in one position; her hands hanging listlessly by her side, her head bent down, her eyes fixed on vacancy, seemingly abstracted from everything around her. The voice of her mother, the presence of her father, were alike powerless to arouse her at such times from her mournful trance. She required her room to be darkened; and the admission of a ray of sunshine made her shiver, as if the light of day were perfectly abhorrent to her. Alarmed at her increasing hatred of life, her mother took measures to guard her with the utmost vigilance; but her cares were vain. One morning her attendant left the room for a few minutes, leaving Mrs Tracy apparently buried in sleep; on her return she was horror-stricken to find her lying prostrate on the floor, with the blood flowing from a wound in her temple. Whether she had fallen against the chimney-piece in attempting to rise, or whether the more horrible suspicion which entered the minds of her agonized parents was true, could never be known. She uttered not a word when she was placed in bed-she returned no answer to the entreaties of her parents, nor the questions of her physi FROM PROFESSOR STEWART'S DISSERTATION ON THE PROGRESS OF METAPHYSICS, PREFIXED TO THE ENCYCLOPEDIA BRITANNICA. As this magnificent discourse is scarcely accessible to a large proportion of the reading public, and as some previous acquaintance with a science, which can never become generally popular, is necessary in order to its being read with relish, we have thought that it might not be an unacceptable task to throw together a few of the more striking conceptions and interesting facts which lie scattered over its pages. We meet at the outset with a very fine image illustrative of the continuity of knowledge. It is quoted from Mr Harris, the well-known author of Hermes. Even in the middle ages, there was always a faint twilight, like that auspicious gleam which, in a summer's night, fills up the interval between the setting and the rising sun.' Prior to the Reformation, the authority of Aristotle was imposed by oath on the teachers in many of the universities. When authors learned to address the multitude in the vernacular tongues, the prejudice began to vanish which had so long confounded knowledge with erudition; and a revolution commenced in the republic of letters, analogous to what the invention of gunpowder produced in the art of war. All the splendid distinctions of mankind, as the Flower of Chivalry indignantly exclaimed, were thereby thrown down, and the naked shepherd levelled with the knight clad in steel.' 'May I,' asks the Professor, in a passage marked by the utmost felicity of thought and expression, may I be permitted to caution my readers against the common error of confounding the Machiavelian politicians with the benevolent reverence for established opinions manifested in the noted maxim of Fontenelle-That a wise man, even when his hand was full of truths, would often content himself with opening his little finger.' Of the advocates for the former, it may justly be said, that they love darkness rather than light, because their deeds are evil;' well knowing, if I may borrow the words of Bacon, that the open day-light doth not show the masks, and mummeries, and triumphs of the world, half so stately as candle-light.' The philosopher, on the other hand, who is duly impressed with the latter, may be compared to the oculist, who, after removing the cataract of his patient, prepares the still irritable eye, by the glimmering dawn of a darkened apartment, for enjoying in safety the light of day.' The following passage, translated from the French of Bodin, a philosophical lawyer of the sixteenth century, reminds us very forcibly of the manner of our own Hooker. By images equally natural with the foregoing, the same grand truth is illustrated and enforced. We ought, in the government of a well-ordered state and commonwealth, to imitate and follow the great God of nature, who in all things proceedeth easily, and by little and little; who of a little seed causeth to grow a tree for height and greatness right admirable, and yet, for all that, insensibly; and still by means conjoining the extremities of nature, as by putting the spring between winter and summer, and autumn betwixt summer and winter, moderating the extremities of the terms and seasons, with the self-same wisdom which it useth in all other things also, and that in such sort, as that no violent course or force therein appeareth.' So late as 1598, it was maintained by Hofman, professor of divinity in the University of Helmstadt, that what was false in philosophy might be true in theology! Strange have been the aberrations of men of genius and learning. Melancthon and Kepler believed in astrology; and Tycho Brahe, the prince of astronomers,' revered as prophecies the ravings of an idiot whom he kept in his service. After that of Buchanan, Scotland has no name of much note in literature for about a century and a half. 'Men believe,' says Bacon, 'that their reason governs their words; but it often happens, that words have power enough to re-act upon reason.' Education he has happily described as the Georgics (agriculture) of the mind.' With a clear presentiment of his future renown, he 'bequeaths his name to posterity, after some generations shall be past.' Hobbes, the next English philosopher of eminence, was born in 1588, and lived to upwards of ninety. His ethical and political doctrines are very closely interwoven with each other. All men he considered by nature equal. Society he deemed entirely an interested league, in which, by common consent, a portion of natural rights is sacrificed that the remainder may be enjoyed in security. Hence the multitude become one thing, called a state or republic. In this the will of the magistrate is supreme, and the only standard of right and wrong. Power and right he consequently believed to be interchangeable terms. "The power of God,' he affirms in his treatise on Liberty and Necessity, alone is a sufficient justification of any action he doth. .. That which he doth is made just by his doing it.' He used to say, in his strong paradoxical style, by way of enforcing the value of reflection-If I had read as much as some others, I should have been as ignorant as they are.' Cudworth (born 1617, died 1688) was the prime antagonist of Hobbes. His great object was to tear up by the roots the whole of the Epicurean philosophy. Professor Stewart imagines that the following passages contain the germ of Kant's leading idea in the Critic of Pure Reason. Independently of this, they are too beautiful in themselves to need any apology for their insertion. The mind, according to Cudworth, perceives, by occasion of outward objects, as much more than is represented to it by sense, as a learned man does in the best-written book, than an illiterate person or brute. To the eyes of both the same characters will appear; but the learned man, in those characters, will see heaven, earth, sun, and stars; read profound theorems of philosophy or geometry; learn a great deal of new knowledge from them, and admire the wisdom of the composer; while to the other nothing appears but black strokes drawn on white paper. The reason of which is, that the mind of the one is furnished with certain previous inward anticipations, ideas, and instruction, that the other wants. In the room of this book of human composition let us now substitute the book of nature, written all over with the characters and impressions of divine wisdom and goodness, but legible only to an intellectual eye. To the sense both of man and brute, there appears nothing else in it, but, as in the other, so many inky scrawls; that is, nothing but figures and colours. But the mind, which hath a participation of the divine wisdom that made it, upon occasion of those sensible delineations, exerting its own inward activity, will have not only a wonderful scene, and large prospects of other thoughts laid open before it, and variety of knowledge, logical, mathematical, and moral, displayed, but also clearly read the divine wisdom and goodness in every page of this great volume, as it were written in large and legible characters.' The fine remark, that hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue, belongs to the Duc La Rochefoucauld. This writer's taste was so fastidious that some of his Maxims were altered thirty times prior to publication. Errors are sometimes relatively beneficial, by displac ing others more noxious than themselves. A toy, says D'Alembert, must sometimes be given to a child to get out of its hands a mischievous weapon. Stewart asserts, that Descartes, by establishing the principle that nothing conceivable by the power of imagination can throw any light on the operations of thought, laid the foundation-stone of the experimental philosophy of the human mind. Gassendi has very smartly observed, in defence of his preference for the atomic theory over the vortices of the later philosopher, that chimæra for chimæra, he could not help feeling some partiality for that which was two thousand years older than the other. From reading Descartes' Treatise on Man, Malebranche was seized with palpitation of the heart. He who was so susceptible under the dull appliances of metaphysics, was unable to read, without disgust, a page of the finest poetry. The chief feature in the philosophy of Malebranche is the rejection of second causes. Closely coinciding with certain Hindoo sages, who teach, according to Sir William Jones, that the creation is an energy rather than a work, he held the Deity to be the immediate cause of every effect in the universe. Ideas are in the Divine mind, not ours; and there we perceive them. By such speculations, some of which, at least, will appear absurd to none but superficial thinkers, the French philosopher may be said to have paved the way for the idealism of Berkeley. Stewart, with a specific reference to the last, has the following splendid passage:- In reflecting on the repeated reproduction of these, and other ancient paradoxes by modern authors, whom it would be highly unjust to accuse of plagiarism, still more, in reflecting on the affinity of some of our most refined theories to the popular belief, in a remote quarter of the globe, one is almost tempted to suppose that human invention is limited, like a barrelorgan, to a specific number of tunes. But is it not a fairer inference, that the province of pure imagination, unbounded as it may at first appear, is narrow, when compared with the regions opened by truth and nature to our powers of observation and reasoning? Prior to the time of Bacon, the physical systems of the learned performed their periodical revolutions in orbits as small as the metaphysical hypotheses of their successors; and yet who would now set any bounds to our curiosity in the study of the material universe? Is it reasonable to think that the phenomena of the intellectual world are less various, or less marked with the signatures of divine wisdom P' Nothing can be more picturesque than the only interview between Malebranche, now considerably above seventy years of age, and the future Bishop of Cloyne. The conversation turned on the non-existence of matter. Malebranche, who had an inflammation in his lungs, and whom Berkeley found preparing a medicine in his cell, and cooking it in a small pipkin, exerted his voice so violently in the heat of their dispute, that he increased his disorder, which carried him off a few days after.' One of the most distinguished and successful antagonists of Malebranche was Anthony Arnauld, who seems to have been at least his match in metaphysical enthusiasm. The latter appears to have anticipated, in part, the doctrines of Reid. 'He died,' says his biographer, in an obscure retreat at Brussels, in 1692, without fortune, and even without a servant; he, whose nephew had been a minister of state, and who might himself have been a cardinal. The pleasure of being able to publish his sentiments was to him a sufficient recompense. Nicole, his friend and companion in arms, worn out at length with these incessant disputes, expressed a wish to retire from the field and to enjoy repose. Repose!' replied Arnauld ; 'wont you have the whole of eternity to repose in ?** 'An anecdote,' continues Stewart, 'which is told of his infancy, when considered in connexion with his subsequent life, affords a good illustration of the force of impressions received in the first dawn of reason. He was amusing himself one day with some childish sport, in the library of the Cardinal du Perron, when he requested of the Cardinal to give him a pen :- And for what purpose?' said the Cardinal. To write books, like you, against the Huguenots.' The Cardinal, it is added, who was then old and infirm, could not conceal his joy at the prospect of so hopeful a successor; and, as he was putting the pen into his hand, said, 'I give it to you, as the dying shepherd Damotas bequeathed his pipe to the little Corydon." There is such a class as that which Pliny calls eruditum vulgus, the learned vulgar. To trace an error,' says Coke, 'to its fountainhead, is to refute it.' There is much smartness in the observation of Montesquieu on the poverty of Spanish literature. The only good book,' he says, which the Spaniards have to boast of, is that which exposes the absurdity of all the rest.' No one need be told that that book is Don Quixote. The first part of the Dissertation brings down the history of metaphysical science to the close of the seventeenth century. The second embraces the eighteenth, and earlier portion of the present. From this, on another occasion, we may present the reader with similar gleanings.' MOUNTAINS. of heaven's concentrated lightning, darkness, and thun- THERE is a charm connected with mountains so powerful, that the merest mention of them, the merest sketch of their magnificent features, kindles the imagination, and carries the spirit at once into the bosom of their enchanted regions. How the mind is filled with their vast solitude! how the inward eye is fixed on their silent, their sublime, their everlasting peaks! How our heart bounds to the music of their solitary cries-to the tinkle of their gushing rills! to the sound of their cataracts-how inspiriting are the odours that breathe from the upland turf, from the rock-hung flower, from the hoary and solemn pine! how beautiful are those lights and shadows thrown abroad, and that fine transparent haze which is diffused over the valleys and lower slopes, as over a vast, inimitable picture! At this season of the year the ascents of our own mountains are become most practicable. The heat of summer has dried up the moisture with which winter rains saturate the spongy turf of the hollows; and the atmosphere, clear and settled, admits of the most extensive prospects. Whoever has not ascended our mountains, knows little of Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold! the beauties of this beautiful island. Whoever has not climbed their long and heathy ascents, and seen the was the burning exclamation of Milton's agonized and intrembling mountain-flowers, the glowing moss, the dignant spirit, as he beheld those sacred bulwarks of richly-tinted lichens at his feet; and scented the fresh freedom for once violated by the disturbing demons of aroma of the uncultivated sod, and of the spicy shrubs; the earth; and the sound of his fiery and lamenting apand heard the bleat of the flock across their solitary ex-peal to heaven will be echoed in every generous soul to panses, and the wild cry of the mountain-plover, the raven, or the eagle; and seen the rich and russet hues of distant slopes and eminences, the livid gashes of ravines and precipices, the white glittering line of falling waters, and the cloud tumultuously whirling round the lofty summit; and then stood panting on that summit, and beheld the clouds alternately gather and break over a thousand giant peaks and ridges of every varied hue-but all silent as images of eternity; and cast his gaze over lakes and forests, and smoking towns, and wide lands to the very ocean, in all their gleaming and reposing beauty, knows nothing of the treasures of pictorial wealth which his own Country possesses. But when we let loose the imagination from even these splendid scenes, and give it free charter to range through the far more glorious ridges of continental mountains, through Alps, Apennines, or Andes, how is it possessed and absorbed by all the awful magnificence of their scenery and character! The sky-ward and inaccessible pinnacles, the Palaces where nature thrones the dark Alpine forests, the savage rocks and precipices, the fearful and unfathomable chasms filled with the sound of ever-precipitating waters; the cloud, the silence, the avalanche, the cavernous gloom, the terrible visitations the end of time. Thanks be to God for mountains! The variety which they impart to the glorious bosom of our planet were no small advantage; the beauty which they spread out to our vision in their woods and waters, their crags and slopes, their clouds and atmospheric hues, were a splendid gift; the sublimity which they pour into our deepest souls from their majestic aspects; the poetry which breathes from their streams, and dells, and airy heights, from the sweet abodes, the garbs and manners of the inhabitants, the songs and legends which have awoke in them, were a proud heritage to imaginative minds; but what are all these when the thought comes, that without mountains the spirit of man must have bowed to the brutal and the base, and probably have sunk to the monotonous level of the unvaried plain. When I turn my eyes upon the map of the world, and behold how wonderfully the countries where our faith was nurtured, where our liberties were generated, where our philosophy and literature, the fountains of our intellectual grace and beauty sprang up, were as distinctly walled out by God's hand with mountain ramparts from the eruptions and interruptions of barbarism, as if at the especial prayer of the early fathers of man's destinies, I am lost in an exulting admiration. Look at the bold barriers of Palestine! see how the infant liberties of |