wert the occasion of our first difference with the dwarfs. Their King, so old, so wise, looked on thee ever with more joy and sadness, and at last he told us that he would fain have thee for his queen, to abide with him always in that secret lunar empire. Us, too, the other dwarfs appeared to love more than we wished. And we found that we must either leave their dominions or consent to inhabit them for ever. We spake to the old King and said, that for thee it would be a woeful doom to see no more our native Faëryland; and that we intreated him of his goodness and wisdom to enable us to dwell there without further peril. Ruby tears fell from his ruby eyes upon his golden beard as he turned away, and the faces of all Dwarfland were darkened.

"No long space seemed to have passed before we were summoned again to the great hall, while thou wert left sleeping in the moon-garden. The King was on his throne, the dwarfs were seated round. But instead of the pillars we had seen before, the metals now had all become transparent, and in the midst of each stood one of our enemies the giants, with one heavy hand hung down, and clenched as if in pain, and the other raised above his head, and sustaining the capital of the column. The small gold plate, with its gold pin, still spun incessantly on the nose; the blue eyes still watched it cunningly; the flakes of fire streamed off and flew between the pillars, and scorched the faces and brownred shoulders of the giants. Our enemies grinned and writhed when they saw us, but seemed unable to utter any sound. The dwarfs also did not speak, but the King rose and moved before us. His beard fell over his shoulders, and formed a path on which we walked. We proceeded on and on, till the Dwarfland seemed changing, and daylight faintly fell upon us. The King grew more and more like the stones and trees around; and at last, we knew not how, but instead of his figure before us, there was only a cleft in the rock, nearly of the same shape. The golden beard was now a track of golden sands such as we had often seen before, with the bright sunshine falling on it. We were again in our own world of Faëry. But oh, dear Sea-Child! I cannot say the grief that smote us when we missed thee. We

wailed and drooped, and even the delights of our land could do nothing to console us, till we found thee sleeping in a grotto of diamond and emerald, which recalled to us the treasures of the dwarfs. Even now we were not happy; for we remembered a prophecy of the old man, that though he might restore us to our home, and rescue us from the giants, short would be our enjoyment of thee whom we had refused him."

The companions embraced anew, and the fairy hung round her friend like a rainbow on a smooth green hill, The fairies now poured in on all sides, singing and exulting in their own land, though not without a thought of grief from the dwarf's prophecy. The sun was hanging over the sea, and gilding the shore, and they looked at the bright waters, and marked the spot where they had first discerned the Sea-Child's swimming cradle. Lo! there was again a speck. A floating shape appeared, and came nearer and nearer. It looked a living thing. Soon it touched the shore, and they saw a figure like that of the Sea-Child, but taller, and stronger, and bolder, and in a stately dress. The fairies said in their hearts-it is a man! Then he seemed not to see but only her. She was frightened, but with a mixtureofgladness at his appearance; and was trembling and nigh to sink, when he took her in his arms, and spake to her of hope and joy.

"I am come from distant lands upon this strange adventure, warned in dreams, and by aërial voices, and by ancient lays, that here I should find my bride, and the queen of my new dominions."

He, too, was beautiful, and of a sweet voice, and she heard him with more fear than pain. When she looked around, she no longer saw the fairies near. There were gleams floating over the landscape, and quivering in the woods, and a song of sweet sorrow-so sweet, that, as it died away, it left the sense of an eternal peace.

Thus did the land of England receive its first inhabitants. Ever since has it been favoured of the fairies; the dwarfs have enriched it secretly, and the giants have upborne its foundations upon their hands, and done it huge though sullen service.

ARCHEUS.

In a former notice of Casuistry, we touched on such cases only as were of public bearings, or such as (if private) were of rare occurrence and of a tragical standard. But ordinary life, in its most domestic paths, teems with cases of difficult decision; or, if not always difficult in the decision of the abstract question at issue, difficult in the accommodation of that decision to immediate practice. A few of these more homely cases, intermixed with more public ones, we shall here select and review; for, according to a remark in our first paper, as social economy grows more elaborate, the demand grows more intense for such circumstantial morality. As man advances, casuistry advances. Principles are the same: but the abstraction of principles from accidents and circumstances, becomes a work of more effort. Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, has not one case; Cicero, three hundred years after, has a few; Paley, eighteen hundred years after Cicero, has many.

There is also something in place as well as in time-in the people as well as the century-which determines the amount of interest in casuistry. We once heard an eminent person delivering it as an opinion, derived from a good deal of personal experiencethat, of all European nations, the British was that which suffered most from remorse; and that, if internal struggles during temptation, or sufferings of mind after yielding to temptation, were of a nature to be measured upon a scale, or could express themselves sensibly to human knowledge, the annual report from Great Britain, its annual balance-sheet, by comparison with those from continental Europe, would show a large excess. At the time of hearing this remarkable opinion, we, the hearers, were young; and we had little other ground for assent or dissent, than such general impressions of national differences as we might happen to have gathered from the several literatures of Christian nations. These were of a nature to confirm the stranger's verdict; and it will not be denied that much of national character comes forward in liter

ature: but these were not sufficient. Since then, we have had occasion to think closely on that question. We have had occasion to review the public records of Christendom; and beyond all doubt the public conscience, the international conscience, of a people, is the reverberation of its private conscience. History is but the converging into a focus of what is moving in the domestic life below; a set of great circles expressing and summing up, on the dial-plate, the motions of many little circles in the machinery within. Now History, what may be called the Comparative History of modern Europe, countersigns the traveller's opinion.

"So, then," says a foreigner, or an Englishman with foreign sympathies, "the upshot and amount of this doctrine is, that England is more moral than other nations." "Well," we answer, "and what of that?" Observe, however, that the doctrine went no farther than as to conscientiousness; the principle out of which comes sorrow for all violation of duty; out of which comes a high standard of duty. Mean time both the "sorrow" and the "high standard" are very compatible with a lax performance. But suppose we had gone as far as the objector supposes, and had ascribed a moral superiority every way to England, what is there in that to shock probability? Whether the general probability from analogy, or the special probability from the circumstances of this particular case? We all know that there is no general improbability in supposing one nation, or one race, to outrun another. The modern Italians have excelled all nations in musical sensibility, and in genius for painting. They have produced far better music than all the rest of the world put together. And four of their great painters have not been approached hitherto by the painters of any nation. That facial structure, again, which is called the Caucasian, and which, through the ancient Greeks, has travelled westward to the nations of Christendom, and from them (chiefly ourselves) has become the Transatlantic face, is, past all disputing, the finest

type of the human countenance divine on this planet. And most other nations, Asiatic or African, have hitherto put up with this insult; except, indeed, the Kalmuck Tartars, who are highly indignant at our European vanity in this matter; and some of them, says Bergmann, the German traveller, absolutely howl with rage, whilst others only laugh hysterically, at any man's having the insanity to prefer the Grecian features to the Kalmuck. Again, amongst the old Pagan nations, the Romans seem to have had "the call" for going a-head; and they fulfilled their destiny in spite of all that the rest of the world could do to prevent them. So that, far from it being an improbable or unreasonable assumption, superiority (of one kind or other) has been the indefeasible inheritance of this and that nation, at all periods of history.

Still less is the notion tenable of any special improbability applying to this particular pretension. For centuries has England enjoyed-lst, civil liberty; 2d, the Protestant faith. Now in those two advantages are laid the grounds, the very necessities, à priori, of a superior morality. But watch the inconsistency of men: ask one of these men who dispute this English pretension mordicus ;-ask him, or bid an Austrian serf ask him, what are the benefits of Protestantism, and what the benefits of liberty, that he should risk any thing to obtain either. Hear how eloquently he insists upon their beneficial results, severally and jointly; and notice that he places foremost among those results, a pure morality. Is he wrong? No: the man speaks bare truth. But what brute oblivion he manifests of his own doctrine, in taxing with arrogance any people for claiming one of those results in esse, which he himself could see so clearly in posse! Talk no more of freedom, or of a pure religion, as fountains of a moral pre-eminence, if those who have possessed them in combination for the longest space of time, may not, without arrogance, claim the vanward place amongst the nations of Europe.

So far as to the presumptions, general or special; so far as to the probabilities, analogous or direct, in countenance of this British claim. Finally, when we come to the proofs, from fact and historical experience, we might appeal to a singular case in the records

of our Exchequer; viz. that for much more than a century back, our Gazette and other public Advertisers, have acknowledged a series of anonymous remittances from those who, at some time or other, had appropriated public money. We understand that no corresponding fact can be cited from foreign records. Now, this is a direct instance of that compunction which our travelled friend insisted on. But we choose rather to throw ourselves upon the general history of Great Britain, upon the spirit of her policy, domestic or foreign, and upon the universal principles of her public morality. Take the case of public debts, and the fulfilment of contracts to those who could not have compelled the fulfilment; we first set this precedent. All nations have now learned that honesty in such cases is eventually the best policy; but this they learned from our experience, and not till nearly all of them had tried the other policy. Weit was, who, under the most trying circumstances of war, maintained the sanctity from taxation of all foreign investments in our funds. Our conduct with regard to slaves, whether in the case of slavery or of the slavetrade-how prudent it may always have been, we need not enquire;-as to its moral principles, they went so far a-head of European standards, that we were neither comprehended nor believed. The perfection of romance was ascribed to us by all who did not reproach us with the perfection of Jesuitical knavery; by many our motto was supposed to be no longer the old one of divide et impera, but annihila et appropria. Finally, looking back to our dreadful conflicts with the three conquering despots of modern history, Philip II. of Spain, Louis XIV., and Napoleon, we may incontestably boast of having been single in maintaining the general equities of Europe by war upon a colossal scale, and by our councils in the general congresses of Christendom.

Such a review would amply justify the traveller's remarkable dictum upon the principle of remorse, and therefore of conscientiousness, as existing in greater strength amongst the people of Great Britain. In the same proportion, we may assume in such a people a keener sensibility to moral distinctions; more attention to shades of difference in the modes of action; more anxiety as to the grounds of action. In the same proportion, we may assume a growing and more direct regard to Casuistry: which is precisely the part of Ethics that will be continually expanding, and continually throwing up fresh doubts. Not as though a moral principle could ever be doubtful. But that the growing complexity of the circumstances will make it more and more difficult in judgment to de. tach the principle from the case; or in practice, to determine the application of the principle to the facts. It will happen therefore, as Mr Coleridge used to say happened in all cases of importance, that extremes meet: for Casuistiçal Ethics will be most consulted by two classes the most opposite to each other-by those who seek excuses for evading their duties, and by those who seek a special fulness of light for fulfilling them.

CASE I. Health.

Strange it is, that moral treatises, when professing to lay open the great edifice of human duties, and to expose its very foundations, should not have begun with, nay, should not have noticed at all, those duties which a man owes to himself, and, foremost amongst them, the duty of cultivating his own health. For it is evident, that, from mere neglect of that one personal duty, with the very best intentions possible, all other duties whatever may become impossible; for good intentions exist in all stages of efficiency, from the fugitive impulse to the realizing self-determination. In this life, the elementary blessing is health. What! do we presume to place it before peace of mind? Far from it: but we speak of the genesis; of the succession in which all blessings de scend: not as to time, but the order of dependency. All morality implies free agency: it presumes beyond all other conditions an agent who is in perfect possession of his own volitions. Now, it is certain that a man without health, is not uniformly master of his own purposes. Often he cannot be said either to be in the path of duty or out of it; so incoherent are the actions of a man forced back continually from the objects of his intellect and choice upon some alien objects dictated by internal wretchedness. It is true, that

by possibility some derangements of the human system are not incompatible with happiness; and a celebrated German author of the last century, Von Hardenberg-better known by his assumed name of Novalismaintained, that certain modes of ill health or valetudinarianism were prerequisites towards certain modes of intellectual development. But the ill health to which he pointed could not have gone beyond a luxurious indisposition; nor the corresponding intellectual purposes have been other than narrow, fleeting, and anomalous. Inflammatory action in its earlier stages, is sometimes connected with voluptuous sensations: so is the preternatural stimulation of the liver. But these states, as pleasurable states, are transitory. All fixed derangements of the health are doubly hostile to the moral energies; first, through the intellect, which they debilitate unconsciously in many ways; and next, both consciously and semi-consciously through the will. The judgment is perhaps too clouded to fix upon a right purpose: the will too enfeebled to pursue it.

Two general remarks may be applied to all interferences of the physical with the moral sanity; 1st, That it is not so much by absolute deductions of time that ill health operates upon the serviceableness of a man, as by its lingering effects upon his temper and his animal spirits. Many a man has not lost one hour in his life from illness, whose faculties of usefulness have been most seriously impaired through gloom or untuned feelings; 2dly, That it is not the direct and known risks to our health which act with the most fatal effects, but the semi-conscious condition, the atmosphere of circumstances, with which artificial life surrounds us. The great cities of Europe, perhaps London beyond all others, under the modern modes of life and business, create a vortex of preternatural tumult, a rush and frenzy of excitement, which is fatal to far more than are heard of as express victims to that system.

The late Lord Londonderry's nervous seizure was no solitary or rare case. So much we happen to know. We are well assured by medical men of great London practice, that the case is one of growing frequency. In Lord Londonderry it attracted notice for reasons of obvious personal interest, as well as its tragical catastrophe. But the complaint, though one of modern growth, is well known, and comes forward under a most determinate type as to symptoms, among the mer cantile class. The original predisposition to it, lies permanently in the condition of London life, especially as it exists for public men. But the im mediate existing cause, which fires the train always ready for explosion, is invariably some combination of perplexities, such as are continually gathering into dark clouds over the heads of great merchants; sometimes only teasing and molesting, sometimes menacing and alarming. These perplexities are generally moving in counteracting paths: some progressive, some retrograde. There lies a man's safety. But at times it will happen that all comes at once; and then comes a shock such as no brain already predisposed by a London life, is strong enough (but more truly let us saycoarse enough) to support.

Lord Londonderry's case was precisely of that order: he had been worried by a long session of Parliament, which adds the crowning irritation in the interruption of sleep. The nervous system, ploughed up by intense wear and tear, is denied the last resource of natural relief. In this crisis, already perilous, a new tempest was called in of all the most terrific_the tempest of anxiety: and from what source? Anxiety from fear, is bad: from hope delayed, is bad: but worst of all is anxiety from responsibility, in cases where disease or weakness makes a man feel that he is unequal to the burden. The diplomatic interests of the country had been repeatedly confided to Lord Londonderry: he had justified that confidence: he had received affecting testimonies of the honour which belonged to such a situation. But a short time before his fatal seizure, in passing through Birmingham at a moment when all the gentlemen of the place were assembled, he had witnessed the whole assemblyno mob, but the collective good sense of the place by one impulse standing bareheaded in his presence, a tribute of disinterested homage which affected him powerfully, and which was well understood as offered to his foreign diplomacy. Under these circumstances could he bear to transfer or delegate

the business of future negotiation? Could he suffer to lapse into other hands, as a derelict, the consummation of that task which thus far he had so prosperously conducted? Was it in human nature to do so? He felt the same hectic of human passion which Lord Nelson felt in the very gates of death, when some act of command was thoughtlessly suggested as belonging to his successor" Not whilst I live, Hardy; not whilst I live." Yet, in Lord Londonderry's case, it was necessary, if he would not transfer the trust, that he should rally his energies instantly: for a new Congress was even then assembling. There was no delay open to him by the nature of the case: the call was-now, now, just as you are, my lord, with those shattered nerves and that agitated brain, take charge of interests the most complex in Christendom: to say the truth, of interests which are those of Christendom.

This struggle, between a nervous system too grievously shaken, and the instant demand for energy seven times intensified, was too much for any generous nature. A ceremonial embassy might have been fulfilled by shattered nerves; but not this embassy. Anxiety supervening upon nervous derangement was bad; anxiety through responsibility was worse; but through a responsibility created by grateful confidence, it was an appeal through the very pangs of martyrdom. No brain could stand such a siege. Lord Londonderry's gave way; and he fell with the tears of the generous even where they might happen to differ from him in politics.

Mean time, this case, belonging to a class generated by a London life, was in some quarters well understood even then; now, it is well known that, had different remedies been applied, or had the sufferer been able to stand up under his torture until the cycle of the symptoms had begun to come round, he might have been saved. The treatment is now well understood; but even then it was understood by some physicians; amongst others by that Dr Willis who had attended George the Third. In several similar cases overpowering doses had been given of opium, or of brandy; and usually a day or two had carried off the oppression of the brain by a tremendous reaction.