reasons to the needs of modern society. Yet nothing like a new idea has arisen, unless it be that of the factory, or the gashouse, or the gaol.

In sculpture, it is acknowledged, the Greeks still stand alone and among the Greeks themselves the art declined after the age of Phidias and Praxiteles. In painting too who has there been for the last century worthy to hold Raphael's palette? Even in what might be deemed a mechanical excellence, colouring, we are put to shame, when we presume to shew our faces by the side of our greater ancestors.

U.

From what has just been said, we may perceive how baseless and delusive is the vulgar notion of the march of mind, as necessarily exhibiting a steady regular advance, within the saine nation, in all things. Even in the mechanical arts, which depend so little on individual eminence, and which seem to require nothing more than the talents ordinarily forthcoming, according as there is a demand for them, in every people,— although the progress in them is more continuous, and outlasts that in higher things, yet, when the intellectual and moral energy of a nation has declined, that decline becomes perceptible after a while in the very lowest branches of trade and manufacture. Civilization will indeed outlive that energy, and keep company for a long time with luxury. But if luxury extinguishes the energy of a people, so that it cannot revive, its

civilization too will at length sink into barbarism. The decay of the Roman mind under the empire manifests itself not merely in its buildings, its statues, its language, but even in the coins, in the shape and workmanship of the commonest utensils.

In fact it is only when applied on the widest scale to the whole human race, that there is the slightest truth in the doctrine of the perfectibility, or rather of the progressiveness of man. Nay, even when regarded in this light, if we take nothing further into account, than what man can do and will do for himself, the notion of his perfectibility is as purely visionary, as the search after an elixir of life, or any other means of evading the pains and frailties of our earthly nature. The elixir of life we have; the doctrine and means of perfectibility we have; and we know them to be true and sure. But they are not of our own making. They do not lie within the compass of our own being. They come to us from without, from above. The only view of human nature, as left to itself, which is not incompatible with all experience, is not its perfectibility, but its corruptibility.

This is the view to which we are led by the history of the antediluvian world. This is the view represented in the primeval fable of the four ages; the view exprest in those lines of the Roman poet:

Aetas parentum, pejor avis, tulit
Nos nequiores, mox daturos

Progeniem vitiosiorem.

Indeed it is the view which man has in all ages taken of his own nature; whether his judgement was determined by what he saw within himself, or in the world around him. It is the view to which he is prompted when his thoughts fall back on the innocence of his own childhood, when he compares it with his present debasement, and thinks of the struggles he has had to maintain against himself, and against others, in order to save himself from a still more abject degradation. The same lesson is taught him by the destinies of nations; which, when they have left their wild mountain-sources, will mostly meander playfully for a while amid hills of beauty, and then flow majestically through plains of luxuriant richness, until at last they lose themselves in morasses, and choke themselves up with their own alluvion.

Of a like kind is the main theme and subject of poetry. Its scroll, as well as that of history. is like the roll which was spread out before the prophet, written within and without and the matter of the writing is the same, lamentations, and mourning, and woe. When we have swallowed it submissively indeed, it turns to sweetness; but not till then in the words of the Greek philosopher, it is through terrour and pity that poetry purifies our feelings. Hence the name of the highest branch of poetry is become a synonym for every disaster: tragedy is but another term for lamentations and mourning and woe:

VOL. II.

C

while epic poetry delights chiefly to dwell on the glories and fall of a nobler bygone generation. With such an unerring instinct does man's spirit recoil from the thought of an earthly elysium, as attainable by his own powers, however great and admirable they may be. What though his strength may seem vast enough to snatch the cup of bliss! what though his intellect appear subtile enough to compass or steal it! what though he send his armies and fleets round the globe, and his thoughts among the stars, and beyond them! he knows that the disease of his will is sure to undermine both his strength and his intellect; and that the higher they mount for the moment, the more terrible will their ruin be, and the more certain. He knows that Sisyphus is no less sure than Typhoeus of being cast into hell through his own perversity; and that only through the flames of the funeral pile can Hercules rise into glory. It was reserved for a feebleminded, earthworshiping, self-idolizing age to find out that a tragedy should end happily.

Nor will the boasted discovery of modern times, the division of labour,-which the senters-out of allegories will suppose to be the truth veiled in the myth of Kehama's self-multiplication, when he is marching against Padalon to seize a throne among the gods,-avail to alter this. The Roman fable warns us what is sure to ensue, when the members split and set up singly and the state of England at this day affords sad confirmation

:

to the lesson, that, unless they work together under the sway of a constraining higher spirit, they jar and clash and cumber and thwart and maim each other.

The notion entertained by some of the ancients, that, when a person has soared to an inordinate pitch of prosperity, the envy of the gods is provoked to cast him down, is merely a perversion of the true idea. Man's wont has ever been to throw off blame upon anything except himself; even upon the powers of heaven, when he can find no earthly scapegoat. At the same time this very notion bears witness of the pervading conviction that a state of earthly perfection is an impossibility. The fundamental idea both of the tragic arn and of the historic véμeous is, that calamities are the inevitable consequences of sins; that the chain which binds them together, though it may be hidden and mysterious, is indissoluble; and that, as man is sure to sin, more especially when puft up by prosperity, he is also sure to perish. The sins of the fathers are indeed regarded by both as often visited upon the children, even to the third and fourth generation; not however without their becoming in some measure accessory to the guilt. Were they not so, the calamities would be as harmless as the wounds of Milton's angels.

This however, which is the essential point in the whole argument, the concatenation of moral and physical evil, and the everlasting necessity by