verted, as if by inspiration, into rich and inexhaustible springs of knowledge and power, on a simple change of our point of view, or by merely bringing them to bear on some principle which it never occurred before to try, will surely be the very last to acquiesce in any dispiriting prospects of either the present or the future destinies of mankind; while, on the other hand, the boundless views of intellectual and moral, as well as material relations which open on him on all hands in the course of these pursuits, the knowledge of the trivial place he occupies in the scale of creation, and the sense continually pressed upon him of his own weakness and incapacity to suspend or modify the slightest movement of the vast machinery he sees in action around him, must effectually convince him that humility of pretension, no less than confidence of hope, is what best becomes his character. he was the author of a certain article in the Edinburgh Review. He replied that he never made communications of that kind, except to intimate friends, selected by himself for the purpose, when he saw fit. His refusal to answer, however, pointed him out-which, as it happened, he did not care for-as the author. But a case might occur, in which the revelation of the authorship might involve a friend in some serious difficulties. In any such case, he might have answered something in this style: "I have received a letter purporting to be from your lordship, but the matter of it induces me to suspect that it is a forgery by some mischievous trickster. The writer asks whether I am the author of a certain article. It is a sort of question which no one has a right to ask; and I think, therefore, that every one is bound to discourage such inquiries by answering them The question "cui bono?" to what prac--whether one is or is not the author—tical end and advantage do your researches with a rebuke for asking impertinent tend? is one which the speculative philo- questions about private matters. I say sopher who loves knowledge for its own private,' because, if an article be sake, and enjoys, as a rational being libellous or seditious, the law is open, should enjoy, the mere contemplation of and any one may proceed against the harmonious and mutually dependent truths, publisher, and compel him either to give can seldom hear without a sense of humi- up the author, or to bear the penalty. liation. He feels that there is a lofty and If, again, it contains false statements, disinterested pleasure in his speculations these, coming from an anonymous pen, which ought to exempt them from such may be simply contradicted. And if the questioning; communicating as they do to arguments be unsound, the obvious course his own mind the purest happiness (after is to refute them; but who wrote it, is a the exercise of the benevolent and moral question of idle or of mischievous curiofeelings) of which human nature is sus- sity, as it relates to the private concerns ceptible, and tending to the injury of no of an individual. If I were to ask your one, he might surely allege this as a suffi- lordship, 'Do you spend your income? cient and direct reply to those who, or lay by? or outrun? Do you and your having themselves little capacity, and less lady ever have an altercation? Was she relish for intellectual pursuits, are con- your first love? or were you attached to stantly repeating upon him this inquiry. some one else before?' If I were to ask such questions your lordship's answer would probably be, to desire the footman to show me out. Now, the present inquiry I regard as no less unjustifiable, and relating to private concerns; and, therefore, I think every one bound, when so questioned, always, whether he is the author or not, to meet the inquiry with a rebuke. Hoping that my conjecture is right, of the letter's being a forgery, I RICHARD WHATELEY, ARCHBISHOP OF DUBLIN. 1787-1863. ANONYMOUS WRITING. A WELL-KNOWN author once received a letter from a peer with whom he was slightly acquainted, asking him whether remain," &c. In any case, however, in which a refusal to answer does not convey any information, the best way, perhaps, of meeting impertinent inquiries, is by saying, "Can you keep a secret?" and when the other answers that he can, you may reply, "Well, so can I." [HUGH MILLER. 1802-1855.] THE NATIONAL INTELLECT OF ENGLAND AND SCOTLAND. works of all our Scotch metaphysicians put together. It is, however, a curious fact, and worthy, certainly, of careful examination, as bearing on the question of development purely through the force of circumstances, that all the very great men of England-all its first-class men-belong to ages during which the grinding persecutions of the Stuarts repressed Scottish energy, and crushed the opening mind of the country; and that no sooner was the weight removed, like a pavement slab from Over a flower-bed, than straightway Scottish intellect sprung up, and attained THERE is an order of English mind to to the utmost height to which English which Scotland has not attained: our intellect was rising at the time. The first men stand in the second rank, not a English philosophers and literati of the foot-breadth behind the foremost of Eng- eighteenth century were of a greatly lower land's second-rank men; but there is a stature than the Miltons and Shakspeares, front rank of British intellect in which Bacons and Newtons, of the two previous there stands no Scotchman. Like that centuries; they were second-class men— class of the mighty men of David, to which the tallest, however, of their age anyAbishai and Benaiah belonged-great where; and among these the men of captains, who went down into pits in the Scotland take no subordinate place. time of snow and slew lions, or "who Though absent from the competition in lifted up the spear against three hundred the previous century, though the operation men at once, and prevailed "-they at- of causes palpable in the history of the tained not, with all their greatness, to the time, we find them quite up to the mark might of the first class. Scotland has for the age in which they appear. No produced no Shakspeare; Burns and English philosopher for the last hundred Sir Walter Scott united would fall short and fifty years produced a greater revoluof the stature of the giant of Avon. Of tion in human affairs than Adam Smith; Milton we have not even a representative. or exerted a more powerful influence on A Scotch poet has been injudiciously opinion than David Hume; or did more named as not greatly inferior, but I shall to change the face of the mechanical not do wrong to the memory of an ingeni- world than James Watt. The History of ous young man (Pollok), cut off just as he England produced by a Scotchman is had mastered his powers, by naming him still emphatically the "English History;" again in a connection so perilous. He at nor, with all its defects, is it likely to be least was guiltless of the comparison; and soon superseded. Robertson, if inferior it would be cruel to involve him in the in the untaught felicities of narration to ridicule which it is suited to excite. his illustrious countryman, is at least Bacon is as exclusively unique as Milton, inferior to none of his English contempoand as exclusively English; and though raries. The prose fictions of Smollett the grandfather of Newton was a Scotch- have kept their ground quite as well as man, we have certainly no Stotch Sir those of Fielding, and better than those Isaac. I question, indeed, whether any of Richardson. Nor does England during Scotchman attains to the powers of the century exhibit higher manifestations Locke: there is as much solid thinking of the poetic spirit than those exhibited in the Essay on the Human Understand-by Thomson and by Burns. To use a ing, greatly as it has become the fashion homely but expressive Scotticism, Scotof the age to depreciate it, and notwith- land seems to have lost her bairn-time of standing his fundamental error, as in the | the giants; but in the after bairn-time of merely tall men, her children were quite as tall as any of their contemporaries. [WILLIAM AND MARY HOWITT.] MOUNTAINS. 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 [autumn] the ascents of our own mountains are 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 the beauties of this beautiful island. Whoever has not climbed their long and heathy ascents, and seen the trembling mountain flowers, the glowing moss, the richly-tinted lichens at his feet; and scented the fresh aroma of the uncultivated sod, and of the spicy shrubs; and heard the bleat of the flock across their solitary expanses, and the wild cry of the mountain plover, the raven, or the eagle; and seen the rich and russet hues of distant slopes and eminenccs, 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 skyward and inaccessable 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 of Heaven's concentrated lightning, darkness, and thunder; or the sweeter features of living, rushing streams, spicy odours of flower and shrub, fresh spirit-elating breezes sounding through the dark pine-grove; the ever-varying lights and shadows, and aërial hues; the wide prospects, and, above all, the simple inhabitants! We delight to think of the people of mountainous regions; we please our imaginations with their picturesque and quiet abodes; with their peaceful secluded lives, striking and unvarying costumes, and primitive manners. We involuntarily give to the mountaineer heroic and elevated qualities. He lives amongst noble objects, and must imbibe some of their nobility; he lives amongst the elements of poetry, and must be poetical; he lives where his fellow-beings are far, far separated from their kind, and surrounded by the sternness and the perils of savage nature; his social affections must therefore be proportionably concentrated, his home-ties lively and strong; but, more than all, he lives within the barriers, the strongholds, the very last refuge which Nature herself has reared to preserve alive liberty in the earth, to preserve to man his highest hopes, his noblest emotions, his dearest treasures, his faith, his freedom, his hearth and his home. How glorious do those mountain ridges appear when we look upon them as the unconquerable abodes of free hearts; as the stern, heaven-built walls from which the few, the feeble, the persecuted, the despised, the helpless child, the delicate woman, have from age to age, in their last perils, in all their weaknesses and emergencies, when power and cruelty were ready to swallow them up, looked down and beheld the million waves of despotism break at their feet; have seen the rage of murderous armies, and tyrants, the blasting spirit of ambition, fanaticism, and crushing domination recoil from their bases in despair. "Thanks be to God for mountains!" is often the exclamation of my heart as I trace the history of the world. From age to age they have been the last friends of man. In a thousand extremities they have saved him. What great hearts have throbbed in their defiles from the days of Leonidas to those of Andreas Hofer! What lofty souls, what tender hearts, what poor and persecuted creatures have they sheltered in their stony bosoms from the weapons and tortures of their fellow-men! Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold!" was the burning exclamation of Milton's agonised and indignant spirit, as he beheld those sacred bulwarks of freedom for once violated by the disturbing demons of the earth; and the sound of his fiery and lamenting appeal to Heaven will be echoed in every generous soul to 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 their 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 Greece were sheltered from the vast tribes of the uncivilised North by the heights of Hamus and Rhodope! behold how the Alps describe their magnificent crescent, inclining their opposite extremities to the Adriatic and Tyrrhene Seas, locking up Italy from the Gallic and Teutonic hordes till the power and spirit of Rome had reached their maturity, and she had opened the wide forest of Europe to the light, spread far her laws and language, and planted the seeds of many mighty nations! Their Thanks to God for mountains! colossal firmness seems almost to break the current of time itself; the geologist in them searches for traces of the earlier world; and it is there, too, that man, resisting the revolutions of lower regions, retains through innumerable years his habits and his rights. While a multitude of changes has remoulded the people of Europe, while languages, and laws, and dynasties, and creeds, have passed over it like shadows over the landscape, the children of the Celt and the Goth, who fled to the mountains a thousand years-upon keen-eyed travellers-Herodotus ago, are found there now, and show us in face and figure, in language and garb, what their fathers were; show us a fine contrast with the modern tribes dwelling below and around them; and show us, moreover, how adverse is the spirit of the mountain to mutability, and that there the fiery heart of freedom is found for ever. A. W. KINGLAKE. THE SPHYNX. AND near the Pyramids, more wondrous and more awful than all else in the land of Egypt, there sits the lonely Sphynx. Comely the creature is, but the comeliness is not of this world; the onceworshipped beast is a deformity and a monster to this generation, and yet you can see that those lips, so thick and heavy, were fashioned according to some ancient mould of beauty-some mould of beauty now forgotten forgotten because that Greece drew forth Cytherea from the flashing foam of the gean, and in her image created new forms of beauty, and made it a law among men that the short and proudly wreathed lip should stand for the sign and the main condition of loveliness through all generations to come. Yet still there lives on the race of those who were beautiful in the fashion of the elder world, and Christian girls of Coptic blood will look on you with the sad, serious gaze, and kiss you your charitable hand with the big pouting lips of the very Sphynx. Laugh and mock if you will at the worship of stone idols; but mark ye this, ye breakers of images, that in one regard the stone idol bears awful semblance of Deity- unchangefulness in the midst of change the same seeming will, and intent for ever and ever inexorable! Upon ancient dynasties of Ethiopian and Egyptian kings upon Greek and Roman, upon Arab and Ottoman conquerorsupon Napoleon dreaming of an Eastern empire-upon battle and pestilence-upon the ceaseless misery of the Egyptian race yesterday, Warburton to-day-upon all and more this unworldly Sphynx has watched, and watched like a Providence with the same earnest eyes, and the same sad, tranquil mien. And we, we shall die, and Islam will wither away, and the Englishman straining far over to hold his loved India, will plant a firm foot on the banks of the Nile, and sit in the seats of the Faithful, and still that sleepless rock will lie watching and watching the works of the new busy race, with those same sad, earnest eyes, and the same tranquil mien everlasting. You dare not mock at the Sphynx! A. H. LAYARD. DISCOVERY OF A COLOSSAL PIECE OF SCULPTURE. ON the morning I rode to the encampment of Sheikh Abd-ur-rahman, and was returning to the mound, when I saw two Arabs of his tribe urging their mares to the top of their speed. On approaching me, they stopped. "Hasten, O Bey, exclaimed one of them-"hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod himself. Wallah, it is wonderful, but it is true! we have seen him with our eyes. There is no god but God;" and both joining in this pious exclamation, they galloped off, without further words, in the direction of their tents. On reaching the ruins I descended into the new trench, and found the workmen, who had already seen me as I approached, standing near a heap of baskets and cloaks. Whilst Awad advanced and asked for a present to celebrate the occasion, the Arabs withdrew the screen they had hastily constructed, and disclosed an enormous human head sculptured in full out of the alabaster of the country. They had uncovered the upper part of a figure, the remainder of which was still buried in the earth. I saw at once that the head must belong to a winged lion or bull, similar to those of Khorsabad and Persepolis. It was in admirable preservation. |