occupied by some of his friends, who, one by one, in turn approached him to receive a sign of recognition, a look of affection, when he was no longer able to address them in words. On Sunday, the 15th of October, his attacks were more violent and more frequent, lasting for several hours in succession. The Countess Delphine Potocka, who was present, was much distressed; her tears were flowing fast when he observed her standing at the foot of his bed, tall, slight, draped in white, resembling the beautiful angels created by the imagination of the most devout amongst painters. Without doubt he believed her to be a heavenly apparition. When the crisis left him for a moment he asked her to sing; they thought him at first seized with delirium; but he eagerly repeated his request. Who could have ventured to oppose his wish? The piano was rolled from the drawing-room to the door of his chamber, when, with sobs in her voice and tears streaming down her cheeks, his gifted countrywoman sang. This beautiful voice had never before attained an expression so full of deepest pathos. He seemed to suffer less as he listened. She sang the famous canticle to the Virgin which is said once to have saved Stradella's life. 'How beautiful!' he exclaimed. My God, how very beautiful! Again—again! ' Though overwhelmed with emotion, the countess had the noble courage to comply with the last wish of a friend, a countryman. Again she sat down at the piano and sang a hymn by Marcello. Chopin, again feeling worse, everybody was seized with fright; by a spontaneous impulse all threw themselves on their knees; no one ventured to speak; the sacred silence was broken alone by the voice of the countess floating like a melody from heaven above the sighs and sobs which formed its heavy and mournful earth-accompaniment. It was the hour of twilight; a dying light lent its mysterious shadows to this sad scene; Chopin's sister, prostrated near his bed, wept and prayed, and never quitted this attitude of supplication while the life of her beloved brother lasted."

Chopin lingered for two days after this scene. Most of the time he was unconscious; but in a lucid interval he received the last sacraments of the Catholic Church from a Polish abbé. He died October 17th, 1849, in the arms of his favourite pupil Gutmann. His last conscious movement was to kiss the hand of his friend in gratitude. His body was literally covered with flowers, especially with his favourite violets. When Chopin, nineteen years before, left his country he took from his native village, Wola, a handful of Polish earth. This was strewn on his coffin when it was lowered into the grave. It had been his wish expressed shortly before his end. He was buried at Père Lachaise, next to Bellini, whom he had much loved in life. Cherubini's grave is on the other side. The bas-relief portrait on his tombstone is by Clesinger, the son-in-law of George Sand. FRANCIS HUeffer.

ANTITHETIC FALLACIES.

PROBABLY no figure of speech is more accountable for vagaries of thought than antithesis. The doctrine that all things are balanced one against another is applied to sentences; and instead of a welladjusted meaning holding its course between two extremes, there is a transition, like the swinging of a pendulum, from one extreme to the other. Writing of this sort does not reflect and help the steady march of thought; it is rather a mere marking of time, or literary goose-step. It usually accompanies the decline of a literature, or at any rate of a school of literature, or the extravagances of searchers after effect. Its worst examples, in the instances of men of a high degree of literary merit, are perhaps to be found in Seneca and in Dr. Johnson. In these writers, the structure of a sentence sometimes becomes a mechanical substitute for thinking. Lord Houghton has said, though it is a humiliating confession, that the necessity of metre often dictates the thought and sentiment which it simply seems to clothe. Butler had made before him the admission that—

Prose of a certain kind is subjected to the same conditions. Hazlitt points out how the very structure of Dr. Johnson's style affected and sometimes marred and rendered meaningless the substance of what he had to say. "Johnson," he says, "wrote a kind of rhyming prose, in which he was compelled as much to finish the different clauses of his sentences, and to balance one period against another, as the writer of heroic verse is to keep to lines of ten syllables with similar terminations. He no sooner acknowledges the merits of his author"—he is speaking of Johnson's criticisms on Shakspeare—“in one line, than the periodic revolution of his style carries the weight of his opinion completely over to the side of objection, thus keeping up a perpetual alternation of perfections and absurdities. We do not know otherwise how to account for such absurdities as the following: 'In his tragic scenes there is always something wanting, but his comedy often surpasses expectation or desire. His comedy pleases by the thoughts and the language, and his tragedy, for the great part, by incident and action. His tragedy seems to be skill, his comedy to be instinct.'" Mr. Burchell's interjection is the only answer which could be made to writing of this kind, which really has as much meaning as the balanced posture-making of a dancer on a tight-rope. It need not be said that it characterizes a

great deal more in Johnson than his judgments on Shakspeare. It is the inseparable accident of his style, through which his strong sense and keen penetration often break, but which accompanies and impedes them.

It is, of course, easy to find other instances of this fallacy of antithesis in later times, for the vice has not died with Dr. Johnson. A very accomplished writer, always ingenious and often profound, attempted the other day, in a grave discussion, to cut the knot of a difficult subject by saying that it was necessary to distinguish between the idea of a limit and the limit of an idea. No doubt; and it is necessary also to distinguish in organized nature between a horse chestnut and a chestnut horse, and in domestic economy between the house of the man and the man of the house. When testing illustrations of this sort are taken, the emptiness of the jingle is obvious. But when a grave philosopher talks to you about the necessity of discriminating between the idea of a limit and the limit of an idea, or tells you that the thought of force must not be confounded with the force of thought, you are apt to think that this is very deep. The notions, unlike those of the horse chestnut and the chestnut horse, of the man of the house and the house of the man, are abstract and somewhat difficult to render to the mind. The sound is more quickly apprehensible than the sense, and is readily taken as its substitute. The master and the disciple, as the French have it, alike "pay themselves with words." A philosopher out of his depth, and in danger of going down, is apt to seize hold of a floating phrase, as a plank on which to support himself for a moment. Often it is merely the intellectual impatience of a quick or wearied mind, which is content to substitute a balance of words for discrimination of thoughts, and to address the ear instead of the mind. The rhymes of poets, and the clauses of writers of antithetic prose, are often like the bonds of the Apostle: they are girded with them and carried whither they would not.

This abuse of antithesis has lately played a large part in political discussions; and before considering it there, we have thought it better to illustrate the vice in a field remote from party and personal feeling. Except in the House of Commons, people are a good deal ashamed now of asserting a contradiction between theory and practice. Everywhere else, where even the show of intelligent discussion takes place, it is acknowledged that between a true theory and useful practice there can be no conflict; and that the theory which does not work well is either false or imperfect, or erroneously and imperfectly applied. But driven from one vicious phrase, minds of a certain looseness of conduct will soon find a city of refuge in another. The British man of business is in the habit of telling you that a certain process or conclusion of thought may be very good logic but it is not common sense. He is apt, with much complacency, to embody

those opposite qualities of mind in the English and French nations. Frenchmen entirely reciprocate the self-satisfaction, and vaunt their logical acceptance of everything that flows from the principles they adopt. They contrast it with the inconsistencies and compromises of their neighbours on this side of the Channel. The question, however, is not of logic, but of the sort of logic, and of its application to the subject matter of life and affairs. Without either self-exaltation or detraction, the types of the French and English may be looked for in two illustrious, and, as our own countryman would have called them, prerogative instances-in Descartes and in Bacon. Descartes sought for, and fancied he found, a fact or principle of self-evident certitude, and was prepared to accept everything that could be deduced from it, and nothing that could not be harmonized with it. Bacon, instead of assuming premises regarded as self-evident, sought for them by observation and experiment, and tested and combined them, coming back always, where it was practicable, to experience for verification. The difference is not between logic and common sense, but between deductive and inductive logic, and between plausibly begging and honestly trying the question. In English and French political conduct and theory this distinction is marked. French politicians, as Mr. Mill has pointed out, "are perpetually arguing that such and such a measure ought to be adopted, because it is a consequence of the principle on which the form of government is founded; of the principle of legitimacy, or the principle of the sovereignty of the people." "Inasmuch, however," Mr. Mill

adds, "as no government produces all possible beneficial effects, but all are attended with more or fewer inconveniences; and since these cannot be combated by means drawn from the very causes which produce them; it would be often a much stronger recommendation of some practical arrangement, that it does not follow from what is called the general 'principle' of the government, than that it does." The French exhibit the Cartesian method, or, at any rate, temper, applied to politics; and it characterizes equally both the theorists and the practitioners of statesmanship in France. They fall, as regards society and government, into the error against which Bacon warned physical investigators, of supposing in nature a greater simplicity than is to be found there. The respect for inconsistencies and anomalies, which has often been ridiculed in English statesmen, has often deserved ridicule; but it sometimes proceeds from an unreasoned but clear perception that government and society depend upon a multiplicity of principles, and that the consequences drawn from one need to be checked and counteracted by those derived from others. The question, therefore, at issue is not one of logic or common sense, but of the sufficiency and accuracy of the premises from which we reason, and of the worth of the logical method applied to them.

Another distinction of which the public has heard a good deal

lately from heated sophists is the antithesis between sentiment and policy. Of course sentiment and policy are not the same things, any more than memory and judgment, perception and imagination. The real discrimination should be between a good and bad policy, between healthy and vicious sentiment. Sentiment and policy must indeed always go together. Without sound sentiment, there cannot be a wise or just policy; and a wise and just policy will in its turn evoke and derive support from pure and noble sentiment. On the other hand, a discreditable and stupid policy will find its help chiefly in the more ignoble and more paltry sentiments. The policy which is merely low cunning and shifty artifice, bent on combinations for the purposes of the moment, without any large view of the past and future, is, in its way, as sentimental as that which appeals to larger and more worthy motives. It finds expression generally in a vicious bluster and buncombe, in appeals to national antipathies, to fear and hate, and in general in a contemptible Chauvinism. Of course, an ill-balanced nature, one in which the feelings rise to an intensity unjustified by the occasion, which demands clearness of perception and sagacity in judgment, is a very unsafe guide. But this excess quite as usually takes the form of panic and a sort of hysteria of suspicion and fear, as of humane and generous feeling. The reigns of Suspicion and Terror during the French Revolution were justified by their promoters, and are justified by their defenders, on the grounds of policy and national interest. Their authors and instruments, as Marat and FouquierTinville, assumed to be men of action and prudence, statesmen, and not sentimentalists. Never in history, however, was the connection of bad policy with debased and contemptible sentiment more close and obvious. The delusions which swayed masses in French society, at different moments of the revolutionary period, with respect to the ubiquitous but invisible brigands, the conspiring aristocrats, and the gold of Pitt, acted on sensitive and hysteric creatures, the dupes of their own impulses and impressions. The screaming brotherhood who shriek at Russia, who trace its desperate intrigues everywhere, and see in Prince Gortschakoff and General Ignatieff, in the Emperor William and Prince Bismarck, in Mr. Gladstone and Lord Salisbury, the agents or dupes of a mysterious conspiracy against the greatness and even the safety of England, really illustrate in their own persons the intellectual disturbance which mean or viciously directed feelings may bring about in ill-balanced natures. Large and generous sentiments, and a pure and elevated morality, are the conditions of a sagacious judgment in all human affairs, whether they be those of nations or individuals. It is through them that the permanent and essential elements of every social problem are discerned and weighed. In their absence, the temporary and superficial incidents of an historic movement disguise the real