1813; A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy, Lond., 1830, 12mo (Lardner's Cab. Cyc.), 1831, 1842, 1851; A Treatise on Astronomy, Lond., 1833, 12mo (Lardner's Cab. Cyc., 43), enlarged as Outlines of Astronomy, 1849, 8vo; Results of Astronomical Observations made during the Years 1834, 35, 36, 37, 38, at the Cape of Good Hope, being the Completion of a Telescopic Survey of the Whole Survey of the Visible Heavens, Commenced in 1825, Lond., 1847, 4to; A Treatise on Physical Astronomy, Lond., 1848, 4to, 1849, 4to (in Encyclopædia of Astronomy); edited and contributed to A Manual of Scientific Enquiry, Lond., 1849, p. 8vo, 2d edit., 1851, p. 8vo: Essays from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews, with Addresses and other Pieces, Lond., 1857, 8vo. He also contributed to Edin. Philos. Journal, Edin. Trans., Cambridge Trans., Philos. Trans., Astronom. Trans., Encyc. Britannica and Encyc. Metropolitana. See also Bohn's Lowndes's Bibl. Manual, iii. (1869) 1295.

"There are few philosophers of the present day who have attained to the same distinction. His mathematical acquirements and his discoveries in astronomy, optics, chemistry, and photography are of a very high order, and have secured for him a wide and well-earned reputation, while his various popular writings have greatly contributed to the diffusion of scientific knowledge among his countrymen."-Imperial Dict. of Univ. Biography, iv. (1866) 889.

INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE.

The difference of the degrees in which the individuals of a great community enjoy the good things of life has been a theme of declamation and discontent in all ages; and it is doubtless our paramount duty, in every state of society, to alleviate the pressure of the purely evil part of this distribution as much as possible, and, by all the means we can devise, secure the lower links in the chain of society from dragging in dishonour and wretchedness: but there is a point of view in which the picture is at least materially altered in its expression. In comparing society on its present immense scale with its infant or less developed state, we must at least take care to enlarge every feature in the same proportion. If, on comparing the very lowest states in civilized and savage life, we admit a difficulty in deciding to which the preference is due, at least in every superior grade we cannot hesitate a moment; and if we institute a similar comparison in every different stage of its progress, we cannot fail to be struck with the rapid rate of dilatation which every degree upward of the scale, so to speak, exhibits, and which, in an estimate of averages, gives an immense pre

ponderance to the present over every former condition of mankind, and, for aught we can see to the contrary, will place succeeding generations in the same degree of superior relation to the present that this holds to those passed away. Or we may put the same proposition in other words, and, admitting the existence of every inferior grade of advantage in a higher state of civilization which subsisted in the preceding, we shall find, first, that, taking state for state, the proportional numbers of those who enjoy the higher degrees of advantage increases with a constantly-accelerated rapidity as society advances; and, secondly, that the superior extremity of the scale is constantly enlarging by the addition of new degrees. The condition of a European prince is now as far superior, in the command of real comforts and conveniences, to that of one in the middle ages, as that to the condition of one of his own dependants.

The advantages conferred by the augmentation of our physical resources through the medium of increased knowledge and improved art have this peculiar and remarkable property,-that they are in their nature diffusive, and cannot be enjoyed in any exclusive manner by a few. An Eastern despot may extort the riches and monopolize the art of his subjects for his own personal use; he may spread around him an unnatural splendour and luxury, and stand in strange and preposterous contrast with the general penury of his people; he may glitter in jewels of gold and raiment of needlework; but the wonders of well contrived and executed manufacture which we use daily, and the comforts which have been invented, tried, and improved upon by thousands, in every form of domestic convenience, and for every ordinary purpose of life, can never be enjoyed by him. To produce a state of things in which the physical advantages of civilized life can exist in a high degree, the stimulus of increasing comforts and constantly-elevated desires must have been felt by millions: since it is not in the power of a few individuals to create that wide demand for useful and ingenious applications, which alone can lead to great and rapid improvements, unless backed by that arising from the speedy diffusion of the same advantages among the mass of mankind.

If this be true of physical advantages, it applies with still greater force to intellectual. Knowledge can neither be adequately cultivated nor adequately enjoyed by a few; and although the conditions of our existence on earth may be such as to preclude an abundant supply of the physical necessities of all who may be born, there is no such law of nature in force against that of our

intellectual and moral wants. Knowledge is not, like food, destroyed by use, but rather augmented and perfected. It acquires not, perhaps, a greater certainty, but at least a confirmed authority and a probable duration, by universal assent; and there is no body of knowledge so complete but that it may acquire accession, or so free from error but that it may receive correction in passing through the minds of millions. Those who admire and love knowledge for its own sake, ought to wish to see its elements made accessible to all, were it only that they may be the more thoroughly examined into, and more effectually developed in their consequences, and receive that ductility and plastic quality which the pressure of minds of all descriptions, constantly moulding them to their purposes, can alone bestow. But to this end it is necessary that it should be divested, as far as possible, of artificial difficulties, and stripped of all such technicalities as tend to place it in the light of a craft and a mystery, inaccessible without a kind of apprenticeship. Science, of course, like everything else, has its own peculiar terms, and, so to speak, its idioms of language; and these it would be unwise, were it even possible, to relinquish: but everything that tends to clothe it in a strange and repulsive garb, and especially everything that, to keep up an appearance of superiority in its professors over the rest of mankind, assumes an unnecessary guise of profundity and obscurity, should be sacrificed without mercy. Not to do this is deliberately to reject the light which the natural unencumbered good sense of mankind is capable of throwing on every subject, even in the elucidation of principles; but where principles are to be applied to practical uses, it becomes absolutely necessary; as all mankind have then an interest in their being so familiarly understood that no mistakes shall arise in their application. A Prelim. Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy.

ON THE ARTS.

of our animal constitution must be satisfied; the comforts and some of the luxuries of life must exist. Something must be given to the vanity of show, and more to the pride of power; the round of baser pleas ure must have been tried and found insufficient before intellectual ones can gain a footing; and when they have obtained it, the delights of poetry and its sister arts still take precedence of contemplative enjoy ments, and the severer pursuits of thought; and when these in time begin to charm from their novelty, and sciences begin to arise, they will at first be those of pure speculation. The mind delights to escape from the trammels which had bound it to earth, and luxuriates in its newly-found powers. Hence, the abstractions of geometry, the properties of numbers, the movements of the celestial spheres,-whatever is abstruse, remote, and extra mundane,- become the first objects of infant science. Applications come late: the arts continue slowly progressive, but their realm remains separated from that of science by a wide gulf which can only be passed by a powerful spring. They form their own language and their own conventions, which none but artists can understand. The whole tendency of empirical art is to bury itself in technicalities, and to place its pride in particular short cuts and mysteries known only to adepts; to surprise and astonish by results, but conceal processes. The character of science is the direct contrary. It delights to lay itself open to inquiry; and is not satisfied with its conclusions till it can make the road to them broad and beaten: and in its applications it preserves the same character; its whole aim being to strip away all technical mystery, to illuminate every dark recess, with a view to improve them on rational principles.

| It would seem that a union of two qualities almost opposite to each other—a going forth of the thoughts in two directions, and a sudden transfer of ideas from a remote station in one to an equally distant one in the other-is required to start the first idea of applying science. Among the Greeks this point was attained by Archimedes, but attained too late, on the eve of that great eclipse of science which was destined to continue for nearly eighteen centuries, till Galileo in Italy, and Bacon in England, at once dispelled the darkness: the one by his inventions and discoveries; the other by the irresistible force of his arguments and elo

Notes by James Murdock, D.D., New York, 1841, 8vo; The Works of Quintus Horatius Flaccus, Illustrated chiefly from the Remains of Ancient Art, with a Life, Lond., 1849, roy. 8vo, without the Life, 1852, crown 8vo, new edit., 1856, 2 vols. 8vo; The History of Latin Christianity, including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicholas V., Lond., 1854-55, 6 vols. 8vo, 2d edit., 1857, 6 vols. 8vo. Dean Milman published some other sermons, articles in the (London) Quarterly Review, and contributed a Memoir of Lord Macaulay (also published separately, Lond., 1862, p. 8vo) to vol. v. (posthumous) of Macaulay's History of England.

"We are always impressed with a conviction of his learning, his ability, and his cultivated taste,

but are haunted at the same time with an unsatis

factory feeling that his poetry is rather a clever recasting of fine things already familiar to us than strikingly fresh and original."-MOIR: Sketches of the Poet. Lit. of the Past Half-Century, 1851, 12mo. See also Edin. Review (Oct. 1829), 47, by

Lord Jeffrey.

Milman's History of Latin Christianity is "One of the remarkable works of the present age, in which the author reviews, with curious erudition and in a profoundly religious spirit, the various changes that have taken place in the Roman hierarchy: and while he fully exposes the manifold errors and corruptions of the system, he shows, throughout, that enlightened charity which is the most precious of Christian graces, as unhappily the rarest."-W. H. PRESCOTT: Philip the Second, 1856, ii. 500, n. 69.

"If it seems to you high praise, I believe no

one who has carefully read the extraordinary work to which it refers will consider it higher than the book deserves."-W. H. PRESCOTT TO S. AUSTIN ALLIBONE, Jan. 1, 1858.

SAINT PAUL AT ATHENS.

At Athens, at once the centre and capital of the Greek philosophy and heathen superstition, takes place the first public and direct conflict between Christianity and Paganism. Up to this time there is no account of any one of the apostles taking his station in the public street or market-place, and addressing the general multitude. Their place of teaching had invariably been the synagogue of their nation, or, as at Philippi, the neighbourhood of their customary place of worship. Here, however, Paul does not confine himself to the synagogue, or to the society of his countrymen and their proselytes. He takes his stand in the public market-place (probably not the Ceramicus, but the Eretriac Forum), which, in the reign of Augustus, had begun to be more frequented, and at the top of which was the famous portico from which the Stoics assumed their name. In Athens, the appearance of a new public teacher, instead of offending the popular

feelings, was too familiar to excite astonishment, and was rather welcomed as promising some fresh intellectual excitement. In Athens, hospitable to all religions and all opinions, the foreign and Asiatic appearance, and possibly the less polished tone and dialect of Paul, would only awaken the stronger curiosity. Though they affect at first (probably the philosophic part of his hearers) to treat him as an idle "babbler," and others (the vulgar, alarmed for the honour of their deities) supposed that he was about to introduce some new religious worship which might endanger the supremacy of their own tutelar divinities, he is conveyed, not without respect, to a still more public and commodious place, from whence he may explain his doctrines to a numerous assembly without disturbance. On the Areopagus the Christian leader takes his stand, surrounded on every side with whatever was noble, beautiful, and intellectual in the older world,-temples, of which the materials were only surpassed by the architectural grace and majesty; statues, in which the ideal anthropomorphism of the Greeks had almost elevated the popular notions of the Deity, by embodying it in human forms of such exquisite perfection; public edifices, where the civil interests of man had been discussed with the acuteness and versatility of the highest Grecian intellect, in all the purity of the inimitable Attic dialect, when oratory had obtained its highest triumphs by "wielding at will the fierce democracy;" the walks of the philosophers, who unquestionably, by elevating the human. mind to an appetite for new and nobler knowledge, had prepared the way for a loftier and purer religion. It was in the midst of these elevating associations, to which the student of Grecian literature in Tarsus, the reader of Menander and of the Greek philosophical poets, could scarcely be entirely dead or ignorant, that Paul stands forth to proclaim the lowly yet authoritative religion of Jesus of Nazareth. His audience was chiefly formed from the two prevailing sects, the Stoics and Epicureans, with the populace, the worshippers of the established religion. In his discourse, the heads of which are related by St. Luke, Paul, with singular felicity, touches on the peculiar opinions of each class among his hearers; he expands the popular religion into a higher philosophy, he imbues philosophy with a profound sentiment of religion.

It is impossible not to examine with the utmost interest the whole course of this (if we consider its remote consequences, and suppose it the first full and public argument of Christianity against the heathen religion and philosophy) perhaps the more extensively and permanently effective oration

66

ever uttered by man. We may contemplate Paul as the representative of Christianity, in the presence, as it were, of the concentrated religion of Greece, and of the spirits, if we may so speak, of Socrates, and Plato, and Zeno. The opening of the apostle's speech is according to those most perfect rules of art which are but the expressions of the general sentiments of nature. It is calm, temperate, conciliatory. It is no fierce denunciation of idolatry, no contemptuous disdain of the prevalent philosophic opinions; it has nothing of the sternness of the ancient Jewish prophet, nor the taunting defiance of the later Christian polemic. Already the religious people of Athens had, unknowingly indeed, worshipped the universal Deity, for they had an altar to the unknown God. The nature, the attributes of this sublime Being, hitherto adored in ignorant and unintelligent homage, he came to unfold. This God rose far above the popular notion; He could not be confined in altar or temple, or represented by any visible image. He was the universal Father of mankind, even of the earth-born Athenians, who boasted that they were of an older race than the other families of man, and coeval with the world itself. He was the fountain of life, which pervaded and sustained the universe; He had assigned their separate dwellings to the separate families of man." Up to a certain point in this higher view of the Supreme Being, the philosopher of the Garden as well as of the Porch might listen with wonder and admiration. It soared, indeed, high above the vulgar religion: but in the lofty and serene Deity, who disdained to dwell in the earthly temple, and needed nothing from the hand of man, the Epicurean might almost suppose that he heard the language of his own teacher. But the next sentence, which asserted the providence of God as the active creative energy,- -as the conservative, the ruling, the ordaining principle,-annihilated at once the atomic theory and the government of blind chance, to which Epicurus ascribed the origin and preservation of the universe. "This high and impressive Deity, who dwelt aloof in serene and majestic superiority to all want, was perceptible in some mysterious manner by man; Ilis all-pervading providence comprehended the whole human race; man was in constant union with the Deity, as an offspring with its parent." And still the Stoic might applaud with complacent satisfaction the ardent words of the apostle; he might approve the lofty condemnation of idolatry. We, thus of divine descent, ought to think more nobly of our Universal Father, than to suppose that the godhead is like unto gold, or silver, or stone, graven by art or man's de

66

vice." But this divine Providence was far different from the stern and all-controlling necessity, the inexorable fatalism, of the Stoic system. While the moral value of human action was recognized by the solemn retributive judgment to be passed on all mankind, the dignity of Stoic virtue was lowered by the general demand of repentance. The perfect man, the moral king, was deposed, as it were, and abased to the general level; he had to learn new lessons in the school of Christ, lessons of humility and conscious deficiency, the most directly opposed to the principles and the sentiments of his philosophy. The great Christian doctrine of the resurrection closed the speech of Paul.

The History of Christianity.

1x

GEORGE TICKNOR, LL.D.,

born at Boston, Massachusetts. 1791, graduated at Dartmouth College, 1807, admitted to the bar 1813; studied and travelled in Europe, 1815-1819, elected Smith Professor of French and Spanish Literature in Harvard University, 1817, and discharged the duties of this office, 1820-35, and resided in Europe, 1837-40, one of the founders of the Boston Public Library, and, 1864-65, President of the Board of Trustees, died at Boston, January 26, 1871.

Syllabus of a Course of Lectures on the History and Criticism of Spanish Literature, Camb., 1823, 8vo; Outlines of the Principal Events in the Life of General Lafayette (from N. Amer. Review, Jan. 1825), Bost., 1825, 8vo, Portland, 1825, 8vo, Lond., 1826, 8vo, in French, Paris, 1825, 8vo; Remarks on Changes lately Proposed or Adopted in Harvard University, Camb., 1825, 8vo; Report of the Board of Visitors on the United States Military Academy at West Point for 1826, 1826, 8vo; The Remains of Nathan Appleton Haven, with a Memoir of his Life, Camb., 1827, 8vo, 2d edit.. Bost., 1828, 8vo; Remarks on the Life and Writings of Daniel Webster, of Massachusetts, Phila., 1831, 8vo; Lecture on the Best Methods of Teaching the Living Languages, etc., Bost., 1833, 8vo: Review of Memoirs of the Rev. Joseph Buckminster and the Rev. Joseph Stevens Buckminster (from Chris. Exam., Sept. 1849), Camb., 1849, 8vo; History of Spanish Literature, New York, 1849, 3 vols. 8vo, Lond., 1849, 3 vols. 8vo, 2d Amer. edit., New York. 1854, 3 vols. 8vo, 3d Amer. edit., Corrected and Enlarged, Bost., 1863, 3 vols. 12mo.

For notices of translations (into Spanish, Dutch, and French) and reviews of this great work,-by far the best of the kind in