worldly prudence. But to substitute these for the laws of reason and conscience, or even to confound them under one name, is a prejudice, say rather a profanation, which I became more and more reluctant to flatter by even an appearance of assent, though it were only in a point of form and technical arrangement.

At a time, when my thoughts were thus employed, I met with a volume of old tracts, published during the interval from the captivity of Charles I. to the restoration of his son. Since my earliest manhood it had been among my fondest regrets, that a more direct and frequent reference had not been made by our historians to the books, pamphlets, and flying sheets of that momentous period, during which all the possible forms of truth and error (the latter being themselves for the greater part caricatures of truth) bubbled up on the surface of the public mind, as in the ferment of a chaos. It would be difficult to conceive a notion or a fancy, in politics, ethics, theology, or even in physics and physiology, not anticipated by the men of that age ;—in this as in most other respects sharply contrasted with the products of the French revolution, which was scarcely more characterized by its sanguinary and sensual abominations than (to borrow the words of an eminent living poet) by

A dreary want at once of books and men.*

The parliament's army was not wholly composed of mere fanatics. There was no mean proportion of enthusiasts; and that enthusiasm must have been of no ordinary grandeur, which could draw from a common soldier, in an address to his comrades, such a dissuasive from acting in the cruel spirit of fear, and such sentiments, as are contained in the following passage, which I would rescue from oblivion,† both for the honor of our forefathers, and in proof of the difference between the republicans of that period, and the democrats, or rather demagogues, of the present. It is as follows:

I judge it ten times more honorable for a single person, in

*Wordsworth.

† The more so because every year consumes its quota. The late Sir Wilfred Lawson's predecessor, from some pique or other, left a large and unique collection of the pamphlets published from the commencement of the civil war to the Restoration to his butler, and it supplied the chandlers' and druggists' shops of Penrith and Kendal for many years.

witnessing a truth to oppose the world in its power, wisdom, and authority, this standing in its full strength, and he singly and nakedly, than fighting many battles by force of arms, and gaining them all. I have no life but truth; and if truth be advanced by my suffering, then my life also. If truth live, I live; if justice live, I live; and these can not die, but by any man's suffering for them are enlarged, enthroned. Death can not hurt me. I sport with him, am above his reach. I live an immortal life. What we have within, that only can we see without. I can not see death; and he that hath not this freedom is a slave. He is in the arms of that, the phantom of which he beholdeth and seemeth to himself to flee from. Thus, you see that the king hath a will to redeem his present loss. You see it by means of the lust after power in your own hearts. For my part I condemn his unlawful seeking after it. I condemn his falsehood and indirectness therein. But if he should not endeavor the restoring of the kingliness to the realm, and the dignity of its kings, he were false to his trust, false to the majesty of God that he is intrusted with. The desire of recovering his loss is justifiable. Yea, I should condemn him as unbelieving and pusillanimous, if he should not hope for it. But here is his misery and yours too at present, that ye are unbelieving and pusillanimous, and are, both alike, pursuing things of hope in the spirit of fear. Thus you condemn the parliament for acknowledging the king's power so far as to seek to him by a treaty; while by taking such pains against him you manifest your own belief that he hath a great power; which is a wonder, that a prince despoiled of all his authority, naked, a prisoner, destitute of all friends and helps, wholly at the disposal of others, tied and bound too with all obligations that a parliament can imagine to hold him, should yet be such a terror to you, and fright you into such a large remonstrance, and such perilous proceedings to save yourselves from him. Either there is some strange power in him, or you are full of fear that are so affected with a shadow.

"But as you give testimony to his power, so you take a course to advance it; for there is nothing that hath any spark of God in it, but the more it is suppressed, the more it rises. If you did indeed believe, that the original of power were in the people, you would believe likewise that the concessions extorted from the king would rest with you. And, doubtless, such of them as in right

eousness ought to have been given would do so, but that your violent courses disturb the natural order of things, in which they still tend to their centre. These courses, therefore, so far from being the way to secure what we have got, are the way to lose them, and (for a time at least) to set up princes in a higher form than ever. For all things by force compelled from their nature will fly back with the greater earnestness on the removal of that force; and this, in the present case, must soon weary itself out, and hath no less an enemy in its own satiety than in the disappointment of the people.

Again, you speak of the king's reputation, and do not consider that the more you crush him, the sweeter the fragrance that comes from him. While he suffers, the spirit of God and glory rests upon him. There is a glory and a freshness sparkling in him by suffering, an excellency that was hidden, and which you have drawn out. And naturally men are ready to pity sufferers. When nothing will gain me, affliction will. I confess his sufferings make me a royalist, who never cared for him. He that doth and can suffer shall have my heart; you had it while you suffered. But now your severe punishment of him for his abuses in government, and your own usurpations, will not only win the hearts of the people to the oppressed suffering king, but provoke them to rage against you, as having robbed them of the interest which they had in his royalty. For the king is in the people, and the people in the king. The king's being is not solitary, but as he is in union with his people, who are his strength in which he lives; and the people's being is not naked, but an interest in the greatness and wisdom of the king who is their honor which lives in them. And though you will disjoin yourselves from kings, God will not, neither will I. God is king of kings, kings' and princes' God, as well as people's, theirs as well as ours, and theirs eminently (as the speech enforces, God of Israel, that is, Israel's God above all other nations, and so king of kings), by a near and special kindred and communion. Kingliness agrees with all Christians, who are indeed Christians. For they are themselves of a royal nature, made kings with Christ, and can not but be friends to it, being of kin to it; and if there were not kings to honor, they would want one of the appointed objects whereon to bestow that fulness of honor which is in their breasts. A virtue would lie unemployed within

them, and in prison, pining and restless from the want of its outward correlative. It is a bastard religion, that is inconsistent with the majesty and the greatness of the most splendid monarch. Such spirits are strangers from the kingdom of heaven. Either they know not the glory in which God lives; or they are of narrow minds that are corrupt themselves, and not able to bear greatness, and so think that God will not, or can not, qualify men for such high places with correspondent and proportionable power and goodness. Is it not enough to have removed the malignant bodies which eclipsed the royal sun, and mixed their bad influences with his, and would you extinguish the sun itself to secure yourselves? O! this is the spirit of bondage to fear, and not of love and a sound mind. To assume the office and the name of champions for the common interest, and of Christ's soldiers, and yet to act for self-safety is so poor and mean a thing that it must needs produce most vile and absurd actions, the scorn of the old pagans, but for Christians who in all things are to love their neighbor as themselves, and God above both, it is of all affections the unworthiest. Let me be a fool and boast, if so I may show you, while it is yet time, a little of that rest and security which I and those of the same spirit enjoy, and which you have turned your backs upon; self, like a banished thing, wandering in strange ways. First, then, I fear no party, or interest, for I love all, I am reconciled to all, and therein I find all reconciled to me. I have enmity to none but the son of perdition. It is enmity begets insecurity and while men live in the flesh, and in enmity to any party, or interest, in a private, divided, and self good, there will be, there can not but be, perpetual wars; except that one particular should quite ruin all other parts and live alone, which the universal must not, will not, suffer. For to admit a part to devour and absorb the others, were to destroy the whole, which is God's presence therein; and such a mind in any part doth not only fight with another part, but against the whole. Every faction of men, therefore, striving to make themselves absolute, and to owe their safety to their strength, and not to their sympathy, do directly war against God who is love, peace, and a general good, gives being to all and cherishes all, and, therefore, can have neither peace nor security. But we being enlarged into the largeness of God, and comprehending all things in our bosoms by the divine spirit, are at rest with all, and de

light in all; for we know in thing but what is, in its essence, in our own hearts. Kings, nobles, are much beloved of us, because they are in us, of us, one with us, we as Christians being kings and lords by the anointing of God."

But such sentiments, it will be said, are the flights of speculative minds. Be it so; yet to soar is nobler than to creep. We attach, likewise, some value to a thing for its mere infrequency. And speculative minds, alas! have been rare, though not equally rare, in all ages and countries of civilized men. With us the very word seems to have abdicated its legitimate sense. Instead of designating a mind so constituted and disciplined as to find in its own wants and instincts an interest in truths for their truth's sake, it is now used to signify a practical schemer, one who ventures beyond the bounds of experience in the formation and adoption of new ways and means for the attainment of wealth or power. To possess the end in the means, as it is essential to morality in the moral world, and the contra-distinction of goodness from mere prudence, so is it, in the intellectual world, the moral constituent of genius, and that by which true genius is contra-distinguished from mere talent.*

The man of talent, who is, if not exlusively, yet chiefly and characteristically a man of talent, seeks and values the means wholly in relation to some object not therein contained.. His means may be peculiar; but his ends are conventional, and common to the mass of mankind. Alas! in both cases alike, in that of genius, as well as in that of talent, it too often happens, that this diversity in the quality of their several intellects, extends to the feelings and impulses properly and directly moral, to their dispositions, habits, and maxims of conduct. It characterizes not the intellect alone, but the whole man. The one substitutes prudence for virtue, legality in act and demeanor for warmth and purity of heart, and too frequently becomes jealous, envious, a coveter of other men's good gifts, and a detractor from their merits, openly or secretly, as his fears or his passions chance to preponderate.†

* See the note to this essay. P.

384.-Ed.

According to the principles of Spurzheim's cranioscopy (a scheme, the indicative or gnomonic parts of which have a stronger support in facts than the theory in reason or common sense) we should find in the skull of such an individual the organs of circumspection and appropriation disproportion