present. Never mind the beyond. Live while you can-all the rest is not worth the snap of a finger and thumb. This is our approved philosophy-not perhaps in the naked sense, but duly wrapped up, scented, and presented by kid-skin gloved professors of expediency, and, knowledge of the world.' Are we indeed stranded upon a boundless shore of epicurean morality, or cast away upon some unheard-of island of the south seas, inhabited entirely by a race of undescribed Pococurantes ? Whatever savours of the generous, or impulsive in nature, is smiled at piteously as romantic. Whatever yields to the power of feeling or emotion, is voted absurd, or rococco. Simplicity has left the earth with Astrea, and the love of it, is clean gone out of us, as the sun-rise euphony has from the desecrated Memnon. Romantic faith has vanished with faith of a more sacred kind, that looked ever hopeful to the mercy seat of glory. There is no longer a readiness to believe in the supernatural ability of the truly good, and the purely benevolent. The realm of 'faery,' is quite disenchanted by the iron wand of utilitarianism. The faculty of the imagination is treated as if it were altogether a word. It is now either starved away in budding infancy, or plucked out in plastic childhood. "In the education of children"sayeth one entitled to be listened to-"love is first to be instilled, and out of love, obedience is to be educed. Then impulse and power should be given to the intellect, and the ends of a moral being be exhibited. For this object, this much is effected by works of imagination; that they carry the mind out of self, and shew the possible of the good and the great, in the human character. The height whatever it may be of the imaginative standard, will do no harm; we are commanded to imitate one who is inimitable."*

The question now asked by every little boy, is, "is it true ?" A very proper question we acknowledge it to be, in certain circumstances. It was one, however, that the old fashioned children of days, when intellect did not keep up such a quick march,' as it now does, never thought of putting. They were docile little creatures that believed every thing to be a truth, which came to them in the guise of adventure and narrative. Their appetites grew by what it fed upon-and where was the harm? Every thing stated to them was true to their innocence, true to poetical justice, as they understood it, and true to the heart. The more philosophical young ladies and gentlemen of the nursery now-a-days must have prosaic matter-of-fact verity. There must be circumstantiality of time, place, parish and indivi

* Coleridge's Literary Remains.

duality. Opening rocks, and gigantic bean stalks, will not do now. Lilliputians and Brobdignagians are out of fashion. Robinson Crusoe's identity even has become questionable. It is in vain now to tell your little boy, when he becomes curious about his infantile advent into this world of ours, that he was found under a gooseberry bush, or an apple tree. That sort of nursery physiology is obsolete as witchcraft. It won't do to mystify him. He knows better. He knows better. He is precocious in his day and generation, and must have Baconian proof and perceptive evidence. Your Forty Thieves' may go hang. Your Wonderful Lamp' may sputter into oblivion. Your 'Mother Goose' may be a goose to the end of the chapter. Your little Red Riding Hood' may eat the wolf instead of the wolf devouring her-it is all one to our three feet nothing philosopher. He is amused no more, but chills you with the quiet unimpassioned query, "is it true." Parvulus even takes a sight after the most approved fashion at a ghost story, or a legend of diamonds and pearls,' and beauty and the beast,' and laughs your own and grandsire's ignorant gullibility out of countenance. Luther's pretty tales on presenting some little market gift to his children, about lovely gardens, delicious fruits, and exquisite toys given in reward of docility and goodness, by beautiful boy or girl angels, would now be no go! Such antediluvian parabolical teaching in metaphor, and heart-softening idealities, is withered to the root by the square and rule, alkali and acid, cause and effect, fact and reality, menticulture that finds favor with the domestic or school educators of our age.

Is there not a perceptible hardness, or absence of cordial tenderness, in social relationship? All emotion is eschewed in intercourse, and the surface of manners is as waveless as the Asphaltite lake of Judea. In the realm of imagination, there is a pervading deadness, in regard to things, persons, and interests, that belong not to the passing day. The heroic is entombed. Instead of inventing new works, or illustrating profound or soaring ideas, it is more congenial to the mocking spirit of our times to travesty all that is old or cherished. Go to the debating club, go to the printing office, go to the theatres-you will find this the rule. A new phase of intellectual activity (it can scarcely be called progress), has opened, and works are professedly established and carried on, for the express purpose of making people laugh at any thing, every thing and all things. This class of works unquestionably is a great improvement upon theSatirists' and Yendas,' of the last age-and The John Bulls,' Ages-and Satirists' of a few years back, which were vehicles of vilest insinuation, and most flagrant ribaldry

E

and calumny. All phenomena and polity seem surrounded by an atmosphere of Pyrrhonism. Every thing is doubted, and the conviction of Marcus Brutus appears to be general, that virtue is but a phantom. There would be a laugh of derision were any one seriously to venture an opinion, regarding the existence of benevolence as a principle of our nature, irrespective of selfishness. Conjoined with this, there is the most besotted worship of chance as omnipotent for many things, more especially the realization of wealth by a per saltum process. There is a continual yearning for the unattainable, not for what is excellent and enduring in itself. Vain glory especially is in the ascendant. It may be said almost to have taken the place of duty, as a motive. Things are done or not done, not according to their essential fitness, but with reference to what a section of the party's intimates; known as the world,' may think of it. A love of true fame is elbowed aside, by a passion for ribbonism, and button-hole distinction which passes for patriotism. No limit is set to curiosity in speculation, and a devouring desire to pry into unrevealed mysteries, beyond what is written. Nothing (sayeth Dr. Channing), is more characteristic of our age than the vast range of enquiry which is opening more and more to the multitude of men. Thought frees the old bounds to which men used to confine themselves. It holds nothing too sacred for investigation. It calls the past to account; and treats hoary opinions as if they were of yesterday's growth. No reverence drives it back. No great name terrifies. The foundations of what seems most settled must be explored. Undoubtedly this is a most perilous tendency. Men forget the limits of their powers. They question the infinite, the unsearchable, with an audacious selfreliance. They mock pious and revering minds, and rush into extravagance of doubt more unphilosophical and foolish than the weakest credulity."

66

Literature is often a pursuit under difficulties. This remark applies particularly to India, where the climate with its relaxing effects on body and mind, indisposes even the most active to vigorous exertion. There is here a comparative stagnation in regard to the current of events and consequences, wholly unknown in England; and of which the good, but exceedingly selfopinionated folks there, can form no just conception. Great place' is not as in England open to many. No individual efforts or merits, can in India raise a man to an elevation of office and rank that in England are within the possibility of talent, character and capital. The certainty of this impassability of barrier to advancement, is productive of much apathy in regard to Government movements, schemes, or promotion. All in the

employ of Government, that is, in covenanted employ, form a caste distinct from the people. Even in the ranks of the covenanted, there is lamentable indifference. This might be accounted for, were it our province to enter into the question-which it is not. Suffice it, that where seniority and interest drive merit into the shade, this indifference is not unnatural. The state itself, too, has evinced rather an exigent disposition in saddling all sorts of work upon their servants, merely because they efficiently serve in some one department, for the specified work of which they are entitled to draw a specified salary. This doubling and trebling of incongruous and laborious extra duties is wholly unknown in England, and would not be tolerated there. It is a growing evil in India, and ought to be diminished. The labourer is worthy of his hire-and if there be extra duties super-added to the routine, there ought to be some extra remuneration, were it only a word of thanks, and in the event of intellectual labour, of a distinguished kind, or of years' devotion to such duties-say a button-hole recognition, such as appears to be the darling desideratum of the age. Various causes tend to deaden the springs of action, to chill emulation, and to clog energy. Properly speaking, there is no reading people. There is a sort of bastard public, but wholly inefficient as stimulating to production in the literary field. There is properly no demand here for the materiel of literature. We prefer the imported to the indigenous article. This is very depressing, and of course has a tor pedo effect on auctorial aspirations. Look, for instance, at the newspaper press of India. It has continually to struggle against the dishonest oblivion of the comparatively limited body of subscribers that support it-many of whom deem that their name alone, will meet all the manifold expenses incidental to the production of that diurnal sheet, the want of which would be worse than that of the morning meal; but for which they are base enough never to pay. Society here does the best it can for itself-which is nothing. No one consequently ever does any thing for society. We are a picture and statue-voting publicbut not a self-regulating one. All is flat and sterile-but not unprofitable to some who can thimble-rig the said 'pensive public, out of a million of paid-up capital in a twinkling, no one can tell how. It was said of a Turkish executioner that he did his office so sweetly, that the sweep of his sharp scymitar was not felt. The sweetness of the operation was confined, we presume, to the adept himself, and the spectators-those principally concerned, having never found an opportunity of recording their experience. Many of our fellow-citizens have been operated on, in regard to their stakes in joint stock companies, in a some

what similar manner. At the very time their pockets were cut away, the feat was so sweetly managed that they did not appear to feel it, though they have been heard to make woeful outcries since. Abuses of various sorts we have in plenty, but those who ought to redress them are deaf to the voice of the charmers of the press, charm they ever so wisely. Were those who draw large salaries, as much dependent on public opinion, as their colleagues in England are, perhaps they would be a little more sensitive to its just complaints. Have these at all produced reform in police, and conservancy, and post office matters ? If not, what is the reason? There wants a vis a tergo; and until there is the vis a tergo of native life, energy and regeneration, we shall have no literature in India, worthy of the name. Notwithstanding young-Bengal pretensions-there is really no demand for literature in its various branches-and this is one grand difficulty in the path of the literary man in India. Nevertheless, the pursuit has been beneficial for many. It is a noble refuge, from ennui, and temptation to idleness and vice. A taste for reading and for composition, act and react on each other. A composer is generally a reader, and a great reader is often an elegant composer. In regard to the former, it is undoubtedly an instrument of great contentment and comfort, as has been instructively set forth by one of the greatest and most accomplished philosophers of our time. "Give a man this taste and the means of gratifying it, and you can hardly fail of making him a happy man, unless indeed you put into his hands a most perverse selection of books. You place him in contact with the best society in every period of history-with the wisest, the wittiest-with the tenderest, the bravest, and the purest characters that have advanced humanity. You make him a denizen of all nations, a cotemporary of all ages. The world has been created for him. It is hardly possible but the character should take a higher and better tone from the constant habit of associating in thought with a class of thinkers, to say the least of it, above the average of humanity."*

It is now many years since the author of the "Literary Leaves," placed his volumes before the public, and we have now the Literary Chit-chat" and "The Lives of the British Poets"—for the first time in a separate form, by the same hand. The "Chit-chat" is so much an off-set of the other works, that it is a pity almost, that they were not incorporated as one; which by a little management they might have been, in the form of another edition of the primary work. The first of these has

Sir John Herschel's address to the subscribers to the Windsor and Eton public Library.