of seeing him; in fact, it was impossible that I should have such an honor, since he died during the American war, which war had closed, although it had not. paid its bills, some time before my birth. He enacted the part of squireen, I have been told, creditably enough in a village belonging either to the county of Leicester, Nottingham, or Rutland. Sir Andrew Aguecheek observes, as one of his sentimental remembrances, that he also at one period of his life had been "adored." "I was adored once," says the knight, seeming to acknowledge that he was not adored then. But the squireen was "adored" in a limited way to the last. This fading representative of a crusading house declined gradually into the oracle of the bar at the Red Lion; and was adored by two persons at the least (not counting himself), namely, the landlord, and occasionally the waiter. Mortgages had eaten up the last vestiges of the old territorial wrecks; and, with his death, a new era commenced for this historical family, which now (as if expressly to irritate its ambition) finds itself distributed amongst three mighty nations, France, America, and England, and precisely those three that are usually regarded as the leaders of civilization.*

* The omission of the De, as an addition looking better at a tournament than as an endorsement on a bill of exchange, began, as to many hundreds of English names, full three hundred years ago. Many English families have disused this affix simply from indolence. As to the terminal variations, cy, cie, cey, those belong, as natural and inevitable exponents of a transitional condition, to the unsettled spelling that characterizes the early stages of literature in all countries alike.

BARBARA LEWTHWAITE.*

THIS girl was a person of some poetic distinction, being (unconsciously to herself) the chief speaker in a little pastoral poem of Wordsworth's. That she was really beautiful, and not merely so described by me for the sake of improving the picturesque effect, the reader will judge from this line in the poem, written, perhaps, ten years earlier, when Barbara might be six years old :

""T was little Barbara Lewthwaite, a child of beauty rare!” This, coming from William Wordsworth, both a fastidious judge and a truth-speaker of the severest literality, argues some real pretensions to beauty, or real at that time. But it is notorious that, in the anthologies of earth through all her zones, one flower beyond every other is liable to change, which flower is the countenance of woman. Whether in his fine stanzas upon "Mutability," where the most pathetic instances of this earthly doom are solemnly arrayed, Spenser has dwelt sufficiently upon this the saddest of all, I do not remember.

Already Barbara Lewthwaite had contributed to the composition of two impressive pictures first, in her infancy, with her pet lamb, under the evening shadows of the mighty Fairfield; secondly, in her girlhood, with the turbaned Malay, and the little cottage child. But, subsequently, when a young woman, she entered unconsciously into the composition of another picture even more rememberable,

* Referred to in the "Confessions," page 93, as a beautiful English girl.

suggesting great names, connected with the greatest of themes; the names being those of Plato, and, in this instance, at least, of a mightier than Plato, namely, William Wordsworth; and the theme concerned being that problem which, measured by its interest to man, by its dependencies, by the infinite jewel staked upon the verdict, we should all confess to be the most solemn and heart-shaking that is hung out by golden chains from the heaven of heavens to human investigation, namely Is the spirit of man numbered amongst things naturally perishable? The doctrine of our own Dodwell (a most orthodox man), was, that naturally and per se it was perishable, but that by supernatural endowment it was made immortal. Apparently the ancient oracles of the Hebrew literature had all and everywhere assumed the soul's natural mortality. The single passage in Job, that seemed to look in the counter direction, has long since received an interpretation painfully alien from such a meaning; not to mention that the same objection would apply to this passage, if read into a Christian sense, as applies to the ridiculous interpolation in Josephus describing Christ's personal appearance, namely - Once suppose it genuine, and why were there not myriads of other passages in the same key? Imagine, for a moment, the writer so penetrated with premature Christian views, by what inexplicable rigor of abstinence had he forborne to meet ten thousand calls, at other turns of his work, for similar utterances of Christian sentiment? It must not be supposed that the objections to this Christian interpretation of Job

rest solely with German scholars. Coleridge, one of the most devout and evangelical amongst modern theologians, took the same view; and has expressed it with decision. But Job is of slight importance in comparison with Moses. Now, Warburton, in his well-known argument, held, not only that Moses did (as a fact) assume the mortality of the soul, but that, as a necessity, he did so, since upon this assumption rests the weightiest argument for his own divine mission. That Moses could dispense with a support which Warburton fancied all other legislators had needed and postulated, argued, in the bishop's opinion, a vicarious support-a secret and divine support. This extreme view will be rejected, perhaps, by most people. But, in the mean time, the very existence of such a sect as the Sadducees proves sufficiently that no positive affirmation of the soul's immortality could have been accredited amongst the Hebrew nation as a Mosaic doctrine. The rise of a counter sect, the Pharisees, occurred in later days, clearly under a principle of " development" applied to old traditions current among the Jews. It was not alleged as a Mosaic doctrine, but as something deducible from traditions countenanced by Moses.

From Hebrew literature, therefore, no help is to be looked for on this great question. Pagan literature first of all furnishes any response upon it favorable to human yearnings. But, unhappily, the main argument upon which the sophist in the Phaedo relies, is a pure scholastic conundrum, baseless and puerile. The homogeneity of human consciousness, upon which is made to rest its indestructibility, is not established

or made probable by any plausible logic. If we should figure to ourselves some mighty angel mounting guard upon human interests twenty-three centuries ago, this tutelary spirit would have smiled derisively upon the advent and the departure of Plato. At length, once again, after many centuries, was heard the clarion of immortality not as of any preternatural gift, but as a natural prerogative of the human spirit. This time the angel would have paused and hearkened. The auguries for immortality, which Wordsworth drew from indications running along the line of daily human experience, were two. The first was involved in the exquisite little poem of "We are Seven." That authentic voice, said Wordsworth, which affirmed life as a necessity inalienable from man's consciousness, was a revelation through the lips of childhood. Life in its torrent fulness that is, life in its earliest stage — affirmed itself; whereas the voice which whispered doubts was an adventitious and secondary voice consequent upon an earthly experience. The child in this little poem is unable to admit the thought of death, though, in compliance with custom, she uses the word.

"The first that died was little Jane;

In bed she moaning lay;

Till God released her from her pain,
And then she went away."

The graves of her brother and sister she is so far from regarding as any argument of their having died, that she supposes the stranger simply to doubt her statement, and she reiterates her assertion of their