June 17. 1833.

NEGRO EMANCIPATION.

HAVE YOU been able to discover any principle in this Emancipation Bill for the Slaves, except a principle of fear of the abolition party struggling with a fear of causing some monstrous calamity to the empire at large! Well! I will not prophesy; and God grant that this tremendous and unprecedented act of positive enactment may not do the harm to the cause of humanity and freedom which I cannot but fear! But yet, what can be hoped, when all human wisdom and counsel are set at nought, and religious faith the only miraculous agent amongst men is not invoked or regarded! and that most unblest phrase the Dissenting interest-enters into the question!

町

June 22. 1833.

HACKET'S LIFE OF

ARCHBISHOP WIL.

LIAMS. CHARLES I. MANNERS UNDER EDWARD III., RICHARD II., AND HENRY VIII.

WHAT a delightful and instructive book Bishop Hacket's Life of Archbishop Williams is! You learn more from it of that which is valuable towards an insight into the times preceding the Civil War than from all the ponderous histories and memoirs now composed about that period.

Charles seems to have been a very disagreeable personage during James's life. There is nothing dutiful in his demeanour.

I think the spirit of the court and nobility of Edward III. and Richard II. was less gross than that in the time of Henry VIII.; for in this latter period the chivalry had evapo

rated, and the whole coarseness was left by itself. Chaucer represents a very high and romantic style of society amongst the gentry.

June 29. 1833.

HYPOTHESIS. SUFFICTION. THEORY. LYELL'S GEOLOGY. GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE. GERARD DOUW'S "SCHOOLMASTER" AND TITIAN'S "VENUS." SIR J. SCARLETT.

It seems to me a great delusion to call or suppose the imagination of a subtle fluid, or molecules penetrable with the same, a legitimate hypothesis. It is a mere suffiction. Newton took the fact of bodies falling to the centre, and upon that built up a legitimate hypothesis. It was a subposition of something certain. But Descartes' vortices were not an hypothesis; they rested on no fact at all; and yet they did, in a clumsy way, explain the motions of the heavenly bodies.

But

your subtle fluid is pure gratuitous assumption; and for what use? It explains nothing.

Besides, you are endeavouring to deduce power from mass, in which you expressly say there is no power but the vis inertiæ: whereas, the whole analogy of chemistry proves that power produces mass.

The use of a theory in the real sciences is to help the investigator to a complete view of all the hitherto discovered facts relating to the science in question; it is a collected view, Sewpía, of all he yet knows in one. Of course, whilst any pertinent facts remain unknown, no theory can be exactly true, because every new fact must necessarily, to a greater or less degree, displace the relation of all the others. A theory, therefore, only helps investigation; it cannot invent or discover. The only true theories are those of geometry, because in geometry all the premisses are true and unalterable. But, to suppose that, in our present exceedingly imperfect acquaintance with the facts, any theory in

chemistry or geology is altogether accurate,

is absurd: it cannot be true.

Mr. Lyell's system of geology is just half the truth, and no more. He affirms a great deal that is true, and he denies a great deal which is equally true; which is the general characteristic of all systems not embracing the whole truth. So it is with the rectilinearity or undulatory motion of light; I believe both; though philosophy has as yet but imperfectly ascertained the conditions of their alternate existence, or the laws by which they are regulated.

Those who deny light to be matter do not therefore deny its corporeity.

The principle of the Gothic architecture is Infinity made imaginable. It is no doubt a sublimer effort of genius than the Greek style; but then it depends much more on execution for its effect. I was more than ever impressed with the marvellous sublimity