first and principal one is the predisposed state of the body; secondly, the specific virus in the atmosphere; and, thirdly, the accidental circumstances of weather, locality, food, occupation, &c. Against the second of these we are powerless: its nature, causes, and sympathies are too subtle for our senses to find data to go upon. Against the first, medicine may act profitably. Against the third, a wise and sagacious medical police ought to be adopted; but, above all, let every man act like a Christian, in all charity, and love, and brotherly kindness, and sincere reliance on God's merciful providence.

Quarantine cannot keep out an atmospheric disease; but it can, and does always, increase the predisposing causes of its reception.

April 10. 1832.

HARMONY.

ALL harmony is founded on a relation to rest on relative rest. Take a metallic plate, and strew sand on it; sound an harmonic chord over the sand, and the grains will whirl about in circles, and other geometrical figures, all, as it were, depending on some point of sand relatively at rest. Sound a discord, and every grain will whisk about without any order at all, in no figures, and with no points of rest.

The clerisy of a nation, that is, its learned men, whether poets, or philosophers, or scholars, are these points of relative rest. There could be no order, no harmony of the whole, without them.

April 21. 1832.

INTELLECTUAL REVOLUTIONS.-MODERN

--

STYLE.

THERE have been three silent revolutions in England: first, when the professions fell off from the church; secondly, when literature fell off from the professions; and, thirdly, when the press fell off from liter

ature.

Common phrases are, as it were, so stereotyped now by conventional use, that it is really much easier to write on the ordinary politics of the day in the common newspaper style, than it is to make a good pair of shoes. An apprentice has as much to learn now to be a shoemaker as ever he had; but an ignorant coxcomb, with a competent want of honesty, may very effectively wield a pen in a newspaper office, with infinitely less pains and preparation than were necessary formerly.

April 23. 1832.

GENIUS OF THE SPANISH AND ITALIANS. SPINOSA.

VICO.

THE genius of the Spanish people is exquisitely subtle, without being at all acute; hence there is so much humour and so little wit in their literature. The genius of the Italians, on the contrary, is acute, profound, and sensual, but not subtle; hence, what they think to be humorous is merely witty.

To estimate a man like Vico, or any great man who has made discoveries and committed errors, you ought to say to yourself:-" He did so and so in the year 1690, a Papist, at Naples. Now, what would he not have done if he had lived now, and could have availed himself of all our vast acquisitions in physical science?"

After the Scienza Nuova, read Spinosa, De Monarchia ex rationis præscripto.* They differed Vico in thinking that society tended to monarchy; Spinosa in thinking it tended to democracy. Now, Spinosa's ideal democracy was realized by a contemporarynot in a nation, for that is impossible, but in a sect I mean by George Fox and his Quakers.+

April 24. 1832.

COLOURS.

COLOURS may best be expressed by a heptad, the largest possible formula for things finite, as the pentad is the smallest possible form. Indeed, the heptad of things finite is in all cases reducible to the pentad. The adorable tetractys, or tetrad, is the formula of God;

* Tractatus Politici, c. vi.

↑ Spinosa died in 1677; Fox in 1681.-ED.