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quantity. It is probable that the yield for 1861, of each of the ducing countries, is roughly as follows:

France

pro

Belgium

Zollverein.

Russia

Austria

Other states

Total

Tons.

160,000

30,000

160,000 (110,000 in 1857)

60,000

40,000

30,000

480,000

This, however, is only an approximative estimate, made in the absence of reliable information: it can only be regarded as illustrative.

The great fact is, however, clear, that a root which has really been only brought into use since 1822 already produces more than a sixth of all the sugar of the world. This result has been attained in forty years, and against all sorts of difficulties. With this experience before us, is it not possible to admit that the continental market may ultimately be entirely supplied by home-grown beet-sugar?

A FEUILLE VOLANTE

APROPOS OF A CERTAIN LACK OF REVERENCE.

"LES grandes âmes ont beaucoup de vénération," writes one who rarely wrote any but axioms, however bitter his wholesome kernels taste to the palates of most men, who prefer their oily Amontillado to his amari aliquid. "Les grandes âmes ont beaucoup de vénération :" true enough! but one must append a vexatious rider to it: Combien de grandes âmes y-a-t-il? Measured by such a gauge, the generality of mankind would be found to have very petites âmes indeed, I fear. The few might reverence Socrates, but the many flocked to enjoy Aristophanes' burlesque on him, and appreciated the caricature, which suited the common taste and passing hour, far better than they did the wisdom it travestied.

Rochefoucauld's veneration is rare, as rare as superstition or credulity is rife. Over and over again has Harvey's theory been ridiculed, and that of Paracelsus been received; Galileo been reviled, and Cornelius Agrippa been exalted; Jenner's science mistrusted, and Cagliostro's accredited; Nostradamus honoured by Kings at St. Germain, and Ramus assassinated for heresy by the Sorbonne, for dogged credulity and dogged irreverence go hand in hand; your peasant who nails up a horseshoe with implicit faith in its potentiality, would ridicule a savant who told him of a simple rational disinfectant. Veneration is a very exceptional quality, and one, I believe, Virgil would have been much quicker to feel for Homer, Jean Paul for Goethe, De Quincey for Pascal, than the world in general to feel for any or for all of them. Pescara would rather have been judged by his opponent Bayard, Corneille by his supplanter Racine, Pitt by his born foe Fox (and rightly, since each was better appreciated by

his rival), than by the whole troop of their individual partisans and claqueurs.

"The immortal bowed to the mortal," writes Sir Walter Scott in Kenilworth, concerning the meeting of Shakspeare, the Stratford poet, with the Queen's favourite; and one can fancy well how not only Leicester, but scores of other mortals besides-infinitesimal pages, proud of the chink of their toy rapiers and the borrowed inches of their highheeled boots, honoured by being numbered in the suite of her Majesty or her Majesty's lover-gave the playwright a condescending bow, and thought they honoured him very kindly if they lingered a moment en passant to play with their ribbon-knots and comment on the last new tragedy brought out at the Globe. Was not Chettle then writing in the "Groatsworth of Wit" depreciative criticism of the Warwickshire actor, that " upstart crow beautified with our feathers, that, with his tiger's heart wrapped in a player's hide, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country?" Was not Shakspeare then being classed, carelessly and blindly, with all the rest of the Blackfriars company, and the cast for the Sejanus being coupled with Burbidge and ranked below the salt by the Lacys? And though his contemporaries had been assured by the show-stone of Dee and the glass bells of Kelly, by geomancy and necromancy, and all the arts of divination, of his future immortality, would they have believed in it, or if they had believed would they not have avenged, the prophecy for the future by flinging sneers at the player of the present, by raking up the boyish story of the Charlecote poaching, by glutting over the marital discord of his life, and by quoting the condemnatory wisdom of the "Groatsworth?" In the player of the Globe none saw the Teacher of the Future; and the little pages jingled their rapiers and picked holes by the light of their small wits in the life of the great Immortal; and-their descendants are among us to this day!

Chettle is only remembered now by having defamed Shakspeare and apologised for it; but there are plenty of Chettle's tribe in every generation, and they write their "Groatsworths," and plume themselves on their wit, and buzz about with their little venomous sting, the same in our time as in the Elizabethan. Veneration is as often lacking among us as among the Athenians who flocked to Aristophanes' burlesque, only that, with us, it has rarely the excuse of wit, like Aristophanes, to plead for it. There is a sort of inquest very common just now, a sadder post-mortem than any that sits on a dead body drawn from the Serpentine, or laid out in the Morgue, needing more tenderness, more delicacy, more respect-I mean the post-mortem that living men hold over the manes of silent brains and embalmed thoughts, over opinions that their owners can no longer defend, over genius that can throb no longer with vital fire, over lips that the "coal from the altar" can touch no more into withering eloquence. Reverence and delicacy of touch are needed, if ever needed anywhere, at such an inquest; yet, strangely enough, the dissectors think only of proving the sharpness of their own knives, the precision of their own guesswork, the skill of their own incisions, and if they have predicted the canker of a disease, only triumph in finding their prediction right, and exultingly hold up to light the cruel blotch on the otherwise fair and noble frame. At the inquest

every raw, rough student tries his new probe, and shows off his new knowledge, careless how he mangles the powerless limbs; after the inquest the dead lie unburied, unpalled, and every daw comes to peck, and every carrion-bird to feed! Such an inquest has been lately held in a good many places upon Porson-in each the unfortunate propensity (so singular in its intensity that, originated in disease, it may plead to have clearly raged beyond his own control) is ruthlessly dwelt upon in painful detail, and every reminiscence of his unhappy vice raked up and retailed without mercy to the great intellect it clouded and the great character it marred; that the man was superior to his fellows, is only a reason why his fault must never slumber with him, why the one misshapen limb must never be covered with the pall of pity and oblivion. With similar acrimony men delight in pointing the finger at Fox and Sheridan at the faro-table and in the sponginghouse; their indiscretions are cited twice as often, ten times more fully than any one of their brilliant talents, their noble traits, their lovable qualities; the one flaw in the diamond is seized on eagerly, and the critical lapidaries vie in running down the value of its otherwise perfect

water.

Does the world in general rejoice that there is no marble so stainless but what it has a dark vein somewhere crossing its gleaming whiteness, no ray of light so brilliant but what it brings some shadow with it? One would think so, for the vein may be as infinitesimal, the shadow as faint as may be, but the Praxitelean beauty of the statue, the noontide radiance of the light, are passed over, and the one stain is seized on, the one shade remembered. Because he can find an error in the shoe, the shoemaker always thinks himself qualified to judge the painting; and the graciousness of Apelles has rarely any other effect than to foster the cobbler's presumption. The ne sutor ultra crepidam, however trite, is always a golden motto, but it is one which falls heedlessly on the tribe who might benefit by it: the cobblers will criticise and the Chettles will write, and Apelles and Shakspeare are judged, with the mass of their own contemporaries at the least, by their judgments.

There is a certain lack of veneration perceptible now-a-days in much that is written and said. If the shoe-tie in the artist's picture be out of drawing, all his greatness and his genius fail to hallow the picture sufficiently to prevent the common herd from crowding in to try it by their little inch measures. Smaller minds have at all times and in all ages delighted in carping at and picking flaws in greater ones. Scaliger could only see in Montaigne "un ignorant hardi," and the Père Daniel, passing over the wit and humour, truth and talent of the Provincial Letters, triumphed in discovering a few "chicanes minutieuses," and glutted over some little trifling inelegancies and tautologies, the sole perceivable fault in a brilliant and world-famous whole. The ignorant so often fancy the best proof of their own wisdom lies in condemning and depreciating the wisdom of others! Will not a Cockney connoisseur attack, pooh-pooh, and run down the beauties of an antique before which Flaxman or Canova would have stood in delighted admiration? ("Ho veduto il Tintoretto ora equale a Titiano, ora minore del Tintoretto," said Caraccio. Caraccio was, at least, just, if severe and satirical; but I don't doubt that the smaller swarm of pretentious dilettanti were delighted to make use of his words and stretch them to a very different sense, ignored the ninety-nine

APROPOS OF A CERTAIN LACK OF REVERENCE.

times Tintoret had rivalled Titian, and exultingly dwelt on the hundredth, when he had not equalled himself.) There seems a great deal of this Cockney connoisseurship about amongst us just now, and while much that is weak and mediocre is permitted to pass current (by a rule directly contrary, by-the-by, to the elder Disraeli's, which wisely decrees that mere industry can produce a faultless mediocrity, but Excellence, the daring and the happy, can only be procured by stars exceptional, who must wander at their own will and in their own paths), great men and great works, requiring the utmost delicacy of discrimination and reverence of touch, are dealt with and dismissed, shallowly and summarily, by men who fancy they have fathomed the ocean when they have dropped into it a plummet that would barely reach to the bottom of a pailful of spring water. "Il est aisé de critiquer, mais il est difficile d'apprécier," says Vauvenargues. And he is right: an ordinary man can point out at a cursory glance the errors and short-comings in a new project or a new invention; it needs the eye and brain of a man of intellect to embrace its utility, its value, and its promise; yet the one will pronounce sentence unhesitatingly, the other will stay to study fully before daring to give judgment. To criticise, gratifies the vanity inherent to human nature, and the love of petty power so often inherent to it too; to appreciate, needs a reverential humility not so pleasant to men's amour-propre; and the shallow hypercriticism, which seems to me a rather favourite indulgence of the day, is best explained perhaps, after all, by another of Luc de Clapier's sayings: "Nous méprisons beaucoup de choses pour ne pas nous mépriser nous-mêmes !"

before

There is an odd lack of reverence for the great who have gone very perceptible, from the vandalism such as swept away Gore House, with all its brilliant memories and hallowed Lares, before the scourge of that prosaic but ruthless Attila-Stucco-to the Chettle-like criticism which à son gré bedaubs with whitewash or begrimes with lamp-black a man's memory or writings, as Mr. Malone plastered the Johnsonof any emiShakspeare bust. The Florentines might go too wide in their reverence when they marked the door of each house where a person and way, nence had died with his name-possibly the streets looked ludicrous, and the honour grew cheap in time; but we go as wide the other too often only mark the closed door of a past life, as officiously and pestilentially as, according to chronicles, the devil marked the doors of the good Milanese with his plague-salve, to the ruin of their city, in 1630. When the lion lies dead, the asses can borrow his skin, and the jackals can rifle his lair, and the mosquitoes can sting his wounds with impunity. There is an odd lack of reverence in many men and many writings of the present day; the majority of young writers have little or no veneration for the men who have gone before them, whose thoughts have moulded their thoughts, whose intellects have formed their intellects, whose eagle-flights have first incited them to try the strength of their own unfledged pinions. Boys of five-and-twenty dip their pens in flippant criticism of those whom they would do better reverently to study; and young fellows, barely free from coaches' lectures and proctors' reprimands, attack Macaulay's style, and treat Byron's pre"Monsieur, je n'ai jamais vu tensions with magnificent contempt. un homme qui prêchât à la fois si tôt et si tard," said Voiture to the child Bossuet, when he preached, at fourteen, to a midnight

gathering of the wits and philosophers who met in the glittering salons of Rambouillet. We have plenty now who preach almost as early, with Bossuet's temerity-but, alas! not with Bossuet's talent to leaven it-to men as much their seniors and superiors as Voiture was his. Toutes les grandes âmes ont beaucoup de vénération." I do not believe there was ever a great mind without veneration : we should feel sure, even did we not read, how Trajan the pupil revered Plutarch the tutor; how Alcibiades reverenced his master in the days of youth, before the Sacred Ship had come from Delos, and the roses of the fatal banquets bloomed. We know that Milton is certain to have read his Spenser fondly and admiringly, strolling through the Christ Church meadows in the summer noons, and to have bowed his head, reverently uncovering its long silky chesnut locks, before the man imprisoned, for the one giant sin of Truth, in the dungeons at Florence who would dream of his having taken the "Faerie Queene," only to pen a pert critique upon it? visited Galileo, only to sketch his theories and dismiss them in a supercilious superficial paper? But there is very little of this sort of reverence left abroad with us; those who cannot chip a letter on a common tombstone, consider themselves fully competent to sit in judgment on the Belvedere or the Laocoon; and fools rush in, every day of their lives, where angels-Anglicè, wise men—fear to tread a step!

The individual flippancy, irreverence, or impertinence, is innocuous, and matters little, but in the aggregate it becomes offensive and painful: the lion lies dead, and the stings cannot harm him; but one longs for a switch to drive away the mosquito-swarms that cannot respect him even in the sanctity of death. "What was Hermion? A wild, handsome young aristocrat, stuffed full of that passionate egotism and inordinate love of approbation which is the bane of many second-rate, of a few even first-rate, geniuses. . . . . Whipped on one cheek, caressed on the other, and maddened by all the temptations of the world, the flesh, and the devil, this poet, this demi-god, who lived not long enough to know himself a fool, ay, and somewhat of a villain to boot, was discovered, after his death, to be both!" Thus is Byron, disguised (for shame's sake?) under the nom de fantaisie of Hermion, treated of in one of the literary ephemera of the hour, in some so-called "Studies from Life," by a lady-writer, very popular, I believe, with lady-readers, and one of the leaders of the feminine squadron of that "safe and healthy" corps I reverted to last month. "A selfish, conceited, parsimonious, narrowminded, vacillating, irritable fop; yet," she goes on kindly to add, with amiable condescension, "not void of some redeemable qualities, and an undoubtedly great poet, for poets are but men;" but calculated, she considers, to "create a belief that all poets are weak, puppyish, and egotistical, because this one poet was so.' So is Byron treated of, and dismissed! Ah me! we need not trouble ourselves about it; the little mauve-bound Mudie-circulated volume will have dropped into the Fountain of Oblivion, and be left to moulder there, while eyes will glisten and hearts throb over Childe Harold and the Isles of Greece through many an unborn generation. Still, there is at once something inexpressibly ludicrous, and as inexpressibly painful, in this shallow, superficial, vituperative judgment, so good a sample of such scores of judgments that pass current through and with the world. A woman, who can in no way

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