id perception of the danger constitutes the greater t of the danger itself Thus men are said to have oned and even died at the sight of a narrow dge, over which they had rode, the night before, perfect safety; or at tracing the footmarks along edge of a precipice which the darkness had conled from them. A more obscure cause, yet not olly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted t, that the exertion of the reasoning faculties tends extinguish or bedin those mysterious instincts of Il, which, though for the most part latent, we vertheless possess in common with other animals. Or the proverb may be used invidiously: and folly the vocabulary of envy or baseness may signify urage and magnanimity. Hardihood and fool-harness are indeed as different as green and yellow, t will appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Couge multiplies the chances of success by sometimes aking opportunities, and always availing itself of em: and in this sense fortune may be said to favor ols by those, who, however prudent in their own inion, are deficient in valor and enterprise. Again: eminently good and wise man, for whom the aises of the judicious have procured a high reputaon even with the world at large, proposes to himself ertain objects, and adapting the right means to the ght end, attains them but his objects not being hat the world calls fortune, neither money nor articial rank, his admitted inferiors in moral and intelectual worth, but more prosperous in their worldly oncerns, are said to have been favored by fortune nd he slighted: although the fools did the same in heir line as the wise man in his: they adapted the ppropriate means to the desired end and so suceeded. In this sense the proverb is current by a nisuse, or a catachresis at least, of both the words, fortune and fools. How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits REPLY. For shame, dear friend renounce this canting strain, Or throne of corses which his sword hath slain? But, lastly, there is, doubtless, a true meaning attached to fortune, distinct both from prudence and from courage; and distinct too from that absence of depressing or bewildering passions, which (according to my favorite proverb, “extremes meet,") the fool not seldom obtains in as great perfection by his ignorance, as the wise man by the highest energies of thought and self-discipline. LUCK has a real existence in human affairs from the infinite number of powers, that are in action at the same time, and from the co-existence of things contingent and accidental (such as to us at least are accidental) with the regu lar appearances and general laws of nature. A fami liar instance will make these words intelligible. The moon waxes and wanes according to a necessary law The clouds likewise, and all the manifold appear ances connected with them, are governed by certain laws no less than the phases of the moon. But the laws which determine the latter, are known and cal culable: while those of the former are hidden from us. At all events, the number and variety of their effects baffle our powers of calculation: and that the sky is clear or obscured at any particular time, we speak of, in common language, as a matter of accident. Well! at the time of full moon, but when the sky is completely covered with black clouds, I am walking on in the dark, aware of no particular danger: a sudden gust of wind rends the cloud for a moment, and the moon emerging discloses to me a chasm or precipice, to the very brink of which I had advanced my foot. This is what is meant by luck, and according to the more or less serious mood or habit of our mind we exclaim, how lucky! or, how providential! The co-presence of numberless phenomena, which from the complexity or subtlety of their determining causes are called contingencies, and the co-existence of these with any regular or necessary phenomenon (as the clouds with the moon for instance) occasion coincidences, which, when they are attended by any advantage or injury, and are at the same time incapable of being calculated or foreseen by human prudence, form good or ill luck. On a hot sunshiny afternoon came on a sudden storm and spoilt the farmer's hay: and this is called ill luck. We will suppose the event to take place, when meteorology shall have been perfected into a science, provided with unerring instruments; but which the farmer had neglected to examine. This is no longer ill luck, but imprudence. Now apply this to our proverb. Unforeseen coincidences may have greatly helped a man, yet if they have done for him only what possibly from his own abilities he might have effected for himself, his good luck will excite less attention and the instances be less remembered. That clever men should attain their objects seems natural, and we neglect the circumstances that perhaps produced that success of themselves without the intervention of skill or foresight; but we dwell on the fact and remember it, as something strange, when the same happens to a weak or ignorant man. So too, though the latter should fail in his undertakings from concur. rences that might have happened to the wisest man, yet his failure being no more than might have been expected and accounted for from his folly, it lays no hold on our attention, but fleets away among the other undistinguished waves in which the stream of ordinary life murmurs by us, and is forgotten. Had it been as true as it was notoriously false, that those all-embracing discoveries, which have shed a dawn of science on the art of chemistry, and give no obscure promise of some one great constitutive law, in the light of which dwell dominion and the power of prophecy; if these discoveries, instead of having been as they really were preconcerted by meditation, and evolved out of his own intellect, had occurred by a set of lucky accidents to the illustrious father and founder of philosophic alchemy; if they had presented themselves to Professor DAVY exclusively in consequence of his luck in possessing a particular galvanic battery; if this battery, as far as DAVY was concerned, had itself been an accident, and not (as in point of fact it was) desired and obtained by him for the purpose of ensuring the testimony of experience to his principles, and in order to bind down material nature under the inquisition of reason, and force from her, as by torture, unequivocal answer to prepared and preconceived questions-yet still they would not have been talked of or described, as instances of luck, but as the natural results of his admitted genius and known skill. But should an accident have disclosed similar discoveries to a mechanic at Birmingham or Sheffield, and if the man should grow rich in consequence, and partly by the envy of his neighbors, and partly with good reason, be considered by them as a man below par in the general powers of his understanding; then, “O what a lucky fellow!-Well, Fortune does favor fools-that's for certain!-It is always so!"-And forthwith the exclaimer relates half a dozen similar instances. Thus accumulating the one sort of facts and never collecting the other, we do, as poets in their diction, and quacks of all denominations do in their reasoning, put a part for the whole, and at once soothe our envy and gratify our love of the arellous, by the sweeping proverb, "FORTUNE FAVORS BOLS." then wrote, I had expressed my own convicte THE philosophic ruler, who secured the favors of fortune by seeking wisdom and knowledge in preference to them, has pathetically observed-"The heart knoweth its own bitterness; and there is a joy in which the stranger intermeddleth not." A simple question founded on a trite proverb, with a discursive answer to it, would scarcely suggest, to an indifferent person, any other notion than that of a mind at ease, amusing itself with its own activity. Once before (I believe about this time last year) I had taken up the old memorandum-book, from which I transcribed the preceding Essay, and that had then attracted my notice by the name of the illustrious chemist mentioned in the last illustration. Exasperated by the base and cowardly attempt, that had been made, to detracted the outward shows of sorrow, it was by force that from the honors due to his astonishing genius, I had slightly altered the concluding sentences, substituting the more recent for his earlier discoveries; and without the most distant intention of publishing what I she In no very dissimilar manner, did the suddet gleam of recollection at the sight of this memorat dum act on myself. I had been stunned by the intel ligence, as by an outward blow, till this trifling inci dent startled and disentranced me: (the sudden pang shivered through my whole frame :) and if I repress I repressed them, and because it is not by tears that features of his character portrayed and preserved. notwithstanding the more than childish ignorance in is I feel it my duty to attempt, and this alone; for which they were kept by their priests, yet compared ing received neither instructions nor permission with the middle and higher classes, were both in n the family of the deceased, I cannot think my mind and body, as ordinary men compared with allowed to enter into the particulars of his pri- dwarfs. Every respectable family had some one e history, strikingly as many of them would illus- knight for their patron, as a matter of course; and to te the elements and composition of his mind. For him the honor of a sister or a daughter was sacriwas indeed a living confutation of the assertion ficed, equally as a matter of course. But why should ributed to the Prince of Conde, that no man ap- I thus disguise the truth? Alas! in nine instances ired great to his valet de chambre-a saying which, out of ten, this patron was the common paramour of uspect, owes its currency less to its truth, than to every female in the family. Were I composing a e envy of mankind and the misapplication of the state memorial, I should abstain from all allusion to ord, great, to actions unconnected with reason and moral good or evil, as not having now first to learn, e will. It will be sufficient for my purpose to ob- that with diplomatists, and with practical statesmen rve, that the purity and strict propriety of his con- of every denomination, it would preclude all attenct, which precluded rather than silenced calumny, tion to its other contents, and have no result but that e evenness of his temper and his attentive and af- of securing for its author's name the official private ctionate manners, in private life, greatly aided and mark of exclusion or dismission, as a weak or suspicreased his public utility; and, if it should please cious person. But among those for whom I am now ovidence, that a portion of his spirit should descend writing, there are, I trust, many who will think it not ith his mantle, the virtues of Sir ALEXANDER BALL, the feeblest reason for rejoicing in our possession of a master, a husband, and a parent, will form a no Malta, and not the least worthy motive for wishing ss remarkable epoch in the moral history of the its retention, that one source of human misery and altese than his wisdom, as a governor, has made in corruption has been dried up. Such persons will hear at of their outward circumstances. That the pri- the name of Sir Alexander Ball with additional reveate and personal qualities of a first magistrate should rence, as of one who has made the protection of Great ave political effects, will appear strange to no re- Britain a double blessing to the Maltese, and broken ecting Englishman, who has attended to the work- the bonds of iniquity" as well as unlocked the fetigs of men's minds during the first ferment of revo- ters of political oppression. tionary principles, and must therefore have witessed the influence of our own sovereign's domestic haracter in counteracting them. But in Malta there vere circumstances which rendered such an example eculiarly requisite and beneficent. The very existence, for so many generations, of an Order of Lay Cælibates in that island, who abandoned even the outward shows of an adherence to their vow of chasity, must have had pernicious effects on the morals of the inhabitants. But when it is considered too that the Knights of Malta had been for the last fifty years or more a set of useless idlers, generally illiterate,* for they thought literature no part of a soldier's excellence; and yet effeminate, for they were soldiers in name only: when it is considered, that they were, moreover, all of them aliens, who looked upon themselves not merely as of a superior rank to the native nobles, but as beings of a different race (I had almost said, species,) from the Maltese collectively; and finally that these men possessed exclusively the government of the Island: it may be safely concluded that they were little better than a perpetual influenza, relaxing and diseasing the hearts of all the families within their sphere of influence. Hence the peasantry, who fortunately were below their reach, *The personal effects of every knight were, after his death, appropriated to the Order, and his books, if he had any, devolved to the public library. This library therefore, which has been accumulating from the time of their first settlement in the island, is a fair criterion of the nature and degree of their literary studies, as an average. Even in respect to works of military science, it is contemptible--as the sole public library of so numerous and opulent an order, most contemptible--and in all other departments of literature it is be low contempt. When we are praising the departed by our own fire-sides, we dwell most fondly on those qualities which had won our personal affection, and which sharpen our individual regrets. But when impelled by a loftier and more meditative sorrow, we would raise a public monument to their memory, we praise them appropriately when we relate their actions faithfully: and thus preserving their example for the imitation of the living, alleviate the loss, while we demonstrate its magnitude. My funeral eulogy of Sir Alexander Ball, must therefore be a narrative of his life; and this friend of mankind will be defrauded of honor in proportion as that narrative is deficient and fragmentary. It shall, however, be as complete as my information enables, and as prudence and a proper respect for the feelings of the living permit me to render it. His fame (I adopt the words of our elder writers) is so great throughout the world that he stands in no need of an encomium; and yet his worth is much greater than his fame. It is impossible not to speak great things of him, and yet it will be very difficult to speak what he deserves. But custom requires that something should be said; it is a duty and a debt which we owe to ourselves and to mankind, not less than to his memory; and I hope his great soul, if it hath any knowledge of what is done here below, will not be offended at the smallness even of my offering. Ah! how little, when among the subjects of THE FRIEND I promised "Characters met with in Real Life," did I anticipate the sad event, which compels me to weave on a cypress branch, those sprays of laurel, which I had destined for his bust, not his monument! He lived as we should all live; and, I rock of strength and refuge, to which the soul may cling amid the fleeting serge-like objects of the senses. Disturbed as by the obscure quickening of an inward birth; made restless by swarming thoughts, that, like bees when they first miss the queen and mother of the hive, with vain discursion seek each in the other what is the common need of all; man sallies forth into nature-in nature, as in the shadows and reflections of a clear river, to discover the originals of the forms presented to him in his own intellect. Over these shadows, as if they were the substantial powers and presiding spirits of the stream, Narcissus-like, he hangs delighted: till finding no where a representative of that free agency which yet is a fact of immediate consciousness sanctioned and made fearfully significant by his prophetic conscience, he learns at last that what he seeks he has left behind and but lengthens the distance as he prolongs the search. Under the tutorage of scientific ANALYSIS, haply first given to him by express revelation (e cœlo descendit, ΓΝΩΘΙ ΣΕΑΥΤΟΝ) he separates the relations that are wholly the creatures of his own abstracting and comparing intellect, and at once discovers and recoils from the discovery, that the reality, the objective truth, of the objects he has been adoring, derives its whole and sole evidence from an obscure sensation, which he is alike unable to resist or to comprehend, which compels him to contemplate as without and independent of himself what yet he could not contemplate at all, were it not a modification of his own being. Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own; The homely Nurse doth all she can ** O joy that in our embers Is something that doth live, The thought of our past years in me doth breed For that which is most worthy to be blest; Of childhood, whether busy or at rest, With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:Not for these I raise The song of thanks and praise, But for those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realized, High instincts before which our mortal Nature But for those first affections, Those shadowy recol.ections, Which, be they what they may, Are yet the fountain lignt of all our day, Are yet a master light of all our sceing; Uphold us-cherish-and have power to make Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavor, Nor all that is at enmity with joy, Can utterly abolish or destroy! Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Can in a moment travel thither- Long indeed will man strive to satisfy the inwar querist with the phrase, laws of nature. But though the individual may rest content with the seemly net aphor, the race cannot. If a law of nature be a mere generalization, it is included in the above as an act of the mind. But if it be other and more, and yet manifestable only in and to an intelligent spirit, must in act and substance be itself spiritual: for things utterly heterogeneous can have no intercom munion. In order therefore to the recognition of | himself in nature, man must first learn to comprehend nature in himself, and its laws in the ground of his own existence. Then only can he reduce Phenomena to Principles-then only will he have achieved the METHOD, the self-unravelling clue, which alone can securely guide him to the conquest of the former -when he has discovered in the basis of their union the necessity of their differences; in the principle of their continuance the solution of their changes. Its the idea of the common centre, of the universal law. by which all power manifests itself in opposite yet interdependent forces (η γαρ ΔΥΑΣ αει παρα Μπαιδι καθηται, και νοεραις αςράπτει τομαις) that enlightening inquiry, multiplying experiment, and at once inspir ing humility and perseverance, will lead him to cam prehend gradually and progressively the relation of each to the other, of each to all, and of all to each. Such is the second of the two possible directions in which the activity of man propels itself: and either in one or other of these channels-or in some one of the rivulets which notwithstanding their occasion! refluence (and though, as in successive schematisms of Becher, Stahl, and Lavoisier, the varying stream may for a time appear to comprehend and insle some particular department of knowledge which even then it only peninsulates) are yet flowing towards this mid channel, and will ultimately fall into it-all intellectual METHOD has its bed, its banks, and its line of progression. For be it not forgotten, that this discourse * During my residence in Rome I had the pleasure of recit ing this sublime ode to the illustrious Baron Von Humboldt, then the Prussian minister at the papal court, and now at the court of St. James. By those who knew and honored both the brothers, the talents of the plenipotentiary were held equal to those of the scientific traveller, his judgment superior. I can only say, that I know few Englishmen, whom I could compare with him in the extensive knowledge and just appe ciation of English literature and its various epochs. He tened to the ode with evident delight, and as evidently not without surprise, and at the close of the recitation exclaimed "And is this the work of a living English poet? I shood have attributed it to the age of Elizabeth, not that I recolect any writer, whose style it resembles: but rather with wonder that so great and original a poet should have escaped my no tice."-Often as I repeat passages from it to myself, I recur to the words of Dante: Canzon! io eredo, che saranno radi 1 1 is confined to the evolutions and ordonnance of knowledge, as prescribed by the constitution of the human intellect. Whether there be a correspondent reality, whether the Knowing of the Mind has its correlative in the Being of Nature, doubts may be felt. Never to have felt them, would indeed betray an unconscious unbelief, which traced to its extreme roots will be seen grounded in a latent disbelief. How should it not be so? if to conquer these doubts, and out of the confused multiplicity of seeing with which "the films of corruption" bewilder us, and out of the unsubstantial shows of existence, which, like the shadow of an eclipse, or the chasms in the sun's atmosphere, are but negations of sight, to attain that singleness of eye, with which "the whole body shall be full of light," be the purpose, the means, and the end of our probation, the METHOD which is "profitable to all things, and hath the promise in this life and in the life to come!" Imagine the unlettered African, or rude yet musing Indian, poring over an illumined manuscript of the inspired volume, with the vague yet deep impression that his fates and fortunes are in some unknown manner connected with its contents. Every tint, every group of characters has its several dream. Say that after long and dissatisfying toils, he begins to sort, first the paragraphs that appear to resemble each other, then the lines, the words-nay, that he has at length discovered that the whole is formed by the recurrence and interchanges of a limited number of cyphers, letters, marks, and points, which, however, in the very height and utmost perfection of his attainment, he makes twenty fold more numerous than they are, by classing every different form of the same character, intentional or accidental, as a separate element. And the whole is without soul or substance, a talisman of superstition, a mockery of science: or employed perhaps at last to feather the arrows of death, or to shine and flutter amid the plumes of savage vanity. The poor Indian too truly represents the state of learned and systematic ignorance-arrangement guided by the light of no leading idea, mere orderliness without METHOD! But see! the friendly missionary arrives. He explains to him the nature of written words, translates them for him into his native sounds, and thence into the thoughts of his heart-how many of these thoughts then first evolved into consciousness, which yet the awakening disciple receives, and not as aliens! Henceforward, the book is unsealed for him; the depth is opened out; he communes with the spirit of the volume as a living oracle. The words become transparent, and he sees them as though he saw them not. We have thus delineated the two great directions of man and society with their several objects and ends. Concerning the conditions and principles of method appertaining to each, we have affirmed (for the facts hitherto adduced have been rather for illustration than for evidence, to make our position distinctly understood rather than to enforce the conviction of its truth) that in both there must be a mental antecedent; but that in the one it may be an image or conception received through the senses, and ori ginating from without, the inspiriting passion or desire being alone the immediate and proper offspring of the mind; while in the other the initiative thought, the intellectual seed, must have its birth-place within, whatever excitement from without may be necessary for its germination. Will the soul thus awakened neglect or undervalue the outward and conditional causes of her growth? For rather, might we dare borrow a wild fancy from the Mantuan bard, or the poet of Arno, will it be with her, as if a stem or trunk, suddenly endued with sense and reflection, should contemplate its green shoots, their leaflets and budding blossoms, wondered at as then first noticed, but welcomed nevertheless as its own growth: while yet with undiminished gratitude, and a deepened sense of dependency, it would bless the dews and the sunshine from without, deprived of the awakening and fostering excitement of which, its own productivity would have remained for ever hidden from itself, or felt only as the obscure trouble of a baffled instinct. Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of EXISTENCE, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself thoughtfully, IT IS! heedless in that moment, whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference, in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words, There is nothing! or, There was a time, when there was nothing! are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity. Not TO BE, then, is impossible: TO BE, incomprehensible. If thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, thou wilt have learnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in the earlier ages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with a sort of sacred horror. This it was which first caused them to feel within themselves a something ineffably greater than their own individual nature. It was this which, raising them aloft, and projecting them to an ideal distance from themselves, prepared them to become the lights and awakening voices of other men, the founders of law and religion, the educators and foster-gods of mankind. The power, which evolved this idea of BEING, BEING in its essence, BEING limitless, comprehending its own limits in its dilatation, and condensing itself into its own apparent mounds-how shall we name it? The idea itself, which like a mighty billow at once overwhelms and bears aloft-what is it? Whence did it come? In vain would we derive it from the organs of sense: for these supply only surfaces, undulations, phantoms! In vain from the instruments of sensation for these furnish only the chaos, the shapeless elements of sense! And least of all may we hope to find its origin, or sufficient cause, in the moulds and mechanism of the UNDERSTANDING, the whole purport and functions of which consist in individualization, in |