music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much interested with a piece of Rossini's which had just been performed. I said, it sounded to me like nonsense But I could scarcely contain myself when a thing verses. of Beethoven's followed. I never distinctly felt the heavenly superiority of the prayers in the English liturgy, till I had attended some kirks in the country parts of Scotland. I call these strings of school boys or girls which we meet near London-walking advertisements. The Brussels riot-I cannot bring myself to dignify it with a higher name is a wretched parody on the last French revolution. Were I King William, I would banish the Belgians, as Coriolanus banishes the Romans in Shakspere.' It is a wicked rebellion, without one just cause. GA OCTOBER 8, 1830. Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Bacon.—Observation and Experiment.* ALILEO was a great genius, and so was Newton; but it would take two or three Galileos and Newtons to make one Kepler. It is in the order of Providence, that the inventive, generative, constitutive mind-the Keplershould come first; and then that the patient and collective mind-the Newton-should follow, and elaborate the pregnant queries and illumining guesses of the former. The laws of the planetary system are, in fact, due to Kepler. There is not a more glorious achievement of scientific 1 "You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate That do corrupt my air, I banish you; And here remain with your uncertainty!” Act iii. sc. 3.-H. N. C. 2 Galileo Galilei was born at Pisa, on the 15th of February, 1564. John Kepler was born at Weil, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, on the 21st of December, 1571.-H. N. C. genius upon record, than Kepler's guesses, prophecies, and ultimate apprehension of the law of the mean distances of the planets as connected with the periods of their revolutions round the sun. Gravitation, too, he had fully conceived; but, because it seemed inconsistent with some received observations on light, he gave it up, in allegiance, as he says, to Nature. Yet the idea vexed and haunted his mind; Vexat me et lacessit," are his words, I believe. 66 We praise Newton's clearness and steadiness. He was clear and steady, no doubt, whilst working out, by the help of an admirable geometry, the idea brought forth by another. Newton had his ether, and could not rest in-he could not conceive the idea of a law. He thought it a physical thing after all. As for his chronology, I believe those who are most competent to judge, rely on it less and less every day. His lucubrations on Daniel and the Revelations seem to me little less than mere raving. Personal experiment is necessary, in order to correct our own observation of the experiments which Nature herself makes for us—I mean, the phenomena of the universe. But then observation is, in turn, wanted to direct and substantiate the course of experiment. Experiments alone cannot advance knowledge, without observation; they amuse for a time, and then pass off the scene and leave no trace behind them. Bacon, when like himself-for no man was ever more inconsistent says, Prudens quæstio-dimidium scientiæ est." AT OCTOBER 20, 1830. The Reformation. T the Reformation, the first reformers were beset with an almost morbid anxiety not to be considered heretical in point of doctrine. They knew that the Romanists were 1 Namely, that the squares of their times vary as the cubes of their distances.-H. N. C. on the watch to fasten the brand of heresy upon them whenever a fair pretext could be found; and I have no doubt it was the excess of this fear which at once led to the burning of Servetus, and also to the thanks offered by all the Protestant Churches, to Calvin and the Church of Geneva, for burning him. NOVEMBER 21, 1830. House of Commons. He astounds the never makes a figure in quietude. vulgar with a certain enormity of exertion; he takes an acre of canvass, on which he scrawls everything. He thinks aloud; everything in his mind, good, bad, or indifferent, out it comes; he is like the Newgate gutter, flowing with garbage, dead dogs, and mud. He is pre-eminently a man of many thoughts, with no ideas: hence he is always so lengthy, because he must go through everything to see anything. It is a melancholy thing to live when there is no vision in the land. Where are our statesmen to meet this emergency? I see no reformer who asks himself the question, What is it that I propose to myself to effect in the result? Is the House of Commons to be re-constructed on the principle of a representation of interests, or of a delegation of men? If on the former, we may, perhaps, see our way; if on the latter, you can never, in reason, stop short of universal suffrage; and in that case, I am sure that women have as good a right to vote as men.' 1 In Mr. Coleridge's masterly analysis and confutation of the physiocratic system of the early French revolutionists, in the "Friend," he has the following passage in the nature of a reductio ad absurdum. "Rousseau, indeed, asserts that there is an inalienable sovereignty inherent in every human being possessed of reason; and from this the framers of the Constitution of 1791 deduce, that the people itself is its own sole rightful legislator, and at most dare only recede so far from its right as to delegate to chosen deputies the power of representing and declaring the general will. But this is wholly without proof; for it has been already fully shown, that, according to the principle out of which this consequence is attempted to be drawn, it is not the actual man, but the Go MARCH 20, 1831. Government.-Earl Grey. OVERNMENT is not founded on property, taken merely as such, in the abstract; it is founded on unequal property; the inequality is an essential term in the position. The phrases-higher, middle, and lower classes, with reference to this point of representation—are delusive; no such divisions as classes actually exist in society. There is an indissoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom; and no man can trace a line of separation through them, except such a confessedly unabstract reason alone, that is the sovereign and rightful lawgiver. The confusion of two things so different is so gross an error, that the Constituent Assembly could scarce proceed a step in their declaration of rights, without some glaring inconsistency. Children are excluded from all political power; are they not human beings in whom the faculty of reason resides? Yes! but in them the faculty is not yet adequately developed. But are not gross ignorance, inveterate superstition, and the habitual tyranny of passion and sensuality, equally preventives of the development, equally impediments to the rightful exercise, of the reason, as childhood and early youth? Who would not rely on the judgment of a well-educated English lad, bred in a virtuous and enlightened family, in preference to that of a brutal Russian, who believes that he can scourge his wooden idol into good humour, or attributes to himself the merit of perpetual prayer, when he has fastened the petitions, which his priest has written for him, on the wings of a windmill ? Again: women are likewise excluded; a full half, and that assuredly the most innocent, the most amiable half, of the whole human race is excluded, and this too by a Constitution which boasts to have no other foundations but those of universal reason! Is reason, then, an affair of sex? No! but women are commonly in a state of dependence, and are not likely to exercise their reason with freedom. Well! and does not this ground of exclusion apply with equal or greater force to the poor, to the infirm, to men in embarrassed circumstances, to all, in short, whose maintenance, be it scanty, or be it ample, depends on the will of others? How far are we to go? Where must we stop? What classes should we admit ? Whom must we disfranchise? The objects concerning whom we are to determine these questions, are all human beings, and differenced from each other by degrees only, these degrees, too, oftentimes changing. Yet the principle on which the whole system rests, is that reason is not susceptible of degree. Nothing, therefore, which subsists wholly in degrees, the changes of which do not obey any necessary law, can be the object of pure science, or determinable by mere reason. Vol. i. p. 341.-H. N. C. دو meaning and unjustifiable line of political empiricism as £10 householders. I cannot discover a ray of principle in the government plan,-not a hint of the effect of the change upon the balance of the estates of the realm,—not a remark on the nature of the constitution of England, and the character of the property of so many millions of its inhabitants. Half the wealth of this country is purely artificial, existing only in and on the credit given to it by the integrity and honesty of the nation. This property appears, in many instances, a heavy burthen to the numerical majority of the people; and they believe that it causes all their distress: and they are now to have the maintenance of this property committed to their good faith—the lamb to the wolves! Necker, you remember, asked the people to come and help him against the aristocracy. The people came fast enough at his bidding; but, somehow or other, they would not go away again when they had done their work. I hope Lord Grey will not see himself or his friends in the woeful case of the conjuror, who, with infinite zeal and pains, called up the devils to do something for him. They came at the word, thronging about him, grinning, and howling, and dancing, and whisking their long tails in diabolic glee; but when they asked him what he wanted of them, the poor wretch, frightened out of his wits, could only stammer forth,-"I pray you, my friends, be gone down again!" At which the devils, with one voice, replied,— "Yes! yes! we'll go down! we'll go down! But we'll take you with us to swim or to drown!" 1 Mr. Coleridge must have been thinking of that “ very pithy and profitable" ballad by the Laureate, wherein is shown how a young man "would read unlawful books, and how he was punished: "— "The young man, he began to read He knew not what, but he would proceed, "And more and more the knocking grew, The young man knew not what to do: Till the door was broke, and the devil came in." |