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the species. Nature is the mightiest and the | such a change as shall make the printed Bible kindliest of teachers. The rocks and unchang-alone the means of regenerating the species. ing hills give to the heart the sense of a dura-"An age of Bibles" may not be an age of tion beyond that of the perishable body. The Christian charity and hope. The word of God flowing stream images to the soul an everlast- may not be revered the more by becoming a ing continuity of tranquil existence. "The common book in every cottage, and a drug in brave o'er-hanging firmament," even to the the shop of every pawnbroker. It was surely most rugged swain, imparts some conscious- neither known nor revered the less when it ness of the universal brotherhood of those over was a rare treasure, when it was proscribed whom it hangs. The affections ask no leave by those who sat in high places, and its torn of the understanding to "glow and spread and leaves and fragments were cherished even kindle," to shoot through all the frame a tre- unto death. In those days, when a single mulous joy, or animate to holiest constancy. copy chained to the desk of the church was We taste the dearest blessedness of earth in alone in extensive parishes, did it diffuse less our childhood, before we have learned to ex- sweetness through rustic hearts than now, press it in mortal language. Life has its uni- when the poor are almost compelled to possess versal lessons far beyond human lore. Kind- it? How then did the villagers flock from disness is as cheering, sorrow as purifying, and tant farms, cheered in their long walks by the aspect of death as softening to the ignorant thoughts not of this world, to converse for a in this world's wisdom, as to the scholar. The short hour with patriarchs, saints, and apostles! purest delights grow beneath our feet, and all How did they devour the venerable and wellwho will stoop may gather them. While sages worn page with tearful eyes, or listen delighted lose the idea of the Universal Parent in their to the voice of one gifted above his fellows, subtleties, the lowly "FEEL after Him and find who read aloud the oracles of celestial wisdom! Him." Sentiment precedes reason in point of What ideas of the Bible must they have entime, and is a surer guide to the noblest reali-joyed, who came many a joyful pilgrimage to ties. Thus man hopes, loves, reveres, and en-hear or to read it! Yet even more precious was joys, without the aid of writing or of the press the enjoyment of those who, in times of perseto inspire or direct him. Many of his feelings cution, snatched glances in secret at its pages, are even heartier and more genuine before he and thus entered, as by stealth, into the parahas learned to describe them. He does not disiacal region, to gather immortal fruits and perpetually mistake words for things, nor cul- listen to angel voices. The word of God was tivate his faculties and affections for a dis- dearer to them than house, land, or the "ruddy cerning public. His aspirations "are raised, drops which warmed their hearts." Instead of not marked." If he is gifted with divine ima- the lamentable weariness and disgust with gination, he may "walk in glory and in joy which the young now too often turn from the beside his plough upon the mountain side," perusal of the Scriptures, they heard with mute without the chilling idea that he must make attention and serious joy the histories of the Old the most of his sensations to secure the ap- Testament and the parables of the New. They plause of gay saloons or crowded theatres. heard with revering sympathy of Abraham reThe deepest impressions are worn out by the ceiving seraphs unawares-of Isaac walking multiplication of their copies. Talking has out at eventide to meditate, and meeting the almost usurped the place of acting and of feel-holy partner of his days-of Jacob's dream, and ing; and the world of authors seem as though their hearts were but paper scrolls, and ink, instead of blood, were flowing in their veins. "The great events with which old story rings, seem vain and hollow." If all these evils will not be extended by what is falsely termed the Education of the Poor, let us at least be on our guard lest we transform our peasantry from men into critics, teach them scorn instead of humble hope, and leave them nothing to love, to revere, or to enjoy!

"Heaven lay

of that immortal Syrian Shepherdess, for whose love he served a hard master fourteen years, which seemed to him but a few days-of Joseph the beloved, the exile, the tempted, and the forgiver-of all the wonders of the Jewish story-and of the character and sufferings of the Messiah. These things were to them at once august realities, and surrounded with a dream-like glory from afar. about them in their infancy." They preserved the purity-the spirit of meek submission-the The Bible Society, founded and supported, patient confiding love of their childhood in no doubt, from the noblest motives, also puts their maturest years. They, in their turn, inforth pretensions which are sickening. Its ad- stilled the sweetness of Christian charity, drop vocates frequently represent it as destined to by drop, into the hearts of their offspring, and change all earth into a paradise. That a com- left their example as a deathless legacy. plete triumph of the principles of the Bible Surely this was better than the dignified pawould bring in the happy state which they look tronage now courted for the Scriptures, or the for can never be disputed; but the history of pompous eulogies pronounced on them by Sr religion affords no ground for anticipating rival orators! The reports of anniversaries such a result from the unaided perusal of its of the Bible Society are often, to me, inexpres pages. Deep and extensive impressions of the sibly nauseous. The word of God is praised truths of the gospel have never been made by in the style of eulogy employed on a common mere reading, but always by the exertions of book by a friendly reviewer. It is evidently living enthusiasm in the holy cause. Provi-used as a theme to declaim on. But the praise dence may, indeed, in its inscrutable wisdom, of the Bible is almost overshadowed by the impart new energy to particular instruments; flatteries lavished on the nobleman or county but there appears no sufficient indication of member who has condescended to preside, and

which it is the highest ambition of the speakers ingeniously to introduce and to vary. Happy is he who can give a new turn to the compliment, or invent a new alliteration or antithesis for the occasion! The copious nonsense of the ⚫ successful orators is even more painful than the failures of the novices. After a string of false metaphors and poor conceits, applauded to the echo, the meeting are perhaps called on to sympathize with some unhappy debutant, whose sense of the virtues of the chairman proves too vast for his powers of expression; and with Miss Peachum in the Beggars' Opera, to lament" that so noble a youth should come to an untimely end." Alas! these exhibitions have little connection with a deep love of the Bible, or with real pity for the sufferings of man. Were religious tyranny to render the Scriptures scarce, and to forbid their circulation, they would speedily be better prized and honoured than when scattered with gorgeous profusion, and lauded by nobles and princes.

The Society for the Suppression of Mendicity is another boasted institution of these coldhearted days. It would annihilate the race of beggars, and remove from the delicate eye the very form and aspect of misery. Strange infatuation! as if an old class of the great family of man might be cut off without harm! "All are but parts of one stupendous whole," bound together by ties of antique sympathy, of which the lowest and most despised are not without their uses. In striking from society a race whom we have, from childhood, been accustomed to observe, a vast body of old associations and gentle thoughts must necessarily be lost for ever. The poor mendicants whom we would banish from the earth, are the best sinecurists to whose sustenance we contribute. In the great science—the science of humanity -they not rarely are our first teachers: they affectingly remind us of our own state of mutual dependance; bring sorrow palpably before the eyes of the prosperous and the vain; and prevent the hearts of many from utterly "losing their nature." They give, at least, a salutary disturbance to gross selfishness, and hinder it

from entirely forming an ossified crust abou the soul. We see them too with gentle interest because we have always seen them, and were accustomed to relieve them in the spring-time of our days. And if some of them are what the world calls imposters, and literally " do beguile us of our tears," and our alms, those tears are not shed, nor those alms given, in vain. If they have even their occasional revellings and hidden luxuries, we should rather rejoice to believe that happiness has everywhere its nooks and corners which we do not see; that there is more gladness in the earth than meets the politician's gaze; and that for tune has her favours, "secret, sweet, and precious," even for those on whom she seems most bitterly to frown. Well may that divinest of philosophers, Shakspeare, make Lear reply to his daughters, who had been speaking in the true spirit of modern improvements:

"O reason not the need: our basest beggars
Are in the poorest thing superfluous :
Allow not nature more than nature needs,
Man's life is cheap as beasts!"

There are many other painful instances in these times of that "restless wisdom" which "has a broom for ever in its hand to rid the world of nuisances." There are, for example, the plans of Mr. Owen, with his infallible recipes for the formation of character. Virtue is not to be forced in artificial hot-beds, as he proposes. Rather let it spring up where it will from the seed scattered throughout the earth, and rise hardly in sun and shower, while the "free mountain winds have leave to blow against it." But I feel that I have already broken too violently on my habits of dreamy thought, by the asperity into which I now and then have fallen. Let me then break off at once, with the single expression of a hope, that this "bright and breathing world" may not be changed into a Penitentiary by the efforts of modern reformers.

I am, Sir,

Your hearty well-wisher, FRANCIS OLDAKER.

A CHAPTER ON "TIME."

BEING AN ATTEMPT TO THROW NEW LIGHT ON AN OLD SUBJECT.

[NEW MONTHly Magazine.]

* We know what we are," said poor Ophelia, | the past and future in each fragment of the in but we know not what we may be." Perhaps stant, even as the flavour of every drop of she would have spoken with a nicer accuracy had she said, "we know what we have been." Of our present state we can, strictly speaking, Know nothing. The act of meditation on our selves, however quick and subtle, must refer to the past, in which alone we can truly be said to live. Even in the moments of intensest enjoyment, our pleasures are multiplied by the quick-revolving images of thought; we feel

some delicious liquid is heightened and prolonged on the lips. It is the past only which we really enjoy as soon as we become sensible of duration. Each bygone instant of delight becomes rapidly present to us, and "bears a glass which shows us many more." This is the great privilege of a meditative being-never properly to have any sense of the present, but to feel the great realities as they pass away,

casting their delicate shadows on the fu

ture.

Time, then, is only a notion-unfelt in its passage-a mere measure given by the mind to its own past emotions. Is there, then, any abstract common measure by which the infinite variety of intellectual acts can be meted any real passage of years which is the same to all-any periodical revolution, in which all who have lived, have lived out equal hours? Is chronology any other than a fable, a "tale that is told?" Certain outward visible actions have passed, and certain seasons have rolled over them; but has the common idea of time, as applicable to these, any truth higher or surer than those infinite varieties of duration which have been felt by each single heart? Who shall truly count the measure of his own days-much more scan the real life of the millions around him?

The ordinary language of moralists respecting time shows that we really know nothing respecting it. They say that life is fleeting and short; why, humanly speaking, may they not as well affirm that it is extended and lasting? The words "short" and "long" have only meaning when used comparatively; and to what can we compare or liken this our human existence? The images of fragility-thin vapours, delicate flowers, and shadows cast from the most fleeting things-which we employ as emblems of its transitoriness, really serve to exhibit its durability as great in comparison with their own. If life is short, compared with the age of some fine animals, how much longer is it than that of many, some of whom pass through all the varieties of youth, maturity, and age, during a few hours, according to man's reckoning, and, if they are endowed with memory, look back on their early minutes through the long vista of a summer's day! An antediluvian shepherd might complain with as much apparent reason of the brevity of his nine hundred years, as we of our threescore and ten. He would find as little to confute or to establish his theory. There is nothing visible by which we can fairly reckon the measure of our lives. It is not just to compare them with the duration of rocks and hills, which have withstood "a thousand storms, a thousand thunders;" because where there is no consciousness, there is really no time. The power of imagination supplies to us the place of ages. We have thoughts which "date beyond the pyramids." Antiquity spreads around as her mighty wings. We live centuries in contemplation, and have all the sentiment of six thousand years in our memories:

"The wars we too remember of King Nine, And old Assaracus and Ibycus divine."

Whence, then, the prevalent feeling of the brevity of our life? Not, assuredly, from its comparison with any thing which is presented to our senses. It is only because the mind is formed for eternity that it feels the shortness of its earthly sojourn. Seventy years, or seventy thousand, or seven, shared as the common lot of a species, would seem alike sufficient to those who had no sense within them

of a being which should have no end. Whea this sense has been weakened, as it was amidst all the exquisite forms of Grecian mythology, the brevity of life has been forgotten. There is scarcely an allusion to this general sentiment, so deep a spring of the pathetic, through. out all the Greek tragedies. It will be found also to prevail in individuals in proportion as they meditate on themselves, or as they nurse in solitude and silence the instinct of the Eternal.

The doctrine that Time exists only in remembrance, may serve to explain some ap parent inconsistencies in the language which we use respecting our sense of its passage. We hear persons complaining of the slow passage of time, when they have spent a single night of unbroken wearisomeness, and wondering how speedily hours, filled with pleasure or engrossing occupations, have flown; and yet we all know how long any period seems which has been crowded with events or feelings leaving a strong impression behind them. In thinking on seasons of ennui we have nothing but a sense of length-we merely remember that we felt the tedium of existence; but there is really no space in the imagination filled up by the period. Mere time, unpeopled with diversified emotions or circumstances, is but one idea, and that idea is nothing more than the remembrance of a listless sensation. A night of dull pain and months of lingering weakness are, in the retrospect, nearly the same thing. When our hands or our hearts are busy, we know nothing of time—it does not exist for us; but as soon as we pause to meditate on that which is gone, we seem to have lived long because we look back through a long series of events, or feel them at once peering one above the other like ranges of distant hills. Actions or feelings, not hours, mark all the backward course of our being. Our sense of the nearness to us of any circumstance in our life is determined on the same principles-not by the revolution of the seasons, but by the relation which the event bears in importance to all that has happened to us since. To him who has thought, or done, or suffered much, the level days of his childhood seem at an immeasurable distance, far off as the age of chivalry, or as the line of Sesostris. There are some recollections of such overpowering vastness, that their objects seem ever near; their size reduces all intermediate events to nothing; and they peer upon us like "a forked mountain, or blue promontory," which, being far off, is yet nigh. How different from these appears some inconsiderable occurrence of more recent date, which a flash of thought redeems for a moment from long oblivion;-which is seen amidst the dim confusion of half-forgotten things, like a little rock lighted up by chance gleam of sunshine afar in the mighty waters!

What immense difference is there, then,,in the real duration of men's lives! He lives longest of all who looks back oftenest, whose life is most populous of thought or action, and on every retrospect makes the vastest picture. The man who does not meditate has no real consciousness of being. Such a one goes to

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death as to a drunken sleep; he parts with ex- | fortune, or the events which have called forth istence wantonly, because he knows nothing their affections. Their first parting from home of its value. Mere men of pleasure are, there is indelibly impressed on their minds-their fore the most careless of duelists, the gayest school-days seem to them like one sweet Aprii of soldiers. To know the true value of being, of shower and sunshine-their apprenticeship vet to lay it down for a great cause, is a pitch is a long week of toil;-but then their first of heroism which has rarely been attained by love is fresh to them as yesterday, and their man. That mastery of the fear of death which | marriage, the births of their children, and of is so common among men of spirit, is nothing their grand-children, are events which mark but a conquest over the apprehension of dying. their course even to old age. They reach their It is a mere victory of nerve and muscle. infancy again in thought by an easy process, Those whose days have no principle of conti- through a range of remembrances few and nuity-who never feel time but in the shape simple, but pure, and sometimes holy. Yet of ennui-may quit the world for sport or for happier is the lot of those who have one great honour. But he who truly lives, who feels the aim; who devote their undivided energy to a past and future in the instant, whose days are single pursuit; who have one idea of practical to him a possession of majestic remembrances or visionary good, to which they are wedded. and golden hopes, ought not to fancy himself There is a harmony, a proportion, in their bound by such an example. He may be in- lives. The Alchemist of old, labouring with spired to lay down his life, when truth or vir- undiminished hope, cheering his solitude with tue shall demand so great a sacrifice; but he dreams of boundless wealth, and yet working on, will be influenced by mere weakness of reso- could not be said to live in vain. His life was lution, not by courage, if he suffer himself to continuous-one unbroken struggle-one arbe shamed, or laughed, or worried out of it! dent sigh. There is the same unity of interest Besides those who have no proper con- in the life of a great verbal scholar, or of a true sciousness of being, there are others even per- miser; the same singleness of purpose, which haps more pitiable, who are constantly irritated gives solidity to floating minutes, hours, and by the knowledge that their life is cut up into years. melancholy fragments. This is the case of all The great Lawyer deserves an eminent rank the pretending and the vain; those who are among true livers. We do not mean a politiever attempting to seem what they are not, or cal adventurer, who breathes feverishly amidst to do what they cannot; who live in the lying the contests, the intrigues, and petty triumphs breath of contemporary report, and bask out a of party; nor a dabbler in criticism, poetry, sort of occasional holiday in the glimmers of or the drama; nor even a popular nisi-prius public favour. They are always in a feverish advocate, who passes through a succession of struggle, yet they make no progress. There hasty toils and violent excitements to fortune is no dramatic coherence, no unity of action, and to oblivion. But we have respect to the in the tragi-comedy of their lives. They have real dull plodder-to him who has bidden an hits and brilliant passages perhaps, which early "Farewell to his Muse," if he ever had may come on review before them in straggling one: who anticipates years of solitary study, succession; but nothing dignified or massive, and shrinks not back; who proceeds, step by tending to one end of good or evil. Such are step, through the mighty maze with a cheerful self-fancied poets and panting essayists, who heart, and counts on his distant success with live on from volume to volume, or from ma- mathematical precision. His industry and gazine to magazine, who tremble with nervous self-denial are powers as true as fancy or elodelight at a favourable mention, are cast down quence, and he soon learns to take as hearty a by a sly alliteration or satirical play on their pleasure in their exercise. His retrospect is names, and die of an elaborate eulogy "in aro- vast and single-of doubt solved, stoutest books matic pain." They begin life once a quarter, mastered, nicest webs disentangled, and all or once a month, according to the will of their from one intelligible motive which grows old publishers. They dedicate nothing to poste- with him, and, though it "strengthened with rity; but toil on for applause till praise sick- his strength," will not diminish with his deens, and their "life's idle business" grows too cline. It is better in the end to have had the heavy to be borne. They feel their best days pathway of life circumscribed and railed in by passing away without even the effort to build forms and narrow observances, than to have up an enduring fame; and they write an elegy strayed at will about the vast field open to on their own weaknesses! They give their human enterprise, in the freest and most gracethoughts immaturely to the world, and thus ful wanderings; because in the latter case we spoil them for themselves for ever. Their cannot trace our road again, or call it over; own earliest, and deepest, and most sacred while in the first, we see it distinctly to the feelings become at last dull common-places, end, and can linger in thought over all the which they have talked of and written about spots where our feet have trodden. The "old till they are glad to escape from the theme. names" bring back the "old instincts" to our Their days are not "linked each to each by hearts. Instead of faint sympathies with a natural piety," but at best bound together in multitude of things, a kind of small partnerforgotten volumes. Better, far better than this, ship with thousands in certain general dogmas is the lot of those whose characters and pre- and speculations, we have all our own past intensions have little "mark of likelihood;"dividual being as a solid and abiding posses whose days are filled up by the exercises of honest industry, and who, on looking back, recognise their lives only by the turns of their

sion.

A metaphysician who thinks earnestly and intensely for himself, may truly be said to live

Jong He has this great advantage over the | about as reasonable as to say, a man never most felicitous inventor of machinery, or the most acute of scientific inquirers, that all his discoveries have a personal interest; he has his existence for his living study; his own heart is the mighty problem on which he meditates, and the "exceeding great reward" of his victories. In a moment of happy thought he may attain conquests, " compared to which the laurels which a Cæsar reaps are weeds." Years of anxious thought are rewarded by the attainment of one triumphant certainty, which immediately gives a key to the solution of a thousand pregnant doubts and mysteries, and enables him almost to "curdle a long life into an hour." When he has, after long pursued and baffled endeavours, rolled aside some huge difficulty which lay in his path, he will find beneath it a passage to the bright subtleties of his nature, through which he may range at will, and gather immortal fruits, like Aladdin in the subterranean gardens. He counts his life thus not only by the steps which he has taken, but by the vast prospects which, at every turn of his journey, have recompensed his toils, over which he has diffused his spirit as he went on his way rejoicing. We will conclude this article with the estimate made of life from his own experience by one of the most profound and original of thinkers.

was young because he has grown old, or never lived because he is now dead. The length or agreeableness of a journey does not depend on the few last steps of it, nor is the size of a building to be judged of from the last stone that is added to it. It is neither the first nor the last hour of our existence, but the space that parts these two-not our exit, nor our entrance upon the stage, but what we do feel, and think while there-that we are to attend to in pronouncing sentence upon it. Indeed, it would be easy to show that it is the very extent of human life, the infinite number of things contained in it, its contradictory and fluctuating interests, the transition from one situation to another, the hours, months, years, spent in one fond pursuit after another; that it is, in a word, the length of our common journey, and the quantity of events crowded into it, that, baffling the grasp of our actual perception, make i slide from our memory, and dwindle into nothing in its own perspective. It is too mighty for us, and we say it is nothing! It is a speck in our fancy, and yet what canvas would be big enough to hold its striking groups, its endless objects! It is light as vanity; and yet if all its weary moments, if all its head and heartaches were compressed into one, what fortitude would not be overwhelmed with the blow! "It is little, it is short, it is not worth having What a huge heap, a ‘huge dumb heap,' of -if we take the last hour, and leave out all wishes, thoughts, feelings, anxious cares, sooththat has gone before, which has been one way ing hopes, loves, joys, friendships, it is comof looking at the subject. Such calculators posed of! How many ideas and trains of senseem to say that life is nothing when it is over; timent, long, deep, and intense, often pass and that may, in their sense, be true. If the through the mind in one day's thinking or readold rule-Respice finem-were to be made abso- ing for instance! How many such days are lute, and no one could be pronounced fortunate there in a year, how many years in a long life, till the day of his death, there are few among still occupied with something interesting-still us whose existence would, upon such condi- recalling some old impression-still recurring tions, be much to be envied. But this is not a to some difficult question, and making progress fair view of the case. A man's life is his in it, every step accompanied with a sense of whole life, not to the last glimmering snuff of power, and every moment conscious of 'the the candle; and this I say is considerable, and high endeavour or the glad success;" for the not a little matter, whether we regard its plea- mind seizes only on that which keeps it emsures or its pains. To draw a peevish con- ployed, and is wound up to a certain pitch of clusion to the contrary, from our own super-pleasurable excitement by the necessity of annuated desires of forgetful indifference, is its own nature."-Hazlitt's Table Talk, Essay 6.

ON THE PROFESSION OF THE BAR.

[LONDON MAGAZINE.]

THERE is no pursuit in life which appears | the founders of honourable families. If the more captivating at a distance than the profes- young aspirant perceives, even in his hasty sion of the bar, as it is followed and rewarded and sanguine glance, that something depends in English courts of justice. It is the great avenue to political influence and reputation; its honours are among the most splendid which can be attained in a free state; and its emoluments and privileges are exhibited as prizes, to be contested freely by all its members. Its annals celebrate many individuals who have risen from the lowest ranks of the people, by fortunate coincidence, or by patient Jabour, to wealth and station, and have become

on fortuitous circumstances, the conviction only renders the pursuit more inviting, by adding the fascinations of a game of chance to those of a trial of skill. If he is forced to con⚫ fess that a sacrifice of principle is occasionally required of the candidate for its most lucrative situations, he glories in the pride of untempted virtue, and pictures himself generously resist ing the bribe which would give him riches and authority in exchange for conscious rectitude

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