under the violent assault of Paganism, itself the immediate forerunner and condition of the spread of a revealed mundane religion ; and then you would have the character of the Roman and the Jew, and the awfulness, the completeness, the justice. I schemed it at twenty-five; but, alas! venturum expectat.

April 29. 1832.

VOX POPULI, VOX DEI.- BLACK.

I NEVER said that the vox populi was of course the vox Dei. It may be; but it may be, and with equal probability, a priori, vox Diaboli. That the voice of ten millions of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will.

Black is the negation of colour in its greatest energy. Without lustre, it indicates or represents vacuity, as, for instance, in the dark mouth of a cavern; add lustre, and it will represent the highest degree of solidity, as in a polished ebony box.

In finite forms there is no real and absolute identity. God alone is identity. In the former, the prothesis is a bastard prothesis, a quasi identity only.

April 30. 1832.

ASGILL AND DEFOE.

I KNOW no genuine Saxon English superior to Asgill's. I think his and Defoe's irony often finer than Swift's.

May 1. 1832.

HORNE TOOKE. - FOX AND PITT.

HORNE TOOKE's advice to the Friends of the People was profound: "If you wish to be powerful, pretend to be powerful.”

Fox and Pitt constantly played into each other's hands. Mr. Stewart, of the Courier, a very knowing person, soon found out the gross lies and impostures of that club as to its numbers, and told Fox so. Yet, instead of disclaiming them and exposing the pretence, as he ought to have done, Fox absolutely exaggerated their numbers and sinister intentions; and Pitt, who also knew the lie, took him at his word, and argued against him triumphantly on his own premisses.

Fox's Gallicism, too, was a treasury of weapons to Pitt. He could never conceive

the French right without making the English wrong. Ah! I remember

-it vex'd my soul to see

So grand a cause, so proud a realm
With Goose and Goody at the helm ;
Who long ago had fall'n asunder
But for their rivals' baser blunder,
The coward whine and Frenchified
Slaver and slang of the other side!

May 2. 1832.

HORNER.

I CANNOT say that I thought Mr. Horner a man of genius. He seemed to me to be one of those men who have not very extended minds, but who know what they know very well-shallow streams, and clear because they are shallow. There was great goodness about him.

May 3. 1832.

ADIAPHORI. CITIZENS AND CHRISTIANS.

my

is one of those men who go far to shake faith in a future state of existence; I mean, on account of the difficulty of knowing where to place him. I could not bear to roast him; he is not so bad as all that comes to: but then, on the other hand, to have to sit down with such a fellow in the very lowest pothouse of heaven, is utterly inconsistent with the belief of that place being a place of happiness for me.

In two points of view I reverence man; first, as a citizen, a part of, or in order to, a nation; and, secondly, as a Christian. If men are neither the one nor the other, but a mere aggregation of individual bipeds, who acknowledge no national unity, nor believe