"Easily," answered Evelyn, "for we might have been so constituted, as to lose friends the most affectionate, and children the most beloved, without thinking of them again; and as to ourselves, we might have carried on all the business of life, performed our fair duties, and answered all the then purposes of our creation, without that extent or refinement of reason, that view of futurity, which now belong to us. Speech, and some little more than the sense of an elephant, or the imitation of a monkey, would have done very well. We should have tilled the ground, bartered its produce, and governed by laws and the gibbet, in the same manner as now, or rather infinitely better, by having less reason, and less free-will. It is reason and free-will alone that confer upon us responsibility, and responsibility is nonsense without a future judgment."

Here he made a considerable pause, and Tremaine, whose attention was at its height, waited in silence for him to go on.

"I have done," said Evelyn, "for 1 have promised you to content myself with what I deem proofs, and not to travel into conjecture. I therefore purposely avoid many beautiful reflections, as well as branches of argument, ▼hich are cogent enough as auxiliaries, but which I leave out of the case. I am willing to press nothing upon you, but what even a rhetorician, arguing for victory, cannot in my mind answer.

"One auxiliary, however, there is," continued Evelyn, "too imposing, if I may not say too convincing in its fabric and colouring, to let it pass unnoticed in an argument of this kind; and this I must therefore be forgiven if I lay before you, in all its beauty, and all its warmth." "To what do you allude?" said Tremaine.

"To that melancholy, but too interesting lamentation of. Wollaston, upon the disappointed lot of man, if, after all he has been allowed to enjoy, and expect as well as enjoy, he is to be levelled with the brutes, who never knew, never were allowed to entertain a notion of their Creator, or a hope of joining him.

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Fancy,' says he, 'a man walking in some retired

field, far from noise, and free from prejudice. Would such meditations as these be unjust?—I know that I am neiher a stock, nor a stone, nor a vegetating plant; I can reason as they, or even the sensitive animals cannot do. I may, therefore, pretend to be much above these things. From what is, and has been, I can gather what may be, and, by thinking, can almost be said to get into another world beforehand; and whether I shall live again, I may be certainly said to be capable of such an expectation, and am solicitous about it; which cannot be said of these clods and brutes. But can I be made capable of such great expectations, which those animals know nothing of (happier by far, in this regard than I, if we must die alike), only to be disappointed at last? Thus placed, just upon the confines of another better world, and fed with hopes of penetrating into it, and enjoying it, only to make a short appearance here, and then be shut out, and totally sunk? Must I, then, when I bid my last farewell to these walks, when I close these lids, and yonder blue regions and all this scene darken upon me and go out,-must I then only serve to furnish dust, to be mingled with the ashes of these herds and plants, or with this dust under my feet? Have I been set so far above them in life, only to be levelled with them ́at death *?" "

Tremaine allowed both the beauty and argument contained in these passages, but hesitated-for he thought of Bolingbroke.

"And what says the noble philosopher," asked Evelyn, "to these glowing sentiments? That all this is nonsense, proceeding from the delirium of metaphysics; that the author is a whining philosopher,' a 'learned lunatic."" "The epithet might certainly have been spared," said Tremaine.

"It is, in truth, downright scolding," returned his friend, "a polissonnerie, a calling of names, in every body's power, though not at all uncommon with our noble philosopher. He here, it must be owned, a little forgot

Religion of Nature, p. 219.

himself, and that high-breeding which even Lord Chesterfield celebrates, but which, unfortunately, whatever it might have been in the drawing-room, seems always to have been forgotten in the study."

"Allowing this," observed Tremaine, "there was at least another answer."

"You shall state it," cried Evelyn.

"I remember it well," said Tremaine, "and I own that it once much impressed me. It is, that we must submit to our nature, whatever it is, and that if we are doomed by God to be trod into dirt with others, our fellow-animals, no indignity is cast upon us; that we are removed, indeed, above them by our intellectual faculties, but only in degree, and above some of them in a very small degree; that we in other respects partake their nature, nay, the nature of mere vegetables, and those very clods to which Wollaston shows such a horror of being related. All, however, is a drama, in which we are appointed actors as well as they, and resignation to our fate, which we can neither sit in judgment upon nor comprehend, is the only duty we have to perform ;— satisfied to live again if we may, to die if we may not, but certainly satisfied that God knows best what is good for us. These are the answers which Bolingbroke would have given Wollaston had he walked with him in his retired field *."

"And do they satisfy you?" asked Evelyn.

"I own not now, though I also own they once did, so far as to harden me against what I thought Bolingbroke had demonstrated to be the ejaculations of a melancholy spirit, rather than argument."

"That such a mind," replied Evelyn, "should be misled by so egregious a coxcomb!"

Tremaine almost started at this attack upon one who, for the fineness of his parts, and the attractions of his style, was still much an object of admiration with him.

* Lord Bolingbroke's Works, 4to. vol. v. sec. 50.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

BOLINGBROKE.

What says King Bolingbroke?

SHAKSPEARE.

His reasons are like two grains of mustard seed, hid in two bushels of chaff you shall seek all day ere you find them; and when you have them, they are not worth the search.

SHAKSPEARE.

"I ALLOW his fine parts," observed Evelyn, "and I am not ill disposed to allow a certain attraction in his style, particularly in his political writings, and most of all in his official correspondence. I am also not unwilling to say, that in the midst of such turbulence as an ambition almost frantic produced in his life, Vacare literis (to use his favourite expression), and to have addressed himself in seclusion, to subjects of such high import to the mind and heart of man, was alone a considerable praise.

"There is something in this so engaging to a real searcher after truth; the very notion of a philosophic retirement is so soothing to the soul; that I will confess to you I formerly, both in England and France (in which last kingdom he prepared many of his philosophical works), rode several miles out of my way to view the seats of his leisure at Fontainebleau and Dawley. At the last in particular, which, with pardonable affectation, he had painted over with rakes, and forks, and other rural emblems (fond as he was of calling it his farm), I lingered with interest. I fancied him there, ordering the motto over his hall-door, 'Satis beatus ruris honoribus,' of which, he said at least, he was so fond. I saw him, with Pope, in his field, running after his cart (while Pope wrote between two hay-cocks), and viewing a rainy sky with a farmer's anxiety *. I followed them to the house, and listened to conversations which no mind

* See Pope's Letters.

imbued with anything like classical impressions can imagine, without feeling great interest for the speakers. But having said this, here I take my leave of him."

"You have almost made amends by these admissions," returned Tremaine, "for the hard word you gave him just now."

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I cannot retract it," replied Evelyn; "for with all his attainments and love of inquiry, a more egregious coxcomb never pretended to the palm of philosophy. The same rash fatality which characterised and ruined his political life, seems to have pursued him here; and though, as I have said, I allow the fineness of his genius, I cannot disguise my contempt for him as a reasoner."

"Are you quite sure," asked Tremaine, "that there is no prejudice in this?"

"No man can be thus sure,” replied Evelyn: "but I can be quite sure both that his arguments, as to essentials, were a tissue of mere pompous nothings, and that his self-sufficiency and affectation made him as offensive in his mode of putting them, as they were weak when put." "And yet," replied Tremaine, "no man brought forward either more learning or more eloquence in support of the system."

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"He had no system," answered Evelyn, nor has he even pretended to any. Though I will do him the justice to believe he would have set one up, had he known how. He is, therefore, singularly obliged to you for giving him what he never could give himself."

"He was keen in exposing error," said Tremaine, "and supported his attacks with an erudition that astonished the world."

“There are two worlds," returned Evelyn, drily, "the learned and the unlearned. The last, perhaps, he might astonish. He had, at least, much pride, if I may not rather say vanity, in displaying this learning of his. He most certainly never lost a customer for want of exhibiting his goods. Like a small capitalist, his wares were always arranged to the best advantage, in the show-window of his shop, for passengers to admire. Yet what was said of him by Hunter, a blind and obscure, but learned parson