kind are always inferior to those which are, in their nature, liable to more faults and shortcomings. For the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it; and it is a law of this universe, that the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form. The wild grass grows well and strongly, one year with another; but the wheat is, according to the greater nobleness of its nature, liable to the bitterer blight. And, therefore, while in all things that we see, or do, we are to desire perfection, and strive for it, we are nevertheless not to set the meaner thing, in its narrow accomplishment, above the nobler thing, in its mighty progress; not to esteem smooth minuteness above shattered majesty; not to prefer mean victory to honourable defeat; not to lower the level of our aim, that we may the more surely enjoy the complacency of success. But, above all, in our dealings with the souls of other men, we are to take care how we check, by severe requirement or narrow caution, efforts which might otherwise lead to a noble issue; and, still more, how we withhold our admiration from great excellences, because they are mingled with rough faults. Now, in the make and nature of every man, however rude or simple, whom we employ in manual labour, there are some powers for better things: some tardy imagination, torpid capacity of emotion, tottering steps of thought, there are, even at the worst; and in most cases it is all our own fault that they are tardy or torpid. But they cannot be strengthened, unless we are content to take them in their feebleness, and unless we prize and honour them in their imperfection above the best and most perfect manual skill. And this is what we have to do with all our labourers; to look for the thoughtful part of them, and get that out of them, whatever we lose for it, whatever faults and errors we are obliged to take with it. For the best that is in them cannot manifest itself, but in company with much error. Understand this clearly: You can teach a man to draw a straight line, and to cut one; to strike a curved line, and to carve it; and to copy and carve any number of given lines or forms, with admirable speed and perfect precision; and you find his work perfect of its kind: but if you ask him to think about any of those forms, to consider if he cannot find any better in his own head, he stops; his execution becomes hesitating; he thinks, and ten to one he thinks wrong; ten to one he makes a mistake in the first touch he gives to his work as a thinking being. But you have made a man of him for all that. He was only a machine before, an animated tool. And observe, you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanise them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves. All their attention and strength must go to the accomplishment of the mean act. The soul of the eye must be bent upon the fingerpoint, and the soul's force must fill all the invisible nerves that guide it, ten hours a day, that it may not err from its steely precision, and so soul and sight be worn away, and the whole human being be lost at last-a heap of sawdust, so far as its intellectual work in this world is concerned; saved only by its heart, which cannot go into the form of cogs and compasses, but expands, after the ten hours are over, into fireside humanity. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him. And, whether the clouds be bright or dark, there will be transfiguration behind and within them.-S. V. MENTAL SLAVERY OF MODERN Reader, look round this English room of yours, about which you have been proud so often, because the work of it was so good and strong, and the ornaments of it so finished. Examine again all those accurate mouldings, and perfect polishings, and unerring adjustments of the seasoned wood and tempered steel. Many a time you have exulted over them, and thought how great England was, because her slightest work was done so thoroughly. Alas! if read rightly, these perfectnesses are signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer-flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense, free. But to smother their souls within them, to blight and hew into rotting pollards the suckling branches of their human intelligence, to make the flesh and skin which, after the worm's work on it, is to see God, into leathern thongs to yoke machinery with -this it is to be slave-masters indeed; and there might be more freedom in England, though her feudal lords' lightest words were worth men's lives, and though the blood of the vexed husbandman dropped in the furrows of her fields, than there is while the animation of her multitudes is sent like fuel to feed the factory smoke, and the strength of them is given daily to be wasted into the fineness of a web, or racked into the exactness of a line. And, on the other hand, go forth again to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children. Let me not be thought to speak wildly or extravagantly. It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine, which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations everywhere into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. Their universal outcry against wealth, and against nobility, is not forced from them either by the pressure of famine, or the sting of mortified pride. These do much, and have done much in all ages; but the foundations of society were never yet shaken as they are at this day. It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure. It is not that men are pained by the scorn of the upper classes, but they cannot endure their own; for they feel that the kind of labour to which they are condemned is verily a degrading one, and makes them less than men. Never had the upper classes so much sympathy with the lower, or charity for them, as they have at this day, and yet never were they so much hated by them: for of old the separation between the noble and the poor was merely a wall built by law; now it is a veritable difference in level of standing, a precipice between upper and lower grounds in the field of humanity, and there is pestilential air at the bottom of it. I know not if a day is ever to come when the nature of right freedom will be understood, and when men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty-liberty from care. The man who says to one, Go, and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, has, in most cases, more sense of restraint and difficulty than the man who obeys him. The movements of the one are hindered by the burden on his shoulder; of the other, by the bridle on his lips: there is no way by which the burden may be lightened; but we need not suffer from the bridle if we do not champ at it. To yield reverence to another, to hold ourselves and our lives at his disposal, is not slavery; often, it is the noblest state in which a man can live in this world. There is, indeed, a reverence which is servile, that is to say, irrational or selfish: but there is also noble reverence, that is to say, reasonable and loving; and a man is never so noble as when he is reverent in this kind; nay, even if the feeling pass the bounds of mere reason, so that it be loving, a man is raised by it. We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men divided into mere segments of men-broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished, sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is, we should think there might be some loss in it also. And the great cry that rises from all our manufacturing cities, louder than their furnace blast, is all in very deed for this, that we manufacture everything there except men; we blanch cotton, and strengthen steel, and refine sugar, and shape pottery; but to brighten, to strengthen, to refine, or to form a single living spirit, never enters into our estimate of advantages. And all the evil to which that cry is urging our myriads can be met only in one way: not by teaching nor preaching, for to teach them is but to show them their misery, and to preach to them, if we do nothing more than preach, is to mock at it. It can be met only by a right understanding, on the part of all classes, of what kinds of labour are good for men, raising them, and making them happy; by a determined sacrifice of such convenience, or beauty, or cheapness as is to be got only by the degradation of the workman; and by equally determined demand for the products and results of healthy and ennobling labour. And how, it will be asked, are these products to be recognised, and this demand to be regu lated? Easily: by the observance of three broad and simple rules: 1. Never encourage the manufacture of any article not absolutely necessary, in the production of which Invention has no share. 2. Never demand an exact finish for its own sake, but only for some practical or noble end. 3. Never encourage imitation or copying of any kind, except for the sake of preserving record of great works.-S. V. LIVES OF THE ESSAYISTS. to the authors. For particular papers the demand was immense; of some, it is said, 20,000 copies were required." In 1716 he married the Countess Dowager of Warwick. This union is generally supposed to have proved unhappy. In the year following he became Secretary of State, which place he soon resigned on a pension of £1500 a year. Holland House, their residence, forms the subject of vignette to the present volume. The story of his marriage is thus told by the Princess Marie Liechtenstein in her work entitled "Holland House:" "Robert, son of the first Earl of Holland, who became second Earl of Holland, and afterwards succeeding his cousin, became, in 1673, fifth Earl of Warwick, made Holland House his principal residence. Edward, his son and successor, married Charlotte, daughter of Sir Thomas Middleton of Chirk Castle, and she was the Countess of Warwick who, on August 2, 1716, married Addison. She had been a widow since 1701, and had devoted herself to the education of her young son, the Earl of Warwick. It is a disputed point whether or not Addison was his tutor, but it is no disputed point that he became the boy's stepfather. Living at Chelsea, he was a country neighbour, which circumstance naturally facilitated his courtship, while Arcadian accompaniments may have graced it. The marriage was announced in The Political State of Great Britain for August, 1716, as follows: About the Beginning of August, Joseph Addison, Esq.; famous for many excellent Works, both in verse and Prose, was married to the Right Honourable Charlotte, Countess of Warwick, Relict of Edward late Earl of Warwick, who died in 1701, and Mother to the present Earl, a Minor."" Addison died here on the 17th June 1719, in his forty-eighth year, leaving one daughter, who died unmarried in 1797. ADDISON, JOSEPH, claims our attention as one | yielded a large revenue, both to the State and of the greatest of the English Essayists. His father was an eminent clergyman of the Church of England, at Milston, near Amesbury, in Wiltshire, where he was born May 1, 1672. At the University of Oxford he distinguished himself by his Latin verse. Originally intended for the Church, he drifted into literature and politics, principally through Dryden's influence over him, and the patronage of Lord Somers, to whom he had dedicated a poem on one of King William's campaigns. In 1699 he received a pension of £300 a year, and started on a continental tour. Returning in 1703 he celebrated the battle of Blenheim in a triumphal poem, when Lord Godolphin, who was so pleased with it, made him Commissioner of Appeals. He acted as Under Secretary of State in 1706, and in 1709 went to Ireland in the capacity of secretary to the Lord Lieutenant. In the same year the Taller was published by Sir Richard Steele, to which he contributed forty-two papers. "At the beginning of March 1711," says Lord Macaulay, "appeared the first of an incomparable series of papers, containing observations on life and literature, by an imaginary spectator. The plan of the Spectator must be allowed to be both original and eminently happy. Every valuable essay in the series may be read with pleasure separately; yet the five or six hundred essays form a whole, and the whole has the interest of a novel. He is entitled to be considered, not only the greatest of the English Essayists, but as the forerunner of the great English novelists. We say this of Addison alone; for Addison is the Spectator. About three-sevenths of the work are his and it is no exaggeration to say, that his worst essay is as good as the best essay of any of his coadjutors. His best essays approach near to absolute perfection; nor is their excellence more wonderful than their variety. The number of copies daily distributed was at first 3000. It subsequently increased, and had risen to near 4000, when the stamp tax was imposed. That tax was fatal to a crowd of journals. The Spectator, however, stood its ground, doubled its price, and though its circulation fell off, still AIRD, THOMAS, one of the most distinguished of the recent Scottish poets, and a writer of excellent poetic and descriptive prose, was born in the village of Bowden, Roxburghshire, in 1802. He received the rudiments of his education at Bowden and Melrose parish schools, and went through a course of literary and philosophical study at the University of Edinburgh. | In 1827 he published a little treatise, entitled "Religious Characteristics." After a residence of some years in Edinburgh, in the course of which he contributed occasionally to Blackwood's Magazine, and other periodicals, he was, in 1835, on the recommendation of his steadfast friend, Professor Wilson, appointed editor of the Dumfries Herald, a Conservative journal newly started in Dumfries, from the editorship of which he has lately retired. In 1845 he published "The Old Bachelor in the Old Scottish Village," a collection of tales and sketches of Scottish scenery, character, and life. In 1848 he collected and published his poems. In 1852 he wrote a memoir of his friend, David Macbeth Moir (the wellknown "Delta" of Blackwood's Magazine), and prefixed it to an edition of Moir's poems, which he edited for behoof of the poet's family. Aird died at his residence, at Castlebank, near Dumfries, 25th April 1876, in the 74th year of his age. BACON, FRANCIS, son of Sir Nicolas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Queen Elizabeth, and one of that queen's wisest counsellors, was born in London on the 22d of January 1561. His mother was a daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, and to her other accomplishments united a knowledge of the Latin and Italian languages. Bacon in his childhood had the good fortune, by the vivacity of his intellect and the sedateness of his behaviour, to attract the attention of the queen, who called him her young Lord Keeper. Being designed by his father for public life, at the age of thirteen he was sent to Cambridge, and his education was completed in the house of Sir Amias Paulet, English Ambassador in France. Gaining the confidence of Sir Amias, he was selected to perform a mission to her Majesty, which he accomplished successfully, publishing as a result of his residence abroad his "Brief View of the State of Europe." His father dying suddenly, in 1579, he was forced to adopt some profession, as he found himself in narrow circumstances. He began to study law, and at the age of twenty-eight was named by Elizabeth her Counsel Extraordinary. An application which he made to his uncle, Lord Burleigh, to procure him some post under Government, where he could spend his leisure in cultivating philosophy and literature, proving unsuccessful, he spent several years more in the study of law. Burleigh had represented him to Elizabeth as of too speculative a turn of mind for the details of business. In 1593 Bacon sat as member for Middlesex, and in 1597 his essays were published in a small volume. When King James came to the throne, in 1603, Bacon was knighted, and rapidly rose in power and influence. He was made King's Counsel in 1604, and became Solici tor-General in 1607, and Attorney-General in In slavish, tyrannous, and turbulent times Had kept it in the main; one that much loved And in his soul devoutly did aspire BURTON, ROBERT, was an English divine, a native of Lindley in Leicestershire. He studied at Oxford University, and became rector of Segrave. Born in 1576, he died in 1640. His claim to rank as an essayist rests on that wonderful book the "Anatomy of Melancholy," written by way of alleviating his own melancholy. With Dr Johnson this volume was a great favourite, so much so that he would turn earlier out of bed to read it. Two chapters, which give a fair idea of the style of the book, are given in a detached essay form. The "Anatomy of Melancholy" is a quarry of the most diverse materials, a storehouse of things new and old, but wanting in signs of art, order, memory, and judgment. BROWNE, SIR THOMAS, the celebrated author of the Religio Medici" (The Religion of a Physician), was born at London, in the parish of St Michael in Cheapside, on the 19th of October 1605. He received the first part of his education at the school of Winchester. In the beginning of 1623, he was removed from Winchester, and entered a gentleman-commoner of Broad- "Near the Foot of this Pillar CARLYLE, THOMAS, one of the most original of all contemporary essayists, and one whose influence has been co-extensive with the diffusion of our literature, was born at Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire, on the 4th December 1795. The intelligence of his father, who was a small farmer, and the piety and strong common sense of his mother, are on record. He attended first the parish school of Ecclefechan, and afterwards that of Annan, where he met Edward Irving, when a strong friendship sprang up between them. In 1809, when about fourteen years of age, he came to study at the Edinburgh University. His habits at this time are said to have been lonely and contemplative, and his reading in all kinds of literature assiduous and extensive. He distinguished himself in the mathematical class, and succeeded in gaining the friendship of Professor John Leslie, which we find was shortly afterwards useful to him, in his appointment to a tutorship at Kirkcaldy. Previous to this appointment he taught for two years in the burgh school of Annan. In 1818 he returned to Edinburgh, became a contributor to the "Edinburgh Encyclopædia," and also made a translation of "Legendre's Geometry." In 1823 he acted as tutor to Charles Buller. He published a translation of Goethe's "Wilhelm Meister" in 1824. His "Life of Schiller" appeared in the London Magazine (1823-24), at that time counting among its contributors Lamb, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Allan Cunningham. In 1826 he married an only daughter of Dr Welsh of IIaddington: on the father's side the Welshes were lineal descendants of John Knox. From the year of his marriage in 1826, till 1834, he resided at Craigenputtoch, a retired farm-house about fifteen miles from Dumfries. In 1834 he removed to London, settling at Chelsea, where he has since resided. "Sartor Resartus," written in the solitude of Craigenputtoch, appeared by instalments in Fraser's Magazine, after numerous rejections. His "History of the French Revolution" was published in 1837. In the same year he delivered a course of lectures on "German Literature," in Willis's Rooms, London; in 1839 he lectured on the "Revolutions of Modern Europe," and in 1840 on "Hero-Worship." This was his last public appearance in this capacity, with the exception of his rectorial address to the Edinburgh students in 1866, a description of which interesting occasion, by Alexander Smith, is given in this volume. Mr Carlyle's other works are, "Past and Present," "Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell," "Latter-day Pamphlets," "Life of John Sterling," "History of Frederick II.," "Early Kings of Norway," also an essay on the "Portraits of John Knox." On the occasion of Mr Carlyle's eightieth birthday, he was presented by a numerous circle of literary friends and admirers, with a gold medal and an address, signed by various friends and wellwishers. The publication of Carlyle's essays marked a new era in biographical portraiture, and his papers on Samuel Johnson and Robert |