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by a prevailing obscurity which will impair, not merely its popularity, but its usefulness. Indeed, it will never be a favorite work with the many who love to read, but cannot think; but they who read that they may think, will use this book, and prize it.

"The view from which our steps are bearing us away is such as we may well be glad to leave. A few scattered palaces, wherein we would not willingly look again, rise amongst a mass of hovels, of which the doors are closed against us, upon a plain grim with devastation and sterility. The cheerful voice of the husbandman is changed to the outcry of the soldier or the wail of the slave; while the earth itself, as if saddened and speechless, denies a place to the waving corn, and bears, it seems, no tree or leaf to hear the murmurs of the wind. Above the plain, a mountain, diademed with clouds, and barren as the fields beneath, supports a single edifice, which, whether it be a residence or a fortress, is equally magnificent and dreary. Here dwells the master, and below him, on the plain, are the subjects of the Roman Empire.

"The prospect to which we turn, at first, is not more gladsome. Without a people, and, a few rare instances excepted, without a ruler that deserves the name, the Empire appears to sink deeper and deeper in the wickedness and feebleness it has inherited. Years pass, and centuries; and as they one by one depart from Rome, her fortitude and hope are not only extinguished, but forgotten. The despotism of the Emperor is the judgment upon the Empire. The hollowness of the Empire, like "an empty urn," becomes fit for the "withered hands" of the Emperor by whom it is held. And the onslaught of the barbarians, at last, is the retribution to which the Emperor, the Empire, and the parent Commonwealth have been long foredoomed. The glimpses before or behind us, that we catch of Rome alone, are all alike mournful.

"In every country and amongst every nation of the ancient world, a marvellous progress from barbarism to comparative civilization or from servitude to comparative freedom had been allowed to precede the decline to each appointed in its turn. The extent of this advancement was generally commensurate with the degree of liberty existing amongst the various races engaged in its production; and the greatest development of knowledge and of cultivation occurred in Greece, together with the greatest development of liberty. A different phase appears to be observable in Rome, under whose laws liberty attained to a greater stature than in any other heathen state, without producing a corres

ponding increase in the sciences, the arts, or the comforts of mankind. The same religion that had interposed itself like a cloud between the freedom of other nations and the light from Heaven hung thinnest above the seven hills; and yet nowhere was the liberty it always obscured so fatal to human works and to human hopes as amongst the proud and finally the lawless conquerors who were trained at Rome.

"Here lies the moral of our history. In the great creation of which we form a part, the process of animation and increase is the result of mutual, though they be unconscious, services amongst its members. The plant subsists upon the breath of the animal, and the animal seeks from the plant those exhalations without which its own life would be intolerable. It is one of the thousand instances with which the world is filled to teach men how to conduct themselves and how to employ their principles; and it may serve, at this moment, as an illustration of the truth, that liberty is virtually servitude, unless it be so connected with human powers as to minister to them and be ministered unto by them in return. The institutions of ancient Rome secured to all the citizens whom they acknowledged the amplest freedom in that age possible; yet freedom failed amongst them for want of higher powers in its possessors than those of conquerors and rulers; while the institutions by which this liberty had been provided were bowed and broken by its courses of blood and despotism. The few, like the Gracchi and Cicero, whom it educated to greater aspirations were not allowed to spread the learning they acquired amongst men, much less to exercise the benevolence they had received from their Creator.

Even

"The wants of the Romans are as evident as their errors. They not only lacked the powers, but the first necessities, of humanity. To be free, they needed to be conscious of their weakness as individuals, and, mortally speaking, as a nation; a consciousness which never came to the nation, and only to its individual members in the day of their utter downfall. had they been sooner humbled, a law of right and wrong would still have failed them; though in order to be free, singly or collectively, they required liberation from the vice and fortification in the virtue of the world. This law, however, was never theirs ; it neither rose with their early institutions nor arrived with their later philosophy, except in part; and the part even which they did obtain was lost before the beginning of the Empire. Without this knowledge of right and wrong, there can be no true power; and without power, again, there can be no real exercise of liberty. There is a holiness of freedom yet to be attained in doing 'whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things

are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report'; and so doing them, that the glory of God, which religion commands, may be fulfilled by man through liberty.

"So far as humility amongst men was necessary for the preparation of a truer freedom than could ever be known under heathenism, the part of Rome, however dreadful, was yet sublime. It was not to unite, to discipline, or to fortify humanity, but to enervate, to loosen, and to scatter its forces, that the people whose history we have read were allowed to conquer the earth and were then themselves reduced to deep submission. Every good labor of theirs that failed was, by reason of what we esteem its failure, a step gained nearer to the end of the wellnigh universal evil that prevailed; while every bad achievement that may seem to us to have succeeded, temporarily or lastingly, with them was equally, by reason of its success, a progress towards the good of which the coming would have been longed and prayed for, could it have been comprehended. Alike in the virtues and in the vices of antiquity, we may read the progress towards its humiliation. Yet, on the other hand, it must not seem, at the last, that the disposition of the Romans or of mankind to submission was secured solely through the errors and the apparently ineffectual toils which we have traced back to these times of old. Desires too true to have been wasted, and strivings too humane to have been unproductive, though all were overshadowed by passing wrongs, still gleam as if in anticipation or in preparation of the advancing day.

"At length, when it had been proved by ages of conflict and loss that no lasting joy and no abiding truth could be procured through the power, the freedom, or the faith of mankind, the angels sang their song, in which the glory of God and the goodwill of men were together blended. The universe was wrapped in momentary tranquillity, and peaceful was the night' above the manger at Bethlehem. We may believe, that, when the morning came, the ignorance, the confusion, and the servitude of humanity had left their darkest forms amongst the midnight clouds. It was still, indeed, beyond the power of man to lay hold securely of the charity and the regeneration that were henceforth to be his law; and the indefinable terrors of the future, whether seen from the West or from the East, were not at once to be dispelled. But before the death of the Emperor Augustus, in the midst of his fallen subjects, the Business of THE FATHER had already been begun in the Temple at Jerusalem; and, near by THE SON was increasing in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and man.

"The sea, as it were, upon which wave has pursued wave through day and night, through years and centuries, before our

eyes, is thus illumined with the approaching light which we have been waiting to behold. And as we stand upon the shore, conscious of the spirit that has moved upon the face of the waters, we may lift our eyes with more confiding faith to the over-watching Heaven."

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ART. V. Lectures on Subjects connected with Literature and Life. By EDWIN P. WHIPPLE, Author of "Essays and Reviews." Boston: W. D. Ticknor & Co. 12mo. pp. 218.

1850.

MR. WHIPPLE may now fairly be called the most popular essayist in this country; and he has substantial merits which go far to justify the favor with which his writings have been received. To a large acquaintance with English literature, a prompt and retentive memory, a lively fancy, and considerable wit, he joins the brisk and smart exuberance of style which is the most agreeable quality of the essayist, and the most essential to his success. His command of expression is almost marvellous; he showers words upon the page with a prodigality that astonishes the lean and bare scribblers who, after painful search and with many contorsions, clothe their shivering thoughts in scant and inappropriate garments. He revels in the abundance of his wealth, and changes his rich costume so frequently and swiftly, that the reader begins to think he is playing tricks with dress, or is substituting words for thought. Yet the suspicion would be groundless. The expression, though lavish and ornate, is almost invariably clear, pointed, and precise. Because he has a large store to choose from, the word selected is just the appropriate word, conveying the precise idea that the writer wishes to impart, without distortion or indistinctness. Mr. Whipple's essays, therefore, form easy and luxurious reading. We are not obliged to pause and dwell upon a sentence before we can detect its meaning, or discern its connection with what precedes and what follows in the train of thought.

The essayist does not aim at complete and elaborate inves

tigations; he touches upon many subjects, but exhausts none. He has no excuse, therefore, for tiring the reader with wiredrawn disquisitions, complex processes of argumentation, painful collections of facts, or a mere farrago of other men's ideas. He is at liberty to skip all that is tedious in the exhibition of his theme, and all that he may suppose to be familiarly known to most of his readers. He is bound not to be dull, feeble, or common-place, but he is not obliged to be methodical, far-reaching, or profound. He is a gleaner on the fields of thought, and is expected to bring into barn only what the regular reapers have left behind them. Still he must bring wheat, and not tares; he must gather what the husbandmen have overlooked, or what has dropped from their wearied arms, not what they have intentionally left to decay. We look to the quality, not the quantity, of the collection that he has made, and are grateful to him for any addition, however slight, that he may make to the sum of knowledge, the means of entertainment, or the materials of thought. The aggregate of good done by many laborers in this department of effort may be considerable; English literature would lose much of what is most entertaining and valuable in it, if the productions of all the essayists were left out of the account, or condemned to the flames. There are some minds Lord Bacon's and Dr. Johnson's, for instance, judging the latter, however, only from his conversations — the mere drippings of which are of more worth than the full flow of other men's thoughts. We prize both the essays of the former and the talk of the latter for the acuteness and originality displayed in them, and never think of censuring them for not looking at all sides of a subject, or not exhausting all that can be said upon it. It is often a greater mark of genius to be able to say something that is new and striking upon a very trite theme, than to spread out a more novel topic in all its breadth and variety.

These considerations, which in themselves are sufficiently obvious, are very necessary to be kept in mind in passing judgment upon such a volume as Mr. Whipple has just published; as we might otherwise unfairly accuse him of presumption in selecting ambitious but hackneyed topics for his Lectures, or of superficiality in his mode of writing upon them. Here is a little book of about 200 pages, which professes to

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