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peer, whatever his moral or mental qualifications may happen to be. That is to say-they are triumphant in the destructive argument; but what figure do they cut in the constructive? What answer do they give to the question: Who are to be the Rulers of the Nation?

The answers are two: 1st, The theorists proclaim a government of the Wisest. 2nd, The more thorough-going republicans proclaim the purity and indispensability of the Representative principle, and demand that the People shall choose whomsoever it pleases them.

"Men," said Plato,

Let us examine each opinion. ،، will never be happy till they are governed by Philosophers." This is such a generous error that we cannot wonder at its wide diffusion. Yet of all Utopias I believe it the least practicable. I need not say with Rousseau that there never has been, never will be, a philosopher who would not, for the sake of his own glory, deceive all mankind; I need only point to the two insuperable obstacles to our ever realising such a government as that of the Wisest.

And, firstly, how are the Wisest to be recognised? How are we to know the men to select? Observe, Percy, the stringency of this question. If the government of Philosophers be desirable, of course the Wisest ought to form that government; for if men of narrower and falser views be selected, the true principle has been violated; and if the absolutely Wisest are not to rule us, then what is the degree of Wisdom which can be pronounced a qualification? It would be difficult to determine.

I return then to the question: How to recognise the Wisest Men ? You will not so far contradict universal experience as to suppose that any age really has recognised its truly wise men, those who

Stood in the foremost files of time."

It is not till the mission of a great thinker is accomplished that the world can judge whether he really was a great thinker or only a fanciful dreamer. Hence the injustice—often times neglect— which meets every great discovery, which strives to gag the utterance of every new important truth. It is not many years since Sir W. Scott ridiculed the idea of steam being used to propel vessels. The names of Galileo and Harvey are perpetually being cited as examples of the tendency I speak of; but how little have these examples prevented succeeding generations from adding

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other examples to them! We round sonorous periods of copious liberality and tolerance; we declaim against the bigotry of mankind; we adorn our rhetoric with world-famous examples; and the first man who startles us with the enunciation of a novelty (if it be not some egregious sophism pandering to our tastes) we treat in the same way as our forefathers treated Harvey! Truth, says Landor, "is only unpleasant in its novelty. He who first utters it says, 'You are less wise than I.' Now who likes this? Great Thinkers can only be fully appreciated by posterity. Great Rhetoricians and great Charlatans will always enchain the sympathies of the day. Great Thinkers are too far removed above the mass to be understood; and excite too much rivalry among their own class to be fairly estimated.

The mass of men, destined to action, sympathise more with an intellect of middling capacity joined to practical activity, than with an intellect of a purely speculative excellence, however elevated. The man of action is understood, and his superiority of mental power is recognised. The man of speculation is not understood; and if his superiority happen to be acknowledged, it is acknowledged blindly,-it excites no sympathy, exerts no influence. I see no reason to deplore this. I believe that Thought is the great instrument of Civilisation; the great central force from which all social action springs. But I also believe that Thought is destined to a purely consultative and preparatory office. By the application of abstract ideas it directs the vessel of the state; but is not itself the Helm. It informs the Pilot how to steer, but leaves the rudder in his hand. Theory is a distinct province, and should never attempt to usurp that of practice. To attempt such an usurpation would only end in crippling the efforts of pure speculation, and in confusing those of practice. For it is well known that speculation to be productive must be left free to range whither it pleases, and in nowise be tied down to practical exigencies; otherwise no advance in theory could be made, everything new being invariably pronounced impracticable. On the other side, suppose the Wisest once recognised and assembled together, and Government placed in their hands, the province of theory would then be found usurping that of practice; whereby both would fall to the ground. The consequences would soon be fatal; among them we should see the establishment of a caste similar to that of the ancient priesthood, which for its own supremacy would use its utmost to keep the many hood-winked, and would itself soon

relapse into sterile indolence. The Egyptian Priesthood was an illustration of the government of the Wise.

Let me now call your attention to the Representative Principle, from which so much is expected. Democrat as I am, I cannot conceal from myself the very great dangers society must incur in allowing itself to be governed by a senate elected by the people, unless controlled by some social theory which all cultivated minds accept. The wide opening it affords to demagogues of all descriptions, the anarchical stimulus given to a paltry ambition, render it necessary to have some counteracting influence of a very decided kind in the other social arrangements. But for this we need a social theory; and a hierarchy founded on that theory; which are the two things I complain of as being totally absent in the Radical scheme.

The foregoing remarks will have explained to you why I cannot receive Radicalism as otherwise than a destructive party, capable of preparing the way for the New Reformation, but not of taking any constructive part in it. As the exponent of Progress

it has a great mission. It is the counterpart of Toryism, whose office is stability. If, as I before said, it is the fear of anarchy which makes Toryism strong, so also is it the fear of retrogression -a sense of the necessity for progress, which makes Radicalism strong. And this great combat between the two principles of Order and Progress keeps society in a state of suspense. Meanwhile they prevent the undue predominance of either too rash a change or too retrogade a movement.

It now remains to see what are the claims of Whiggism to be considered as the true exponent of Order and Progress.

reserve for my next.

Yours ever,

This I

VIVIAN.

THE SEASON OUT OF SEASON.

BY PAUL BELL.

Street, London, June 5th, 1847.

"AND how camest thou here?" was the question, put during one of her prison-visits, by Priscilla Gotobed, to a fine, young, tawdry creature in durance, whose graces had not excused her from " a month on the mill."-"If you thought proper, ma'am," was the

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answer,- -"I was at the theatre one night" what had a respectable young woman like thee-the mother of a small child," interrupted the kindly, but straight-laced Friend— "to be doing in such a place? "O ma'am," was Cowslip's reply, in the tone of one who vents an established fact" Everybody, you know, must go to the play once in a season!

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No less necessary is it for every one of US to be in London from time to time; especially now that the days of pillion-journeying are over (I hope that some one has hoarded a pillion for The British Museum), now that Members of Parliament do frank-and the Morning Post complains-are frank-no more. We have duties. There are deputations; railway committees involving free quarters, white-bait dinners and opera-boxes. There is Exeter Hall: and what merciful Christian will be so lukewarm as not to drop his burning coal upon the cairn of blazing fire-brands annually raised there, under which Popery, as all the sons of Simeon know lies half suffocated and altogether like to die?—There are foreign customers from the Continent to be met. One must buy wine: our wives bonnets. One MUST-this is a religion only one degree less fervent than that of Exeter-Hall-going-hear Jenny Lind! In the present instance, there were exhibitions my Lame Boy longed to look at. Then, my Mrs. Bell has been for a year dinning into my ears, that I "owed it to myself" to be seen in the literary circles, by way of simple acknowledgment of the verses written to me (which she has read):—and of the favourable notice which my Lancashire talk is known to have excited in the highest quarters. But I do not believe, as I have told her a score of times, that Her Majesty and H.R.H. the Prince would send for me, to meet my old correspondent Mr. Wordsworth, were I in London ever so constantly!-nor that Lady Londonderry would give sixpence for my glove-following the example of what the most charming Duke of Dukes (to quote Miss Le Grand) did the other day for hers at the Irish Bazaar. Still less, that Mr. Lane has been offered a large sum by Mr. Sheriff Moon-for a speaking likeness of me, to hang in the shops. When people are told they owe anything to themselves," they are mostly supposed to want being persuaded to do something they ought not to do. But though I am in London, it does not follow that I should make a fool of myself. Mr. Jerrold knows that he is bound, under a penalty, not to acquaint any one where I lodge. It is not in

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Belgravia, however; nor among the Italian gentlemen who sing for Mr. Lumley, in Golden Square. Beyond this fact, merely adduced to satisfy ill-natured persons in Halcyon Row, that I am neither grown foppish nor foreign-I shall not divulge my residence. Those may be made Lions of, who will :-and can.

As to the best of Lionism, indeed, what a transient thing has that become, owing to the rapidity of the times we are living inand the rapidity of all successions of emotion! Granting that wares of all sorts are not essentially flimsier than they used to be, when the wisdom of our Ancestors contrived them,-they are indisputably sooner laid by than formerly. I started in London, on the day when the rumour of O'Connell's death arrived there— happening to dine with an old friend and correspondent, whom, thirty years ago, such a topic would have lasted from the beginning of his dinner at four o'clock P.M. till the end of his after session at four o'clock A.M., when some of the party were fain to tumble home to their wives, under protection of Rattle and Lantern! Well-a-day, matters were changed with a vengeance! changed as entirely as Dilberry's dwelling, which the good manunder pretext of fresh air-hath removed from Red Lion Square to Westbourne Place, in the country, behind Kensington Gardens -making it a journey, I must say, to get there! To think of the Liberator being dismissed with "Poor O'Connell! Well: there was a time when he would have been a loss!"-And then to hear my old friend-the once-political Dilberry, straightway divaricating," with as keen an interest as that of Mrs. Dilberry the Third, or Miss Annette, or Miss Lucie, to the "prices current" of stalls in the Haymarket, and pits in the Gardento Lind's " Oh!" and Alboni's "Ah!" Was this not enough to make a plain man shake his head and rub his eyes? It was strange and sad to see how small a sensation was excited by the return to France of the ashes of Napoleon; but this indifference at the departure of one little less cheered, little less abused, little less powerful in his day, and in propriá personá a good deal more eloquent, struck me more intensely than I can describe: not merely as a type of the difference betwixt False and True, between tinsel and gold, between " Fame which must endure, and Fame which will not last," but as a reminder of the rate at which we are living. When we have "girdled the earth," we may, possibly, come back to O'Connell!—and some Carlyle may work his Life and Times into something as poetical as an epic, as breathlessly

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