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Can you get for me, and send me a good Erse gramınar; and that book that you were mentioning, about the Welsh being Picts, and not the Aborigines of Wales? I shall want all this for the Gallic invasion of Rome; so beautifully does History branch out into all varieties of questions, and continually lead one into fresh fields of knowledge. I have all but finished my abstract of Gaius' Institutes of the Roman Law, and delight in it.

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CXLIV.

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TO W. C. LAKE, ESQ.

Rugby, November 18, 1836.

I am well satisfied with your impressions of Germany. I never have wished to exchange my own country for it, but I feel indignant that, with all our enormous advantages, we continually let the Germans do what ought to be done by us. But I have no temptation, even for one summer, to resign Fairfield for Drachenfels. I dare say that gossiping flourishes among the German women, as smoking does among the men, and I like neither the one nor the other; and their scholars are perhaps instances of the division of labour carried into excess a; they are not enough universal, not enough of men, of citizens, and of Christians. But then I turn and look round, and where can I find what we should most desire on this side of the water either? Where is the knowledge,

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a Extract from a Letter to Chevalier Bunsen, in October, 1836. "What a strange work Strauss' Leben Jesu appears to me, judging of it from the notices in the Studien und Kritiken.' It seems to me to show the ill effects of that division of labour which prevails so much amongst the learned men of Germany. Strauss writes about history and myths, without appearing to have studied the question, but having heard that some pretended histories are mythical, he borrows this notion as an engine to help him out of Christianity. But the idea of men writing mythic histories between the time of Livy and Tacitus, and of St. Paul mistaking such for realities!"

where the wisdom, and where the goodness, which combine to form the great man. I know of no man who approaches to this character except Whately, and he is taken away from the place where he was wanted, and sent where the highest greatness would struggle in vain against the overpowering disadvantages of his position.

We, in our little world, are going on much as usual, but of this you will hear from Clough more than I could tell you. For myself, I have nearly finished my abstract, or almost translation of Gaius' Institutes, which I thought it necessary to finish before I begun to write about the Twelve Tables. It has answered to me, I think, very well; for, by the mere result of having had my mind so long engaged about the Roman Law, so left, as it were, to soak in it, I have gained a much greater familiarity with it than I could have done by a short and voracious cram of the same number of pages. It has greatly served to increase that sense of reality about the Romans,—that living in a manner amongst them, and having them and their life distinctly before our eyes;—which appears to me so indispensable to one who would write their history. This is quiet and interesting, but not exciting reading; other points press me more nearly, and seem to have a higher claim upon me. I have translated nearly half of the first Epistle to the Thessalonians, and am disposed to prefer the plan of bringing out those two Epistles first, rather than the Pastoral Epistles. The chronological order of the Epistles is undoubtedly the natural one, and luckily the Epistles to the Thessalonians offer no very suspicious topics; they will not be thought to have been chosen for purposes of controversy, and yet they may really be made to serve my purposes quite as well; for every part of the New Testament gives a picture of Christianity or of some one great feature in it, and every part negatively confutes the Priestcraft heresy, because that is to be found nowhere, insomuch that no man yet ever fell or could fall into that heresy by studying the Scriptures; they are a bar to it

altogether, and it is only when they are undermined by traditions and the rudiments of men that the heresy begins to make its way. And it is making its way fearfully, but it will not take the form that Newman wishes, but its far more natural and consistent form of pure Popery.

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CXLV. TO REV. DR. HAWKINS.

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Rugby, November 23, 1836.

I am quite well again, and indeed my attack was short and slight; only so far remarkable to me that I kept my bed one whole day for the first time since 1807, which was as gentle a reminder as could have been given me, that my health cannot be always what it has been. We are all well, and are very glad to hear good accounts of your party. I was in Laleham for five hours on Monday morning, to attend the funeral of my aunt, the last survivor of my mother's household. She was in her eightieth year, and after having been an invalid all her life, yet outlived all her own family, and reached the full age of man. I cannot tell you how solemn a thought it is to have now lost all my relations of the generation preceding our own, and to be thus visibly brought into that generation whose time for departure comes the next.

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I am very desirous of going fully into my views about the Church, because there is no subject which I have more studied, and none where I seem to see my way so clearly, or to sympathize more entirely with the Scriptures and with the notions of all great writers on government. I hold the Church to be a most divine institution, and eminently characteristic of Christianity, and my abhorrence of the Priestcraft and Succession doctrines, (I do not mean that they are synonymous,) is grounded on my firm conviction that they are and ever have been in theory and in practice a most formidable device of the great Enemy to destroy the real living Church, and even to drive it out of men's minds, by the false and superstitious idea of a Church

which never has and never can overthrow his kingdom. And in this sense,-so far as Popery is priestcraft, I do believe it to be the very mystery of iniquity, but then it began in the first century, and had no more to do with Rome in the outset, than with Alexandria, Antioch, or Carthage. The whole confusion of the ideas of priesthood and government,—the taking half a notion from one, and half a notion from the other, the disclaiming a priesthood and yet clinging to conclusions which are only deducible from the notion of a priesthood,-and the want of familiarity with all political questions which characterize all that I have ever seen written on English High Church grounds, may be exposed piece by piece with the utmost ease and certainty. .. I am for the Church, and against the Priesthood; not for individual licence against the Church.

CXLVI. TO J. C. PLATT, ESQ.

Rugby, November 28, 1836.

The state of the country interests me as much as ever, but since my correspondence with the Sheffield Courant, I have written nothing on the subject. I do not like the aspect of things at all. An extraordinary period of commercial enterprise threw into the shade for the time all those evils in the state of the labouring population, which I have ever dreaded as the rock fatal to our greatness; but, meanwhile, those evils were not removed, nor in fact attempted to be lessened, except by the Poor Law Act, a measure in itself wise and just, but which, standing alone, and unaccompanied by others of a milder and more positively improving tendency, wears an air of harshness, and will, I fear, embitter the feelings of the poorer classes still more. Now we are threatened by a most unprincipled system of agitation,-the Tories actually doing their best to Jacobinize the poor, in the hope

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of turning an outbreak against the Whig government to their own advantage. Then there is the Currency question, full of immense difficulties, which no man can clearly see his way through. And withal the threatened schism between the Whigs and Radicals about the Reform of the House of Lords. Surely there never was such folly as talking about a reform in the House of Lords, when it is. very doubtful whether, if Parliament were dissolved, the Tories would not gain a majority even in the House of Commons. It is nonsense to talk of its being a struggle between the aristocracy and the people; if it were so, it would be over in a week, provided they mean by the ariscracy the House of Lords. It is really a great contest between the adherents of two great principles, that of preserving, and that of improving; and he must have studied history to very little purpose, who does not know that in common circumstances the former party is always the most numerous and the strongest. It gets occasionally overpowered, when it has had rope enough given it to hang itself; that is, when it has carried its favourite Conservatism to such a height, that the mass of unreformed evil becomes unendurable, and then there comes a grand reform. But, that grand reform once effected, the Conservaative instinct again regains its ascendancy, and goes on upon another lease; and so it will ever do, unless some rare circumstances enabled a thoroughly enlightened government to remain long in power; and as such a government cannot rely on being popular;-for reform of evil in the abstract is gall and wormwood alike to men's indolence, and love of what they are used to, as to their propensities for jobbing,—so it is only accident or despotism that can keep it on its legs. This is the secret of the Tory reaction; because men are all Tories by nature, when they are tolerably well off, and it is only some monstrous injustice or insult to themselves, or some atrocious cruelty, or some great reverses of fortune, that ever make them other

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