advice when they were to conquer Canaan." "I cannot," he said, "enter fully into these lines of Wordsworth—

To me the meanest flower that breathes can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.'

There is to me something in them of a morbid feeling-life is not long enough to take such intense interest in objects themselves so little." Secluded as he was, both by his occupations and his domestic habits, from contact with the world, even more than most men in his station, yet the interest with which, now more than ever, he entered into public affairs, was such as can rarely be felt by men not actually engaged in the government of the country. The life of a nation, he said, was to him almost as distinct as that of an individual; and whatever might be his habitual subjects of public interest,-the advance of political and social reform,-the questions of peace and war,-the sufferings of the poorer classes,-the growth of those rising commonwealths in the Australian colonies, where from time to time, he entertained an ardent desire to pass the close of his life, in the hope of influencing, if possible, what he conceived to be the germs of the future destinies of England and of the world, -came before him with a vividness, which seemed to belong rather to a citizen of Greece or Rome, than to the comparative apathy and retirement of the members of modern states.

It was of course only or chiefly through his writings, that he could hope to act on the country at large; and they accordingly, almost all, became inseparably bound up with the course of public events. They were not, in fact, so much words as deeds; not so much the result of an intention to instruct, as of an incontrollable desire to give vent to the thoughts that were struggling within him. "I have a testimony to deliver," was the motive which dictated almost all of them. "I must write or die," was an expression which he used more than once in times of great public interest, and which was hardly too strong to describe what he felt. If he was editing Thucydides, it was with the thought that he was engaged, "not on an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions, but a living picture of things present, fitted not so much for the curiosity of

the scholar, as for the instruction of the statesman and the citizen." (Pref. vol. iii. p. xxii.) If he felt himself called upon to write the history of Rome, one chief reason was, because it "could be understood by none so well as by those who have grown up under the laws, who have been engaged in the parties, who are themselves citizens of our kingly commonwealth of England." (Pref. vol. i. p. vii.) If he was anxious to set on foot a Commentary of the Scriptures, it was mostly at times, when he was struck by the reluctance or incapacity of the men of his own generation to apply to their own social state the warnings of the Apostles and Prophets. If he was desirous of maintaining against the Oxford school his own views of the Church, it was that, "when he looked at the social condition of his countrymen," he "could not doubt that here was the work for the Church of Christ to do, that none else could do it, and that with the blessing of her Almighty Head she could." (Serm. vol. iv. Pref. p. cxv.)

It is not, therefore, to be wondered at, if that impatience of present evil, which belonged alike to his principles and his disposition, appeared in his writings, and imparted to them-often probably, unknown to himself-something, if not of a polemical aspect, at least of an attitude of opposition and attack, averse though he was himself to controversy, and carefully avoiding it with those whom he knew personally, even when frequently challenged to enter upon it. "The wisdom of winter is the folly of spring," was a maxim with him, which would often explain changes of feeling and expression that to many might seem inconsistencies. "If I were living in London," he said, "I should not talk against the evil tendencies of the clergy, any more than if I were living in Oxford I should talk against the evil tendencies of the political economists. It is my nature always to attack that evil which seems to me most present." It was thus a favourite topic, in his exposition of Scripture, to remark how the particular sins of the occasion were denounced, the particular forms of Antichrist indicated often without the qualification, which would have been required by the presence of the opposite danger. "Contrast," he used to say, "the language of the first chapter of Isaiah, when the

Hierarchy of Jubil vas — as 4e and power, with the language of the second chapter of Malachi when it was in a state of decline and neglec

Connected with this, was the permbar vehemence of language, which he often used, a speaking of the subjects and events of the day. This was indeed partly to be accounted for by his eagerness to speak out whatever was in his mind, especially when moved by his kein sense of whst be thought evil-partly by the natural simplicity of his mode of speech, which led him to adopt phrases in their suplest sense, without stopping to explain them, or suspecting that they would be misunderstood. But with regard to public principles and parties, it was often more than this. With every wish to be impartial, yet his natural temperament, as he used himself to acknowledge, made it difficult for him to place himself completely in another's point of view; and thus he had a tendency to judge individuals, with whom he had no personal acquaintance, from his conception of the party to which they belonged, and to look at both through the medium of that strong power of association, which influenced materially his judgment, not only of events, but of men, and even of places. Living individuals, therefore, and existing principles, became lost to his view in the long line of images, past and future, in which they only formed one link. Every political or ecclesiastical movement suggested to him the recollection of its historical representative in past times,—and yet more, as by an instinct, half religious and half historical, the thought of what he conceived to be the prototypes of the various forms of error and wickedness denounced by the Prophets in the Old Testament, or by our Lord and his Apostles in the New. And looking not backwards only, but forwards, to their remotest consequences, and again guiding himself, as he thought, by the example of the language of St. Paul, who "seemed to have had his eye fixed in vision rather upon the full-grown evil of later times, than upon the first imperfect show-the faint indications of it-in his own time," (Serm. vol. v. p. 346,) he saw in them the germs of mischief yet to come,-not only the mischief of their actual triumph, but the mischief of the reaction against them.

There was besides a peculiar importance attaching, in his view, to political questions, with which every reader of his works must be familiar. The life of the commonwealth is to him the main subject of history—the laws of political science the main lesson of history-"the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government-the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind." And those who read his letters will be startled at times by the interest with which he watches the changes of administration, where to many the real difference would seem to be comparatively trifling. Thus he would speak of a ministry advocating even good measures inconsistently with their position or principles, "as a daily painfulness-a moral east wind, which made him feel uncomfortable without any particular ailment❞—or lament the ascendancy of false political views, as tending "to the sure moral degradation of the whole community, and the ultimate social disorganization of our system," "not from reading the Morning Chronicle or the Edinburgh Review, but from reading the Bible and Aristotle, and all history."

Such expressions as these must indeed be taken with the necessary qualifications which belong to all words spoken to intimate friends in a period of great excitement. But they may serve to illustrate at least the occasional strength of feeling which it is the object of these remarks to explain. It arose, no doubt, in part from his tendency to view all things in a practical and concrete form, and in part from his belief of the large power possessed by the supreme governors of society over the social and moral condition of those intrusted to them. But there were also real principles present to his mind whenever he thus spoke, which seemed to him so certain, that "daily experience could hardly remove his wonder at finding that they did not appear so to others." (Mod. Hist. Lect., p. 391.) What these principles were in detail, his own letters will sufficiently show. But it must be borne in mind how, whilst he certainly believed that they were exemplified to a great degree in the actual state of English politics, the meaning which he attached to them rose so far above their meaning as commonly used, that it could hardly be thought that the same subject was spoken of. Conserva

LIFE OF DR. ARNOLD.

tism in his mouth was not merely the watchword of an English party, but the symbol of an evil, against which his whole life, public and private, was one continued struggle, which he dreaded in his own heart no less than in the institutions of his country, and his abhorrence of which will be found to pervade not only the pamphlets which have been most condemned, but the sermons which have been most admired, namely, the spirit of resistance to all change. Jacobinism, again, in his use of the word, included not only the extreme movement party in France or England, to which he usually applied it, but all the natural tendencies of mankind, whether "democratical, priestly, or chivalrous," to oppose the authority of Law, divine and human, which he regarded with so deep a reverence. Popular principles and democracy (when he used these words in a good sense) were not the opposition to an hereditary monarchy or peerage, which he always valued as precious elements of national life, but were inseparably blended with his strong belief in the injustice and want of sympathy generally shown by the higher to the lower orders,-a belief which he often declared had been first brought home to him, when, after having as a young man at Oxford held the opposite view, he first began seriously to study the language used with regard to it by St. James and the Old Testament Prophets. Liberal principles were not merely the expression of his adherence to a Whig ministry, but of his belief in the constant necessity of applying those principles of advance and reform, which, in their most perfect development, he conceived to be identical with Christianity itself. Even in their lower exemplifications, and in every age of the world except that before the Fall of man from Paradise, he maintained them to have been, by the very constitution of human society, the representatives of the cause of wisdom and goodness. And this truth, no less certain in his judgment than the ordinary deductions of natural theology, he believed to have been placed on a still firmer basis by the higher standard held out in the Christian religion, and the revelation of a moral law, which no intermixture of races or change of national customs could possibly endanger.

That he was not, in the common sense of the word, a mem