My unassisted heart is barren clay, Of good and pious works thou art the seed, That quickens only where Thou say'st it may: Do Thou, then, breathe those thoughts into my mind By which such virtue may in me be bred The fetters of my tongue do Thou unbind, It is irrational to suppose that inward or moral beauty has little connection with outward beauty of expression, and exerts no influence on the looks of a man; as if the one were not the veritable index of the other a fact established beyond a doubt by physiognomists, and by all shrewd pure-hearted observers. Hence first impressions are so frequently correct. The words of Duncan "There's no art To find the mind's construction in the face," uttered after having been deceived and disappointed in the character of Cawdor, only tend to confirm the general truth of the proposition. Debasing trains of thought, habitually indulged in, will, to some extent, legibly write themselves on the features, notwithstanding all the meretricious lacquerings, forced levellings, and spurious graces of a studied fashionable hypocrisy. Wordsworth, addressing Coleridge, makes a passing allusion to this subject-a matter unfortunately of too frequent occurrence not to be generally understood: "To thee I speak, unapprehensive of contempt, The insinuated scoff of coward tongues, Blots from the human countenance all trace Of beauty and of love."1 The converse is also true: true of nations as well as individuals. All know Gay's lines "What is the blooming tincture of the skin While cordially accepting the conclusion arrived at, we object to the assumption implied, that inward and outward beauty, when of the highest order, can ever be thus antagonistic to each other. Symmetry of feature may, we admit, be awanting in the good and estimable; but even in extreme cases such as Socrates, we will certainly have the yet higher beauty of expression. Shakspere looks philosophically into the matter when he exclaims, . "O, how much more doth beauty beauteous seem, By that sweet ornament which Truth doth give! The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem For that sweet odour which doth in it live." Elsewhere he has finely said, "Beauty lives with kindness." And also "The hand that hath made you fair, hath made you good; the goodness that is cheap in beauty, makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace being the soul of your complexion, should keep the body of it ever fair.” 1 "Prelude," p. 52. Spenser, regarding it in the same light, even affirms that "Soul is form, and doth the body make." St. Pierre says, "Every trait of beauty may be referred to some virtue, as to innocence, candour, generosity, modesty, and heroism ;" and old Sir Thomas Overbury finely observes in one of his pithy lines "Tis the mind's beauty keeps the other sweete." The following noble exhortation we find in Wordsworth's "White Doe of Ryleston:" nature. "If thou art beautiful, and youth And thought endow thee with all truth, Antoninus, from whom we have already largely quoted, says, "A wrathful countenance is exceedingly against When the countenance is often thus deformed, its beauty dies, and cannot be revived again. By this very thing you may apprehend that it is against reason."1 Cicero, in his De Officiis, expresses himself in a similar manner; and one of our old divines even goes the length of saying, "Would'st thou diffuse over thy physiognomy a character of dignity, let thy mind be stored with sentiments of religion and virtue; they will imprint on every feature the peace which reigns in thy soul, and the elevations of thy conceptions." Such peace and harmony exist not apart from a good conscience-conscience, which Croly truly calls "Our breath of breath, our life of life; The flowing river of our inward peace; The noble confidence that bids man look His fellow-man i' the face; and be the thing Fearless and upward eyed-that God has made him." Thus inward beauty ever finds an outward manifestation; "for," as Spenser sings, "all that's good is beautiful and fair!" Notwithstanding seeming perturbations, the existence of Moral Law, order, harmony, or beauty, cannot be gainsaid, and therefore need not be further demonstrated. As in the physical world, "God hath made all things by measure, number, and weight"-a passage from the "Wisdom of Solomon,"1 confirmed and elucidated in a singular manner by the discoveries of Higgins, Richter, and Dalton2-so in the perfect ordering and adjustments of the moral world, from the rise or fall of an empire, to the veriest infant's tear. "Nature," says E. H. Strype, "is infinite in her combinations, and there is no limit which we can fix for the plastic functions of humanity to mix or separate; to harmonize, or even to make discord; to touch with transient meaning, like a passing moonbeam on a cenotaph, revealed and hidden too suddenly to be read; or to permeate as with a presiding soul all her attributes and symbols. . There is as much liberty in the quietude of the flowers as in the ravings of the tempest, and a law of equal and unquestionable authority 1 Chap. xi., v. 20. 2 See "Memoir of Dalton, and History of the Atomic Theory up to his time," by Robert Angus Smith, Ph.D., F.C.S., F.R.S., &c. Bailliere, London, 1856; containing one of the most interesting and best accounts of the various opinions which have prevailed in regard to matter. and government rules both angry storm and silent growth." Law, we have seen, takes cognizance of individual thoughts and actions, however trivial these may appear. It also rules the whole tenor of a life, and then again the sum of all the thought and action of all lives, from the first to the last man. Thus harmony is ultimately evolved, even from amid seeming discord. Bishop Wilkins says, in A Discourse on the Beauty of Providence-published 1649-“We cannot see the whole frame of things, how sundry particular events in a mutual relation do concur to make up the beauty of the whole. He that can discern only two or three wheels in a clock, how they move one against another, would presently think that there were contrariety and confusion in the work; whereas he that beholds the whole frame, and discerns how all those divers motions do jointly conduce to the same end, cannot choose but acknowledge a wise order in the contrivance of it. So likewise is it in the frame of times, where he alone is fit to judge of particulars who understands how they refer to the general." A modern writer has eloquently and comprehensively said of the historian's mighty task, in a sentence the magnificent structure of which has been likened to the prose of Milton or Jeremy Taylor:-"The field of operation is so vast and unsurveyable; so much lies wrapped up in thick, impenetrable darkness, while other portions are obscured by the mists which the passions of men have spread over them, and a spot, here and there, shines out dazzlingly, throwing the adjacent parts into the shade; the events are so inextricably intertwisted and |