Sobriety, watchfulness, discipline, above all a thorough understanding of ourselves, a knowledge of what we can do and wherein we must fall short of our aims-these are the true means of victory which Nature has placed within the reach of all. But few there are who learn to use them. Few are they who, like the candidates for knighthood of old, can endure the long hours of fasting and prayer within the nightly chapel, though morning is to welcome them to all the bright and joyous activity of their new vocation.

But this once achieved, the world is thine. Thine are all the blandishments of sense; for thou canst use without abusing them. Thine the gratifications of the intellect; for thou knowest the limits of its functions, and canst therefore enjoy its fullest exercise, without that blank disappointment which the sense of unsatisfied aims brings to less chastised minds. Thine the delights of sentiment, by whatever name it be called-love, enthusiasm, generosity; nay, the sterner pleasures of asceticism and self-discipline; for thou canst separate the true from the seeming, the reality of the sentiment from the falsehood of the idolatry which underlies it, and canst savour the one without chewing the bitter ashes of the other. All that Pagan philosophies have imagined of their sages and adepts, all that esoteric Christian sects have held of the spiritually emancipated-all these things in their inmost sense are true of thee. Thus fortified, life will be to thee one uninterrupted career of advance and of progressive happiness; and as for death, who must come at last— O selig der, dem er im Siegesglanze

Die blutigen Lorbeern um die Schläfe windet,

Den er, nach rasch durchrastem Tanze,

In eines Mädchens Armen findet!

external conflict, Man learns a saying hard to comprehend: From the power which binds fast all creation, that man liberates himself who conquers himself.

But happier than either, he who passes, fully prepared and fearless, into that state of existence which, unless our deepest sympathies deceive us, can but afford the wise a sphere for widening exertion and more comprehensive enjoyment.

This, we are well aware, is a very imperfect exposition of the general tendency of Göthe's view of life; yet we think that most readers-most English readers at all events-will accept it as not an unjust one; and the more so in proportion to their familiarity with the author. And, if so, they will assuredly agree with us, that genius of the highest order was never employed in developing a system more seductive to human weakness, nor one which more forcibly reminds us of the ominous words with which Bunyan concludes his allegory:- Then saw I that there is a way to Hell even from the gates of Heaven, as well as from the City of Destruction.'

And its effects have been proportionally great. Considering the sphere of Göthe's operations from a mere literary point of view, it can, indeed, scarcely be said that he has formed a school of imitators, like his predecessors Voltaire and Rousseau. As a poet his followers of note have not been numerous nor (with the exception of Rückert) very successful. His peculiar tone as a novelist seems, as we have already remarked, to have been chiefly caught by female writers; and we have no wish on the present occasion to break lances with the admirers of sundry countesses and citoyennes, who enjoy a very respectable amount of popularity. But in his more important functions as a moral philosopher there can be no doubt that his labours have fructified abundantly, and that his eclecticism, if such it may be called, is continuing to make its conquests at the expense of the mechanical Deism, and the unreal but generous Sentimentalism, of a former generation.

That there has been a great reaction against it is also true; but the reaction of bitterness, of wild and impotent disappointment, not of sound faith or solid principle. The school of Börne is quite as destitute of either as that of Göthe himself. Nay, some of the latter's successors and antagonists have endeavoured to place humanity, if possible, on a still lower stage than he did. He only taught us, at the worst, to cherish and cultivate those middle impulses of our nature which seem to occupy a doubtful place between the divine and the bestial; some of these seem bent on persuading us that our grossest animal appetites are equally sacred with any other portions of our deified selves.

From such a chaos as this the hitherto final result from a century's labour of those great sovereigns who have thus successively reigned in moral philosophy and literature-the mind turns anxiously towards a future which must assuredly arrive, although as yet there are no signs of its approach. The pride of false system must be thoroughly mortified, ingenious sophistry must have exhausted its last shifts, disappointed aspirations after superhuman greatness must have ended in utter selfabasement, before men will deign to retrace their steps, and submit to the humiliating but inevitable palinode, 'Incende quod adorasti, adora quod incendisti.' Many a revolution, social and political, must first pass over the European world. In religion, in ethics, in mental science, men's minds must long continue to oscillate, as they do now, between the most abject superstitions and the wildest infidelities, and find scanty resting-place in the intervals. So it must be, until some single or collective voice speaking with authority shall rouse them once more, by selecting all that is true in modern moral philosophy, and incorporating it with the one leading

principle of man's relation to God-not as a portion to a whole, a fraction of spirit to some great Anima Mundi in which it originates, but as creature to Creator, subject to Sovereign, responsible agent to his Master, weak and imperfect nature to Him who can purify and exalt it.

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A FEW WORDS ON JUNIUS AND ON

MARAT.

THE secret of Junius' has been kept until, like over-ripe wines, the subject has lost its flavour. Languid indeed is the disposition of mind in which any, except a few veterans who still prefer the old post-road to the modern railway, take up an essay or an article professing to throw new light on that wearisome mystery, or to add some hitherto unknown name to the ghostly crowd of candidates for that antiquated prize. And yet there is a deep interest about the inquiry, after all, to those who, from any special cause, are induced to overcome the feeling of satiety which it at first excites, and plunge into the controversy with the energy of their grandfathers. The real force and virulence of those powerful writings, unrivalled then, and scarcely equalled since, let critics say what they may; the strangeness of the fact that none of the quick-sighted, unscrupulous, revengeful men who surrounded Junius at the time of his writing, who brushed past him in the street, drank with him at dinner, sat opposite him in the office, could ever attain to even a probable conjecture of his identity; the irresistible character of the external evidence which fixes the authorship on Francis, contrasted with those startling internal improbabilities which make the Franciscan theory to this day the least popular, although the learned regard it as all but established-the eccentric, repulsive, dour' character of Francis himself, and the kind of pertinacious longing

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