other peculiarity, makes them haughtily refuse all common and even the fair methods of securing what the Evangelical books call 'acceptance,' and what old Aristotle lays down as one of the first things to be acquired, and indispensable to the success of one who addresses masses—namely, the 'goodwill of the audience,' that is, a personal feeling of well-disposedness towards the speaker who is to convince or teach them.

I am proceeding with Cellini's 'Life.' What a wonderful picture of human life, and human heart, and human society ! The naïve and inordinate vanity of the man is astonishing, and refutes the foolish popular notion that real talent is never vain, and real courage never boastful. Falstaff's braggadocio is modest in comparison of his. Conceive a man gravely telling

you that after the vision in his prison a glory encircled his head through life-visible on his shadow, especially on the dewy grass at morning, and which he possessed the power of showing to a chosen few. And then the religiosity and hymn-writing of a man who records, in admiration, the murder in revenge of three separate persons who had slightly offended him. Very curious, too, is his account of the unblushing rapacity, violence, and profligacy of the Popes Clement and Paul III., to say nothing of the villany of the cardinals, bishops, and Dukes of Ferrara. It was a curious time when men had to redress their own wrongs, and goldsmiths were compelled to be accomplished swordsmen if they would live one day in safety. Fancy Mr. Lewis armed cap-à-pie, or a tailor coming to measure you with a sword on his thigh! Yet a dusky clouded sense of right, honour, and religion runs through the book: bizarre enough, it is true, and suggestive of many reflections. Society progresses - do men? Benvenuto gratified every passion, slashed and slew his way through life. London jewellers wear no swords, and get rich by bankruptcies; is the gain very great, are we not less of men than in those days?

It is a wonderfully graphic life. That power of painting what was seen and what appeared, instead of our modern habit of reflecting and philosophising upon it, brings the whole scene

before the eyes.

How living and real, as if of yesterday, the portraits of Francis I., Madame d'Estampes, Titian! And how curious, as compared with Rousseau and Tasso, is Cellini's perpetual discovery of conspiracies against himself, and of the implacable enmities of popes, dukes, ladies! The imaginativeness of a brain which had in it a fibre of insanity, near which genius often lies, would, I suppose, account for two-thirds of this and his extraordinary irascibility was but another form of it. An innkeeper, whose horse he has overridden, keeps his saddle and bridle in retaliation, and Cellini sets off and buries his dagger in the spine of his neck. Another man affronts him slightly, and he resolves to cut off his arm; then his mad escape from prison with the ingenuity of a maniac; the descent by sheets, curiously procured, cut in strips, and the desperate fall and fractured leg; all to escape from a Pope, who was trying to murder him in the most incredible ways—it is very

curious.

CXLVIII.

A letter arrived from to-day. I did not like the expression in the one you sent me, where she speaks of the sacrifice made for and the strengthening effect of sacrifice on the character. It is a bad habit of sentiment to fall into. People who make real sacrifices are never able to calculate self-complacently the good the said sacrifices are doing them; just as people who really grieve are unable at the time to philosophise about the good effects of grief. 'Now, no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous but grievous.' That is true philosophy. In the lips of one struggling might and main to strengthen character, and living a life of the Cross and of sacrifice, such a sentence as I have quoted might be real; as it is, it is simply unreal—a sentence got by heart, and I think very dangerous. Nothing is more dangerous than the command of a pen which can write correct sentiments, such as might befit a martyr or an angel. And the danger is, that the confusion between a commonplace life and that of an angel or a martyr

is hopeless. For when the same sublimities proceed from the lips and pens of both, who is to convince us that we are not beatified martyrs and holy angels? Such a sentence as this would have been more real, though somewhat sentimental still: How dare I talk of Sacrifice! and, how little of it is there in my life-one perpetual succession of enjoyments!' It has often struck me that Christ never suffered these sentimentalisms to pass without a matter-of-fact testing of what they were worth and what they meant. It is a dangerous facility of fine writing, which I say it in deep reverence to Him-Christ would have tested by some of those apparently harsh replies which abound in His life, such as to one professing great anxiety to be with Him, saying he wished it and not doing it, 'Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man hath not where to lay His head.'

I only took the mo:ning duty yesterday, being too tired for the second. As I sat inactive in the afternoon, listening to Mr. Langdon and gazing on the dense crowd before me, I felt humbled exceedingly to think I had to address those numbers every week twice, and that their spiritual life depended, for those hours at least, speaking humanly, on me. How wonderful the opportunity, and how heavy the responsibility! In the crush and rush and hurry of work, and the personal anxieties connected with it, such thoughts do not come, except rarely; but when out of harness, and looking, in the dusky light of evening, into the almost solemn darkness, the feeling came painfully. Such feelings, unhappily, evaporate in the dust of life.

CXLIX.

The last hour has been spent in examining a pile of eighteen letters waiting my arrival-some long, none important, two anonymous-one of them from a young lady defending fashionable society against my tirades; these last I feel are worse than useless, and very impolitic. Nevertheless, more and more, a life of amusement and visiting seems to me in irreconcilable

antagonism to Christianity, and more destructive to the higher spirit than even the mercantile life in its worst form; and yet I do not know; who shall say which is the national spirit more surely, inevitably tending to decay-that of the cities of the plain, or that of Tyre and Sidon?

The austerity that comes after life's experience is more healthy, because more natural, than that which begins it. When it begins life it is the pouring of the new wine into the old weak wine-skins, which burst; and the young heart, cheated out of its youth, indemnifies itself by an attempt to realise the feelings which were denied it by a double measure of indulgence in age. An unlovely spectacle! Can anything be more melancholy than the spectacle of one who is trying to be young, and unable to descend gracefully and with dignity into the vale of years? There is a fine tomb of, I think, Turenne,' at Strasbourg. An open grave lies before him; Death at its side, touching him with his dart; and the warrior descends, with a lofty step and saddened brow, but a conqueror still, because the act is so evidently his own and embraced by his own will, into the sepulchre. I remember it impressed me much with its moral force, and it has little or nothing in it of French theatricality and attitudinising.

me.

CL.

A long dreary vista of many months of pain opens out before Was that a good omen-just as I wrote those words a sudden gleam of sunshine burst out of this gloomy day upon my paper? Benvenuto Cellini would have taken it for a special prediction vouchsafed from heaven, yet it would have made him not a whit the better man. What I miss exceedingly is any religious aspiration through all his book. Convictions of Heaven's personal favour and favouritism are expressed in abundance, but I do not think those religious, in the true sense of the word. In a lower sense, perhaps, they are; at least, a

1 Query, Maréchal Saxe.

feeling of Divine and personal sympathy is indispensable to religion—perhaps one of its bases; but the other basis—a belief in and aspiration after what is high, beautiful, and good—is the more solid and the less easily misused basis of the two; and this you do not find in Cellini's art as in Michael Angelo's, Canova's, Beethoven's-no effort at expressing a something unearthly, which is the true province of imagination.

I think it would be an interesting thing to work out that thought: How far religion has those two sides- the sense of Personality, including sympathy, and the sense of an abstract Beauty, and Right and Good-the one, if alone, producing superstition and fanaticism, or else the mysticism of the Guyon school; the other, if alone, producing mere ethics or mere statesmanship.

CLI.

This morning I arrived here on a visit to Lady Byron, and have been in the house all day, having had no time yet to go out to see the country, which I am told is interesting, with rich woods and fine commons. Lady Byron showed me a picture of Lady Lovelace, taken at seventeen. How different from what she was when I knew her unquestionably handsome, and with an air of sad thoughtfulness which then characterised her! Startling lessons these, in which two or three portraits bring a whole life before you, and show the fearful changes in the outward being. 'Our little life is rounded with a sleep.' Startling, because it reminds how the only thing that remains permanent is character. I have seen, too, to-day the original MS. of Beppo, from which the poem was printed. All such things are curious, and, in certain moods, prolific of much reflection, or rather feeling. The sweep of time, the nearness of the farthest off to that which is nearest, the nothingness of one's own existence in that flood of time-these are the thoughts which come, and, though very old ones, very new every time they present themselves, for they always startle.

The quietude of this place is refreshing, after the inevitable