a kingdom of God. I will accept, however, a dish of un-crimped cod on a Christian's table, if you can find it, as such an evidence; or a soup-kitchen, or a ducal suggestion of curry-powder for starving people, provided it comes off his own plate. But the invention of piquant sauces, luxurious furniture, tasteful jewellery, &c. &c. &c. I humbly decline to accept as proofs of anything beyond the fact that man is a very sagacious and surprising beaver. A spirit? Non, mille fois non, unless he can show something more than this. Poor Robert Owen's book, right or wrong, raises Humanity, in my eyes, above a thousand Exhibitions. Cheops and Cephrenes built great pyramids; so did Rhamsinitus, a brick one, very marvellous in its day-a new era in building, they say, as when glass superseded brick. The spirituality of those 'material manifestations?' Mummy of the sacred cat! whose dry carcase has rested there these three thousand years at the expense of the life and breath of the myriad wretches who toiled for their pay of a few onions—say how we shall unswathe the spirituality of that most manifest materialism out of thy most holy cerements. And yet I fancy the progress of the race was made thereby 'patent to the masses,' by a very royal 'patent! I grant the grandeur of the understanding and 'beaverism.' I only say that I measure the spirituality of the grandest undertaking by the degrees of its unselfishness.

Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow :
The rest is all but leather and prunello.

CIX.

June, 1851.

I have been reading some of Leigh Hunt's works lately, the 'Indicator,' ' A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla,' and am surprised at the freshness, and sweetness, and Christian, not lax, spirit of human benevolence and toleration which existed in the heart of one who was the contemporary, and even colleague, of Byron. The Indicator,' a series of papers like the 'Spectator,' &c., is a most refreshing collection of ancient stories and kindhearted literary gossip. The Jar of Honey' is, in fact, nothing

more than a collection of all the sweet things that poetry has hived up for centuries in the literature of Sicily, from the times of Polyphemus, &c. &c., down to those of Theocritus, and even to the present day. There is no very transcendent talent anywhere, but good taste, refinement, tolerably extensive reading, and the springiness of a kind heart, imparting a life and newness to all he says.

You were unfortunate about Covent Garden Market; but it is not always so. Sometimes the brightness of that hour in London is very remarkable. Your description of the fog, dirt, smoke, bustle, &c., made me feel how little, how very, very little, we know and think of the suffering life of our fellowcreatures. To get a dish of green peas, or young potatoes, on a West-End table, how much toil and unknown deprivation must be gone through by human beings! It seems to me a great and good lesson to go through these crowded places to see what life is the life of the millions, not the few-and then to think of our æsthetics, as Kingsley said—and our life one long pursuit of enjoyment, and disappointment if we do not get it. When life to us, from mere heat, is simply endurance, what must it be to those who have only the shady side of a burning house to shelter them, and that only for a few minutes? —for if they stop, there will be no supper that day at home.

About Pascal's opinion, that, as beauty perishes, attachment for the sake of beauty is not attachment-well, I do not know. Mind gets weak; therefore to be attached to a person for mental qualification is not, &c. &c.; and character changes, therefore he who was attached to that which did not last was not attached at all. I do not think this is true. Beauty may be a lower cause of attachment, but I suppose persons may be really attached for that, not merely to that; and quite true that in a low nature that will be a low attachment. I do not think that in a high one it must. In some it kindles high and selfdevoted feelings, just as in a degraded and sensual nature it produces selfish ones. Besides, it is untrue to say that la petite vérole will extinguish it necessarily; it may have begun on account of beauty, and then gone on to something higher. Chivalry, gratitude, habits of tenderness, I believe, would retain

affection, provided it had not been quenched already. No, it would not be la petite vérole that would undermine it, but moral deformity which had been discovered uncorresponding to outward beauty. I am quite certain that beauty attracts an unvitiated heart only because it seems, by a law of our thought, the type of mental and moral beauty; and where these are not, disgust and reaction would come sooner and more surely than from small-pox. Further, I think that where qualities are loved and appreciated by habit, the beauty of feature is no longer observed, nor its absence missed. Expression reminds of what we know of the person, and the shape and colour are actually forgotten. The ugliest man I ever knew I actually at last thought handsome; and I do not believe that any beauty would seem surpassingly beautiful after it had once reminded of folly or evil.

CX.

Thank you for your account of the 'Associations Ouvrières. The time is coming, no doubt, when in some form or other this principle will be tried. I do not expect that it can be the final form of human co-operation. It is too artificial and, at present, only another shape of protection: for which reason I cannot feel very enthusiastic about the 'self-sacrifice' which you think it implies. However, I am willing to accept it as a step to better things. That inalienable capital which your friends are forming, to belong only to the association, will, after a time, become the capital of a wealthy corporation; and if many such corporations should arise, the struggle of the next generation will be to break them down: they will be bloated aristocracies of the year 2000, and the chivalry of that age will be exhibited in a crusade against them.

The elective affinities cannot hold five men together for a month. I wonder where we shall find a principle of cohesion to bind men together really, except interest; for chartisms and socialisms are only this.

I saw a family of love at the Zoological Gardens- five leopards together, kissing and playing with one another. By

and-by a keeper came with sundry joints of a murdered sheep. The brothers began to growl and bite, each seized a bone and went off to his corner, snarling, and unable to enjoy for fear.

An eclectic is one who pieces together fragmentary opinions culled out of different systems on some one or other principle of selection.

I endeavour to seize and hold the spirit of every truth which is held by all systems under diverse, and often in appearance contradictory, forms.

I will give you an instance.

A very short time ago, Mrs. Jameson was showing me the sketches she had made for her new work on Christian Art, exhibiting the gradual progress in the worship of the Virgin.

At first the sculptures were actual copies of known heathen goddesses with a child in arms; then the woman kneeling before the Son-next the woman crowned, on a throne with the Son, but lower; after that, on the same throne on a higher level; lastly, the Son in wrath, about to destroy the universe, and the mother interposing her woman's bosom in intercession. These were distinctly different in date.

Well, I remembered at once, this is what the Evangelicals do in another way. They make two Gods, a loving one and an angry one-the former saving from the latter. Both, then, agree in this, that the anger and the love are expressed as resident in different personalities.

Now here I get a truth.

Not by eclecticism, taking as much of each as I like, but that which both assert; and then I dispense with the former expression of the thought. The Son and the Virgin, the Father and the Son, opposed to each other; this is

the form of thought, in both false; the human mind's necessity of expressing objectively the opposition of two truths by referring them to different personalities, leaving them thus distinct, real, and undestroyed by a namby-pamby blending of the two into one, I recognise as the truth of both.

The Evangelical 'scheme' of reconciling justice with mercy I consider the poorest effort ever made by false metaphysics. They simply misquote a text. That he might be just [and yet] the justifier. Whereas St. Paul says, the just and the justifier : i.e. just because the justifier. The Romish view is as usual materialistic, but both express the same felt necessity. And, in fact, truth is always the union of two contradictory propositions, both remaining undiluted—not the via media between them.

The Romish view, however coarsely and materially, expresses another truth. In Christ is neither male nor female.' Now the common view of His incarnation had only exhibited the fact that man, meaning the masculine sex, had become in Him divine. Soon, however, the world began to feel womanly qualities are divine too. Not the courage and the wisdom, which used to be deified, but the graces which Christianity has emphatically pronounced blessed. Now they did not perceive that this truth is contained in the incarnation of Him in whom met all that was most womanly and all that was most manly: that divine manhood means not divine masculiness, but divine humanity, containing both sexes as the mutual supplement of each other. Accordingly, what was left for them but to have a queen of heaven as well as a Son of God?

It is very curious that M. Comte, the French infidel, has, in his way, felt the same necessity. In his last work, I am told, he speaks of woman-worship as that which the age wants.

Thus, then, out of Evangelicalism and Romanism, I get one and the same truth. And out of Romanism and Atheism I get another truth-not eclectically, but just as I should get oxygen out of rust, carbonic acid, mould, and then hold oxygen as one of the principles of the universe, because I found it in almost everything.

My system, no doubt, is vague; but it saves me from dogma