a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a mind like Hoffmann's, the path of propriety was difficult to find-still more difficult to keep. "Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse." A good or a wise man we must not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, "to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust." So, again, in the same author's review of the life and writings of Werner—who, always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us. For "there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to explain them." Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh or even irreverent investigation. "He is a wise man that, having such a belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those, we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that of other men's." Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively but negatively,-less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle's doctrine, not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. "This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared to them!" Here,

according to our author, lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. "Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs."

To a very different style of sinners the same judgmentrather the same refusal to judge-is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history of France's reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so greedily her own children. "For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now [April 1794] stript of its bonnet rouge [and a traveller by tumbril to Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death were an eternal sleep'? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I."

Once more: "Unhappy soul! who shall judge him?" is the historian's deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically strong,-who dies, confessedly a very great sinner, early in 1733. Who shall judge him?

"Hereafter?—And do you think to look
On the terrible pages of that Book
To find his failings, faults, and errors?
Ah, you will then have other cares,
In your own shortcomings and despairs,
In your own secret sins and terrors !"

Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief-rather hotly, for his esprit de corps was piqued-that when a soldier "gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson-though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby-for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)-it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not."

In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a "double-first" candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: "And yet," comes the charitable clause conditional, "I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?"

In Mr. Thackeray's instance, exception has been taken, on ethical grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters. Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place (nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question-for some years a main support of the National Review-recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men's real motives of action.*

"WE

PART KNOWLEDGE.

I CORINTHIANS xiii. 9.

E know in part," said the apostle; who, therefore, prophesied in part; always with the assurance that when that which is perfect is come, then shall that which is in part be done away. Meanwhile, we see through a glass darkly, through a medium obscurely-"now I know in part."

*The avoidance of moral estimate, on the other hand, is imputed to an insufficient sense of the duty incumbent on all of us to form determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own conduct in life. (See "W. C. Roscoe's Essays," vol. ii., p. 308.)

If so it was with him that once was caught up into the third heavens, much more with his readers. For we are but of yesterday, and know nothing. "Behold, God is great, and we know Him not." At the height of our knowledge we can but fall back upon the old saying, "Lo, these are parts of His ways; but how little a portion is heard of Him!" And when we consider the heavens, the work of His hands; the moon and the stars, which He hath ordained; the earth beneath, the ocean round about, the waters under the earth, the pent-up fires within it, verily He is a God that hideth Himself still, and that revealeth but a portion of His work, clouds and darkness covering the rest. His thoughts are very deep; and what is man that he should know them, or the son of man that he should find them out unto perfection? From the topmost pinnacles attained by science he can see but the utmost part of them, and cannot see them all.

Locke argues the intellectual and sensible world to be in this perfectly alike: that the part which we see of them holds no proportion with what we see not; and that whatsoever we can reach with our eyes, or our thoughts, of either of them, is but a point, almost nothing, in comparison with the rest. Shall he whose birth, maturity, and age, as Beattie has it, scarce fill the circle of one summer day-shall the poor gnat conclude nature in collapse because of a passing cloud, not transparent to the insect's vision ?

"One part, one little part, we dimly scan

Through the dark medium of life's feverish dream;
Yet dare arraign the whole stupendous plan,

If but that little part incongruous seem.

Nor is that part perhaps what mortals deem ;

Oft from apparent ill our blessings rise.

Oh then renounce that impious self-esteem,

That aims to trace the secrets of the skies ;

For thou art but of dust be humble and be wise."

Freethinking Lord Shaftesbury begins a section of his "Characteristics" with the remark, that when we reflect on any ordinary frame or constitution, either of art or nature, and consider how hard it is to give the least account of a particular

Q

part without a competent knowledge of the whole, we need not wonder to find ourselves at a loss in many things relating to the constitution and frame of the universe. Elsewhere he suggestively observes, that in an infinity of things mutually relative, a mind which sees not infinitely, can see nothing fully; "and since each particular has relation to all in general, it can know no perfect or true relation of anything in a world not perfectly and fully known." And supposing the case of an ignorant landsman presuming to question the details of a ship's rigging, his lordship breaks out into the apostrophe, "O my friend, let us not thus betray our ignorance, but consider where we are, and in what a universe. Think of the many parts of the vast machine in which we have so little insight, and of which it is impossible we should know the ends and uses; when instead of seeing to the highest pennons, we see only some lower deck, and are in this dark case of flesh, confined even to the hold and meanest station of the vessel." There is Mrs. Browning's usual energy of diction in the exclamation,

"Ay, we are forced, so pent,

To judge the whole too partially, confound
Conclusions. Is there any common phrase
Significant, when the adverb's heard alone,
The verb being absent, and the pronoun out?

But we, distracted in the roar of life,

Still insolently at God's adverb snatch,

And bruit against Him that His thought is void,
His meaning hopeless."

The same good Providence, as Madame de Sévigné writes, that governs all, shall one day unravel all; we poor mortals being, in the meanwhile, so many all but stone-blind and utterly ignorant lookers-on. We suffer, as the author of "Thorndale " says there is no doubt about that—and we naturally speak and think under the sharp pang of our present agony ; but the ultimate and overruling judgment which we form of human life, should be taken from 'some calm, impersonal point of view. "We should command the widest horizon possible. Of the great whole of humanity we see but a little at a time. We pause sometimes on the lights only of the picture, some