in imagining the very surly answers which it might suit the character of Charon to return to them.' Upon further consideration,' said he, 'I thought I might say to him, Good Charon, I have been correcting my works for a new edition. Allow me a little time, that I may see how the public receives the alterations. But Charon would answer, When you see the effect of these, you will be for making other alterations. There will be no end of such excuses; so, honest friend, please step into the boat. But I might still urge, Have a little patience, good Charon: I have been endeavouring to open the eyes of the public. If I live a few years longer, I may have the satisfaction of seeing the downfall of some of the prevailing systems of superstition. But Charon would then lose all temper and decency: You loitering rogue, that will not happen these many hundred years. Do you fancy I will grant you a lease for so long a term? Get into the boat this instant, you lazy, loitering rogue.'

"The hour of his departure had now arrived. His decline being gradual, he was, in his last moments, perfectly sensible, and free from pain. He showed not the slightest indication of impatience or fretfulness, but conversed with the people around him in a tone of mildness and affection; and his whole conduct evinced a happy composure of mind. On Sunday, the 25th of August, 1776, about four o'clock in the afternoon, this great and amiable man expired.”—Pp. 298–301.

On this most remarkable exhibition we think there was room for the biographer to have made several observations

First, supposing a certainty of the final cessation of conscious existence at death, this indifference to life, if it was not affected (which indeed we suspect it to have been in part) was an absurd undervaluation of a possession which almost all rational creatures, that have not been extremely miserable, have held most dear, and which is in its own nature most precious. To be a conscious agent, exerting a rich combination of wonderful faculties, to feel an infinite variety of pleasurable sensations and emotions, to contemplate all nature, to extend an intellectual presence to indefinite ages of the past and future, to possess a perennial spring of ideas, to run infinite lengths of inquiry, with the delight of exercise and fleetness, even when not with the satisfaction of full attainment, and to be a lord over inanimate matter, compelling it to an action and a use altogether foreign to its nature,-to be all this, is a state so stupendously different from that of being simply a piece of clay, that to be quite easy and complacent in the immediate prospect of passing from the one to the other, is a total inversion of all reasonable estimates of things; it is a renunciation, we do not say of sound philosophy, but of common sense. The certainty that the loss will not be felt after it has taken place, will but little soothe a man of unperverted mind in considering what it is that he is going to lose.

2. The jocularity of the philosopher was contrary to good taste. Supposing that the expected loss were not, according to a grand law of nature, a cause for melancholy and desperation, but that the contentment were rational; yet the approaching transformation was at all events to be regarded as a very grave and very strange event, and therefore jocularity was totally incongruous with the anticipation of such an event: a grave and solemn feeling was the only one that could be in unison with the contemplation of such a change. There was, in this instance, the same incongruity which we should impute to a writer who should mingle buffoonery in a solemn crisis of the drama, or with the most momentous event of a history. To be in harmony with his situation, in his own view of that situation, the expressions of the dying philosopher were required to be dignified; and if they were in any degree vivacious, the vivacity ought to have been rendered graceful by being accompanied with the noblest effort of the intellect of which the efforts were going to cease for ever. The low vivacity of which we have been reading, seems but like the quickening corruption of a mind whose faculty of perception is putrefying and dissolving even before the body. It is true that good men, of a high order, have been known to utter pleasantries in their last hours. But these have been pleasantries of a fine ethereal quality, the scintillations of animated hope, the high pulsations of mental health, the involuntary movements of a spirit feeling itself free even in the grasp of death, the natural springs and boundings of faculties on the point of obtaining a still much greater and a boundless liberty. These had no resemblance to the low and laboured jokes of our philosopher; jokes so laboured as to give strong cause for suspicion, after all, that they were of the same nature, and for the same purpose, as the expedient of a boy on passing through some gloomy place in the night, who whistles to lessen his fear, or to persuade his companion that he does not feel it.

3. Such a manner of meeting death was inconsistent with the scepticism, to which Hume was always found to avow his adherence. For that scepticism necessarily acknowledged a possibility and a chance that the religion which he had scorned, might, notwithstanding, be found true, and might, in the moment after his death, glare upon him with all its terrors. how dreadful to a reflecting mind would have been the smallest chance of meeting such a vision! Yet the philosopher could

But

be cracking his heavy jokes, and Dr. Smith could be much diverted at the sport.

4. To a man who solemnly believes the truth of revelation, and therefore the threatenings of divine vengeance against the despisers of it, this scene will present as mournful a spectacle as perhaps the sun ever shone upon. We have beheld a man of great talents and invincible perseverance, entering on his career with the profession of an impartial inquiry after truth, met at every stage and step by the evidences and expostulations of religion and the claims of his Creator, but devoting his labours to the pursuit of fame and the promotion of impiety, at length acquiring and accomplishing, as he declared himself, all he had intended and desired, and descending toward the close of life amidst tranquillity, widely-extending reputation, and the homage of the great and the learned. We behold him

appointed soon to appear before that Judge to whom he had never alluded but with malice or contempt; yet preserving to appearance an entire self-complacency, idly jesting about his approaching dissolution, and mingling with the insane sport his references to the fall of "superstition," a term of which the meaning is hardly ever dubious when expressed by such men. We behold him at last carried off, and we seem to hear, the following moment, from the darkness in which he vanishes, the shriek of surprise and terror, and the overpowering accents of the messenger of vengeance. On the whole globe there probably was not acting, at the time, so mournful a tragedy as that of which the friends of Hume were the spectators, without being aware that it was any tragedy at all.

If that barbarous old Charon would have permitted a century or two more of life, it is probable that Hume would have been severely mortified in viewing the effect of his writings against "superstition," an effect so much less than his vanity no doubt secretly anticipated. Indeed, his strictly philosophical works seem likely to fall into utter neglect. The biographer justly observes, that, though very acute, they are not very lucid or systematic in point of reasoning; and they have none of that eloquence, which sometimes continues to interest the general reader in works that are becoming superannuated in the schools of philosophy. Many of his shorter essays will always be read with much advantage; but his History, we need not say, is the basis of his permanent reputation; and it will perpetuate the moral, as well as the

intellectual cast of his mind; it will show a man indifferent to the welfare of mankind, contemptuous of the sublime feelings of moral and religious heroism, incapable himself of all grand and affecting sentiments, and constantly cherishing a consummate arrogance, though often under the semblance and language of philosophic moderation.

XIV.

PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE.

The Philosophy of Nature; or, the Influence of Scenery on the Mind and Heart.

IT may be asserted that there is a relation between the human mind and the whole known creation: in other words, that there are some principles of correspondence in the constitution of the mind, and in the constitutions of all known created things, such as some modes of inspiration, in consequence of which, those things are adapted to produce some effect on the mind when they are presented to it, whether through the medium of the senses, or in any more immediately intellectual manner. It may be added, perhaps, that if the condition of the mind were absolutely and perfectly good, this effect would always be beneficial.

As the mind must, in all periods and regions of its existence, receive its happiness from causes exterior to itself, and as it is probable the one Supreme Cause of that happiness, the Deity, will make a very great part of the happiness which human spirits are to receive from him, come to them through the medium of his works, it is a matter of inexpressible exultation, that those works are so stupendous in multiplicity and magnitude; that they are, indeed, for all practical purposes, infinite. It is with a triumphant emotion, that an aspiring spirit, assured of living for ever, trusting in the divine mercy that it shall be happy in that eternity of life, and certain that its happiness must arise from the impressions made on it by surrounding existences,-it is with an emphatic emotion of triumph that such a spirit considers the vastness of the universe, as progressively demonstrated to us by the advances of science, and as attempted to be realized by an earnest, a delightful, but still an overwhelmed effort of imagination. For it regards the infinity of things as the scene of its indefatigable