the day when the good rules of English society will be exchanged for continental laxity.' 'Confound your impudence, Mr. P. P.!' returned Harry Bobus, a youth of an irreverent frame of mind, what do you mean by talking about society? I'm society.' It was a sublime announcement. L'état c'est moi had been the parallel declaration of Louis Quatorze. We were on the pier at Boulogne. I was tired of the boulevards and was recruiting with a little sea-bathing; and two or three days after my arrival Bobus broke in upon me at my hotel. I gave him such of my company as I could spare from the writing of these immortal papers. Just at this moment the Maravillier girls passed me. They were pleased to salute me with a very gracious smile, I suppose on the strength of my great-aunt having been a Maravillier. What awfully swell girls!' said Bobus-he has never been able to shake off the absurd slang which he picked up during his very temporary sojourn at Oxford-'I have seen them a dozen times in the grounds of the Etablissement, and have wondered so much who they are. I wish you would give me an introduction.' I discovered afterwards that Harry Bobus had been 'loafing about after them'-I use his own coarse term, for which and for the confession I equally reproved him-and his existence had been scornfully ignored. I confess that I hesitated. I wonder whether that elderly Miss Maravillier would thank me for introducing a mere detrimental to her nieces. Bobus had been plucked at college. I had no doubt but all through life his destiny would be to get plucked in one way or another. He was well dressed and good-looking, and had plenty of small-talk, but was not well off either for cash or cleverness. But I thought that the lad would be dull since I could give him so little of my company, and the girls would be pleased to have a good-humoured fellow to fetch and carry for them; and it would be only a passing acquaintance, for I meant to take Bobus back with me; and Miss Maravillier would never disapprove of anything I did; and

I have got a morbid weakness in the way of obliging people. So the words were said, the Open Sesame' uttered, the hat upraised; and ever since that moment Bobus has entirely dropped me; and morning after morning on the sands and pier, evening after evening in the glittering halls of the Etablissement, he was escorting them about. Refusing my word of command to return to England, he allowed me to go home alone, saluting me a little patronisingly, a little ironically, as the boat glided close by them on the pier, as if the Maravillier connection belonged to him rather than to me. I have since heard that he is engaged to marry Kate Maravillier, say in about seven years' time; and 1 shrewdly suspect that my name has disappeared out of that little codicil to old Miss Maravillier's will, either to show her indignation at the unwise introduction or to augment the limited resources of friend Harry Bobus.

But I am a philosopher, and I have been set philosophising on the general subject of introductions. My first feeling naturally is that one cannot be too cautious about them; but then I recollect the wise saying of a good man, that after all prudence is a rascally virtue. What one has to say respecting a personal introduction is doubly true in the case of a letter of introduction. A letter of introduction is virtually a sort of letter of credit. You are A, we will suppose, and you assure B that C will be kind to him, and you assure C that B will be worthy of his kindness. It assumes, in fact, that we are all three well-regulated letters of the alphabet. A letter of introduction is, to me at least, a very sacred thing. It is an appeal both to one's good faith and sense of honour, and also to one's generosity and hospitality. As a rule, you can rarely bestow favours on those who have showed kindness to you: you can only repay it by showing kindness to others, and so expand the ever-widening circle of mutual good offices. Consequently, I rarely feel at liberty to refuse, and never at liberty to ignore, a letter of introduction. And there are only

a certain sort of people, and a certain time of life in which these will be of essential service. A time comes at which, upon the whole, you had rather not increase the number of your acquaintance. Your tastes are formed, your habits fixed, your friendships made, and you do not much care to advance by a hair's breadth beyond your wonted groove. I need hardly say that I should look upon such symptoms as symptoms of mental decrepitude, and should jealously guard against their encroachments. But still they are feelings which consciously or unconsciously govern the minds of a large proportion of mankind. It is in the fresh morning of life, when a man is commencing his career, whether he is striking out into the great world of politics, or is following a humbler, and, in comparison, a more secluded path at a fixed locality, in one of the learned professions, that the great worth of good introductions comes into play. It is not too much to say that the introductions given at this period lend a decided tinge to all the future colour of one's life. There are certain persons by whom, almost to the last, introductions are assiduously sought as essential elements to their success in life. It frequently happens that the lawyer, the doctor, the schoolmaster, considers each additional introduction as an additional step in the extension of their connection; and extension of connection is the single condition of progress and professional advancement.

I cannot but think that if some of the restrictions of society were construed in a more liberal spirit there would be more 'sweetness' and 'light' in the world, and it would be a more graceful and a happier world to live in. I imagine that they do these things better on the Continent and in the United States. I have heard of a clergyman who travelled all over the States, and was received everywhere with boundless hospitality, with no other credentials than a commendatory letter from an English bishop commending him to the kindness of all Christian people. Much of this

VOL. XVII.-NO. CII.

kindness is shown to visitors at a Church Congress, or a meeting of the British Association. Your own friends are probably quite full, but you find yourself billeted on some worthy family, who admit you into kind and sudden intimacy and treat you with unbounded benignity and hospitality. It is well known that when public men are on a tour for some religious or political purpose, they are conveyed from house to house, and their line of travel represents something like a triumphal progress. Might not something of this kind be done in a more limited and private way? For instance, if you are making a long pedestrian tour over a lonely line of country, why should you sit down in a knoll of the turf for your sandwiches? or, if a heavy rain comes on, why should you only resort to a cottage or a public-house? or, if you have missed the train at a little station and must wait for hours before another train comes, why should you consume your time and yourself by stamping up and down within that air-swept shed? Why should you not at once resort to the residence of the squire or the parson, briefly mention your mischance, and be assured of courtesy, rest, and refreshment? You need no introduction: the mischance itself is an introduction. I can imagine no chance more grateful than finding a stranger with simple faith appealing to my sense of courtesy and brotherhood. He shall partake of my tankard and sit among my books; and he shall either have my humble converse or partake of that better silent converse solid books will give him as he lounges on restful sofa or in arm-chair. I may be 'entertaining angels unawares,' or my poor blessing shall return into my own bosom. The misfortune is that one hardly ever gets the chance of doing a simple act of kindness. The selfish and conventional type of our age has been destructive of any thing of the kind. A man would not run the chance of being stared at, and would think it a decided 'grind' to have to make any explanatory remarks. Moreover, a man would probably think it a great bore to

2 P

have to make himself agreeable at a great house; he would prefer to be alone that he may cogitate or read. No thinking man ought to be annoyed at being obliged to take refuge in a cottage for an indefinite time, or to spend some hours at a small station. Probably he has got his writing-case with him, and if he has not got his book, he has his thoughts. Some of the hardest work I have ever done has been wrought under such untoward circumstances. But I believe I have a knack of coming out strong under creditable circumstances. I nearly worked through the Ethics of Aristotle in an omnibus, but then the study of the great founder of the peripatetic philosophy came, I suppose, naturally easy to the Peripatetic.

I have met with persons who have told me that they considered introductions to be altogether supererogatory. They are so confident in their station, character, and address, so perfectly assured that they are able to win their way whenever they choose to do so--and not without valid reasons also-that they hold that introductions are altogether a relic of a vanished ceremonial. Theodore Hook used to say this sort of thing; and there may be people who think it necessary to make the acquaintance of those to whom they cannot obtain an immediate formal introduction. I have often noticed this eccentricity on the part of worthy people, and I can only explain it on the theory of some vague, ill-regulated yearning for sympathy, or on the theory of romantic nonsense of which neither they nor ourselves could give any rational account. But when Haroun Alraschid went about in disguise, and was obliged, when he got himself into circumstances of difficulty, to own himself Haroun Alraschid, he was not always believed to be the Caliph. And a conventional world will hardly credit that a man is a man of sense and status when he does anything opposed to the conventional ideas of their great social requisites. The general impression on the subject of introductions is that we should be both more careful and more liberal in the

matter. A fresh acquaintance is often like fresh air. It liberates the fixed atmosphere, and lets in the helpful ozone that purifies and quickens social life. We would desire that an ampler and freer circulation of these social notes should pass current in the world. Especially in the case of young men beginning their life in London, I would earnestly inculcate the necessity of some thoughtfulness and generosity. At the same time there ought to be much more care and forethought than is often the case with these social instruments. No man has a right to sow his introductions broadcast, inflicting a certain amount of annoyance and inconvenience, when unworthy demands are made upon your good offices, and discrediting an institution which ought to be scrupulously and jealously maintained-the institution which is twice blessed, in conferring hospitality on the stranger, and honour on the absent friend who introduces him.

THE LETTERS OF SIR G. C. LEWIS AND OF SIR CHARLES BELL.*

The letters of Sir G. C. Lewis and of Sir Charles Bell are certainly books which ought to be bracketed together. At the first view there are many points of contact and similarity. Each possessed great eminence in his own walk of life; each had a scientific order of mind; each wrote letters well worthy of preservation at a time when letters had not degenerated, through the penny postage, into mere messages; each had an able and affectionate brother to whom the world is indebted for these memorial pages; each had that same initial title, whatever its value may happen to be; each was prematurely cut off by sudden acute illness. There are here certainly a crowd of similarities. But although the parallel is more complete than that between

*Letters of the Right Hon. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Bart,, to Various Friends." Edited by his Brother, the Rev. F. G. Lewis. Longmans.

'Letters of Sir Charles Bell, Selected from his Correspondence.' Murray.

Macedon and Monmouth, there is also a wonderful difference between the two types of moral and intellectual excellence presented to us in these contemporaneous volumes of mixed biography and autobiography. Let us just glance at the primary impressions left behind by these life-like and instructive books.

Sir George Cornewall Lewis had a mind absolutely dominated by the love of knowledge. His supreme happiness was to be reading and writing; and he tells us that his method was to read when he had plenty of time and to write when he had only scraps of time. His was the celebrated apothegm, that life would be very tolerable save for its amusements. The meeting of Parliament was 'abominable;' to become a Cabinet minister was a bore. He was a student after the fashion of the great students of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The attitude of his mind was always that of critical inquiry. He saw through the dry light' of philosophy, and he saw far whatever way he looked. His mind always took the negative side by a kind of instinct. With lynx-like cleverness he discerned when a controversialist had not proved his case; but the flaw in his mental constitution was that he proceeded to conclude that the unproved case would never be proved. He was content that Niebuhr and Arnold should pull down the fanciful structures of early Latin history, but he declined to endorse any of their reconstructions. Perhaps the only thing that could seriously annoy him was the declared belief that a man could live to a hundred. His hard intellect was singularly lucid and passionless, undimmed by a prejudice or a sympathy. His leading aims were to verify or to contradict. His intense industry, acuteness, sense, and integrity commanded for him a degree of respect hardly paralleled in political and literary circles. But he gives us the impression that while his intellect was developed to the utmost point of human development, the other faculties, which require equal development for the unity and balance of human nature,

were somewhat starved. His most human and redeeming feature was that he was always capable of a hearty laugh. Sir John Pakington said the other night in the House of Commons that the cares of the War Office had killed Sir George Lewis and other war ministers. But it was when he was Secretaryat-War that he composed his Latin disquisition on 'Hey-diddle-diddle,' almost his solitary joke, which would make us imagine that these cares were not overwhelming. His familiar letters showed as much erudition as his familiar wit. He writes a book on the Astronomy of the Ancients,' and then, in a letter to his brother, he discusses the gardens of the Ancients.' He explains that they were not gardens at all, but only shrubberies with bits of statuary about them. The 'Ancients'-those repellent, strangegarbed people-were to him as real as the moderns' who elbowed him in the lobby of the House of Commons. He discusses the matter of yesterday with the same philosophic calmness and detail as the matter of two thousand years ago, and the matter of two thousand years ago with the same carefulness and anxiety for accuracy as if it ruled the living interests of to-day. Yet his stupendous attainments did not save him from an average crop of blunders. He believed that the Crimean war would never result in a peace. He believed that the American war would not terminate in a disruption. Perhaps he was equally mistaken, demonstrably mistaken, when he disbelieved in centenarianism, and utterly denied that there was any interpretation of the cuneiform inscriptions. Intense caution and incredulity, perhaps, after all, are not the best intellectual instruments. The Chancellor of the Exchequer has left no mark in our history. The editor of the Edinburgh Review' has left no mark in our literature. One of the oddest things about him is that he could not understand the popularity of Dickens and Macaulay. It is not difficult to detect the thousand faults, which, as Oliver Goldsmith said, might be proved to be as

many beauties, in these great writers. But not to appreciate the reasons of that popularity indicates a certain intellectual barrenness and deficiency of sympathy. As we look at his stupendous attainments we are reminded of the corded strands of an athlete's arm. The strength is prodigious, but the man may not be very strong. Muscular force is one thing, and vital force is a different thing. We have always greatly respected the character of Sir G. C. Lewis-the effect of this biography is to heighten that respect-but we are unable to see that he was a great statesman, a great writer, or even a great man.

Sir Charles Bell is of a different order of men, more lovable, and without a certain kind of stateliness possessed by Sir George Lewis. Lewis considered men in broad masses, historically, politically, sociologically even; Bell was probably capable of doing the same, but he rather looked upon men with an intense human individual interest. With him the feelings of the poet and the painter are always struggling for expression. He had that tenderness and imaginativeness which are not uncommon with men of profoundly scientific thought, such as Buffon and Faraday. He came up from Edinburgh to London, with great talent and with the reputation for great talent, to try his fortune; and after many years he returned to Edinburgh once more, as Professor in his University, the post, which, to his modest ambition, seemed highest and most honourable of all posts. He took a big, dark, dilapidated house in Soho Square, which once belonged to Speaker Onslow, whither he consigned his museum, his house pupils, his kinsmen, and his servants, and with all his energies went in for that great London practice in which large sums are earned and expended. During all these years in London he corresponded almost daily with his brother in language of frankness and affection which it is difficult to read wholly unmoved. Even in the London streets and squares, where once he delighted to lose himself, observing all the details of the mo

notonous life around him, he keenly noticed each aspect of natural things:

Now, too, the foliage is cool and dark, the light breaks through the trees with silver splendour, and the distance is bright and enticing.' Unlike Sir George, he did not despise the rational amusements of life; the theatre, the opera, and the fine arts were for him enthusiastic relaxations. But his greatest delight, especially if he had been performing an operation, was to get away to country scenes and sounds. His way was made easy for him. Both men of science and men of letters gave him a warm and kindly appreciative reception. Abernethy, who always concealed kindness of heart under roughness of manner, was more than civil to him, and Sydney Smith wrote to Jeffrey: He is modest, amiable, and full of zeal and enterprise in his profession. I could not have conceived that anything could be so perfect and beautiful as his wax models.' It is a remarkable instance of his energy that directly he heard of the battle of Waterloo he started off to the field of action to enlarge his knowledge of gunshot wounds. His surgical instruments proved sufficient passport. The line he took up was the performance of capital surgical operations on the French prisoners. It is remarkable that almost simultaneously we have just had two new and most vivid accounts of the field of Waterloo. One of them is contained in the Letters of Sir C. Bell;' the other is in General Mercer's 'Journal of the Waterloo Campaign.' There is a considerable similarity in the two accounts. Each of them mentions the curious fact that the ground where the French lay seemed a sort of library: each French soldier carried with him into the field the little book, partly printed, which he was obliged to keep, containing a code of rules and his receipts for pay. He thought his French patients looked little better than mere banditti; there was a resentful, sullen rigidness of face, a firmness in their dark eyes as they lay half-covered in the sheets.' Lockhart, in the Life of Scott," mentions that one of his letters had

Mr.