thinkers of the age from a profound into a superficial treatment of the problems they are called upon to solve. Every age has its temptations-earlier times were no more without them than our own. To our thinking, the alternating superstitious dread and senseless adulation to which the pioneers of thought were subjected, must have exerted a more wintry influence upon their spirits than any adverse influences their successors are called to combat. From the vague and imperfect knowledge of science, and the dim and shadowy conceptions of the material universe which filled their minds, the thinking of those much-lauded times was necessarily as often puerile as profound. No man of letters need now, as many men of letters in those ages did, build up a seemingly goodly structure reflecting the highest lustre upon their ingenuity and acuteness, but which, from its utter want of any basis of facts, proved nothing better than a card-castle, which the first breath of the zephyr might blow into dust. With all due deference, then, to those who venerate with an idolatrous reverence the bulky tomes of our literary sires, we believe that in the present we shall find as profound thinkers as in any past time. Nor should such a statement be deemed at all extravagant: if, as Carlyle truthfully and humorously remarks, the world has been under way ever since Noah left the ark, we ought to have made some progress-at least,

there should be no retrogression, no degeneracy. And we have only to scan our present position, to find there really has been none. We see no necessity for allowing the gloom which clouds the souls of some, as they contrast the past with the present, to cast its pall over our spirits. The bow of God and the everlasting arch of heaven's azure as really o'erspans our horizon as it did all our fathers'. A question very naturally suggests itself here, To what do we owe this advancement of society-this progress of the race! We stay not to indicate all the varied elements which have combined to produce so gratifying a result. Our business now is with the purely literary element. That it has imparted a very powerful and very salutary impetus to society, will, we presume, be disputed by none, except perchance the autocrat whose attempts to throttle it have been thwarted, or some college of cardinals who have beheld their darling dogmas toppling to their fall beneath its influence.

We know no more interesting study than tracing the progress of this power from its state of nonage to its present maturity and position. In its earlier and infantile condition, we find it alternately flattered and frowned upon by the great ones of the earth, as they imagined it either served or subverted their purposes -seconded or thwarted their ambition. Now, it has grown into an authority which, on occasion, makes the

mighty of the earth tremble. Formerly statesmer could afford to dispense with the aid of literature, and could affect to despise its paper-shot; now there is no measure they can hope to carry until it has been thoroughly ventilated by the press. Formerly ecclesiastical corporations and ecclesiastical courts could riot, unchecked, in the caprices of tyranny or rapacity; now every indication of the exercise of the one, or the indulgence of the other, is instantaneously denounced by this subtle and lynx-eyed power.

Not the periodical press alone, but the novelist has found in these abuses material to interest the people while influencing authority. Conspicuous among those who have almost become a political power through the popular novel, is Charles Dickens. It may be a question with critics how far Dickens has, in his more recent writings, been sacrificing permanent fame for immediate effect, by entering this fertile and inviting field; but there can be no question about the effect. Lawyers have reclaimed against the treatment they have met with in "Bleak House;" and had only lawyers complained, they might perhaps have been left to nurse their sorrow and their wrath. Unfortunately, from caricaturing Chancery, Dickens passed to caricaturing Christianity. Like the late Lord Jeffrey, Hugh Miller enjoyed the most exquisite gratification from the genial and genuinely English writings of the

prince of modern novelists. Nevertheless, he was unable to refrain from embodying in one of his latest and most elaborate articles, a stern dissent from the mode in which Dickens has abused the opportunities of the novelist in burlesquing the sanctities of a day, the sole relic of an innocence that is no more, and still the sacrament of benison and blessing sin cannot destroy:

"Never was Burke more essentially wrong, and never was he more popularly right, than, when speaking of the high tone of civilization in the court of France, he described it as that unbought grace of life 'by which vice itself loses half its evil by losing all its grossness.' It is not vice, but the accessories of vice, that shock the feelings of worldly men. A fine gentleman of the Feejee Islands, when he happens to quarrel with one of his wives, and is resolved that her fate shall be an example to the rest, takes her into a field, and orders her to prepare and heat a native oven; which being done, he clubs her, and putting her into the oven, coolly sits down till she is sufficiently baked, when he devours her at his leisure. On hearing of such an atrocity, the good-natured world holds up its hands in horror and amazement; while a plain story of every-day murder excites very little attention. In like manner, it is not virtue, but the mere adjuncts of virtue, that command the admiration of the vulgar. And these, in order to please the popular taste, must

be painted in the most glaring and exaggerated colours, like Tony's 'Bet Bouncer of these parts,' who had 'two eyes as black as sloes, and cheeks as broad and red as a pulpit-cushion.' Well did our old writers of romance know this failing of humanity; and, therefore, when vice was to be pourtrayed, it stalked forth

'A monster of such hideous mien,

As, to be hated, needs but to be seen;'

and when virtue was brought on the stage, she appeared in pure white muslin and all sorts of bedizenments, like the heroine of a provincial theatre. Our popular romancer, Mr. Dickens, has improved on this ancient plan. He has the same sort of audience to deal with; he also must consult the taste of the groundlings; but, to diversify the entertainment he has contrived to clothe his vicious characters with some of the most attractive attributes of virtue, and to exhibit virtue in some of the most repulsive habiliments of vice. His Newman Noggs and Dick Swivellers,-characters which, if met in actual life, would be studiously avoided by all who had a character to lose,-he invests with the most amiable qualities, borrowed, like their garments, from better men. On the other hand, his Pecksniffs and Dombeys, who, we doubt not, were very virtuous and excellent men in their own way, it is his delight