respect the ages which have preceded us, and that it will be well for us to entertain for our ancestors an indulgence, of which we shall have only too great need from our posterity." That the children's view of past times, however taken up, is nearer to the truth, historically speaking, than that of many able and learned writers who represent those ages in exclusively dark colours, will be the conviction established by subsequent study, but with which of course we have no concern here. To glance however at one instance, and borrow the language of the Père de Neuville: "Look at the facts in the reign of St. Louis. I see battles gained and enemies humbled. What more could have been done by a warlike king? I see glory sacrificed to the repose of the people. What more could have been accomplished by a pacific prince? I see successful diplomacy. What more could have been achieved by a politic sovereign? The arts in honour, sciences cultivated, talents recompensed. What more by a philosophic ruler? Exact and precise laws and administrators. What more by a crowned legislator? Commerce flourishing, innocence safe, vice intimidated. What more by the virtuous chief of a republic? Neighbouring nations appealing to him in their disputes. What more by a Solomon? This warrior is a man of peace and gentleness; this lover of peace is dreaded; this politician is a man of simplicity; this lover of the arts is a man of prayer and austerity; this legislator is a man of equity; this general arbitrator, a man of humility, devoted to the happiness of his own nation." "I began the study of the ancient society," says De Tocqueville, in his recent work, "full of prejudices against it; I finished full of respect for it *." You see then, if you will attach credit to any testimony, that the young people's instinctive admiration, and what the old French writers would call their raisonnettes, did not lead you so astray, even in regard to a vulnerable side of the ancient Christian civilization, which was still resisted by many barbaric elements. And if you take into account religious considerations, which after all that we can say, are of more importance than any results affecting civil and temporal matters, or conclusions merely historical, political, or literary, you will

*L'Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 198.

find still greater reason to feel gratitude for your little guides who so artlessly and so safely lead you. With breathless attention you will then hear, to the justice of the children's view of past ages, the attestations of the wise and thoughtful, who, turning from the brilliant but shallow declamations of the modern historians, politicians, and parliamentary talkers, will say with one who witnessed their first success, without perceiving what good Providence effected for the present and future period of the world, by means of their foolish will which anticipated it not, "Allow me to confess, gentlemen, I see what we have lost for heaven by this revolution of ideas and sentiments. I do not see what we have gained for the earth. I do not see with what moral virtue the place of the evangelical virtues has been supplied, nor what can console me as a citizen, for what I regret as a Christian. When there will be fewer saints in the country, will there be more great men? Do we perceive that in proportion as faith disappears, equity, gravity, and the study of law attains to greater perfection in the sanctuary of justice? application, capacity, disinterestedness, and the avoidance of luxury in the military state? modesty, decorum, affection in the bosom of families? the love of the people in those who preside over the public fortune? We ridicule the simplicity of the people in the times of St. Louis. I admit they had only the talents of probity, truth, courage, disinterestedness, magnanimity, cordiality, love of religion and of fatherland. We have the talents of speculation, of discussion, of system, that of thinking with finesse, of expressing ourselves with grace, of disputing, of reasoning, of subtilizing in every thing, and of despising every thing excepting our own age and our personal merit *.'

Moved by such convictions, men in later life will sometimes even go beyond what the thoughts of children would suggest. They will deny the natural, ancient, and Christian notion of the progressive improvement of mankind, which, as Villemain remarks, dates in the West from St. Ambrose, St. Augustin, and Salvian, St. Ambrose, in his reply to Symmachus, having said that the human race attains to more perfection by degrees,

*De Neuville.

as the universe arose out of chaos, and that it is even the progress of social life which leads man towards a purer religion. They will affect incredulity respecting such hopes, denounce their own age, write, as Lamb humorously says, "for antiquity," or, like those described by Tacitus, they will, while extolling ancient things, be indifferent to what is recent, and, from wanting the juvenile freedom and the natural equipoise of judgment which belongs to the young, will fancy that past times alone are entitled to respect, like Evelyn advising a friend to cite Socrates Scholasticus rather than Sir Walter Raleigh's History of the World, "who was but of yesterday;" or like the friend of Emerson, of whom he says, "The old times of England impress him much; he reads little now but Acta Sanctorum. He finds all English history therein. The Acta Sanctorum show plainly that the men of those times believed in God, and in the immortality of the soul, as their abbeys and cathedrals testify,-now all is gone!"-concluding thus, with rash and immoderate opinions, like many other grown-up learned men, who deal in exaggerations implying consequences affecting those with whom we live, of which children and youth would be never guilty; for they resemble those great characters that, while connected by a thousand ties with the past, evince sympathy for modern ideas, and an interest in the progress of their own times. Moved by what is ancient, and filled with admiration for what is new, they are always living in their own age, and gathering instruction out of their own age, like the greatest men, whether poets, or artists, or historians, who all of them, as an eminent author remarks, in the instances of Dante, Chaucer, Masaccio, and Tintoret, regardless of minor errors of every kind, are "getting always vital truth out of the vital present;" while, in regard to things Divine, they find verified the remark of Pascal, that "the true religion is such, that the state in which it is actually at any time is sufficient to prove its truth *.”

Aristotle says that when men think of the the earth; when of the future, to the sky.

past they look to Youth may have

its little archæologians, who like to creep below ruins, and grub in the ground, stooping over it to find what is bygone; but its

* Pensées.

eyes are generally not downwards cast: they are directed upwards. They find raking in the past beneath their feet to be but poor work after all. They look at the sky; they gaze at its glorious colours, at its openings into infinity; and men can learn from this custom of the bower to hail and cling to that truth which speaks most of the future, and of which the chief attraction is the hope that it holds out to them of obtaining at last what alone can satisfy the human heart,—the eternal felicity of heaven.

But we must close this chapter, lest truth, tired with iteration, should find no cause to thank us. One suggestion more, and it shall end.

In no country does the transition from youth to maturity produce such abrupt and disagreeable contrasts as in one where the spirit of society is at greatest variance with the ancient religion of Christendom. Now, there's a fact for you. In such a land every stranger is enchanted with the countenances of children and young people up to fifteen or even twenty years of age, while feeling a totally different impression from observing those of persons more advanced in years, who, to their boast that they will tell us wonders, deserve to hear only Jaquenetta's answer,- "With that face?" Elia himself had thought of this when he exclaimed, upon seeing the Eton boys at play, "What a pity to think that these fine ingenuous lads in a few years will all be changed into frivolous members of Parliament!" A man must be without the sense of beauty and of the ludicrous who has not often been struck with this fact, however it may impress him. Is it that the natural affinity between youth and truth explains the expression of the former, so full of sweetness, symmetry, and repose, as you meet them in the streets and highways hourly, outreaching all efforts of conception as all power of realization, were it Raffaelle's three times over? And is it that the artificial, antagonistic, and discordant elements, to which men yield in later life, have produced the latter, containing "so many broad indications of evil, which the bluntest feeling may perceive," as pride, disdain of what is below them, avarice, luxury, profaneness, brutality? The contrasts between what is seen in the bower and what is witnessed in the hall, cannot, as we might show, for many reasons, be

VOL. II.

F

referred to physical causes, for such things are powerless in moulding the corporeal expression of mental character; but lest we should seem in our turn to exaggerate any thing, and as you may not be willing to hear me while I give a guess, it must be left to others to draw whatever conclusions on this point they may think fit and legitimate. It is probable that, if they refuse to adopt the young for guides in respect to the present lesson, it will not be from a wish to retain in manhood the charming expression of youthful purity, docility, or the aspect of that childlike tenderness and simplicity, which Frederick Schlegel says he has always considered "as the original characteristic of the human race." It is certain that it will not be from having a mind well informed as to the means of cultivating those qualities themselves, and of combining them with those that can belong to later life, of which the traces suggestive of the Adamite fall can proclaim at the same time that "the renewing of our nature in the divinity of Christ is a nobler condition than that of Paradise

CHAPTER XIII.

HE sea-shore has its bowers as the garden hath, and here is one of them. It is very wrong, no doubt, but I own that I have more sadness than delight in beholding this part of creation. It is said that the mediævals had a

peculiar dislike for it. So far, at least, I am

one of them. Without having been ever shipwrecked and nearly drowned, like Ulysses, though often in younger days, as indeed, for that matter, I might sometimes wish still to be, beaten about in it, the wide expanse of the "fruitless and devouring sea," while I am sitting on the beach without any other object in view, to my eyes looks desolate.

*Ruskin.