said upon subjects. As we now stand, no individual man holds or can hold that relation to universal knowledge, which was held by Dante, or by Bacon, or by Leibnitz. A few subjects, in most cases a very few indeed, are or can be known in themselves by direct and immediate study; a larger number by an immediate knowledge of what writers, or the most accredited writers, have said upon them; the largest number by far only from indirect accounts, or as it were rumours, of the results which writers and students have attained.

Ad nos vix tenuis famæ perlabitur aura.

It seems, however, safe to say that the largest part even of civilised nations, in the greater proportion of the subjects that pass through the mind, or touch the course of common action, have not even this, but have only a vague unverified impression that the multitude, or the best, think so and so, and that they had better act and think accordingly. To some this may be an unwelcome announcement. The fact of their ignorance, and its burden, they have borne in patience; but it is less easy to bear equably the discovery how great that burden is.

Authority, in matters of opinion, divides itself (say) into three principal classes. There is the authority of witnesses. They testify to matters of fact: the judgment upon these is commonly though not always easy; but this testimony is always the substitution of the faculties of others for our own, which, taken largely, constitutes the essence of authority. This is the kind which we justly admit with the smallest jealousy. Yet not always: one man admits, another refuses, the authority of a sea-captain and a sailor or two on the existence of the sea-serpent.

Then there is the authority of judges. To such authority we have constantly to submit. And this too is done for the most part willingly; but unwillingly, when we have been told what we are about. These judges sometimes supply us with opinions upon facts, sometimes with facts themselves. The results, in pure science, are accepted by us as facts; but on the methods by which they are reached, the mass, even of intelligent and cultivated men, are not competently informed. Judgments on difficult questions of finance are made into compulsory laws, in parliaments where only one man in a score, possibly no more than one in a hundred, thoroughly comprehends them. All kinds of professional advice belong to this order in the classification of authorities.

But, thirdly, as Lewis has observed with much acuteness, we are in the constant habit of following yet another kind of authority, the authority of ourselves. In very many cases, where we have reached certain results by our own inquiries, the process and the evidence have been forgotten, and are no longer present to the mind at times when we are called upon to act; they are laid aside as no longer necessary;

we are satisfied with the knowledge that we inquired at a former time. We now hold to the conclusion, not remembering accurately its warrant, but remembering only that we once decided that it had a warrant. In its essence, this is acting upon authority. From this sort of action upon authority I believe no man of active life, however tenacious be his memory, can escape. And no man, who is content to act on this kind of authority, is entitled to object in principle to acting on other kinds. That I myself am the authority for myself is only an accident of the case. It would be more, could I lay down. the dogma that an inquiry by me is better and more conclusive than an inquiry by others. We are bound to act on the best presumption, whether that presumption happens to rest on something done by others, or on something we have done ourselves.

While the naked exhibition of the amount of guidance found for us by authority is certainly unflattering, it has a moral use in the inculcation of much humility. It also offers to the understanding a subject of profound and wondering contemplation, by revealing to us, in measureless extent, the law of human interdependence, which again should have its moral use in deepening the sense of the brotherhood of man.

A general revolt, then, against authority, even in matters of opinion, is a childish or anile superstition, not to be excused by the pretext that it is only due to the love of freedom cherished in excess. The love of freedom is an essential principle of healthy human action, but is only one of its essential principles. Such a superstition, due only to excess in the love of freedom, may remind us that we should be burned to cinders were the earth capable of imitating its wayward denizens, and indulging itself only in an excess of the centripetal force. We may indeed allow that when personal inquiry has been thorough, unbiassed, and entire, it seems a violation of natural law to say that the inquirer should put it aside in deference to others, even of presumably superior qualification. Here there enters into the case a kind of sacred right of insurrection, essential as a condition of human progress. But the number of the cases in which a man can be sure that his own inquiry fulfils these conditions is comparatively insignificant. Wherever it falls short of fulfilling them, what may be called the subjective speciality of duty disappears; there remains only the paramount law of allegiance to objective truth, and that law, commonly dealing with probable evidence, binds us to take not that evidence with which we ourselves have most to do, but that which, whether our own or not, offers the smallest among the several likelihoods of error. The common cases of opposition lie not between authority and reasonable conviction, but between authority and fancy; authority and lame, or weak, or hasty, or shallow, processes of the mind; authority and sheer selfconceit or headstrong or indolent self-love.

There is something noble in a jealousy of authority, when the intention is to substitute for it a strong persistent course of mental labour. Such labour involves sacrifice, and sacrifice can dignify much error. But unhappily the rejection of authority is too often a cover for indolence as well as wantonness of mind, and the rejection of solid and venerable authority is avenged by lapse into the most ignoble servitudes. Those who think lightly of the testimony of the ages, the tradition of their race, which at all events keeps them in communion with it, are often found the slaves of Mr. A. or Mr. B., of their newspaper or of their club. In a time of much mental movement, men are apt to think it must be right with them, provided only that they move; and they are slow to distinguish between progress and running to and fro. If it be a glory of the age to have discovered the unsuspected width of the sway of law in external nature, let it crown the exploit by cultivating a severer study, than is commonly in use, of the law weighty beyond all others, the law which fixes, so to speak, the equation of the mind of man in the orbit appointed for the consummation of his destiny.

W. E. GLADSTONE.

TURKISH STORY-BOOKS.

ALL who know the Turkish common people intimately speak well of them. Sober, honest, and industrious, the Turk, so long as he is poor and lowly, is a respectable member of society, with numerous good points in his character. But, like the proverbial beggar, he no sooner mounts aloft than he hastens towards evil. There are certain fishes which are intended by nature for great sea depths; severe pressure suits them, and they thrive in their extremely low position. But when they are raised towards the surface they undergo a change very much for the worse, culminating in collapse and subsequent physical corruption. In like manner the Turk, when elevated from his low estate, rapidly degenerates. The virtues which throve under the stern pressure of need collapse, and he becomes morally corrupt. The decent, God-fearing villager or artisan becomes the rapacious, brutal official, who sets at defiance laws human and divine. Fortunately for the prospects of Turkey, the tolerably good common people are many, the intolerably bad magnates are few in number. Under a wise system of government the virtues of the people may be preserved and fostered, the vices of its officials may be scotched if not quite killed. We all know the immense change for the better in this respect which has been brought about in Russia during the last twenty years. Let us hope that similar good fortune is in store for the realm of the Sultan.

From books of travel and other accounts of the Turk written by men of alien race, tongue, and creed, it is difficult and even dangerous to derive decided impressions of Turkish life and character. But there are certain books which have been written by Turks for Turks, and which, as they bear the stamp of popular approval, doubtless describe the people of Turkey as they really are, and not as they appear to be to a hasty foreign observer. From such of these as have been translated into Western tongues, a probably correct though limited idea of the Turkish popular mind may be formed by ordinary readers. Take, for instance, the military romance,' supposed to have been composed about the end of the fourteenth or the beginning of the fifteenth century, which tells how the Ottoman hero, Sayyid Battâl, warred against the Greeks, utterly routing them, and putting

1 Die Fahrten des Sajjid Batthâl. Ein alttürkischer Volks- und Sittenroman, übersetzt von Dr. Hermann Ethé. Leipzig, 1871.

them to open shame on every occasion, during a long life which reached its prime about the end of the eighth century. From it may be obtained some notion of the martial spirit which made the Ottomans a ruling race, and especially of the physical and moral superiority which enabled them so easily to subdue the enervated and dissolute Greeks of the Lower Empire. To that ferocity, also, which not only survives among the present Turks, but has infected their Albanian and Slavonic subjects or neighbours, the tale frequently bears witness-the narrator evidently chuckling as he describes how his hero, on receiving unpleasant messages from the Greeks, would slay the innocent messengers, or send them back to their employers deprived of their ears and noses. But this unhistorical novel' deals almost entirely with the warlike side of Turkish life. For a picture of civil and domestic existence it is better to turn to another popular Turkish work, the Counsels given by Nabi Effendi to his son Abul Khair. This poem was composed about the year 1694; but as all things change slowly in the East, the sketches it contains of Turkish customs, the impressions it conveys of Turkish sentiment, are probably as true now as they were then. Born at Roha about the year 1632, Nabi Yusuf Effendi filled several posts of distinction, finally occupying that of Controller of the Cavalry, which he held until his death in 1712 at Constantinople. The Turks rank his writings among their classics, admiring them for various reasons. But the merit of the book in question consists, so far as foreign readers are concerned, in the elevation of its moral tone, in the kindly spirit to which it testifies on the part of its author, and in the generous fervour with which he denounces those sins of the governing classes which have never ceased to bear most bitter fruit on Turkish soil from his times down to our own. His morality is not always exactly the same as ours. Thus in the, to a great extent, very sensible chapter on marriage, he recommends his son not to be in a hurry to wed. A young man married is evidently, in his eyes, a young man marred.

But when he speaks on other subjects his sentiments are seldom in disaccord with ours. His thought is usually as noble as his expression is ornate, more especially when he attacks hypocrites and oppressors, strips the mantle of sanctity from the dervish, or scourges the unjust cadi and the rapacious pasha. What can be more hateful,' he cries, 'than those miserable impostors who parade through the provinces their pretended sanctity?' Neither in this world nor in the next will their false devotion help them. The frock, the chaplet, and the staff have become lures to obtain material goods.' As to the dances and songs of the dervish, they are the fruit of hypocrisy and cunning. His actions are a farce, his love for God a pretence, his ecstasies a mere sham. And yet to the like of him the poor and

2 Conseils de Nabi Efendi à son fils Aboul Khair. Publiés en turc avec la traduction française et des notes par M. Pavet de Courteille. Paris, 1857.