light" comes often on small wings. For seem always as if they were being wieldthe pleasure that we take in beautiful na-ed and swept together by a whirlwind; of ture is essentially capricious. It comes the air coming, laden with virginal persometimes when we least look for it; and fumes, over the myrtles and the scented sometimes, when we expect it most cer- underwood; of the empurpled hills standtainly, it leaves us to gape joylessly for ing up, solemn and sharp, out of the days together, in the very home-land of green-gold air of the east at evening. the beautiful. We may have passed a There go many elements, without place a thousand times and one; and on doubt, to the making of one such moment the thousand and second it will be trans- of intense perception; and it is on the figured, and stand forth in a certain splen happy agreement of these many elements, dour of reality from the dull circle of on the harmonious vibration of many surroundings; so that we see it " with a nerves, that the whole delight of the mochild's first pleasure," as Wordsworth ment must depend. Who can forget saw the daffodils by the lake side. And how, when he has chanced upon some if this falls out capriciously with the attitude of complete restfulness, after healthy, how much more so with the inva-long uneasy rolling to and fro on grass lid. Some day he will find his first violet, or heather, the whole fashion of the landand be lost in pleasant wonder, by what alchemy the cold earth of the clods, and the vapid air and rain, can be transmuted into colour so rich and odour so bewilderingly sweet. Or perhaps he may see a group of washerwomen relieved, on a spit of shingle, against the blue sea, or a meeting of flower-gatherers in the temperate daylight of an olive-garden; and something significant or monumental in the grouping, something in the harmony of faint colour that is always characteristic of the dress of these southern women, will come home to him unexpectedly, and awake in him that satisfaction with which we tell ourselves that we are the richer by one more beautiful experience. Or it may be something even slighter as when the opulence of the sunshine, which somehow gets lost and fails to produce its effect on the large scale, is suddenly revealed to him by the chance isolation as he changes the position of his sunshade of a yard or two of roadway with its stones and weeds. And then, there is no end to the infinite variety of the olive-yards themselves. Even the colour is indeterminate and continually shifting: now you would say it was green, now grey, now blue; now tree stands above tree, like "cloud on cloud," massed into filmy indistinctness; and now, at the wind's will, the whole sea of foliage is shaken and broken up with little momentary silverings and shadows. But every one sees the world in his own way. To some the glad moment may have arrived on other provocations; and their recollection may be most vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of tropical effects, with canes and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that

scape has been changed for him, as though the sun had just broken forth, or a great artist had only then completed, by some cunning touch, the composition of the picture? And not only a change of posture-a snatch of perfume, the sudden singing of a bird, the freshness of some pulse of air from an invisible sea, the light shadow of a travelling cloud, the merest nothing that sends a little shiver along the most infinitesimal nerve of a man's body-not one of the least of these but has a hand somehow in the general effect, and brings some refinement of its own into the character of the pleasure we feel. And if the external conditions are thus varied and subtle, even more so are those within our own bodies. No man can find out the world, says Solomon, from beginning to end, because the world is in his heart; and so it is impossible for any of us to understand, from beginning to end, that agreement of harmonious circumstances that creates in us the highest pleasure of admiration, precisely because some of these circumstances are hidden from us forever in the constitution of our own bodies. After we have reckoned up all that we can see or hear or feel, there still remains to be taken into account some sensibility more delicate than usual in the nerves affected, or some exquisite refinement in the architecture of the brain, which is indeed to the sense of the beautiful as the eye or the ear to the sense of hearing or sight. We admire splendid views and great pictures; and yet what is truly admirable is rather the mind within us, that gathers together these scattered details for its elight, and makes out of certain colours, certain distributions of graduated light and darkness, that intelligible whole which alone

falls out of the little eddy that circulates in the shallow waters of the sanatorium. He sees the country people come and go about their every-day affairs; the foreigners stream out in goodly pleasure parties; the stir of man's activity is all about him, as he suns himself inertly in some sheltered corner; and he looks on with a patriarchal impersonality of interest, such as a man may feel when he pictures to himself the fortunes of his remote descendants, or the robust old age of the oak he has planted over night.

we call a picture or a view. Hazlitt, re- | out of the mid race of active life, he now lating, in one of his essays how he went on foot from one great man's house to another's in search of works of art, begins suddenly to triumph over these noble or wealthy owners, because he was more capable of enjoying their costly possessions than they were; because they had paid the money and he had received the pleasure. And the occasion is a fair one for self-complacency. While the one man was working to be able to buy the picture, the other was working to be able to enjoy the picture. An inherited aptitude will have been diligently im- In this falling aside, in this quietude proved in either case; only the one man and desertion of other men, there is no has made for himself a fortune, and the inharmonious prelude to the last quieother has made for himself a living spirit. tude and desertion of the grave; in this It is a fair occasion for self-complacency, dulness of the senses there is a gentle I repeat, when the event shows a man to preparation for the final insensibility of have chosen the better part, and laid out death. And to him the idea of mortalhis life more wisely, in the long run, than ity comes in a shape less violent and those who have credit for most wisdom. harsh than is its wont, less as an abrupt And yet even this is not a good unmixed; catastrophe than as a thing of infinitesiand like all other possessions, although mal gradation, and the last step on a long in a less degree, the possession of a brain decline of way. As we turn to and fro in that has been thus improved and culti- bed, and every moment the movements vated, and made into the prime organ of grow feebler and smaller and the attia man's enjoyment, brings with it certain tude more restful and easy, until sleep inevitable cares and disappointments. overtakes us at a stride and we move no The happiness of such an one comes to more, so desire after desire leaves him ; depend greatly upon those fine shades of and day by day his strength decreases, sensation that heighten and harmonize and the circle of his activity grows ever the coarser elements of beauty. And narrower; and he feels, if he is to be thus a degree of nervous prostration, thus tenderly weaned from the passion that to other men would be hardly disa- of life, thus gradually inducted into the greeable, is enough to overthrow for him slumber of death, that when at last the the whole fabric of his life, to take, ex-end comes, it will come quietly and fitly. cept at rare moments, the edge off his pleasures, and to meet him wherever he goes with failure, and the sense of want, and disenchantment of the world and life. It is not in such numbness of spirit only that the life of the invalid resembles a premature old age. Those excursions that he had promised himself to finish, prove too long or too arduous for his feeble body; and the barrier-hills are as impassable as ever. Many a white town that sits far out on the promontory, many a comely fold of wood on the mountain side, beckons and allures his imagination day after day, and is yet as inaccessible to his feet as the clefts and gorges of the clouds. The sense of distance grows upon him wonderfully; and after some feverish efforts and the fretful uneasiness of the first few days, he falls contentedly in with the restrictions of his weakness. His narrow round becomes pleasant and familiar to him as the cell to a contented prisoner. Just as he has fallen already

If anything is to reconcile poor spirits to the coming of the last enemy, surely it should be such a mild approach as this ; not to hale us forth with violence, but to persuade us from a place we have no further pleasure in. It is not so much, indeed, death that approaches as life that withdraws and withers up from round about him. He has outlived his own usefulness, and almost his own enjoy. ment; and if there is to be no recovery; if never again will he be young and strong and passionate, if the actual present shall be to him always like a thing read in a book or remembered out of the far-away past; if, in fact, this be veritably nightfall, he will not wish greatly for the continuance of a twilight that only strains and disappoints the eyes, but steadfastly await the perfect darkness. He will pray for Medea: when she comes, let her either rejuvenate or slay.

And yet the ties that still attach him to the world are many and kindly. The

sight of children has a significance for he survive and be perpetuated. Much of him such as it may have for the aged also, Etienne de la Boetie survived during all but not for others. If he has been used the years in which Montaigne continued to feel humanely, and to look upon life to converse with him on the pages of the somewhat more widely than from the ever-delightful essays. Much of what narrow loophole of personal pleasure and was truly Goethe was dead already when advancement, it is strange how small a he revisited places that knew him no portion of his thoughts will be changed more, and found no better consolation or embittered by this proximity of death. than the promise of his own verses, that He knows that already, in English coun- soon he too would be at rest. Indeed, ties, the sower follows the ploughman when we think of what it is that we most up the face of the field, and the rooks seek and cherish, and find most pride follow the sower; and he knows also that and pleasure in calling ours, it will somehe may not live to go home again and see times seem to us as if our friends, at our the corn spring and ripen and be cut decease, would suffer loss more truly down at last, and brought home with glad- than ourselves. As a monarch who ness. And yet the future of this harvest, should care more for the outlying colthe continuance of drought or the coming onies he knows on the map or through of rain unseasonably, touch him as sensi- the report of his vicegerents, than for bly as ever. For he has long been used the trunk of his empire under his eyes to wait with interest the issue of events at home, are we not more concerned in which his own concern was nothing; about the shadowy life that we have in and to be joyful in a plenty, and sorrow- the hearts of others, and that portion in ful for a famine, that did not increase or their thoughts and fancies which, in a diminish, by one half loaf, the equable certain far-away sense, belongs to us, sufficiency of his own supply. Thus than about the real knot of our identity there remain unaltered all the disinter--that central metropolis of self, of which ested hopes for mankind and a better fu- alone we are immediately aware or the ture which have been the solace and diligent service of arteries and veins, inspiration of his life. These he has set and infinitesimal activity of ganglia, which beyond the reach of any fate that only we know (as we know a proposition in menaces himself; and it makes small Euclid) to be the source and substance difference whether he die five thousand of the whole? At the death of every years, or five thousand and fifty years, one whom we love, some fair and honbefore the good epoch for which he faith- ourable portion of our existence falls fully labours. He has not deceived him- away, and we are dislodged from one of self; he has known from the beginning these dear provinces; and they are not, that he followed the pillar of fire and perhaps, the most fortunate who survive cloud, only to perish himself in the wil-a long series of such impoverishments, derness, and that it was reserved for till their life and influence narrow gradothers to enter joyfully into possession ually into the meagre limit of their own of the land. And so, as everything spirits, and death, when he comes at last, grows greyer and quieter about him, and can scotch them at one blow. slopes towards extinction, these unfaded visions accompany his sad decline, and follow him, with friendly voices and hopeful words into the very vestibule of death. The desire of love or of fame scarcely moved him, in his days of health, more strongly than these generous aspirations move him now; and so life is carried forward beyond life, and a vista kept open for the eyes of hope, even when his hands grope already on the face of the impassable.

Lastly, he is bound tenderly to life by the thought of his friends; or shall we not say rather, that by their thought for him, by their unchangeable solicitude and love, he remains woven into the very stuff of life beyond the power of bodily dissolution to undo? In a thousand ways will

ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON.

From The Spectator.

THE OLD SCOTCH MODERATES. THE Duke of Richmond's Bill for the Abolition of Lay Patronage in the Church of Scotland casts a vivid light on the change which has come over that institution, and recalls an interesting set of Churchmen. Patronage was once the battle-ground of the two great parties into which that, like every other Church, is divided. On the one side was the party which walks by faith, and on the other that which prefers to walk by sight so long as the sun is up. On the

many of the Scotch clergy and laity fought as stoutly against the fanaticism of the Covenanters, and the temper of the whole Evangelical school, as Mr. Buckle himself, although they could not match the rancour of his monkish intellectual bigotry, for the reason that they knew what they were speaking about. Knowledge is the strait-waistcoat which prevents fury from doing mischief to itself.

-

one side were clergy fervent in spirit and prone to push earnestness to the length of bigotry, while the clergy on the other were inclined to test all arguments by the edge of the naked reason, to be impatient of heroics, to look with scepticism on the promptings of enthusiasm, and to hew away the portals of the faith until the way should be broad enough to admit even the crowds of the marketplace. The old Evangelicals of Scotland were cast in much the same mould as the A "Moderate" minister of the old Low Churchmen of England were fifty school was a Calvinistic Broad Churchyears ago, and they were not unlike what man, at least as much a lawyer as a theoMr. Spurgeon's congregation would be logian, a man of the world rather than a to-day, if it were made up of hard logi- saint, and a human creature who did not cal heads as well as of believing hearts. disdain the inspiration of conviviality. But it is not so easy to find an English As his name implied, he aspired to be parallel to the old Scotch Moderates."moderate" in all things. He preached They have a character of their own, Calvinism moderately, he moderately which is an insoluble puzzle to those im- told men to be moral, he preached modpatient students who, like Buckle, fancyerately long sermons, and he rebuked that they know Scotch Presbyterianism fanaticism with moderate warmth of conwhen they have studied a few books of tempt. In the same spirit did he interCameronian divinity; when they have pret the command to preach the Gospel applied their philosophical measuring- to the whole earth. The divine behest wand to the "godly Mr. Renwick " and implied, he thought, that the Gospel was to Richard Cameron; and when, with a a very good thing when taken in modehappy union of insolence and ignorance, ration, but that it would be rash to push they have devoted a few pages of rhetor- missionaries especially if they were ical sneers to a nation which could throw Evangelicals into the placid and happy its rare intellectual capacity at the feet of ignorance of a heathen village. There what they are pleased to term a besotted was only one subject which made him fanaticism. Buckle would scarcely have lose his moderation, and that was fanatiunderstood the retort that the fanati-cal attacks on patronage, for these were cism" even of the Covenanters was never attacks on himself. But for patronage, "besotted," and that he himself would he would never have had a good stipend have had a slender chance of victory if and a comfortable manse. No body of he had tried a fall in the field of logic worshippers would ever have chosen him, with some of the fanatics on whom he if they had been left to the freedom of showered the philosophic scorn that he their own will, and if their impulses had borrowed from Comte. Mr. Froude, had been governed by that sense of rewho does see the real spirit of Scotch sponsibility which comes with liberty. Calvinism, treats it with a respect and an Hugh Miller once drew a striking picture admiration which form a happy contrast of a divinity student who rose to the to the insolent contempt of the historian ministry by sheer dint of his scholarship who fancied that the world could be and his keen brain, but whose character healed of its woes by the glad tidings of was open to such suspicions that no constatistical tables. And the truth is, that gregation would ever give him a "call." the theological extravagances of the Cov- His hope lay in the good offices of a paenanters became a quickening intellec-tron; but the power of Veto which the tual agent, because they forced the peo- General Assembly gave to congregations ple to think for themselves. By present- seemed to blast them forever, and he ing to the mind of unlettered peasants left the country. Had he remained a metaphysical problems, which were only theological renderings of the deepest questions of the schools, they gave the thoughts of those wayfaring men such a range, and often such a sublimity, as will never come to any like body of people who draw their inspiration from merely secular knowledge. And meanwhile,

few years, he would have found the decree of the General Assembly set aside by the Court of Session and the House of Lords, and his own chances brought back again for a brief space of time. Although painted by the hand of an Evangelical, that picture does not unfairly represent the old race of

rural" Moderates." Many of them were One, which played a great part during clever, and their skill in debate showed the Ten Years' Struggle of the Disrupthat they would have been capital lawyers tion, consumed as much toddy as would or politicians. Many of them could write have drowned the General Assembly. English with elegance, and they did not | Even the leaders of the Moderate party allow their style to jolt over the "corde- did not disdain the spirituous comforts of roy road" of Calvinistic logic, but they this life. "Jupiter Carlyle," as the statetook the smoother way of the moral law. ly and convivial minister of Inveresk was Stout Cameronians, "Old Lights," and called, sends up a steam of toddy from all the grim zealots of Secession, turned his wonderful diary, when he does not aside with disgust from the "cauld mo- soak it in claret. Indeed, he and the rest rality" of the Moderates, saying that it of the intellectual Moderates drank as had not an ounce of the Gospel from one hard as the lawyers of their time; and it year's end to the other, and that it was little would not be easy to find a more vigorbetter than heathenism. It was precisely ous comparison. That they were also the dislike to that "cauld morality" that a band of clever and cultivated men, it is caused the Disruption. The parishioners needless to say, when they included of Auchterarder did not pretend that Mr. Robertson, Blair, Hill, and other writers Young was morally bad, nor did those of or preachers of only one degree less Marnoch specify any such blot in the mark. These men deliberately set themcharacter of Mr. Edwards as could have selves to the task of stripping Scotch been seen by a Court of law. Each band Presbyterism free from provincialism, of devotees thought merely that the man and so triumphant were they that most of of the patron's choice had not unction their sermons might have been preached enough to be a fit teacher of the Gospel, in a Catholic church or in a heathen temand they refused to accept "cauld moral-ple as fitly as in St. Giles's. They taught ity" in its place. But the Moderate min- the moral law with politeness; they ister was as certain of the laird's or the made philosophy the handmaid of Chrislord's favour as of the devotees' frown. tianity with well-bred moderation; and A deposed minister once pathetically they so handled the grimmer tenets of pleaded that he had been deprived of a Calvin as to hurt no susceptibilities. manse, a stipend of a hundred and fifty They were masters of theological deportpounds a year, and the privilege of peri- ment, and they would have been Fathers odically dining with his Grace the Duke of the Church, if the Church had been a of Argyll. The Moderates further dis- school of manners. Hence, their sudained the fanaticism which fled from preme effort was to write a good style. whisky, and, when whisky took the ethe- They aspired to rank with the men of realized form of toddy, they believed in its | letters who were making Paris and Lonvirtues much more fervently than they don the New Jerusalems of Literature. credited the Confession of Faith. Many a Robertson polished his sentences as ladeep carouse did they comfort themselves boriously as an old Covenanter would with when they met at Presbytery din- have tried to smooth the way unto eternal ners, or when the business of the Gospel life, and we fear that he rather disdained drew half a dozen of them to the same the jerky rhetoric of St. Paul. He treasmanse. They bore the scars of spirituous ured the compliment of Horace Walpole battles on their glowing faces. The rich that his style was fine, as fondly as a coppery hue of many a reverend counte- Cameronian might have nursed the renance had been got only by dint of long membrance of the day when he was huntand persistent effort,-by nightly touched to the hills by the dragoons of Clavering and retouching, by the laying of tint house, or when he smote those messenon tint, by the determination never to gers of Satan hip and thigh at Drumclog. throw away an opportunity of giving mel- Blair was even more careful to smooth lowness to the alcoholic colouring of his rhetoric until it should satisfy the imyears. Some of their faces could not perative decorum of the Schools, and he have been tinted for less than five or six has had his reward in the fact that his serhundred pounds, and if they had drunk mons, if they do not yield inspiration to the old port instead of toddy, the operation theologian, are valued in grammar-classes might have cost them half as many thou- for the Pharisaic cleanness of their style. sands. There were "drunken Presbyter- The leaders of the Moderates were men ies," filled, of course, with theologians of the world, as well as writers and theowho, even in the last stages of articula- logians. They could play whist with a tion, boasted that they were Moderates.' skill worthy of an Episcopalian training;