1713, when she was at home and all was well with her; and in the rage and anguish of her deathbed, the unfortunate soul bethought herself of the young man who seems to have touched all the world with a feeling of his goodness. She left her whole fortune-wildly indifferent to her own kindred, wildly indig nant with the man on whom she would fain have bestowed it-to be divided between Berkeley and another of her friends, though it was years since she had met the philosopher, and there seems to have been no special friendship between them. His share amounted to about £4000-no inconsiderable matter for a man without fortune. This curious incident does not seem to have made any breach in the friendship between himself and Swift, which is remarkable enough. A year or two later the preferment came in the substantial shape of the deanery of Derry, which was worth £1100 a-year. By this time Berkeley was forty-not the most adventurous of ages. After long waiting, he had at length attained such a climax of his temporal hopes as justified him in marrying and settling, as people say. Marry he did after a while, but the idea of "settling" was far from having any place in his mind. Not quite six months after his appointment to the deanery we find him once more setting out for England with the strangest errand. Not philosophy this time, which in most previous cases had been found quite compatible with the strictest regard to a man's private interest. On the contrary, it was Quixotism of the wildest description, such as never philosopher had been known to be guilty of before. An idea had seized upon his busy brain more dangerous than any onslaught upon matter. It had occurred to him some fine day, no one knows howin the learned babble of Leicester Fields perhaps, or on the Italian hills, or amid the salt spray on the .shores of his own island-to think

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of certain ignorant savages far away over the seas, where a new English empire seemed forming on the shores of America. America itself was hidden in the mists of the future, and no premonition warned Dean Berkeley of that immeasurable Yankee nation which was so soon to come into being. It was a scheme for converting the savage Americans to Christianity" that began to work in his teeming brain. The unhappy Red men, so dwindled, so miserable and hopeless, bore an interest then which it seems now strange to contemplate. Nobody knew how they were to be swallowed up and pushed out of their places; and men had already dimly opened their eyes to the value of that great continent as a place big enough and rich enough to supply room for the overflowings of the mother country, however vast these overflowings might be. And in this case, how important was it to conciliate, and cultivate, and Christianise the native race! To be sure there were but two things to do that, or exterminate them; and extermination had not dawned upon any mind as the preferable alternative as yet. Accordingly, the new Dean is scarce warm in his seat before this idea, howsoever conceived or suggested, begins to work so strongly in him that he cannot rest. Derry and £1100 a-year, and all the advantages of place and position, become as nothing in comparison with those savage Americans. Yet there is a certain statesmanlike calm even in his fervour. It is no wild solitary expedition on which he longs to set out. His scheme is to carry a staff with him-to go accompanied with his brotherhood, a colony of evangelists. Their work was to be done by means of "a college to be erected in the Summer Islands, otherwise called the Isles of Bermuda." In 1725 he published his plan for this expedition. He himself was to resign his appointment and become head of the college on the magnificent stipend of a hun

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dred pounds a-year; and his eloquence and enthusiasm had so won upon his friends, that no less than three young Fellows of his University declared themselves willing to accompany him, abandoning all their prospects. To gain an endowment for this college, Berkeley set out in the end of '24, armed with all the recommendations his friends could give him, to men powerful in Church and State. Here is one of these commendatory letters, which not only throws the vivid light of personal revelation upon Berkeley, but reveals out of the darkness, in one of his softest moments, a tragical figure, still more remarkable and universally known than himself. The letter is addressed to Lord Carteret, then Lieutenant of Ireland, and it is Swift who writes:

"3d of September 1724.-There is a gentleman of this kingdom just gone for England--it is Dr George Berkeley, Dean of Derry, the best preferment among us, being worth about £1100 a-year. He takes the Bath in his way to London, and will of course attend your Excellency, and be presented, I suppose, by his friend, my Lord Burlington; and because I believe you will choose out some very idle minutes to read this letter, perhaps you may not be ill entertained with some account of the man and his errand. He was a Fellow in the University here, and, going to England very young, about thirteen years ago, he became the founder of a sect there called the Immaterialists, by the force of a very curious book on that subject. Dr Smalridge and many other eminent persons were his proselytes. I sent him secretary and chaplain to Sicily with my Lord Peterborough; and upon his lordship's return, Dr Berkeley spent above seven years in travelling over most parts of Europe, but chiefly through every corner of Italy, Sicily, and other islands. When he came back to England he found so many friends that he was effectually recommended to the Duke of Grafton, by whom he was lately made Dean of Derry; Your Excellency will be frightened when I tell you all this is but an introduction, for I am now to mention his He is an absolute philosopher with regard to money, titles, and

errand.

power, and for three years past hath been struck with a notion of founding a university at Bermuda, by a charter from the Crown. He has seduced several of the hopefullest young clergymen and others here, many of them well provided for, and all of them in the fairest way of preferment; but in England his conquests are greater, and I doubt will spread very far this winter. He showed me a little tract which he designs to publish, and there your Excellency will see his whole scheme of a life academic-philosophic of a college founded for Indian scholars and missionaries, where he most exorbitantly proposeth a whole hundred pound ayear for himself, forty pounds for a fellow, and ten for a student. His heart will break if his deanery be not taken from him and left at your Excellency's disposal. I discourage him by the coldness of courts and ministers, who will interpret all this as impossible and a And vision, but nothing will do. therefore I do humbly entreat your Excellency either to use such persua sions as will keep one of the first men in this kingdom for learning and virtue quiet at home, or assist him by your credit to compass his romantic design, which, however, is very noble and generous, and directly proper for a great person of your excellent education to encourage."

Berkeley's pamphlet, which was published early in the ensuing year, sets forth at length all the necessity and advantage of this wonderful scheme. He begins by lamenting "that there is at this day little sense of religion, and a most notorious corruption of manners in the English colonies settled on the continent of America and the islands," and that "the Gospel hath hitherto made but a very inconsiderable progress among the neighbouring Americans, who still continue in much the same ignorance and barbarism in which we found them above a hundred years ago." After summing up the causes of this condition of affairs, one of which he describes as the mean qualifications, both in learning and morals, of the clergy, who are, in many cases, "the very dregs and refuse" of the Church, he propounds his plan-a plan which has been adopted in recent

It is strange that these verses should never have been suggested by any enterprising American as the national anthem of the new empire-curiously falsified so far as Berkeley's meaning went, yet taking, like so many other bits of unconscious prophecy, a wonderful signification of their own.

On the 1st of August 1728, Berkeley was married to Anne Forster, a daughter of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commonsa lady, as he himself says in the quaint phraseology of the time, "whose humour and turn of mind pleases me beyond anything I know in the whole sex." On the 6th of September the pair set sail from Gravesend upon their amazing mission. Mr James and Mr Dalton, two young men of fortune; a Mr Smilert or Smibert, "an ingenious painter;" and a cousin of Mrs Berkeley's, "my Lady Hancock's daughter," made up the little party. Berkeley took with him "a pretty large sum of money of his own property, and a collection of books for the use of his intended library." Thus the wild enterprise was actually carried out with such defiance of prudence and such devotion to a purpose as perhaps no mature man newly married, and with the responsibilities of individual life upon him, ever manifested before. He was now over forty, an unenthusiastic age, and the position which he thus abandoned must have been, both in income and rank, fully up to his highest hopes. Nevertheless the philosopher set sail, America shining before him in a haze of coming splendour, the empire of the future, Time's noblest offspring." fear America has proved ungrateful as well in the present advanced state of her history as in the immediate result of Berkeley's mis

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sion, and has not added, as she ought, the name of this early and fervid believer in her destiny to her beadroll of saints and heroes.

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But the little mission never got to Bermuda. The party went to Rhode Island, and took up its residence in Newport, a town “ taining about six thousand souls, the most thriving, flourishing place in all America for its bigness." In this small community Berkeley found "four sorts of Anabaptists, besides Presbyterians, Quakers, Independents, and many of no profession at all," but all living in tolerable peace and quiet, and all agreed, or politely professing to be so, that the Church of England was the second-best. Here he purchased land and built a farmhouse, meaning to make of his new property a stock farm to supply the future college at Bermuda. But the months passed wearily on, and the first flush of hope wavered, and the promised Government grant, without which nothing could be done, was not forthcoming. Anxious letters, full of increasing care, came from the troubled missionary. Though he threw himself at once into clerical work in his temporary abode, it was work with no satisfaction in it. If this were to be all, he could not but bethink himself that upon all private accounts I should like Derry better than New England." His friends, wearying too of the quiet of Newport and the suspense, went off to Boston, and upon various expeditions. There his first child was born, and "a great joy" to him.

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Among all my delays and disappointments, I thank God," he says, with quaint sobriety, "I have two domestic comforts that are very agreeable, my wife and my little son, both which exceed my expectations, and fully answer all my wishes." But yet notwithstanding these solaces, even Berkeley's stout heart began to fail. His letters convey the idea to us of a man on a headland straining his eyes

out to sea for ships which will not come. The winds blow him chance bits of news in an irregular, halfreliable way. Now it is that one of the men whose co-operation he had hoped for, has been made a bishop at home, which calls from him an impatient sigh of congratulation, "since I doubt we are not likely to see him in this part of the world." Now it is the heartsickening tidings that a ship has been cast away with letters on board, which probably would have brought consolation. But consolation in the shape of his £20,000, Berkeley was not destined to receive. With his wife only standing by him, and his baby to amuse him, and his ear continually on the strain for such echoes from England as might come across the sea, the indomitable soul set to work again, and produced, by way of occupation to his anxious leisure, the 'Minute Philosopher,' a book in tended for the refutation of the freethinkers of his time. It was "written in a series of dialogues on the model of Plato," and contained-besides a long strain of close and powerful argument, which of course, in the change which has come over scepticism, as well as other modes of thought, is little better than a fossil at this timemany pleasant quaint indications of the manners of the day, the "dishes of tea," in which even freethinkers seemed to delight, and the little landscapes, quaint compositions, like the pretty artificial background of one of Stothard's engravings, where they meet the virtuous rustic, and find all their skill and cleverness crumble to nothing before him. Such was the fashion of the age; and nothing can more clearly manifest the difference between that period and our own, than the contrast between the freethinker as set forth by Berkeley, who was himself a man of the world, and knew what he was describing-professed libertine and scoffer, setting pleasure high above

virtue, and almost professedly denying God in order to be free of the restraints of His law-and the pious, even pietistic, doubter of our own time, with his high morality and his tender conscience. Berkeley knew of no such refined and wonderful being. His Alciphron and Lysicles are fine gentlemen, "bloods" of the fullest flavour. And yet this is how (being on a visit in the country) they manage their meetings: "As we sat round the tea-table, in a summer parlour which looks into the garden, Alciphron, after the first dish, turned down his cup, and, reclining back in his chair, proceeded as follows"! How comical are the little changes of manner and custom which a century makes; and how much more than comical, how amazing, the difference in sentiment and thought!

But in the mean time no news or bad news came from England. The money from which the endowment of the Bermuda College was to have come was otherwise appropriated; and Sir Robert Walpole, on being finally appealed to, made answer, that of course the money would be paid as soon as suited the public convenience, but, as a friend, he counselled Dean Berkeley to return home and not to await that far-off contingency. Thus the whole chivalric scheme broke down. Berkeley had wasted four years in the blank existence of the little New England town, had "expended much of his private property," and spent infinite exertions and hopes in vain. A long period before his actual setting-out had been swallowed up in negotiations to obtain this futile charter and unpaid grant. He gave up, on the whole, some seven years of the flower and prime of his life to the scheme thus cruelly and treacherously rendered abortive. It is so that England treats the generous movements and attempted self-devotion of her sons. Had it been a factory or a plantation, there might have been some hope for Berkeley;