animate nature. To Newton, and to Newton's dog, the outward creation was physically the same; to the apprehension of Newton and of Newton's dog, how different! Hear the author :

"To this clear issue the case is brought Man does introduce into nature something from himself: either the inertness, the negative quality, the defect, or the beauty, the meaning, the glory. Either that whereby the world is noble comes from ourselves, or that whereby it is mean; that which it has, or that which it wants. Can it be doubtful which it is?"

that experience proves that this world is not managed upon any system of optimism; that in this creation things are constantly going wrong; and especially that all history gives no account of any mere creature whose will who did not do ill frequently. Is it likely that was free to do either good or ill; and yet to all this there is one entire exception; one thing, and that so large a thing as all inanimate nature, perfectly obedient, perfectly holy, perfectly right-and all by its own free will? I grant there is something touching in the author's eloquent words :

Not in the least. Give me the rational "Because she is right, Nature is ours; more and immortal man, made in God's image, truly ours than we ourselves. We turn from the rather than the grandest oak which the June inward ruin to the outward glory and marvel at sunbeams will be warming when you read the contrast. But we need not marvel; it is the this, my friend-rather than the most ma- difference of life and death: piercing the dimjestic mountain which by and by will be ness even of the man's darkened sense, jarring purple with the heather. Reason, immor- upon his fond illusion like waking realities upon tality, love, and faith, are things liker God a dream. Without is living holiness, within is deathly wrong." than ever so many cubit feet of granite, than ever so many loads of timber. "Behold," says Archer Butler, "we stand alone in the universe! Earth, air and ocean can show us nothing so awful as we!"

Let the reader, ever remembering that in such cases analogy is not argument but illustration-that it makes a doctrine clearer, but does not in any degree confirm it-read You fancy, says our author, that Nature is the chapter entitled "Of the Illustration inert, because it goes on in so constant and from Astronomy." It will tend to make the unvarying a course. You know, says he, great doctrine of Man and his Dwelling what conscious exertion it cost you to pro- Place comprehensible; you will see exactly duce physical changes; you can trace no such what it is, although you may not think it exertion in nature. You would beleive, says true. As astronomy has transferred the aphe, that nature is active, but for the fact that parent movements of the planets from them her doings are all conformed to laws that to ourselves, so, says our author, has science you can trace. But invariableness, he main- transferred the seeming inertness of nature tains, is no proof of inaction. "RIGHT AC- from it to us. The phenomenon of nature is TION is invariable; RIGHT ACTION is abso- physical and inert: the being is spiritual and lutely conformed to law. Why, therefore active and holy. And if we now seem to should not the secret of nature's invariable-have an insuperable conviction that man is ness be, not passiveness, but rightness ?" not inert and that nature is inert, it is not The unchanging uniformity of nature's course stronger than our apparent consciousness proves her holiness-her willing, unvarying obedience to the Divine law. "The invariableness of nature bespeaks holiness as its

cause."

May we not think upon all this (not dogmatically) in some such fashion as this? Which is likelier:

1. That nature has it in her power to vary from the well-known laws of nature; that she could disobey God if she pleased; but that she is so holy that she could not think of such a thing, and so through all ages has never swerved once. Or,

2. That nature is bound by laws which she has not the power to disobey; that she is what she looks, an inanimate, passive, inert thing, actuated, as her soul and will, by the will of the Creator?

And to aid in considering which alternative is the likelier, let it be remembered that Revelation teaches that this is a fallen world;

that the earth is unmoving. Man lives under illusion as to himself and as to the universe. Reason, indeed, furnishes him with the means of correcting that illusion; but in that illusion is his want of life.

Strong in his conviction of the grand principle which he has established, as he conceives, in his first book, the author in his second book, goes crashing through all systems of philosophy. His great doctrine makes havoc of them all. All are wrong, though each may have some grain of truth in it. The Idealists are right in so far as that there is no such thing as Matter. Matter is the vain imagination of man through his wrong idea of nature's inertness, but the Idealists are wrong if they fancy that because there is no matter, there is nothing but mind, and ideas in mind.

Nature, though spiritual, has a most real and separate existence. Then the Sceptics are

a revelation must be to show us things from God's view of them, that is, as they truly are. Sin truly is damnation, though to us it is pleasure. That sin is pleasure to us, surely is the evil part of our condition."

ural death and spiritual: they do not show | view is simply the truth. Surely one object of that the things are one: they do not show that in the strict unfigurative use of terms man's spiritual condition is one of death. They show that man's spiritual condition is very like death; that is all. It is so like as quite to justify the assertion in Scripture: it is not so identical as to justify the introduction of a new philosophical phrase. It is perfectly true that Christianity is described in Scripture as a means for bringing men from death to life; but it is also described, with equal meaning, as a means for bringing men from darkness to light. It is easy to trace the analogy between man's spiritual condition and the condition of one in darkness-between man's redeemed condition and the condition of one in light; but surely it would be childish to announce, as a philosophical discovery, that all men are blind, because they cannot see their true interests and the things that most concern them. They are not blind in the ordinary sense, though they may be blind in a higher; neither are they dead in the ordinary sense, though they may be in a higher. And only confusion, and a sense of being misled and trifled with, can follow from the pushing figure into fact and trying to identify the

two.

Stripping our author's views of the unusual phraseology in which they are disguised, they do, so far as regards the essential fact of man's loss and redemption, coincide exactly with the orthodox teaching of the Church of England. Man is by nature and sinfulness in a spiritual sense dead; dead now, and doomed to a worse death hereafter. By believing in Christ he at once obtains some share of a better spiritual life, and the hope of a future life which shall be perfectly holy and happy. Surely this is no new discovery. It is the type of Christianity implied in the Liturgy of the Church, and weekly set out from her thousands of pulpits. The startling novelties of Man and his Dwelling Place are in matters of detail. He holds that fearful thing, Damnation, which orthodox views push off into a future world, to be a present thing. It is now men are damned. It is now men are in hell. Wicked men are now in a state of damnation: they are now in hell. The common error arises from our thinking damnation a state of suffering. It is not. It is a state of something worse than suffering, viz., of sin :—

"We find it hard to believe that damnation can be a thing men like. But does not what every being likes depend on what it is? Is corruption less corruption, in man's view, because worms like it? Is damnation less damnation, in God's view, because men like it? And God's

And indeed it is to be admitted that there is a great and much-forgotten truth implied here. It is a very poor, and low, and inadequate idea of Christianity, to think of it merely as something which saves from suffering-as something which saves us from hell, regarded merely as a place of misery. The Christian salvation is mainly a deliverance from sin. The deliverance is primarily from moral evil; and only secondarily from physical or moral pain. "Thou shalt call His name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins." No doubt this is very commonly forgotten. No doubt the vulgar idea of salvation and perdition founds on the vulgar belief that pain is the worst of all things, and happiness the best of all things. It is well that the coarse and selfish type of religion which founds on the mere desire to escape from burning and to lay hold of bliss, should be corrected by the diligent instilling of the belief, that sin is worse than sorrow. The Saviour's compassion, though ever ready to well out at the sight of suffering, went forth most warmly at the sight of sin.

Here I close the book, not because there is not much more in it that well deserves notice, but because I hope that what has here been said of it will induce the thoughtful reader to study it for himself, and because I have space to write no more. It is a May afternoon; not that on which the earliest pages of my article were written, but a week after it. I have gone at the ox-fence at last, and got over it with several contusions. Pardon me, unknown author, much admired for your ingenuity, your earnestness, your originality, your cloquence, if I have written with some show of lightness concerning your grave book. Very far, if you could know it, was any reality of lightness from your reviewer's feeling. He is non ignarus mali: he has had his full allotment of anxiety and care; and he hails with you the prospect of a day when human nature shall cast off its load of death, and when sinful and sorrowful man shall be brought into a beautiful conformity to external nature. Would that Man were worthy of his dwelling-place as it looks upon this summer-like day! Open, you latticed window: let the cool breeze come into this somewhat feverish room. Again the tree-tops; again the white stones and green graves; again the lambs, somewhat larger; again the distant hill. Again I think of Cheapside, far away.

Yet there is trouble here. Not a yard of any of those hedges but has worried its owner in watching that it be kept tight, that sheep or cattle may not break through. Not a gate I see but screwed a few shillings out of the anxious farmer's pocket, and is always going wrong. Not a field but either the landlord squeezed the tenant in the matter of rent, or the tenant cheated the landlord. Not the smoke of a cottage but marks where pass lives weighted down with constant care, and with little end save the sore struggle to keep the wolf from the door. Not one of these graves, save perhaps the poor friendless tramp's in the corner, but was opened

and closed to the saddening of certain hearts.
Here are lives of error, sleepless nights,
over-driven brains; wayward children, un-
natural parents, though of these last, God
be thanked, very few. Yes, says Adam Bede,
"there's a sort of wrong that can never be
made up for. No doubt we are dead: when
shall we be quickened to a better life?
Surely, as it is, the world is too good for
man. And I agree, most cordially and en-
tirely, with the author of this book, that
there is but one agency in the universe that
can repress evil here, and extinguish it here-
after.
A. K. H. B.

THE "GOLD ANTS" OF HERODOTUS.-In | filled list of so-called modern inventions which, the Athenæum of May 19th, p. 687, is this state- whether intentionally or accidentally, are nothment from Froebel's Travels in Central Amer- ing but adaptions of old ideas. Who was the ica:advertiser mentioned by Fuller? and did he ever succeed in bringing his invention into use? -Notes and Queries. G. M. G.

"That certain species of ants in New Mexico construct their nests exclusively of small stones, of the same material, chosen by the insects from the various components of the sand of the steppes "MORS MORTIS MORTI," ETC.-Who is the and deserts. In one part of the Colorado Des-author of the Latin distich annexed, of which I ert their heaps were formed of small fragments have subjoined an attempt at translation ?— of crystalized feldspar; and in another, imper-« Mors mortis morti mortem nisi morte dedisset, feet crystals of red transparent garnets were the materials of which the ant-hills were built, and any quantity of them might there be obtained.""Had This corroborates an observation in vol. ii. of Humboldt's Cosmos (I made no note of the page):

Eternæ vitæ Janua clausa foret."

not the death of death by death given death to death,

Our souls had perished with this mortal breath."

"It struck me to see that in the basaltic districts of the Mexican highlands, the ants bring-Notes and Queries. together heaps of shining grains of hyalite, which I was able to collect out of their hillocks."

Does not this elucidate the gold-collecting ants of Herodotus, and rescue a fact from the domain of fiction ?-Notes and Queries.

F. C. B. MANIFOLD WRITERS.-Here is an extract taken from one of quaint old Fuller's Sermons (Grand Assizes), alluding to an invention which is generally supposed to have originated in modern times

W. B.

BURNING ALIVE. "In treasons of every kind," says Blackstone, iv., vi., "the punishment of women is the same, and different from that of men. For as the decency due to the sex forbids the exposing and publicly mangling their bodies, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to sensation as the other) is to be drawn to the gallows, and there to be burned alive.”

This punishment of women was abolished by stat. 30 George III. c. 48. What is the latest "There is still a Project propounded on the known instance of its having been inflicted ?* Royall Exchange in London wherein one offers (if The punishment of burning alive is at the presmeeting with proportionable encouragement for ent time (if we may believe the newspapers) not his pains), so ingeniously to contrive the matter unfrequently inflicted on negroes in the United that every letter written, shall with the same States. Is this done under the authority of any pains of the Writer instantly render a double statutes of the local legislatures? and, if not, impression, besides the Originall; each of which have those who have inflicted the punishment Inscript (For Transcript I cannot properly been ever visited with any penalties for so dotearme it) shall be as faire and full, as lively and ing? In what civilized countries has burning legible as the Originall. Whether this will ever alive been sanctioned as a punishment for secube really effected, or whether it will prove anlar offences as distinguished from heresy, etc.? Abortive as most designs of this nature Time-Notes and Queries. will tell. Sure I am, if performed, it will be very beneficial to Merchants, who generally keepe Duplicates of their letters to their Correspond

W.

In the 2d vol. of our 1st Series will be found being burnt alive. The last, which took place on recorded many of the latest instances of women the 18th March, 1789, is described by an eyewitThis is another addition to the already well-ness in "N. & Q." 1st S. ii. 260.-ED. "N. & Q.”

ents."

550

From The Cornhill Magazine.
THE FOUR GEORGES.

But for his obstinate love of peace, we should
have had wars, which the nation was not

SKETCHES OF MANNERS, MORALS, COURT, AND strong enough nor united enough to endure.

TOWN LIFE.

II. GEORGE THE SECOND.

But for his resolute counsels and good-humored
resistance we might have had German despots
attempting a Hanoverian regimen over us;
we should have had revolt, commotion, want,
and tyrannous misrule, in place of a quarter
of a century of peace, freedom, and material
prosperity, such as the country never enjoyed,
until that corrupter of parliaments, that disso-
lute tipsy cynic, that courageous lover of peace
and liberty, that great citizen, patriot, and

IN the afternoon of the 14th of June, 1727, two horsemen might have been perceived galloping along the road from Chelsea to Richmond. The foremost, cased in the jackboots of the period, was a broad-faced, jollylooking, and very corpulent cavalier; but, by the manner in which he urged his horse, you might see that he was a bold as well as a skil-statesman governed it. In religion he was ful rider. Indeed, no man loved sport better; and in the hunting-fields of Norfolk, no squire rode more boldly after the fox, or cheered Ringwood and Sweettips more lustily, than he who now thundered over the Richmond road.

He speedily reached Richmond Lodge, and asked to see the owner of the mansion. The mistress of the house and her ladies, to whom our friend was admitted, said he could not be introduced to the master, however pressing the business might be. The master was asleep after his dinner; he always slept after his dinner; and woe be to the person who interrupted him! Nevertheless, our stout friend of the jackboots put the affrighted ladies aside, opened the forbidden door of the bedroom, wherein upon the bed lay a little gentleman; and here the eager messenger knelt down in his jackboots.

He on the bed started up, and with many oaths and a strong German accent asked who was there, and who dared to disturb him?

"I am Sir Robert Walpole," said the messenger. The awakened sleeper hated Sir Robert Walpole. "I have the honor to announce to your majesty that your royal father, King George I., died at Osnaburg, on Saturday last, the 10th instant."

"Dat is one big lie!" roared out his sacred majesty, King George II.; but Sir Robert Walpole stated the fact, and from that day until three and thirty years after, George, the second of the name, ruled over England.

How the king made away with his father's will under the astonished nose of the Archbishop of Canterbury; how he was a choleric little sovereign; how he shook his fist in the face of his father's courtiers; how he kicked his coat and wig about in his rages, and called everybody thief, liar, rascal, with whom he differed; you will read in all the history books; and how he speedily and shrewdly reconciled himself with the bold minister, whom he had hated during his father's life, and by whom he was served during fifteen years of his own with admirable prudence, fidelity, and success. But for Sir Robert Walpole, we should have had the Pretender back again.

little better than a heathen; cracked ribald jokes at bigwigs and bishops, and laughed at high church and low. In private life the old pagan revelled in the lowest pleasures; he passed his Sundays tippling at Richmond; and his holyday's bawling after dogs, or boozing at Houghton with boors over beef and punch. He cared for letters no more than his master did; he judged human nature so meanly that one is ashamed to have to own that he was right, and that men could be corrupted by means so base. But, with his hireling House of Commons, he defended liberty for us; with his incredulity he kept churchcraft down. There were parsons at Oxford as double-dealing and dangerous as any priests out of Rome, and he routed them both. He gave Englishmen no conquests, but he gave them peace, and ease, and freedom; the three per cents. nearly at par; and wheat at five, and six, and twenty shillings a quarter.

It was lucky for us that our first Georges were not more high-minded men; especially fortunate that they loved Hanover so much as to leave England to have her own way. Our chief troubles began when we got a king who gloried in the name of Briton, and, being born in the country, proposed to rule it. He was no more fit to govern England than his grandfather and great-grandfather, who did not try. It was righting itself during their occupation. The dangerous, noble old spirit of cavalier loyalty was dying out; the stately old English high church was emptying itself; the questions dropping, which, on one side and the other;-the side of royalty, prerogative, church, and king;- the side of right, truth, civil, and religious freedom, had set generations of brave men in arms. By the time when George III. came to the throne, the combat between loyalty and liberty was come to an end; and Charles Edward, old, tipsy, and childless, was dying in Italy.

Those who are curious about European Court history of the last age know the memoirs of the Margravine of Bayreuth, and what a court was that of Berlin, where George II.'s cousins ruled sovereign. Frederick the Great's father knocked down his sons, daugh