English song again. The Court experiment failed altogether; there was a vehement reaction against it, to be followed by a different reaction afterwards.

The other case to which I alluded stands in close relation to the history of this Stuart time, but it is drawn from the eighteenth century. Some of the earnest men who were opposed to the Court of Charles became the founders of the New England colonies. These colonies, in truth, exhibited the feelings and belief of the middle class at a time when their feelings and belief were particularly serious and deep. Their descendants in the eighteenth century believed less; but they inherited much of the firmness, solidity, thriftiness, of their forefathers; they were fitted for the independence into which the madness of their mother-country forced them. One boy especially, a printer's boy of Boston, prepared them for the moment when they should enter upon new and mighty functions. I do not know such another career in the world's history. Benjamin Franklin, trained in the school of hardship, rising by sheer self-denying industry, with little personal ambition, stamped his own image upon a new world. "Poor Richard's Maxims, or the Way to Get Wealth," became a textbook, almost a Bible to his contemporaries. They deserved much of their fame. They gave warnings which we all need to have; they denounced habits of extravagance, and recommended habits of thrift, which are precious to all honest people. But was the civilization which is sketched out for us in "Poor Richard's

Maxims” a civilization which would bear the test of a country's experience? The noblest Americans, the men who are doing most, suffering most, for the sake of their country, are the foremost to give us the answer. They will tell us, that, so far as Americans only pursue the ends which this book set before them, so far they cannot be what Franklin would have wished them to be-not to take any higher standard. Franklin was a man of science. But those who merely follow the way to get wealth-however much science may be needed to that end-will never delight to live laborious days merely to find truth. Franklin wished to get rid of the slave trade,―ultimately, no doubt, of slavery. But those who think only of the way to get wealth must maintain that cursed institution. Franklin loved, above all things, thrift, and honesty, and fairdealing. Those true-hearted Americans, of whom I spoke, cover their faces and weep while they talk of commercial panics and repudiations as the consequence of the eagerness to get wealth.

Are we to judge Americans? God forbid! I claim this lesson for us, then, as well as for them. I claim it as a proof that Civilization is not to be merely of a class; that each class is meant to contribute its own element to the greatness and perfection of it. I claim it in speaking to you, because I am sure that you the members of the middle class-have a right, not only to the Civilization of your own class, but to all that has belonged to your nation, now and in the days of old. I claim it, because I say that the chivalry of

former days, the arts of former days, the poetry of former days, belong to you as much as to any nobles of the land. I claim it because I feel that you, as members of a Christian association, are bound to believe that there is a Divine power at work, in yourselves and the whole nation, to give it blessings of which no dreams of ours can conceive. I claim it, with all the other lessons I have tried to set before you to-night, because I do trust that I shall yet see the highest class, the middle class, the learned class, bringing in all the treasures of wisdom, thought, life, to help in the work they have to accomplish-the civilization of the large class which still craves it at their hands, which demands all the help they can give it, which, we may be sure, it is God's will should share every blessing that His Son has conferred on us.

VI.

ANCIENT HISTORY.1

I AM to give a lecture this evening on History. The subject cannot be indifferent to any of us. I believe its importance will be brought home, one day or other, to every man. There have been times in most of our lives when it has become utterly dead to us, when we have said, as an English statesman said, "Read me anything but that." There have been times when we have been roused to such a sense of its meaning, and of our concern in it, that nothing has seemed so precious to us. What has been our experience, may be the experience of any Englishman. He may want some crisis to tell him, that every step in past history is a message to him concerning the present, and the future; concerning his own life, and the life of his children. Then what have been merely sounds in his ear may become words that ring through his heart. We should be preparing others and ourselves for such crises; we should be considering what has quickened

1 Delivered at the Working Men's College, Great Ormond Street, 1865.

lessons in our minds that had been lying in them like mere lumber. It is not the worth of the things we say which makes them effective; it is their fitness for those who hear them, it is the breath that kindles them.

We commonly divide History into Ancient and Modern. This is a convenient and honest division, not forced upon the facts, but derived from them. I shall speak of Ancient History to-night. If there should be an open Saturday next term, or the term after, I may speak of Modern. But I think we may learn something of what history is, and of the impulses which stir men to seek for it, and care for it, if we only hear of its beginnings.

وو

What the name means, you, perhaps, know; I think I have spoken of its derivation more than once in this place. We ought not to forget it, for it is not what we should have expected; and it suggests much. We are wont to think of "history as a narrative of events. It was taken from a verb which signifies, to ask questions. How did these two senses, apparently so different, become connected in the mind of a man, or a nation? We must ask the Greeks, from whom we get the word, to tell us that.

Herodotus of Halicarnassus is often called "the Father of History." Whether he has a right to that title or not, he was at least an indefatigable questioner. What kind of questions he asked, and of whom, and where he asked them, and how he was led to ask them, I will try to indicate.

If there is a translation