truths all that he could prove of the painted hieroglyph. "Out of thine own mouth" must be the only formula of condemnation for the ordinary critic in these times. There is no presumption in this. So far and no farther inay he dare.

But there is a yet higher kind of critic, unhappily rare upon the earth, who, adding to the judicial faculties much of the poetic instinct, has been induced by directing circumstances to exercise it otherwise than in written poetry. To him only belongs the high function of discerning of prophets. And this man-this angel in plain clothes-this x axregos — who shall recognise the children of light by the freemasonry of kin, is the literary want of our time. For those "dryasdust" men of precedent-those men who killed Keats, maddened Shelley, and damned Byron, are bad enough in the tamest, placidest, and most definite of times. But in these years of disorganisation, anarchy, and universal melée, when everything that can fight-young and old, rich and poor, good and bad, venerable and contemned-has girded, or is girding on its armour to the battle-field of the nations, who heeds commissions signed by overturned dynasties— "articles of war," to which bag-wigged regiments stepped, last century, the minuet of polite slaughter-or orders of the day, which fulmined to listening Europe the length of a jacket or the colour of a feather? Who cares for the gazette at Armageddon?

THE CRITIC OF THIS AGE MUST COME BAPTISING WITH WATER. "He who cometh after me!" must be his cry. By his soul he must declare upon whom "the Spirit descended"-no matter from what Nazareth" the good thing" comes. He must not disbelieve the seeing of his eyes, even though the denunciation of the Anointed should be against the priests of the temple and the stones of the holy place though Caiaphas order him to judgment, and the Pilate of universal empire assign him his portion with the transgressors. Never was there a time when the functions of the great critic should be exercised with a more awful and prudent care. In the words of Divine lips, applied to an age which had many points of resemblance to our own," the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent taketh it by force." Men's hearts are failing them in doubt and fear, and for looking after these things, and men which are coming upon the earth. To be a herald of advent is the first great duty, the diagnosis of a seer the first great study of the critic in such times-to separate the gifted from the giftless-to know the men of Pisgah from the maniacs of Delphi-the gesture of the prophet from the grimace of the python ; and in the discharge of this mission, to him first is spoken the adjuration of the apostle, "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for some have thereby entertained angels unawares."

In this age, therefore, the true critic's duty is with men, rather than with their works-with their works only in so far as they are the miracles which attest the man. Let us now see our "moderator" as theologian. The essential qualities of the religious student in all ages are not within our province here. We have to do with him as he relates to present wants; and perhaps the first qualification indispensable in him is this: that he be "a man of the age," according to God, and not "a man of the age," according to men-that he belong to the cycle rather than to the century-to the thousand years rather than to the

he will often discover unity of fact in opposition of language, and will often see in apparent extremes only the counterparts of a divided truth. He will oftenest say-and say well-not in medio, but in ambobus tutissimus. Like the angel in the Apocalypse, he must hold a book open, but lift up his right hand to heaven. To him a present God must explain the universe. A theistic must take possession of every evidence and argument of a pantheistic philosophy. He will translate natural law, the custom of God; miracles will be to him neither impossible, nor inconsistent, nor insignificant; a verbal revelation to the mind of man will seem to him as natural and necessary as a principle of gravitation for his body; cause and effect will be (who has proved them more?) the order of divine action; great and little things will be alike wonders; and he will smile at the complacent sciolism of a day not yet gone by, which explains one mystery by discovering another, and thinks it less divine that the meeting of two transverse nebular streams in heaven should give the incipient rotation to their atoms, than if the hand of God had bowled the round planet spinning into space!

But though the true place of the philosopher is on the throne of heaven-and from that height alone he must endeavour to see the universe --he will remember, that neither he nor his human brethren can act at that height, and that the perspective of creation thence is far other than what it is, or ought to be, when viewed from the seat of the moralist in the centre of the heart of man. Hence the moralist is often wrong in the theory, and the philosopher in the practice of religion. The one makes a mortal of Omnipotence; the other would be a god before his time. He alone who combines the theologian with the philosopher descends from his vision-height, the profoundest of optimists; and while believing of the universe that it " is very good,” accepting, without let or limit, that "whatever is, is right," can yet remind Carlyle and Germany that they have often confounded the human and divine officewhat is right in human duty with what is right in Divine dispensation; and that a fair application of their morality would make a saint of that man who should import the cholera and inoculate the plague.

The philosopher of this age must have neither master nor disciple. A faith in the goodness and the imperfection of our nature must teach him that he cannot by possibility be right who wholly believes or disbelieves in any man. He must be a profound student of anaclatics. The great Expounder of the "truth in things false," and, if we may so say, the falsehood in things true, he must wage sleepless warfare with the unnatural creations of the tongue-the bugbear Simulacra, which begin and end in language. (He who could lay them would redeem our age.) Above all, and comprehending all, the philosopher of the time must remember that the young mind of the age, whether infidel or Christian, will accept only a philosophy in the best sense transcendental-not a philosophy which explains the beautiful by showing that man has always had "a sweet tooth," but a philosophy which, neither idolising nor degrading the beautiful and the true, shall set them in reverent love upon the steps of that throne, whereon sits SOMETHING which we need a new faculty to comprehend. Such a philosophy, for instance, as shall explain our love of beauty and truth, our sense of the sublime, our feelings of wonder and worship towards the material or the spiritual, by no love of

sugar or "fear of death," but by showing that they are obedient to exciting causes, in the proportion of the resemblance of those causes to some one or other of the attributes of God, and by inferring that he has endowed us with this involuntary disposition towards the divine-an energic philosophy, radiating directly from the throne of eternal power -a natural philosophy, gravitating like nature, not only to the centre of the universe, but to the centre of creation.

Thus briefly and imperfectly we have endeavoured to give the characteristics of the Isocrates of our time-the critic, theologian, and philosopher in one, which that man must aspire to be who comes forward in these days as the spiritual adviser of their ruling and rising spirits. Are these the characteristics, latent or patent, of the author of the two volumes before us? Let every reader, bearing those characteristics in mind, search and judge for himself. We confess that we have risen from the perusal of these books with very decided opinions. That Mr Gilfillan has already arrived at all the qualifications of that "moderatorship," to which, or to utter rejection, he must address himself, we are not prepared to say. That there are points in which he has not yet seen or reached all that the age requires of him, we unequivocally affirm; but that he possesses such powers, properties, and aptitudes for this office, as have been combined by no other modern author, is a conviction from which, we think, the impartial reader cannot escape. That his first book bears the stamp of youth (a glorious blemish), and that his second has here and there the marks of haste and preoccupation, his warmest admirers will readily admit. They are evidently-what the preface proclaims the second to be the recreations of a mind employed in loftier labours-essays written in the intervals of authorship-the very holiday-work of genius. "Have you read Gilfillan's first Gallery?" was asked in our hearing. "I never read poetry," was the laconic and sufficient reply. We have elsewhere said, the poet works to move himself; the orator to move others. To an obedience to this law, in the first volume, and a temporary oblivion of it in the second, we may trace the excellencies and defects of both. The temperament of Gilfillan's mind is poetic. In the first volume he gave it scope, and wrote for himself; in the second his eyes are too often upon the audience. In the first, consequently, we put down the book, or the chapter, with a sharpened appetite; in the second we are sometimes tempted to remind our author, that, on earth as in heaven, men are not "heard for their much speaking." Let him compare the noble tribute to his father, in which he wrote neither to public nor critic, but to his own overflowing soul, with the style of some other essays in the same volume, and he will understand us. Evidences of subordinate attention break on us, as might be expected, here and there, in the shape of what, in the work of so deep a thinker, we pass over as the half thinking of a careless moment, the shot of a bow half bent. To some such moments we set down much of the critique on George Dawson, and some of the remarks on Charles Dickens. The lecturer on "Things not seen," and "Popular Proverbs," can hardly be accused of a want of reverence for "the mysterious," or for "the past." In such a moment, too, he must have suffered the brilliant monoculism of that literary cyclops, Croly, to address, unrebuked, creation to the created to make a sermon of the universe, and a preacher of his God.

The emanation of Divine mind must be full of Divine attributes, as surely as the thought of man is coloured by his character; but to suppose that we can yet compass the purpose of the emanation, is to suppose that the worm which feeds upon the brain can conceive the glorious visions which have informed it. In such a moment, also, (we think) our author has allowed himself to require too apparent a purpose in the works of human genius. Whatever purpose may be in a poet's life will be in his works; but any more obvious purpose in them than the cast of his mind and the selection of his subject involve-any straining at "a moral," beyond what the natural treatment of that subject exhibits, is a special pleading of which the true poet will not be guilty. The best poetry is oftenest no more than exudation-whether, as in Byron, the bloody sweat, or in Tennyson the fragrant breath and tears of myrrh, or in Coleridge the luminous efflorescence of the electric light within.

But all these things are blemishes which our author can shake off like the dew; passing clouds in a landscape, wherein, like Claude's, the very shadows are soaked in light. In estimating the natural place of a strong mind, we must look, not so much to the temporary position in its orbit, as to the centre, from which the circle of its beliefs and sympathies is described. The radii of two orbits may be equal, and the arcs for a time may be coincident, and yet the centre in the one case be before, and in the other behind the age.

We look, therefore, on the shortcomings of a mind like Gilfillan's with no fear of the future. To such a mind all things are possible. For such a mind we feel convinced there is no place of rest. For such a mind it is not a matter of choice or ambition, but of inevitable necessity, to ascend in due course that chair of which we have already spoken -to become the "common measure" of rising genius-the central truth in the intellect of our time.

VOICES OF NATURE.

The moonlight winds play'd through the leafy trees,
Making sweet music o'er the sleeping flowers:
The old stars told the hours,

And, like the swell of mournful symphonies,
The ocean surges, wafted by the breeze,
Echoed among the bowers.

I caught the solemn music-bent the knee,
Joining the glorious hymn of Love and Liberty!
Across the far-blue "Morgen Land” the storm
Hung its dark mantle, and the gathering clouds
Came down like sable shrouds
Over the distant mountains. Heavy, warm,
With a sepulchral breath, the dead air hung
As waiting to be stirr'd. The lightning flash'd
Rapid and far, rains dash'd,

Swelling the mountain torrents. Each a tongue
Proclaim'd in loudest accents, "We are free”—
In thrilling concert sung,

The same all glorious song of Love and Liberty!