and history which led him thus to oppose Puritanism, and to regard it as nothing more than a temporary outbreak of madness drawing hypocrisy along with it, was also the secret root of his other dislikes and antipathies. Hence his satires on speculation as such; on the heroic forms of literature; on chivalry towards women; on abstract reasoning in politics; on theory of all kinds, and on what he called the foolish investigations of the physical philosophers. All these were to him but so many other forms of that affection of mind for the supra-sensible, that devotion to the unseen and untangible, which Butler had derided in his attacks on the Puritans. There were many ways, he thought, in which men entertained themselves with "Fool's Paradises of what should be, not what is ;" and he made it his business to ridicule them all, as equally contrary to sound sense and prudence. And yet curiously enough, there are instances in which Butler, by the very penetrating excess of his hard sense, comes out, so to speak, at the other side, and by ruminating on descendentalism itself, contrives almost to become transcendental for a moment. There is a kind of serene sorrowful wisdom in some of his sayings, showing that in his old age, and when severe experience had reduced his sense to the form of a quintessence, he did touch on the extreme and metaphysical, if only in abjuring it. Thus:

"The understanding of man hath a sphere of activity, beyond which, if it be forced, it becomes inactive, as it does vigorous by being confined. Unless a vine be pruned, it will bear no fruit; and he that related to the Senate, de coercendis Imperii terminis, was no unwise statesman. Opinion of knowledge has ever been one of the chiefest causes of ignorance; for most men know less than they might, by attempting to know more than they can."-Thoughts upon various subjects.

Again:

"The end of all knowledge is to understand what is fit to be done, for to know what has been, and what is, and what may be, does but tend to

that."-Ibid..

In these, and other similar sayings, we have Butler at his highest; but a very great part of his writings, and especially of his prose writings, consists of serious and severe thought and criticism, shewing no mean sagacity of observation, strength of judgment, and honest integrity of purpose.

As all know, however, it is his wit that has made him immortal; and it is by the prodigious amount and concentration of this one quality in his writings-and that too, in the exact sense in which psychologists are wont to definite wit when they distinguish it from the apparently similar but really greater quality of humorthat these writings will live in our literature. Here are a few specimens from his prose writings:

"Governments are not built as houses are, but grow as trees do. And as some trees thrive best in one soil, some in another, so do governments; but none equally in any, but all generally where they are most naturally produced; and therefore 'tis probable the state of Venice would be no more the same in any other country, if introduced, than their trade of glass-making."

"One that is proud of his birth is like a turnip there is nothing good of him, but that which is underground."

"His (the courtly fop's) tailor is his creator, and makes him of nothing; and though he lives by faith in him, he is perpetually committing iniquities against him."

"A proud man is a fool in fermentation."

"He (a literary plagiarist) is like an Italian thief that never robs but he murders to prevent discovery."

steers the sense of his lines by the rhyme that is "When he (a versifier) writes, he commonly at the end of them, as butchers do calves by the tail."

"A Popish priest is one that takes the same course that the devil did in Paradise; he begins with the woman."

"A traveller is a native of all countries, and an alien at home. His observations are like a sieve, that lets the finer flour pass, and retains only the bran of things. He believes all men's wits are at a stand that stay at home, and only those advanced, that travel, as if change of pasture did make great politicians, as well as fat calves.'

"He (the amateur of science) is like an elephant that, though he cannot swim, yet of all creatures most delights to walk by the river's side."

Butler's verse is but his prose put through a process of metrical torture, trituration, and re-compression, so as to come out more compact, knotty, and glittering. He had early found out, as we have seen, the advantage that would be given him by calling to his aid the additional stimulus to odd intellectual invention afforded by metre and rhyme; and from that time, though he continued to write in prose, it was with a mental reservation in favor of doggrel, and especially octosyllabic doggrel, with

plenty of double and triple rhymes in it, as the natural and proper form of his highest literary efforts. Accordingly, it is in his doggrel that we have Butler at his best. The stuff or essential fabric of the writing is still the same-namely, hard, bare, ruthless sense, often directly polemical in its tenor, and always cynical; the peculiar literary excellence whereby this sense is recommended and set off is, as before, wit, or odd associations of images supplied by the fancy; but the wit is richer and more exquisite from the very fact, that the fancy, in producing it, has worked under the additional restriction and stimulus of metre and rhyme. Let us cull a handful of specimens at random.

"If he that in the field is slain

Be in the bed of honor lain,
He that is beaten may be said
To lie in honor's truckle-bed."

"Some have been beaten till they know
What wood a cudgel's of by the blow."
"For what is worth in anything

But so much money as 'twill bring?" "The sun had long since in the lap Of Thetis taken out his nap,

And, like a lobster boiled, the morn From black to red began to turn." "And we are best of all led to

Men's principles by what they do ;" "For the more languages a man can speak His talent has but sprung the greater leak."

"As beasts are hunted for their furs, Men for their virtues fare the worse."

"A teacher's doctrine and his proof Is all his province and enough; But is no more concern'd in use Than shoemakers to wear all shoes," "Success, that owns and justifies all quarrels, And vindicates deserts of hemp with laurels; Or, but miscarrying in the bold attempt, Turns wreaths of laurels back again to hemp." "In the Church of Rome to go to shrift Is but to put the soul on a clean shift."

"A convert's but a fly that turns about After his head's pulled off, to find it out."

In such sententious distichs, many of which, to use Johnson's words, "have passed into conversation, and been added as proverbial axioms to the general stock of practical knowledge," we have the essence of Butler's poetry. Just, however, as Butler's judgment, by the very excess of its devotion to the hard and the material, did now and then attain to the verge of the spiritual and metaphysical, so his fancy, in its sheer search after the witty and the quaint, sometimes reaches the limits of the poetical and beautiful. Thus: "Love is too great a happiness

For wretched mortals to possess ;
For, could it hold inviolate
Against those cruelties of fate
Which all felicities below
By rigid laws are subject to,
It would become a bliss too high
For perishing mortality,

Translate to earth the joys above;

For nothing goes to Heaven but Love."

Such passages show that the author of Hudibras had a vein in him of finer material than the merely burlesque or Hudibrastic. That vein, however, he did not cultivate; and hence, so long as Butler is remembered, it will be only, in the first place, in his defunct capacity as the contemporary opponent and satirist of the great Puritan movement in England; and, secondly, in his more permanent character as the author of a great number of sayings and maxims which, though conceived in the spirit of the cynical philosophy, and used at first to burlesque Puritanism and other high matters, are still so terse and good and sensible as to be available, in consistency with any philosophy whatever, for general human purposes. Even in the former, or his defunct historical capacity, Butler may have done good, for hypocrisy mingles with all things, and the Hudibrastic is one method of beating it out.

IN olden times man knew but little of the attributes of the earth beneath his feet. He found that it furnished him all the necessities of his frame required, and much of agreeable superfluity besides. To his senses it seemed to be a broad plain girt by a wide ocean, which stretched further than his glance could follow it:

"Circumfluus humor

Ultima possedit solidumque coercuit orbem."

But this was long the measure of his apprehension. During the brightest days, indeed, of early civilisation, a gleam of some deeper significance was caught by philosophy; and poetry and religion even peopled the untravelled realms of the infinite, and the bright constellations of the firmament, with beings of a superior race. These, however, were dreams of the fancy, unsubstantial fabrics which faded and left no truth behind, that science could pick up and store away in her treasury. It was reserved to the renowned Copernicus, some two centuries and a half ago, first distinctly to demonstrate that the apparent terrestrial plain was really a free and independent material mass moving in a definable path through space. Then Newton explained that this independent mass moved through space because it was substantial and heavy, and because it was unsupported by props or chains; that in fact, as a massive body, it

*Of the Plurality of Worlds: an Essay. With a Dialogue on the same Subject. 2d edition. London: 1854.

More Worlds than One-the Creed of the Philosopher, and the Hope of the Christian. By Sir DAVID BREWSTER, K.H., F.R.S., V.P.R.S. Edin, &c. &c. 3d thousand, corrected and enlarged. London:

1854.

Essays on the Spirit of the Inductive Philosophy, the Unity of Worlds, and the Philosophy of Creation. By the Rev. BADEN POWELL, M.A., F.R.S., &c., Savilian Professor of Geometry in the University of

Oxford. London: 1855.

A few more Words on the Plurality of Worlds. By W. S. JACOB, F.R.A.S., Astronomer to the Honorable East India Company. London: 1855.

is falling for ever through the void, but that as it falls it sweeps round the sun in a never-ending circuit, attracted towards it by magnet-like energy, but kept off from it by the force of its centrifugal movement. Next, Snell and Picard measured the dimensions of the heavy and falling mass, and found that it was a spherical body, with a girdle of 25,000 miles. Subsequently to this, Bailly contrived a pair of scales that enabled him approximately to weigh the vast sphere, and he ascertained that it had within itself somewhere about 1,256,195,670,000,000,000,000,000 tons of matter. To these discoveries Foucault has recently added demonstration to the actual senses of the fact that the massive sphere is whirling on itself as it falls through space, and round the sun, so that point after point of its vast surface is brought in succession into the genial influence of the sunshine, an investing atmosphere of commingled vapor and air is made to present clouds, winds, and rain, and the invested surface to bear vegetable forms and animated creatures in great diversity. The world then is a large solid sphere, invested with a loosened shell of transparent, elastic, easily movable vapor, and whirling through space within the domains of sunshine, so that by the combined action of the transparent mobile vapor and the stimulant sunshine, organised creatures may grow and live on its surface, and those vital changes may be effected, amongst which conscious and mental life stands as the highest results.

But the idea had occurred even to Copernicus, that this heavy mundane sphere, which affords convenient and substantial support to the footsteps of man, might possibly be not the only body of this kind contained within the wide realms of universal space. He knew that if he could get far enough away from its sunlit form, he must see it dwindle down to a shining point or star. He perceived that the transparent regions surrounding the

earth are crowded with such shining points, which become visible when the observer is protected from the glare of the sun by the nocturnal shadow of the globe. He watched these shining star-points night after night, until he ascertained that some amongst them at least, move in space, as the earth does, and round the sun. From these simple data, with the bold dash of genius, he leaped at once to the conclusion that man's world is not solitary in the infinite wilderness of space; that it has companions and brethren amidst the shining hosts of the sky; that there are other orbs of substantial material, whirling in the sunshine, and capable of affording all the conditions which life of the highest kinds needs for its development and support.

Year after year, as fresh appliances have been brought to bear upon the advancement of astronomical science, new arguments have been furnished in favor of the sagacious surmise of Copernicus. So soon as the telescope was added to the instruments of man's research, mountains, valleys, and plains were observed on the earth's nearest neighbor-the moon. Then it was found that the planets revolve on their axes like the earth, as they sweep along their orbits, and that some of them bear traces on their surfaces of atmospheres and clouds and winds. Upon one of them even polar snow was discovered, which melted by slow degrees as it was inclined in the warmth of advancing summer. The larger planets were proved to be of far greater bulk, and to contain far greater weights of substantial matter, than the terrestrial sphere. The fixed stars, also those shining points which are withdrawn so far into the immensity that no dimensions can ever be grasped in them by the eye, although aided by the most powerful telescopes-were found to be masses, rolling through space, and attracting each other, and therefore possessing dense substantiality, which placed them in the category of worlds that might have vital atmospheres and organised existences, as well as the light which encircles them. In this way the idea of a Plurality of Worlds in the universe of the Creator, has been gradually developed, till it has been insensibly transformed into an article of faith in most intelligent minds, and men have come to believe that not only the planets, but also the shining stars of the boundless firmament in all

their countless myriads, must be seats both of life and of sentient intelligence, capable of enjoying and employing its faculties and attributes, and of carrying forward some ordained plan of beneficent wisdom; and that to deny this qualification to the planets and stars, would be tantamount to limiting the realms of the Creator, and robbing him of a portion of his majesty and glory. But even this is not all. Modern astronomy has gone out far beyond the boundary of the star-firmament, and there it has descried, lying in immeasurable distance, faint definite clouds of filmy light, which, even to good telescopes, look, as they float in the chasms of darkness, like whisps of pale phosphorescent mist. At first these were taken to be the vaporous comets of the remote universe, and they were called by a name which implied that they were nothing more than mist or cloud. They were designated nebula by their discoverers. In process of time, however, as the construction of the telescope was rendered more perfect, in was found that some of these light clouds were really clouds of stars; that, in fact, they were other firmaments lying out so far beyond the extremest bounds of the great firmamental system to which the sun, with its dependent planetary worlds, belongs, that even their light points were blended in misty confusion. Sir William Herschel was able to discern stars without number in several of them, and since his time, as grander and yet grander instruments have been brought into operation, more and more clouds have put off their nebulous features, and have assumed the glories of sidereal bodies. Scarcely any of the nebulæ, indeed, known before the commencement of Lord Rosse's observations, have resisted the resolvent might of the giant telescopic eye that he has framed. Firmament after firmament has revealed itself to the penetrating glance of his great mirror. In this way has gradually been matured the idea that there are in the wide universe countless myriads of firmamental star-clusters, which are themselves, severally, what the cluster is that is seen by the naked eye to spangle the surrounding heavens at night; that there are families of firmaments, as there are groups and associated clusters of stars or suns.

But immediately upon the recognition of this idea followed, as a matter of course, the extension to these external