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"The existence of a body of creatures, capable vation as this, is, according to all that we can of such a law, of such a trial, and of such an eleconceive, an object infinitely more worthy of the exertion of the Divine Power and Wisdom, in the creation of the Universe, than any number of planets occupied by creatures having no such lot, no such law, no such capacities, and no such reponsibilities.

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from his own particular region of research. his position is no longer tenable. He He has shown that there are in some ver- writes: tebrated creatures rudiments of supernumerary limbs beyond the two ordinary pairs, which have never been developed and matured in any existing or extinct terrestrial creature, and he hence infers the probable existence elsewhere of vertebrate forms of animal life, in which these additional members are perfected and brought into full operation and activity. To say the least of it, this "train" of anatomical "speculation" is as worthy of being followed to the end as those other trains which have led the anonymous essayist to his vitreous and aqueous balls and curdled light, to his abortive worlds and his universal chaos. For ourselves, we frankly confess, that in the absence of any more authoritative guide, the reasoning of the essayist would incline us so much the more to cast in our lot with the comparative anatomist. We might calmly bear the sense of having no other companionship in the wide universe than our own pleasant earth affords, but we can not brave the chaos that is here set before

us.

Instinctively we shrink from "the lumps which have flown from the potter's wheel of the Great Worker; the shredcoils which, in the working, sprang from his mighty lathe; the sparks which darted from his awful anvil when the solar system lay incandescent thereon; the curls of vapor which rose from the great cauldron of creation when its elements were separated." If all readers were constituted like ourselves, this Essay, paradoxically named "Of the Plurality of Worlds," would be found to have done more for the cause of "Plurality" than the united labors of Copernicus and Galileo, Huyghens and Lalande, Chalmers and Fontenelle.

have urged to show that other animals, in com'Perhaps it may be said that all which we parison with man, are less worthy objects of creative design, may be used as an argument to prove that other planets are tenanted by men, or by moral or intellectual creatures like men; since, if the creation of one world of such creatures exalts so highly our views of the dignity and importance of the plan of creation, the belief in many such worlds and reverence of the greatness and goodness of the Creator; and must be a belief, on that account, to be accepted and cherished by pious minds.

must elevate still more our sentiments of admiration

"To this we reply, that we can not think ourselves authorized to assert cosmological doctrines, selected arbitrarily by ourselves, on the ground of their exalting our sentiments of admiration and reverence for the Deity, when the weight of all the evidence we can obtain respecting the constitution of the universe is against them." (P. 367.)

Enough has been said to show that when science is looked at in the commonsense, practical way, instead of in the essayist's "somewhat different view," the weight of the evidence derived from what is known of the physical constitution of the universe is not against these metaphysical considerations, and that therefore they must be allowed to make their full and uninterrupted impression, according to their own innate momenta. In truth, the existence of a body of intellectual and moral beings on the earth does seem so much more worthy of the exertion of Divine Creative Power than that of mere brute But whilst "physical reasons," appealed creatures, that it is hardly possible to to by the essayist to support his notions conceive the endless array of stupendous of extra-terrestrial chaos, thus, instead of spheres not to be so worthily filled. But answering the appeal, really increase a not only so; for this line of argument is hundred-fold the strength of the proba- so comprehensive and influential, that it bility that the remote spheres of the uni- applies as aptly to the abstract question verse are dwelling-places for diversified of vitality, as it does to that of intelligent life, important considerations of a meta- and moral existence. The existence of a physical kind also present themselves as body of living beings on the earth seems very powerful arguments in the same di- to the philosophic observer so worthy an rection. And indeed the essayist himself exertion of creative wisdom and power, seems fully sensible of the force of these that it is hardly possible to conceive the considerations, for he admits, after a fash-like exertion not to have been made ion, that if his physical defence fails him, wherever there is a similar material thea

which, after traversing the immensity which separates them from the earth, are there obedient to the same laws with the light-beams of the sun and of artificial illumination. The rays of the nebula and stars are collected by the lenses of the telescope, through their refracting powers, into visual spectra and images, just as the rays of the sun, or of lamp-light are. But in this vast system of related bodies the region under our direct observation is found to be crowded with organized forms. Matter and light in it seem to be fulfilling the one sole commission of supporting vitality. The inference is plain. Matter and light in other less conspicuous regions, being still under the same laws, must be working to a similar purpose, and tending to a similar end.

tre basking in sunlight-matter is so ob- | possess the same gravitating attributes, viously, in man's experience of nature, and emit luminous vibratory streams, destined for, and employed in, the production and support of living organization. The surface of man's earth is so crowded with a limitless diversity of organic contrivance there is such profusion every where of moving and feeling creatures species are multiplied upon species in such countless thousands-generations succeed to generations in such an endless repetition-there is such an avidity for vitality upon every possible habitable portion of the mundane sphere-the Great Designer of Nature's scheme has so manifestly willed that that portion of the material universe within the scope of human observation should be teeming with living things, that it is improbable in the extreme the same designer should have left blank and desolate the other wide regions of substantial capacity, which are equally fitted to be the seat of similar developments, which are unquestionably kindred parts of one physically connected system, and which in extent transcend the terrestrial surface as millions upon millions in untold immensity transcend a unit. The essayist may feel that one theatre of moral action is "a sufficient centre of innumerable hosts of stars and planets;" but in avowing this feeling he lays himself open to the retort that the Creator of all things obviously has not felt so too, seeing that he has placed in that one theatre "corals and madrepores, fishes and creeping things," as well as moral agents. He who has fashioned the mole and the beetle, in order that even the mouldering soil of that moral theatre may have its sentient tenants; who has formed the whale and the clio, in order that the half-frozen depths of the Arctic Sea may have their inhabitants; and who has made the feathered bird and winged insect, the tortuous serpent and the four-handed monkey, in order that the otherwise impenetrable recesses of the tropical forest may not be without their abundant population; can never have left such spheres as the magnificent orb of Jupiter, which is more than fourteen hundred times larger than the earth, or those solar orbs that have surfaces thousands of times larger than the earth's, unoccupied. The universe consists of myriads of material objects, which are, notwithstanding the vastness of their numbers, all related parts of one comprehensive scheme, for they

The essayist remarks, that if any one holds the opinion, on whatever evidence, that there are other regions than this earth in which God has subjects and servants, he does not breathe a syllable against such a belief; he only contends that it is a rash and unadvised proceeding, unwarranted by religion, and at variance with all that science teaches, to place those other extra-human spheres of Divine government in the planets and in the stars; and that " a belief in the Divine government of other races of spiritual creatures besides the human race, and in Divine ministrations committed to such beings, can not be connected with our physical and astronomical views of the nature of the stars and the planets, without making a mixture altogether incongruous and incoherent- a mixture of what is material and what is spiritual, adverse alike to sound religion and to sound philosophy." Fully agreeing in this remark, we can not sufficiently wonder that so intelligent a writer and thinker as the author of this Essay obviously is, should, with such a principle in his mind, have undertaken to show "that the teaching of religion suggests the wisdom" of not admitting the Plurality of Worlds upon scientific grounds; for in the attempt to do this, he could only expect, according to his own premise, to produce an incongruous and incoherent mixture that many must deem alike adverse to sound religion and sound philosophy. Our respect for the literary skill and intellectual power of the essayist constrains

us deeply to regret that he has committed | perfected suns; it does not establish the himself, even anonymously, to a task in position that the planets can not be inhabwhich his skill and power have of neces- ited worlds, either in the sense of their sity signally failed. The Essay "Of the being seats of simple organic vitality, or Plurality of Worlds" does not show that of moral existence; and, in its own pages, the majority of the nebula are not star- it incidentally suggests metaphysical confirmaments; it does not prove that the siderations which are unanswerably opgeneral host of the fixed stars are not posed to its own argument.

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HISTORIANS generally have recorded the deeds of heroes, but of the devotedness and gentleness of women they have taken but slight account. They have considered it too much their province to narrate the ambitious projects of kings, the intrigues and crimes of men seeking their own aggrandizement by any means-the horrors of war, the rise and fall of states, the consolidation of nationalities, and the conflict of contradictory principles, which have their embodiment in monarchical and popular institutions; but they record the names and life-deeds of but few women, and these, for the most part, are of that sterner mould and of that ferocious character which can be associated only painfully with our thoughts of the gentler sex. The characters of Cleopatra, Julia, Messalina, Catharine de Medici, the English and Scotch Marys, show darkly amid the memorials of the generations passed away. It is painful to think they were women. Herodius and the Magdalene, Drusilla and Lydia appear darkly and brightly in the brief but sublime narratives of the early Church, as if those faultless memorials intentionally exhibited the ultimate possibility of vice and virtue, cruelty and kindness in feminine character. Time gives intensity to the lineaments alike of the hero and the villain; and if it be true that there is properly no history, only biography, if all history, to

* L'Amour dans le Mariage. [Love in Marriage. By M. Guizot. Second Edition. Paris: L. Hachette & Co.] Par M. Guizot. Deuxième Edition. Paris: Librairie de L. Hachette et Cie. Pp. 92. 1855.

quote the words of a great essayist, becomes subjective, one sees in all that recorded past still only the same nature, the same humanity in its contradictory developments. Thus, from the hour when the first pyramid was commenced, until to-day, man is identical. That which has been done, will be repeated in the present and the future. If the evil shall reappear, so also shall the good.

Few women are comparable with the wife of the unfortunate William Russell; and it may be hoped, from the advance of good principles, and from the general progress of mankind, that evil times, such as those in which she lived, will never return. In her mournful story are recorded those noble characteristics, which are generally depicted only on the pages of romance. In her they were actual, the strength and beauty of her life-not only an enduring self-denial, an entire devotion to the memory of her murdered lord, and to the well-being of their children, but that persistent goodness of heart, that entire religiousness of conduct, equal in her happiness and in her sorrow, which

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"What can I pray for," she writes in one of these charming epistles, " but that God, if it seem good to him, may continue to me all these joys? And if he decide it otherwise, that he may give wise arrangements and to his sovereign provime strength to submit without murmuring to his dence, keeping a grateful heart for those years of perfect happiness which I have already received from him. He knows, better than we, at what moment we have obtained and enjoyed enough here below. That which I earnestly implore of his compassion is, that, no matter which of us without hope of finding his beloved one again. may first depart, the other may not despair, as if Let us joyfully hope that we may live together until a good old age; if not, let us not fear but that God will sustain us in the trial with which he may afflict us. Let us daily pray to God that it may be so, and we shall fear nothing. Death is, it is true, the greatest evil, and which troubles our nature the most; let us overcome our immoderate fear of death, both for our beloved and for ourselves; we shall live then with tranquil hearts.

lustrious Ruvigny family, who were driven | sent to languishing beauties and eager from France by religious persecution, she rivals-the gossip, follies, and frivolities early learned, not only those grand truths in the voluptuous court of the "muttonthat man is responsible for his faith to his eating king," whose words were never Maker alone, and that it were better to foolish, and whose deeds were never wise. die than to live enslaved, but also to feel How these letters evince, also, her pasa perfect sympathy with the misfortunes sionate love, carefulness, and appreheneven of strangers, and thus, as if in an- sions for her absent lord; and, most of ticipation of her future, to know the sub- all, the suspicion that such complete joy limity of patient endurance. Married, as theirs could not but some day have in her eighteenth year, to Lord Vaughan, its cloud, such peace its storm! the elder son of the Earl of Carberry, she became a widow at the end of two years, and shortly after the decease of her husband, her father died, leaving his vast property to be shared by herself and sister, the Lady Elizabeth Noel. In 1670, Lady Vaughan became the wife of Lord William Russell, and it is from this epoch that she is known to the world, sharing the fortunes of the ill-starred and time-honored patriot, the victim of a king without virtue and without heart. Rare in this world of ours, amid the antagonism of rival interests, and the selfishness of the multitude, is love like that of Rachel Russell, without mistrust or fear, a pure passion, without intemperance and without discord, and which, as M. Guizot writes, in harmony with all aspirations human and divine, to them who enjoy it, is Paradise regained. Tranquil, modest, and supremely virtuous, loving ardently and innocently her husband, whose heart beat high with patriotic ardor and in his hope Nearly eleven years had passed away that, one day, he should see his fatherland since this letter was written, and the prosperous because free; and that it dreaded storm broke at last; the serene might be his glorious life-work to estab- sky became densely clouded; but, even lish reasonable liberty on a lasting basis; amid the murky air, the star of hope rewith a truly Christian soul, warped by no mained to allure the patient mourner to bigotry, and exhibiting always an exalted brighter worlds. The tyranny of Charles charity to those who did not think as she II. had become insupportable to all intelthought, Lady Russell appears before us ligent lovers of their country. The monwith peculiar grandeur and character. arch, himself a mere pensioner of the How tender, and yet how touching are ambitious French king, was popish at her letters, those especially of her earlier heart, and, even under the cloak of a wedded life, sent to her husband during sublime hyprocrisy, was unable entirely his occasional absences from home, with to conceal his predilection from the vigitheir scanty intelligence of such news of lant men who sighed for the virtue and the day as could reach her-that there the heroic spirit which passed away when had been, it was rumored, a great sea- Oliver died. The standing army was a fight off Solbay, in which Ruyter was van- burden and a terror to men who painfully quished, but with grievous loss-that the remembered the fields of Naseby and Duke of York's marriage was broken off Worcester; the Parliament was corrupt that the courtship between Miss Ogle and and servile; and the government weak, Tom Howard's son continued-and that despotic, and mercenary. Lords Hollis Tom Wharton was looking out for another and Russell, with the hope of remedying mistress; such chit-chat as the "Morning these evils, which perilled the very existPost," in our own day, delights to pre-ence of the State, had entered into a

clandestine correspondence with the French ambassador; but Barillon's letters abundantly prove that their conduct was actuated only by patriotism. The time was come, when serious questions were to be asked by them and by all serious men: How was the royal tyranny most effectually to be resisted? How was the nation to attain to liberty? Would it be well to invite foreign coöperation? That the majority of the Whig party, and their adherents, would fight side by side with the troops of the Grand Monarque, even could these effect a landing on the English shores, was to the last degree improbable. Better to live under the despotism of a heartless and profligate English king, than to obtain freedom by the intervention of a foreign and a popish power. Lord Russell, sincere, earnest, inexperienced, and guided always by principles of high honor, and by nobility of mind, could not counsel freedom for the fatherland by such means. But was the old spirit entirely quelled, which had kindled so great a conflagration against the first Charles? If a conspiracy could be formed among some of the wealthier and more popular nobles, would it not succeed? To establish the Commonwealth again was out of the question, but it were not difficult, perhaps, to form a strong and lasting constitutional government, by which a king should rule in harmony with the wishes of the people. Was there not every thing to justify an armed resistance? The Parliament had been corrupted, and the entire state was at the feet of a debauched ruler and his profligate harlots. Russell revolved these weighty matters frequently -alas! without consulting his noble wife, whose counsels, perhaps, had overborne his sterner purpose. But his resolution was formed, to overthrow the hated tyranny by the armed hand. Conspirators, like gamblers, calculate on a theory of probabilities entirely their own, but with too little regard to the chances of failure, and with too much placed upon those of success. That success was far from hopeless, may be assumed from the fact that noblemen such as Essex and Russell, who had so much to lose if the attempt miscarried, had not engaged in it but with a prospect of accomplishing their lofty purpose. No one at all acquainted with the character of these two illustrious men, could suppose that they were connected with the minor plot for the assassination of the king.

That were to degrade themselves from patriots to assassins. In an evil hour, Russell, Essex, Algernon Sidney, and Hampden, admitted Lord Howard to their counsels-a man of a fickle nature and malignant heart, a hasty conspirator and a ready traitor. Howard, fearing for his own safety if the conspiracy failed, or desirous to build his fortune upon the ruin of the confederates, secretly went to the king at the apartments of the Duchess of Portsmouth, and informed him of all which the misplaced confidence of the patriots had permitted him to learn. Intelligence of the discovery was immediately conveyed to the conspirators. Lord Shaftesbury fled into Holland; Essex was placed in the Tower, where he speedily destroyed himself; Lord Russell was arrested, and taken before the council. The king presided, keenly watching the noble prisoner, and already resolved that he should not escape, if it were possible to destroy him. The examination was long and perplexing, and at its close Russell was committed to the Tower. On entering that gloomy fortress-the dungeon-home through weary years, and at last the grave, of many a gallant hearthe said to his valet: "They will have my life; the devil is unloosed." Fifteen days elapsed before the unfortunate nobleman was brought to trial, his wife, the while, doing the utmost to serve him, using every effort to rescue him from that last evil she feared so much. On July 13, 1683, Lord Russell was brought to trial. Pemberton, the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who presided, was a humane, but a weak and vacillating, man. The counsel for the crown against the prisoner were Sawyer and Jefferies, the latter of whom has earned an immortality of infamy-"a man," as Mr. Macaulay has described him," constitutionally prone to insolence and to the angry passionsthe most consummate bully ever known in the profession." The sheriffs, either commanded by the court to do so, or eager to obtain substantial proofs of the king's favor, had packed the jury. No modern jury would have returned a verdict of guilty on the evidence of such witnesses as Howard and Rumsey; but, in those evil days, judge and counsel alike prosecuted the unhappy victims of royal hatred or mistrust. The hall of trial was so crowded that the lawyers complained they had no place in which to sit down.

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