PHYSICAL THEORY OF ANOTHER LIFE.*

(EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1840.]

In a series of volumes of later birth than | fashioned meeting-house, coeval with the acthat from which the author of the "Natural cession of the House of Hanover-and near History of Enthusiasm" takes the title of his it the decent residence, in which, since that literary peerage, he has bent his strength to auspicious era, have dwelt the successive pasthe task of revealing to itself the generation to tors of that wandering flock-fanning a genewhich he belongs. A thankless office that of rous spirit of resistance to tyrants, now happily the censorship! A formidable enterprise this, to be encountered only in imagination, or in to rebuke the errors of a contentious age, the records of times long since passed away. while repelling the support of each of the con- Towards the close of the last century, a mild tending parties! To appease the outraged and venerable man ruled his household in that self-complacency of mankind, such a monitor modest but not unornamented abode; for there will be cited before a tribunal far more relent- might be seen the solemn portraits of the oriless than his own. Heedless both of con- ginal confessors of nonconformity, with many tumely and of neglect, he must pursue his a relic commemorative of their sufferings and labours in reliance on himself and on his their worth. Contrasted with these were the cause; or, if fame be the reward to which he lighter and varied embellishments which beaspires, he must content himself with the anti-speak the presence of refined habits, female cipation of posthumous renown. It is not, however, easy for the aspirant himself to find the necessary aliment for such hopes. The writer of these works will therefore indulge us in a theory invented for the aid of his and our own imagination. Let it be supposed, that, instead of yet living to instruct the world, he was now engaged in bringing to the test of experiment his own speculations as to the condition of mankind in the future state. He reappears amongst sublunary men under the auspices of some not unfriendly editor; who, however, being without any other sources of intelligence respecting his course of life and studies, has diligently searched his books for such intimations as may furnish the materials for a short "Introductory Notice" of him and of them. The compiler is one of those who prefer the positive to the conjectural style of recounting matters of fact; and has assumed the freedom of throwing into the form of un-audible sigh from his resolute spirit, even when qualified assertion the inferences he had gleaned his more delicate sense was writhing under from detached passages of the volumes he is wounds imperceptible to their coarser vision. about to republish. With the help of this He had deliberately made his choice, and was slight and not very improbable hypothesis, the content to pay the accustomed penalties. A author of these works, while still remaining sectarian in name, he was at heart a Catholic, amongst us, may suppose himself to be read-generous enough to feel that the insolence of ing, in some such lines as the following, the sentence which the critic of a future day will pass on his literary character.

taste, and domestic concord. There also were drawn up, in deep files, the works and the biographies of the Puritan divines, from Thomas Cartwright, the great antagonist of Whitgift, to Matthew Pool, who, in his Synopsis Criticorum, vindicated the claims of the rejected ministers to profound Biblical learning. This veteran battalion was flanked by a company of recruits drafted from the polite literature of a more frivolous age. Rich in these treasures, and in the happy family with whom he shared them, the good man would chide or smile away such clouds as checkered his habitual sere nity, when those little nameless courtesies, so pleasantly interchanged between equals, were declined by the orthodox incumbent, or accepted with elaborate condescension by the wealthy squire. The democratic sway of the ruling elders, supreme over the finances and the doctrines of the chapel, failed to draw an

some of his neighbours, and the vulgarity of others, were rather the accidents of their position than the vices of their character. VexaOne of those seemingly motionless rivers tions such as these were beneath the regard of which wind their way through the undulating him who maintained in the village the sacred surface of England, creeps round the outskirts cause for which martyrs had sacrificed life of a long succession of buildings, half town, with all its enjoyments; and who aspired to half village, where the monotony of the wat- train up his son to the same honourable sertled cottage is relieved by the usual neigh-vice, ill requited as it was by the glory or the bourhood of structures of greater dignity; riches of this transitory world. the moated grange-the mansion-house, pierced by lines of high narrow windows-the square tower of the church,struggling through a copse of lime trees-the gray parsonage, where the conservative rector meditates his daily newspaper and his weekly discourse-the barn

Physical Theory of Another Life. By the author of "Natural History of Enthusiasm." 8vo. London, 1839.

That hope, however, was not to be fulfilled. The youth had inherited his father's magnanimity, his profound devotion, his freedom of thought, and his thirst for knowledge. But he disclaimed the patrimony of his father's ecclesiastical opinions. His was not one of those minds which adjust themselves to whatever mould early habits may have prepared for them. It was compounded of elements, be

spiritual democracy, from the parsimonious simplicity of their sacred edifices, from the obtrusive prominence of the leaders of their worship, and from their seeming isolation in the midst of the great Christian commonwealth, his thoughts turned to those more august communions, where the splendours of earth symbolize the hierarchies of heavenwhere the successors in an unbroken lineage of apostles and martyrs are yet ministering at the altar-where that consecrated shrine echoes to the creeds and the supplications of the first converts to the faith-and where alone can

tween which there are no apparent affinities, | To one worthy of the much prostituted name but the reverse; and which, for that reason, of poet, no forms of society are without their produce in their occasional and unfrequent interest and their charm. But he whom the combination, a character substantive, indivi- gods have not made poetical may be kinddual, and strongly discriminated from that of hearted and wise, and even possessed by many other men. Shrinking from the coarse fami- a brilliant fancy, and by many a noble aspiraliarities of the world, he thirsted for the world's tion; and so it fared with this scion of a nonapplause at once a very libertine in the un-conformist race. From the coarseness of a fettered exercise of his own judgment, and a very worshipper of all legitimate authorityalternately bracing his nerves for theological strife, and dissolving them in romantic dreams -now buried in the depths of retirement, that he might plunge deeper still into the solitudes of his own nature; and then revealing his discoveries in a style copied from the fashionable models of philosophical oratory; the young man of whom we tell might be described as a sensitive plant grafted on a Norwegian pine, as a Spartan soldier enamoured of the Idylls of Theocritus, or as an anchorite studious of the precepts of the cosmetic earl of Chester-flourish those arduous but unobtrusive virfield. Nature and accident combined to produce this contrast; integrity and truth gradually blended it into one harmonious, though singular whole. The robust structure of his understanding might have rendered him a rude dogmatist, if the delicate texture of his sensitive or spiritual frame had not forbidden every approach of arrogance. Exploring with intrepid diligence the great questions debated amongst men regarding their internal interests, he recoiled with disgust from the unmannerly habits, the sordid passions, and the petty jealousies which proclaim, but too loudly, that while we dispute about the path to heaven, we are still treading the miry ways of this uncelestial world. Angelic abodes, and holy abstractions, and universal love, were the alluring themes; but, handled as they were by polemics in the language of Dennis, and in the spirit of the Dunciad, our theological student was sometimes tempted to wish that the day on which he was initiated into the mysteries of the hornbook might be blotted from the calendar. Thrown into early association with the depressed and less prosperous party in the ecclesiastical quarrels of his native land, the asperities of the contest presented themselves to his inquisitive and too susceptible eye, unmitigated by the graceful and well-woven veil, beneath which sophistry and rancour can find a specious disguise when allied to rank and fortune and other social distinctions. Episcopal charges and congregational pamphlets might vie with each other in bitterness and wrong; but there rested with the mitred disputant an unquestionable advantage in the grace and dignity and seeming composure with which he inflicted pain and quickened the appetite for revenge. By the unsullied moral sense of the young divine, either form of malevolence might be equally condemned; but to his fastidious taste the ruder aspect which it bore amongst the advocates of dissent was by far the more offensive.

tues, of which an exact subordination of ranks forms the indispensable basis. Already halfdiverted by such yearnings as these from his hereditary standard, his return to the embrace of the Episcopal Church was further aided by a morbid dislike, unworthy of his powerful intellect, of falling into common-place trains of thought or language. Educated in a body through which religious opinions and pious phrases but too lightly circulate, his instinctive dread of vulgarity led him into speculations where such associates would be shaken off, and to the use of a style such as was never employed by the dwellers in tabernacles. Of a nature the most unaffected, and irreproachably upright in the search of truth, he conducted his inquiries with such elaborate fineness of speech, and with such a fear of acquiescing in the bare creed of the school in which he had been bred, that his fellow-scholars must have formed an unjust estimate of their companion, had he not been withdrawn in early life to other associations, and to far different studies from those which they had pursued in common. From his parental village, the future author was transferred to the remote and busy world in which our English youth are instructed in the unjoyous science of special pleading, and trained for the dignities of the coif.

By the unlearned in such matters, more distinct evidence of this passage in his life may perhaps be demanded than the indications which his writings afford of a technical acquaintance with the law. But every "free and accepted brother" of the craft will recognise, in his frequent and curiously exact use of forensic language, a confidence and a skill which belong only to the acolite in those studies. That the Term Reports would be searched in vain for the specimens of his dialectic powers may, however, be readily believed Thurlow had as little to fear from the rivalry of the author of the "Task," as Lord CottenFeelings painfully alive to the ungraceful ham from that of the author of the "Natural and the homely in human character, invariably History of Enthusiasm." Westminster Hall indicate an absence of the higher powers of is no theatre to be trodden by men of pensive imagination. To a great painter the counte- spirits, delicate nerves, and high-wrought sennance of no man is entirely devoid of beauty.sibilities. It is to England what the plain of

Elis was to Greece; and when a Pindar shall a little ostentatiously prominent, accorded to arise to celebrate the triumphs achieved there, them not merely from their own unrivalled he must sing of heroes who have rejoiced in worth and beauty, but also perhaps from the the dust and sweat and turmoil of the strife, of wish of the autocrat to avow their influence men of thick skins and robust consciences, over him. But the main power of his state buoyant and fearless, prompt in resources, and consisted in a race of ancient lineage and obunscrupulous in the use of them. Far other- solete tongues, beginning with Clement, Justin, wise the original of the portrait, so vividly yet and Irenæus, and so onward through the long so unconsciously self-drawn in these volumes. series of Greek and Latin Fathers, eccclesiasEvery lineament tells of one incapable of lend- tical historians, acts of councils and of saints, ing himself to any wilful sophistry-of a man decretals, missals, and liturgies, all in turn rich both in knowledge and in power, though casting their transient lights and their deep destitute of that quiet energy which in judicial shadows over the checkered fortunes of the tribunals, finds appropriate utterance in the Christian Church. Brought within the presimplest combinations of the plainest words-cincts of this wide dominion, Homer, Eschyof a mind banqueting on contemplations most lus, Dante, Shakspeare, and the humbler par abhorrent from those of the peremptory paper. takers of their inspiration, awaited at some Not, however, "the worst of all his ills, the distance the occasional summons of this mighty noisy bar." Political strife shed a repulsive potentate. But in their reverend aspect might gloom over the other halls of the ancient pa- be perceived something, which confessed that lace of Westminster. The whole tribe of party they were not amongst his chosen and habitual writers, diurnal and hebdomadal, overshadowed companions. Court favour here, as elsewhere, his path, like a flight of obscene birds, pol- seemed to be capricious in proportion as it luting by their touch and distracting by their was diffusive; and writers on physiology, dissonance those researches into the interests astronomy, plants, insects, birds, and fishes, of the commonwealth and the duties of her shared with metaphysicians, moralists, and the chiefs, to which he desired to address a serene writers of civil history, the hours occasionally and unbiassed judgment. His heart assured, withdrawn by their master from more serious and his observation convinced him, that not intercourse with his apostolic, patristic, papal, merely the leaders, but even the subalterns of and reformed counsellors. In short, it was one contending factions, were far wiser and better of those rooms which he who can securely men than they appeared in those clever, reck-possess, quietly enjoy, and wisely use, may, in less, and malignant sketches thrown off from sober truth, pity the owners of Versailles and day to day by writers condemned to lives of the Escurial. ceaseless excitement, and excluded from the blessings of leisure and of self-communion.

It is an old tale. Our author bade the town farewell, yet in a spirit far different from that of the injured Thales. He had no wrongs, real or imaginary, to resent, nor one sarcasm for the great city in which he had faintly wooed the smiles of fortune. With a mind as tranquil as the rural scenes to which he retired, he sought there leisure for many an unworldly and for some whimsical speculations, with a resting-place for the household and the library which divided his heart between them.

A topographical catalogue of the books which a man has collected and arranged for his own delight, will lay open some of the recesses of his bosom as clearly as ever the character of courtier or cavalier was sketched by the pen of Clarendon.

Wise men read books that they may learn to read themselves, and for this purpose quit their libraries for the open air. The heath, the forest, or the river-side, is the true academy. There the student, with no kind neighbour to dissipate his thoughts, and with no importunate author to chain them down, casts them into such forms of soliloquy or dialogue, of verse or prose, as best suits the humour or the duties of the passing day. This peripatetic discipline is best observed under cover of an angling rod, a bill hook, or a gun; for then may not the vicar or the major, without an evident breach of privilege, detain you on the county-rate question, nor may the gentler voice of wife or daughter upbraid you with the sad list of your unrequited visits? Besides, your country philosopher flatters himself that in hooking a trout, or flushing a pheasant, his In the chamber where our recluse held his eye is as true and his hand as steady as those reign, the monarch of many a well-peopled of the squire; and from this amiable weakness province, giving audience in turn to each of the historian of enthusiasm would seem not to his many-tongued subjects, and exacting from have been quite exempt. Emerging from his them all tribute at his pleasure, might be seen, library as one resolved to bring home some supreme in place and favour, a venerable copy score head of game, his stout purposes would of the Jewish and Christian scriptures. A gradually die away as he reached the brook, troop of tall, sad-coloured folios, the deposito- whose windings were oddly associated in his ries of the devout studies and anxions self-mind with various theories by which the world searchings of the Puritan divines, was drawn up on shelves within reach of his outstretched arm. With but little additional effort it encountered a tribe of more lofty discourse, bred in the sacred solitudes of Port-Royal, yet redolent of the passion of their native land for an imposing and graceful demeanour. Honest George Latimer, with a long line of Episcopal and Episcopalian successors, held a position

was one day to be enlightened, and with many half-conceived chapters of essays yet to be written. To meditate on the advantages of meditation, was on these occasions one of his chosen exercises; and, in the ornate style to which he was wedded, he would muse on those in whom "the intellectual life is quick in all its parts." "It is," he would say, "as when the waters of a lake are left to deposit their

feculence and to become pure as the ether itself, so that they not on.y reflect from their surface the splendours of heaven, but allow the curious eye to gaze delighted upon the decorated grottoes and sparkling caverns of the depth beneath. Or might we say, that the ground of the human heart is thickly fraught with seeds which never germinate under either a wintry or a too fervent sky; but let the dew come gently on the ground, and let mild suns warm it, and let it be guarded against external rudeness, and we shall see spring up the gayety and fragrance of a garden. The Eden of human nature has indeed long been trampled down and desolated and storms waste it continually; nevertheless the soil is still rich with the germs of its pristine beauty, the colours of paradise are sleeping in the clods, and a little favour, a little protection, a little culture, shall show what once was there. Or, if we look at the human spirit in its relation to futurity, it must be acknowledged that as an immortality of joy is its proper destiny, so it is moved by instincts which are the true prognostics of eternal life. Earthly passions quench these fore-scents of happiness, but meditation fosters them; and the life of the religious recluse is a delicious anticipation of pleasures that shall have no end."

meant in many of his discourses, no one, with reverence be it spoken, has ever very clearly discovered; but who would have found courage to make the attempt, but for those bright fictions which bring the reader into a colloquial party, where much of the gaseous matter which must otherwise have exhaled into an impalpable mist, is fixed and brought within the range of human perception by the necessities of the dialogue. Even so, our modern speculator, after soaring "into that wide and uncircumscribed sphere wherein spirits excur sive and philosophically modest take their range," and gathering there, "if not certain and irrefragable conclusions, at least scattered particles of wisdom, which he more highly esteemed than all the stamped coinage whereof dogmatism makes its boast," would make his way home again, and explain himself to an audience which Socrates might have envied. There, condescending to enter "within that bounded circle of things which may be measured on all sides and categorically spoken of," he would exhibit the inbred vigour of his understanding, quickened and guided by the native kindness of his heart. Had he not been a husband and a father, he would have been a mystic. His interior life would have degenerated into one protracted and unsubstantial vision, if his house had not echoed to a concert of young voices executing all manner of sprightly variations on the key-notes sounded by his own. His "free converse with truth and reason in the sanctuary of his own bosom," would have been held in that incommunicable language which reason was never yet able to under stand, if his free converse with his boys and girls had not habitually admonished him that the sublime in words may be easily combined with the beautiful in sentences, without the slightest advantage to the author of the spell or to any one else. After musing on the compromise of antagonist principles throughout universal nature, he was thus taught the necessity for reconciling the hostile propensities of his own-bosom-the one beckoning him to tread the dizzy confines which separate the transcendental from the nonsensical, the other inviting him to drag the river with his sons, or to read L'Allegro to his daughters. Peace was concluded on better terms for the father than the visionary. Each passing year found him a plainer-spoken man, more alive to sublunary thoughts, and more engaged in active duties. Yet to the last, like some of the great painters of his day, he eschewed transparent lights and clear outlines, and loved to delineate objects through a haze.

Strange that one who justly claimed a high station among the bold and original thinkers of his times, should have woven this tissue of brave words, and should have decked his most elaborate inquiries with countless posies as garish as these! But the key to the riddle has already been given. Could notes have been struck less in unison with the Cantilena of the meeting-house? Could any have been touched better fitted to charm those dear but dangerous judges, who in winter evenings listen to a revered and familiar voice reciting passages, which still glow in their and in his own too partial eyes with all the freshness of creation? Has not the immutable decree gone forth, that though he whose home is secure from the invasions of the world may write excellently upon home education, he must watch jealously against home criticism? And yet an English gentleman of our railway age, who had devoted himself to an anchorite life, might with some reason insist that the fruits he had gathered for the use of other secluded households could be brought to no better test than the good or illliking of the companions of his own retreat. To betake himself, as our author was wont to do, "to some valley of silence," and there, as he expressed it, to "accumulate a rich treasure of undefined sentiments and indistinct conceptions," was to indulge in a diet at once There is a great want of a philosophical intoxicating and unnutritious. The juices of essay on the choice, the benefits, and the treathis mental frame would have been altogether ment of the hobby horses. It would form a attenuated by thus feeding on bright unutter-connecting link between the Libraries of Useable day-dreams about the microcosm within ful and of Entertaining Knowledge. Scarcely a him; or the unembodied spirits who surrounded' him; or the physical structure of the paradise he hoped to regain; or any thing else, so long as it was but foreign to the pursuits, the cares, and the interests of the world in which he lived. But then would succeed the cheerful fireside talk, which compelled him to become intelligible to others and to himself. What Plato

man (the made-up and artificial man alone excepted) who could not be laid under contri bution for such a work. Our learned and amiable recluse might have a whole chapter to himself. When it was not a field-day with him, and he had no exercises in divinity to perform, he would descend from the great horse, and amble about to his heart's

content on a favourite pad, which, however, it was his whim to dress in the housings of his tall charger, and to train to the same paces. To extract the marrow of church history was his appointed duty-to construct schemes of physiology his habitual pastime. Uncle Toby never threw up his intrenchments, nor "my father" his theories with greater spirit. He worked out, at least on paper, a complete plan of education, founded on a diligent survey of the functions of the brain; and composed an elaborate system, exhibiting the future condition of man when disencumbered of those vis-"Ideality," and the "Conceptive Faculty," and cous and muscular integuments, which in the present life serve as a kind of sheath to protect the sentient mind within, from the intensities of delight or of pain to which, without such a shelter, it would be exposed. Too wise ever to become frivolous or vapid, his wisdom was not of that exquisite mould, which exhibits itself in unimpaired lustre, in a state of gayety and relaxation. Whatever might be his theme, his march was still the same, stately, studied, and wearisome. His theological and his cerebral inquiries were all conducted in the same sonorous language. Period rolled after period in measured cadence, page answered page in scientific harmony. This paragraph challenged applause for its melodious swell, that for its skilful complexity, the next for the protracted simile with which it brought some abstruse discussion to a picturesque and graceful close. Any of them would have furnished Dr. Blair with illustrations of his now-forgotten rules for writing well; and exceedingly fine writing it was. But, after all, one's hobby might as well be put into a waltz as into the grand menage. It is only in his own easy natural shuffling gait that the animal shows to advantage. So kind-hearted, however, and so full of matter was our rider, that the most fastidious critic could hardly think twice of such a trifle.

apophthegm while watching the play or lis tening to the prattle of his own children. But that, north or south of Trent, such another is to be found must be disbelieved, until a commission of married men, of six years' standing at the least, shall have ascertained and reported the fact. What with managing constituents and turnpike trusts, writing sermons and prescriptions, meeting the hounds to-day and the quarter-sessions to-morrow, an English country gentleman, whether clerical or laic, who should undertake the late development of the the "Sense of Analogy," of his children, though he should address himself to "the intuitive faculties" alone, and those “gently stimulated by pleasurable emotions," would, in a myriad of cases to one, end in something very different from the promised result of "putting their minds into a condition of intellectual opulence." Adam was earning the bread of his sons by the sweat of his brow, while they were learning to keep sheep, and to till the ground, and such has ever since been the condition of his descendants. Here and there may perhaps be found an Eden such as our author inhabited and described, where exempt from the cares of earth, and cultivating a correspondence between the human and the Divine mind, fathers such as he was are training their offspring to apprehend truth, to impart truth, and to discover truth. A lovely scene it was, and drawn with all the earnest pathos of paternal love. But as the Belvidere Apollo differs from an honest sportsman of our days, or the Godfrey of Tasso from an officer of her majesty's Life-Guards, even such was the difference between our rural philosopher and the ten thousand respectable gentlemen over the walls of whose country mansions fertile vines have crept, and whose tables are thickly set with olive branches: though amongst them may be found double first-class men, and here and there a senior wrangler.

The lines had fallen to him in pleasant places, and his gratitude to Providence expressed itself in depicting his goodly heritage Thus flowed on a life which kings might for the delight and the emulation of others. have envied, sages approved, and poets sung, Not, indeed, that he laid bare the sacred re- if in these later days those illustrious personcesses of his home to the vulgar gaze, by pub- ages had not become very chary of such falishing journals, confessions, or an autobio-vours. Things looked as if the village sculp graphy. He would just as soon have surren- tor and versifier would be the sole guardian dered his body to the surgeons for dissection of his posthumous fame, and he known to as an anatomie vivante. But reversing the familiar method of conveying moral precepts under the veil of narrative, he told unconsciously in a didactic form, a story as beautiful as it was true. An English country house was the scene: the dramatis personæ parents, enjoying competency, health, and leisure, very learned and amiable withal, and wise above measure, with a troop of boys and girls as intelligent and docile as they were gay: the plot or fable being made up of the late, though complete development of their various mental powers.

That such a house did exist, and that beneath its tranquil shelter many a youth and many a maid were trained to improve and to adorn the land which gave them birth, no reader of the book called "Home Education," will for a moment doubt; or at least none who has ever invented a theory or revolved an

posterity only as one of those best of fathers and of men, over whose remains the yew tree in the neighbouring church-yard stood sentinel. Such a catastrophe would have suited well with his quiet scorn of terrestrial glory, but ill with those high-wrought graces of style in which he was accustomed to express it Religion and philosophy may diminish the danger, but hardly the strength, of the univer sal craving for the esteem of our fellow-mor tals. He knew and had reflected much; and it was his duty to impart it. He had discovered many current errors, and it behooved him to expose them. His flow of language was choice and copious, and philanthropy itself suggested that he should awaken all its melodies. If renown would follow, if a frivolous world would admire her monitor, if his labours of love should win for him the regard of the discerning few, or even the applause of