entirely silent as to the close.

However, he

chanced on the deserted Villa Scarpa: he found a despatch-box, bearing the name of Charles Thorndale, whom he had known, though not intimately. This despatch-box contained the manuscript volume already mentioned, which Thorndale seemed to have bequeathed to the first finder; and the good-natured Italian to whom the villa belonged, willingly gave up box and manuscript to one who said he had been Thorndale's friend. We quote a single sentence, for its graceful beauty, from the picture of Thorndale called up to the mind's eye of his editor, on thus chancing on his last retreat:

His eye was not that of which it is so often said that it looks through you, for it rather seemed to be looking out beyond you. The object at which it gazed became the halfforgotten centre round which the eddying stream of thought was flowing; and you stood there, like some islet in a river which is encircled on all sides by the swift and silent flood.

The manuscript volume now published has been divided by its editor into five books, and each of these into several chapters. Book I. is called The Last Retreat; it is given to many reflections, mostly thrown out with little arrangement, upon the Sentiment of Beauty, and upon the two Futurities, the one on this side and the other beyond the grave. In Book II., which is called The Retrospect, the current of thought has set away into the past; and we have an autobio

graphical sketch. Book III., called Cyril, or the Modern Cistercian, gives an account of the conflict of thought by which a companion passed from an evangelical Anglican to a Roman Catholic monk. Book IV., Seckendorf, or the Spirit of Denial, sketches the character and views of a friend who cavilled at the possibility of all human progress. In Book V., Clarence, or the Utopian, we first read how, as strength and life had well-nigh ebbed away, Thorndale met once more with an old friend of hopeful views, who seems to have stayed by him to the last: and when Thorndale's weak hand had laid down the pen for the last time, Clarence wrote out, in the last two hundred pages of the volume, his Confessio Fidei;—a connected view of his theory of man, the growth of the individual consciousness, and the development of the human

race.

The earlier part of the book is very desultory; and the book as a whole appeals to a limited class of readers. There will never be a rush for it to the book-club in the county town. Young-lady readers will for the most part vote it a bore: and solid old gentlemen of bread-and-butter intellect will judge Thorndale and his friends a crew of morbid dreamers, though the book, amid sublimer speculations, sets out here and there much common sense on the affairs of practical life. But we trust that Mr. Smith may find an audience fit, and not so few.

It elevates and refines the mind to hold converse with an author of his stamp. And how much the world must have gone through before such a character as Thorndale's became possible! No appliance of modern luxury, no contrivance of modern science, says so much as the conception of such a character for the civilisation and artificiality of our modern life. Although the book is mainly dissertational, the reader will find in it much exquisite narrative, and much skilful delineation of character, in the history of the hero and his friends, their views and fates. Yet, while we cordially acknowledge in Mr. Smith a man of refined and pathetic genius, we should not be doing justice to ourselves if we did not say, that in all the views of life and society, whether hopeful or desponding, which are set out in the book, we have felt strongly a great blank and void. We believe, and we humbly hope we shall never cease believing, that Christianity shows us the true stand-point from which to look at man, and the true lever by which to elevate him. We believe that the same influence which has raised our hopes to 'life and immortality,' must and will elevate and purify this mortal life. We believe that it is false philosophy to ignore the existence, power, and teaching of the Christian faith: and to take pains, before looking into the framework and the prospects of society, to exclude the only light which can search out the dark recesses, and dissipate the gloom that

hangs before. Why should a man persist in wading through Chat Moss on a drenching December day, when the means are provided of flitting over it, light and warm and dry? Why should we go up to Boxhill, and declare we shall dig our way through it with our own nails and fingers (being in haste); when we know that it has been nobly tunnelled for us already?

The first book, entitled The Last Retreat, consists of disjointed fragments of thought, cast upon the page with little effort at arrangement. All these fragments are well worthy of preservation; many of them are of striking originality and force. The dying man becomes aware that a peculiar beauty has been added to the beautiful scenes around him by the close approach of death. He

says:

I owe to death half the beauty of this scene, and altogether owe to him the constant serenity with which I gaze upon it. .. Strange! how the beauty and mystery of all nature is heightened by the near prospect of that coming darkness which will sweep it all away!-that night which will have no star in it! These heavens, with all their glories, will soon be blotted out for me. The eye, and that which is behind the eye, will soon close, soon rest, and there will be no more beauty, no more mystery for me. . . . What an air of freshness, of novelty, and surprise does each old and familiar object assume to me when I think of parting with it for ever!

There is no more of ennui now. Time is too short, and this world too wonderful. Everything I behold is new and

strange. If a dog looks up at me in the face, I startle at his intelligence. I am in a foreign land,' you say. True, all the world has become foreign land to me. I am perpetually on a voyage of discovery.

Very true, very real, is this feeling, drawn from the much-suggesting Nu yàp pxeraι! We really do enjoy things intensely, because we know we are not to have them long. And how well does experience certify that the most familiar scene grows new and strange to us when we are forthwith to leave it. The room in which we have sat day by day for years,-rise to quit it for the last time, and we shall see something about its proportions, its aspect, that we never saw before. The little walk we have paced hundreds of times,-how different every evergreen beside it will seem, when we pace it silently, knowing that we shall do so no more! Here is an apt and happy comparison :—

When the lofty and barren mountain, says a legend I have somewhere read, was first upheaved into the sky, and from its elevation looked down on the plains below, and saw the valley and the less elevated hills covered with verdure and fruitful trees, it sent up to Brahma something like a murmur of complaint, 'Why thus barren? Why these scarred and naked sides exposed to the eye of man?' And Brahma answered, 'The very light shall clothe thee, and the shadow of the passing cloud shall be as a royal mantle. More verdure would be less light. Thou shalt share in the azure of heaven, and the youngest and whitest cloud of a summer day shall nestle in thy bosom. Thou belongest half to us.'

So was the mountain dowered. And so, too, have the loftiest minds of men been in all ages dowered. To lower