SARAH ELLIS. -"The Women of England," and several others. ARTHUR HELPS. - "Friends in Council," and "Companions of my Solitude." JOIN RUSKIN. 1819. The very popular author of "Modern Painters, Seven Lamps of Architecture," and "The Stones of Venice." "The GEORGE GILFILLAN. ALEXANDER DYCE. And many others, all of whom have written one or more volumes worthy the pupil's attention. SCIENCE. Sir DAVID BREWSTER. - 1781-1868. "Optics;" "More Worlds than One;" and "Life of Sir Isaac Newton." Twenty years writing "Edinburgh Encyclopædia." RICHARD WHATELY.-1787-1863. "Logic;" 66 Rhetoric;" "Political Economy," and other philosophical works. Sir WILLIAM HAMILTON.-1788-1856. "Distinguished Metaphysicians." WILLIAM WHEWELL. 1795. " and one of "The Bridgewater Treatises." "The Connection of the Physical Sciences;" "Physical JOHN STUART MILL.-1806. "Logic; ""Political Economy; " and "Liberty." One of the ablest men of the time. WILLIAM SMITH.-1769-1839. Geology. WILLIAM BUCKLAND. - 1784-1856. Geology. DIONYSIUS LARDNER. - 1793-1859. "Museum of Science," and "Lectures." MICHAEL FARADAY.-1794-1867. Distinguished chemist. JAMES FERRIER. Dr. MANSELL. M'COSH. ALEXANDER BAIN. HERBERT SPENCER. THOMAS CARLYLE. BORN 1795. A remarkable essayist of a truly original style. A disjointed collection of short apostrophes to the varied elements of French society about the time of and during the French Revolution, he calls a history of that period. "The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, with Elucidations," are more connected, and give a vivid picture of the man and the times. "Sartor Resartus," 66 PRINCIPAL WORKS. Latter-day Pamphlets," "Frederick the Great," and several others of the same vigorous, sledge-haminer style. OLIVER CROMWELL. ANTI-DRYASDUST. WHAT and how great are the interests which connect themselves with the hope that England may yet attain to some practical belief and understanding of its history during the seventeenth century, need not be insisted on at present; such hope being still very distant, very uncertain. We have wandered far away from the ideas which guided us in that century, and indeed which had guided us in all preceding centuries, but of which that century was the ultimate manifestation: we have wandered very far; and must endeavor to return, and connect ourselves therewith again. It is with other feelings than those of poor peddling dilettanteism, other aims than the writing of successful or unsuccessful publications, that an earnest man occupies himself in those dreary provinces of the dead and buried. The last glimpse of Godlike vanishing from this England; conviction and veracity giving place to hollow cant and formalism; antique "Reign of God," which all true men in their several dialects and modes have always striven for, giving place to modern "Reign of the No-God,” whom men name Devil,—this, in its multitudinous meanings and results, is a sight to create reflections in the earnest man. One wishes there were a history of English Puritanism, the last of all our heroisms, but sees small prospect of such a thing at present. "Few nobler heroisms," says a well-known writer long occupied on this subject, "at bottom, perhaps no nobler heroism, ever transacted itself on this earth; and it lies as good as lost to us, overwhelmed under such an avalanche of human stupidities as no heroism before ever did. Intrinsically and extrinsically, it may be considered inaccesible to these generations. Intrinsically, the spiritual purport of it has become inconceivable, incredible, to the modern mind; extrinsically, the documents and records of it, scattered waste as a shoreless chaos, are not legible. They lie there, printed, written, to the extent of tons and square miles, as shot-rubbish; unedited, unsorted, not so much as indexed; full of every conceivable confusion; yielding light_to_ very few; yielding darkness in several sorts to very many. Dull pedantry, conceited idle dilettanteism, prurient stupidity in what shape soever, is darkness, and not light. There are from thirty to fifty thousand unread pamphlets of the Civil War in the British Museum alone, - huge piles of moldering wreck, wherein, at the rate of perhaps one pennyweight per ton, lie things memorable. They lie preserved there, waiting happier days: under present conditions, they can not, except for idle purposes, for dilettante excerpts and such like, be got examined. The Rushworths, Whitlockes, Nalsons, Thurloes, enormous folios these, and many others: they have been printed, and some of them again printed, but never yet edited, — edited as you edit wagon-loads of broken bricks and dry mortar, simply by tumbling up the wagon. Not one of these monstrous old volumes has so much as an available index. It is the general rule of editing on this matter. If your editor correct the press, it is an honorable distinction to him. Those dreary old records were compiled at first by human insight in part, and in great part by human stupidity withal; but then it was by stupidity in a laudable, diligent state, and doing its best, which was something: and, alas! they have been successively elaborated by human stupidity in the idle state, falling idler and idler, and only pretending to be diligent, whereby now, for us, in these late days, they have grown very dim indeed. To Dryasdust printing societies, and such like, they afford a sorrowful kind of pabulum: but, for all serious purposes, they are as if non-extant; might as well, if matters are to rest as they are, not have been written or printed at all. The sound of them is not a voice, conveying knowledge or memorial of any earthly or heavenly thing it is a widespread, inarticulate, slumberous mumblement, issuing as if from the lake of eternal sleep; craving for oblivion, for abolition, and honest silence, as a blessing in comparison. : "This, then," continues our impatient friend, "is the Elysium we English have provided for our heroes! - the Rushworthian Elysium; dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge; obscure in lurid twilight as of the shadow of death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer; where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant pedants, dilettanti, and doleful creatures; by - the phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities; by nightmares, pasteboard norroys, griffins, wiverns, and chimeras dire. There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations, — does the age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is what we, for our share, have been able to accomplish toward keeping our heroic ones in memory. By way of sacred poet, they have found voluminous Dryasdust, and his collections and philosophical histories. "To Dryasdust, who wishes merely to compile torpedo histories of the philosophical or other sorts, and gain immortal laurels for himself by writing about it and about it, all this is sport; but to us who struggle piously, passionately, to behold, if but in glimpses, the faces of our vanished fathers, it is death. O Dryasdust, my voluminous friend! had human stupidity continued in the diligent state, think you it had ever come to this? Surely, at least, you might have made an index for these huge books! Even your genius, had you been faithful, was adequate to that. Those thirty thousand or fifty thousand old newspapers and pamphlets of the King's Library it is you, my voluminous friend, that should have sifted them many long years ago. Instead of droning out these melancholy skepticisms, constitutional philosophies, torpedo narratives, you should have sifted those old stacks of pamphlet-matter for us, and have had the metal grains lying here accessible, and the drossheaps lying there avoidable: you had done the human memory a service thereby some human remembrance of this matter had been more possible." Certainly this description does not want for emphasis; but all ingenuous inquirers into the past will say there is too much truth in it. Nay, in addition to the sad state of our historical books, and what, indeed, is fundamentally the cause and origin of that, our common spiritual notions, if any notion of ours may still deserve to be called spiritual, are fatal to a right understanding of that seventeenth century. The Christian doctrines, which then dwelt alive in every heart, have now, in a manner, died out of all hearts (very mournful to behold), and are not the guidance of this world any more. Nay, worse still, the cant of them does yet dwell alive with us (little doubting that it is cant); in which fatal intermediate state the eternal sacredness of this universe itself, of this human life itself, has fallen dark to the most of us; and we think that, too, a cant and a creed. Thus the old names suggest new things to us; not august and divine, but hypocritical, pitiable, detestable. The old names and similitudes of belief still circulate from tongue to tongue, though now in such a ghastly condition; not as commandments of the living God, which we must do, or perish eternally; alas! no, as something very differ ent from that. Here properly lies the grand unintelligibility of the seventeenth century for us. From this source has proceeded our maltreatment of it, our miseditings, miswritings, and all the other "avalanche of human stupidity," wherewith, as our impatient friend complains, we have allowed it to be overwhelmed. We have allowed some other things to be overwhelmed. Would to Heaven that were the worst fruit we had gathered from our unbelief and our cant of belief! Our impatient friend continues: Truer "I have known nations altogether destitute of printers' types and learned appliances, with nothing better than old songs, monumental stone-heaps, and quipo-thrums to keep record by, who had truer memory of their memorable things than this. memory, I say; for at least the voice of their past heroisms, if indistinct, and all awry as to dates and statistics, was still melodious to those nations. The body of it might be dead enough; but the soul of it, partly harmonized, put in real accordance with the 'eternal melodies,' was alive to all hearts, and could not die. The memory of their ancient brave ones did not rise like a hideous, huge leaden vapor, an amorphous emanation of chaos, like a petrifying Medusa specter, on those poor nations: no! but like a Heaven's apparition, which it was, it still stood radiant, beneficent, before all hearts, calling all hearts to emulate it; and the recognition of it was a psalm and song. These things will require to be practically meditated by and by. Is human writing, then, the art of burying heroisms and highest facts in chaos, so that no man shall henceforth contemplate them without horror and aversion, and danger of locked-jaw? What does Dryasdust consider that he was born for? that paper and ink were made for? "It is very notable, and leads to endless reflections, how the Greeks had their living Iliad where we have such a deadly, indescribable Cromwelliad. The old Pantheon, home of all the gods, has become a peerage-book, with black and white surplice; controversies superadded, not unsuitably. The Greeks had their Homers, Hesiods, where we have our Rymers, Rushworths, our Norroys, Garter-Kings, and Bishops Cobweb. Very notable, I say. By the genius, wants, and instincts and opportunities, of the one people, striving to keep themselves in mind of what was memorable, there had fashioned itself in the effort of successive centuries a Collin's peerage, improved by Sir Egerton Brydges. By their Pantheons ye shall know them! Have not we English a talent for silence? Our very speech and printed speech, such a force of torpor dwelling in it, is properly a higher power of silence. There is no silence like the speech you can not listen to without danger of locked-jaw. Given a divine heroism, to smother it well in human dullness, to touch it with the mace of death, so that no |
