is a kind of Manuscript author-he writes a cypher-hand, which the vulgar do not pry into. The construction of his sentences is a curious framework with pegs and hooks to hang his thoughts upon for his own use and guidance, but quite out of the reach of any body else. It is a barbarous philosophical jargon with all the repetitions, parentheses, formalities, uncouth nomenclature and verbiage of law-Latin; and what makes it worse, it is not mere verbiage, but has a great deal of acuteness and meaning in it, which you would be glad to pick out if you could. In short, Mr. Bentham writes as if he had but a single sentence to express his whole view of a subject in, and as if, should he omit a single objection, circumstance, or step of the argument, it would be lost to the world for ever, like an estate by a single flaw in the title-deeds. This is overrating the importance of our own discoveries, and mistaking the nature and object of language altogether. Mr. Bentham has acquired this disability-it is not natural to him. His admirable little work On Usury, published forty years ago, is clear, easy, and spirited. But Mr. Bentham has shut himself up since then "in nook monastic," conversing only with followers of his own, or with "men of Ind," and has endeavoured to overlay his natural humour, sense, spirit, and style, with the dust and cobwebs of an obscure solitude. The best of it is, he thinks his present mode of expressing himself perfect, and that, whatever may be objected to his law or logic, no one can find the least fault with the purity, simplicity, and perspicuity of his style.

Mr. Bentham, in private life, is an amiable and exemplary character. He is a little romantic or so; and has dissipated part of a handsome fortune in practical speculations. He lends an ear to plausible projectors, and if he cannot prove them to be wrong in their premises or their conclusions, thinks himself bound in reason to stake his money on the venture. Strict logicians are licensed visionaries. Mr. Bentham is half-brother to the late Mr. Speaker Abbott-Proh pudor! He was educated at Eton, and still takes our novices to task about a passage in Homer, or a metre in Virgil. He was afterwards at the University, and he has described the scruples of an ingenuous youthful mind about subscribing the articles, in a passage in his Church of Englandism, which smacks of truth and honour both, and does one good to read it in an age when "to be honest (or not to laugh at the very idea of honesty) is to be one man picked out of ten thousand !" Mr. Bentham relieves his mind sometimes, after the fatigue of study, by playing on a noble organ, and has a relish for Hogarth's prints. He turns wooden utensils in a lathe for exercise, and fancies he can turn men in the same manner. He has no great fondness for poetry, and can hardly extract a moral out of Shakspeare. His house is warmed and lighted with steam. He is one of those who prefer the artificial to the natural in most things, and think the mind of man omnipotent. He has a great contempt for out-of-door prospects, for green fields and trees, and is for referring every thing to Utility. There is a little narrowness in this, for if all the sources of satisfaction are taken away, what is to become of Utility itself? It is indeed the great fault of this able and extraordinary man, that he has concentrated his faculties and feelings too entirely on one subject and pursuit, and has not "looked enough abroad into universality."

CASTLE BUILDERS.

It is well for man that his mental amusements are frequently cal culated for restoring his intellectual faculties when they are wearied with exertion; and not a little singular that this renovation should be sometimes effected by the exercise of those functions which have been most recently in use. The mind, perhaps, never really tires; it is only the corporeal organs, through which impressions are received, that suffer fatigue, and require intervals of rest. Suppose we are exhausted ever so much by thinking on an abstruse subject for a long time together: let us lay it by and commence building castles in the air, we at once forget our exhaustion, lucid forms come before us, a fairy region opens to our view glittering with unrivalled splendours, bright suns scatter with their golden rays the lassitude that oppressed us, we make for ourselves a little heaven and enjoy its glories,-all nature and art, the worlds of truth and fiction, lay their wealth before us, and the mind recovers itself in the enjoyment of its own air-woven paradise, and finds relaxation from what appears to be almost the cause of its suffering. I am fond of castle-building; and who is not? It is delightful to lay one's head on the pillow at night, and rear these airy edifices, which, though flimsy fabrics, it must be granted, amuse and restore the mind at the time we are at work upon them. Those who cannot thus indulge, may be very safely put down for dull unimaginative beings, having no buoyancy, mere ponderous clods-"leaden souls that love the ground." The castle-builder's is a region

-of calm and serene air

Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth.

He may visit the "sphery chime," command time, and subdue space. He may surmount physical impossibility, and with inexhaustible ardour follow his object over every impediment. Neither dungeons nor bars, situation nor climate, can rob him of his recreation.—Castle-building, to be brief, is an enjoyment less liable to be disturbed by external appliances than any other. It is essentially a thing of mind, an intellectual banquet. On retiring to rest when sleep flies from us, during a morning walk, or in an after-dinner chair, it is delightful to give place to this beguiler of mental ennui. The subject will necessarily always prove an agreeable one. Last night, after a series of complicated operations, and begging a question or two, I cut an excellent canal, from the Nicaragua lake into the Pacific ocean, communicating with the gulph of Nicoya. I calculated all probable obstacles, and soon overcame them. I entered into a treaty with the local government. I took levels, built my locks, and finally, in an hour or two, rendered the navigation a matter of small difficulty for vessels of six or seven hundred tons. I drew for money to carry on my work upon the sums allotted and expended for Northern expeditions, which I again collected into masses for my purpose, and found that I was possessed of ample funds; that Captain Parry need labour no more among the Polar ice, that our merchants might ship goods to Panama via the gulph of Florida, and receive their returns in little more than the short space of time required for a Jamaica voyage, and that the East India Company might trade

to China, and import teas and mandarins by the route of Cape Blanco. I had at last the satisfaction of seeing a British squadron, consisting of three-deckers, pass through my canal into the Pacific.

It is not a week ago since I purchased Fonthill, and having turned Farquhar and Phillips, and the buyers and jobbers, out of the temple, I completed the edifice on its original model. Here, within a day's journey of the metropolis, and with a property in nubibus not equal to what some of our rich ones possess, I determined to fix my earthly rest, and to labour for posterity. A gallery, as long as any conducting to the halls of Eblis, I devoted to sculpture, and to exact models of the antique. I visited Rome to obtain the casts of ancient works, and those of Michael Angelo and Canova. Another gallery I filled with a noble collection of paintings as numerous as select. Every thing was severely and tastefully arranged, and I suffered no gewgaws and toys of virtù to enter my apartments. No Chinese nor Kamskatchan saloons made even the day-light hideous, but a severe simplicity governed every thing. The great hall I fitted up as a library to contain books of every nation, tongue, and people. The tower was my observatory, and I constructed a great telescope, to which Herschel's at Slough might serve as an eye-glass. I established a school for a hundred boys, taking good care to provide that the master should not have it in lis power to subvert the founder's intention, and add to his profits by reducing his scholars to some half-a-dozen, a thing not uncommon in similar institutions-thanks to Mr. Brougham for the disclosure. I then made my will, and devised the whole to the Nation as a great seminary for public instruction without distinction of creed. I drew up a code of laws for its government, and provided that the students should learn something more than to be tolerable classics and mathematicians-something adapted to fit them for the active purposes of life, according to their respective prospects. In short, not to be tedious, I regulated my university agreeably to the state of modern discoveries and the present enlightened era, and rejected what smacked of monkish times, past superstitions, and all that in the present day is worse than useless. But I must not waste time in enumerating the kingdoms set free from despotism-public works constructed—triumphs of art achieved, and labours for the general benefit without number, which I have thus brought to perfection.

But I shall be told, perhaps, that all castle-building is "blear illusion," and that though every instance of it may not be followed by the consequences which overtook the unlucky castle-builder Alnaschar, the glass-seller, in the Arabian Nights, it is equally empty and unsubstantial. But I contend that it is better to build castles than not to employ the mind at all-than to lie down like the boor and steep both body and soul in oblivion, or to sit in one's after-dinner chair a very corpse with respect to intellectual action. The first hint thus casually afforded to the mind has been sometimes brought within the limits of possibility, shaped and fashioned for practical use, and ultimately proved of important service to society. Castle-building differs essentially from what students call "thinking;" in the latter case the mind is employed in one particular way upon a given subject with the greatest degree of intensity. No play is allowed to the imagination; but the mental fibre, if I may so express myself, the vibrations of which be

long to that one subject, becomes overstretched and overworked, and is injured by being kept a long time acting in the same direction. Castle-building, on the contrary, adapts itself to all the different functions of the mind, and to those in a peculiar manner which are agreeable to us at the moment. It may thus be styled a sort of spiritual game, invigorating while it affords delight, and enabling us to return with fresh energy to close study. There is something highly agreeable in the quiescence we experience when we are rearing these shadowy edifices: fancy has full play, and we invent the most graceful images-our thoughts reflect "colours dipt in heaven”—an interval of that happiness is felt, which consists in an absence from every disagreeable sensation and the enjoyment of a delightful illusion. Thus in the midst of the turmoil of life, in the very jaws of care and sorrow, we snatch a momentary respite from the troubles that environ us. Our enjoyment is not like dreaming, defective in its essentials, the judgment at one time being asleep with the body, and at another time the memory, so that the images which appear before us are incongruous and defective. The castle-builder is awake in the full plenitude of his mental functions; he may ride, or walk, or sit, or lie, and enjoy his amusement.

But it is obvious that the architecture of the edifices so constructed will partake of the leading character of the individual that plans them, and be coloured with the hue of the habits and manners to which he has been accustomed. What an infinite variety of these schemes must be eternally at work, and how amusing a couple of hundred closeprinted folios would be, descriptive of the better part of them, especially of those that are begotten by genius, and that

"Float in light visions round the poet's head."

Different nations also have their characteristics, agreeably to the peculiar impressions of each. The East is the centre of magnificent sensual castle-building, if we may judge from the fictions of the people. Incited by opium, the disciple of Mahomet sits stately and speechless upon his rich carpets for hours together, building palaces of topazes and emeralds, stocking his harems with the beauties of Paradise, and guarding them with the most faithful eunuchs of Africa, now lulled to repose by soft music in the midst of the luscious dances of the most beautiful Circassian slaves; quaffing rich wine for sherbet, slyly, out of ruby cups, in spite of the commands of the Koran; inflicting the basti nado even upon grand vizirs; cutting off the heads of Christian dogs; impaling Israelites; exploring enchanted islands, and supping with Mahomet and Cajira in the third heaven. At a less magnificent extreme of castle-building, but equally delightful to the architect, is the sober London citizen. His harem contains but one plump carneous fairone, the emblem of plethoric vacuity, in whose presence he rears his more humble edifice over a pipe and brown-stout after a calorific supper. The fabric which his less excursive and more humble fancy erects, will be limited by the possession of a brick-house of two or three stories in the City-road, or in the purlieus of Hackney, a onehorse chaise, a hot joint every day, with added pudding to "solemnize the lord's," in a state of retirement from his shop in Cripplegate. His utmost stretch of mind never grasps a coach-and-four, nor does his notion of space extend much beyond Finchley in one direction, and Norwood

in another; a steam-boat line to Margate, perhaps, excepted. Beyond this, the world, save through the speculum of a newspaper, is a terra incognita, and never enters into his fancies. Yet while contemplating the Ultima Thule of his desires, he is equally satisfied with the turban'd Mussulman in the pomp of his paradisaical meditations. How infinite the variety between the before-mentioned extremes-the merchant gazing on his visionary plums, and aping the nobility at the West-end; the parson contemplating accumulated tithes, pluralities, mitres, and translations; lawyers dazzling themselves with the glitter of gold gathered from litigations, bankruptcies, and felonies, amid a harvest of human misery; statesmen enjoying premierships with submissive parliaments and easy sovereigns; painters with cartoons out-Raphaelling Raphael, and imagining themselves without rivals; booksellers, each with an army of Scotch novelists; courtiers with toy-shops, ribbons, and baubles; princes with newly usurped powers and uncontrolled authority; and authors with literary leisure and literary glory.

Certain great geniuses have been notorious for castle-building. Fontenelle, the centenarian, was so accustomed to indulge in erecting these airy fabrics, that he may be said, fairly enough, to have lived as much out of the world as in it, and by this means there can be no doubt he prolonged his life. His perfect indifference to all those matters that commonly raise a great interest among mankind in general, made his temper even and placid, and his love of castle-building contributed to his long good health. Deaths, marriages, earthquakes, murders, calamities of all kinds, scarcely affected him at all. He built castles by day and by night, in society and out of it. His body was a machine with a moving power, and went through its actions mechanically, but his mind was generally in some region far remote from the situation it occupied. He got at one time among the stars, found them peopled, and began to study the laws, manners, and dispositions of the inhabitants of worlds many million times farther from the earth than thrice to "th' utmost pole." Going one day to Versailles early in the morning, to pay a visit to the court, he was observed to step under a tree, against which he placed his back, and beginning to castle-build, he was found pursuing his architectural labours in the evening upon the selfsame spot. Kings, courtiers, and such "small gear," were unable to abstract him from following his favourite amusement, when the temptation of enjoying it was strong. Perhaps Fontenelle and Newton may illustrate the difference between the profound thinking of the scholar, and the amusement of which we are treating. Newton directed all his faculties into one focus upon a single object, proceeding by line and rule to develope the mystery which it was his desire to unravel. No play was allowed to the fancy, nor operation to more than one faculty of the soul at once; it is this which is so wearying to the frame, that gives pallor to the student's compiexion, and frequently abridges life. Your castle-builder, on the contrary, may be a ruddy, florid, healthy personage. He quaffs an elixir vitiæ; his abstractions arising only from a pleasurable pursuit in following his wayward fancies, and not from painful attention to a single subject. Sancho Panza was something of a castle-builder, jolly-looking as he was. I mention him merely to show its effect on the person. When he appeared asleep, and his master demanded what he was doing, he replied, "I govern,"