CHAP. XVI.]

world, and of solace to their authors. It was he who presented us with the Quarterly Review, and most of the greatest works of the greatest men during the present century; for he began business when he came of age in 1799, and carried it on in full vigour till his death in 1843. His first highly successful enterprise was Mrs Rundell's Cookery Book; and the next the Quarterly Review, which he set up in 1809, and which remains the property of his house. When, in after-times, men read of the generous and enlightened publishers who first succeeded to the patrons of authors, it will not be forgotten that our age had a John Murray.

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and resolved to devote his life to the redemption of that helpless race, the greatest step was taken ever known to have been taken by any man for the assertion and establishment of human rights. And Clarkson was not one to forsake an aim. He lived for the cause to the very last, and drew in others to live for it. Mistakes were made by his coadjutors and himself; for, in enterprises so new and vast, the agents have to learn as they go; but the national conscience was roused, the principles of human liberty were asserted, the national testimony was transferred to the side of right, and the emancipation of all races of men was made a question merely of time. As it was Clarkson who began, and who stimulated Wilberforce and all other good men to carry on the work, whom could we place higher than Clarkson on our list of benefactors? Wilberforce and all other good men assigned him the first place; and there he remains, and will remain.

A Roman Catholic lady, well educated, and deeply impressed with the advantages of education, was living in the neighbourhood of London during the whole of the period of our history, watching the results of the efforts made by Lord Brougham and others for the extension and improvement of education in England. Her name was Flaherty. She was not rich; but she was unmarried, and free to live as she chose, and dispose of her income as she would. She chose to live frugally, and to ride in an omnibus instead of a better carriage, that she might have means to aid the extension of education. In 1836, she presented to the council of University College, the sum of £5000 in the 34 per cents., out of which scholarships have been founded. This lady has shewn us that there is nothing in our modern civilisation-our omnibuses and unsectarian schools-which can preclude the antique spirit and practice of love and good works; and in this the admirable Mary Flaherty has perhaps left us as true a benefit as in the scholarships which bear her name. She died in 1845, aged eighty-four.

Of other benefactors of the century, we find that Dr Birkbeck, the founder of mechanics' institutes, died in 1841, in the sixty-sixth year of his age. When the departure of this excellent man was known, there was sorrow over all the land where the workingmen met for self and mutual instruction.-Another eminent friend of popular enlightenment was William Allen, who aided in founding the British and Foreign School Society, and in seeing what could be done by the Lancasterian schools. He was also one of the most active of the indefatigable abolitionists, and aided first in the extinction of the British slavetrade, and then in the overthrow of colonial slavery. He was a man of science, too, the friend of Davy, and for many years lecturer on chemistry and natural philosophy at Guy's Hospital and the Royal Institution. After a life of varied good works, the enlightened and benevolent William Allen, whom the Friends had the honour of including in their sect, died in the seventy-fourth year of his age, at the close of 1843.-Two of his friends and fellowlabourers soon followed him-Mrs Fry in 1845, in her sixty-fifth year; and Thomas Clarkson in 1846, in the eighty-sixth year of his age. If it be true, as we are wont to say, that the distinctive social effect of Christianity is its inducing the care of the helpless who were before left to perish, the existence of such persons as these three-Allen, Clarkson, and Mrs Fry-at one time, and in close companionship, marks our age as a Christian one, after all its drawbacks. The ignorant, the guilty, and the enslaved, were the chief care in life to these friends, who might have passed their years in ease and indolence, or the gratification of merely intellectual tastes; but it suited their noble natures better to go out on the highways of the sea and land, and search through dark alleys, and disgusting prisons, and hellish slave-ships, to seek and save that which was lost. They sustained, moreover, the most irksome and dispiriting toil, the most disheartening disappointment-a long and painful probation of heart and mind-in pursuit of their objects; and they died, all faithful to the aims of their life. When Mrs Fry entered the room in Newgate where 160 guilty and ignorant wretches were shut up, and in her serene and noble countenance brought them the hope which they had believed to be for ever shut out, she began that reform in the treatment of moral disease which, however tentative and vague at present, can never now stop short of completion. And when Clarkson sat down, his heart throbbing with his new knowledge of the wrongs of the negro,

The creation of wealth, and consequently of human life, by means of the cotton manufacture, is pointed out as one of the leading social events of the last century. It is reckoned that the cotton manufacture has added permanently 2,000,000 to our population. Something analogous, on a smaller, but still on a great scale, has been effected in our own time by the agricultural improvements of one man-Mr Coke, of Norfolk, who died Earl of Leicester. By the simple and virtuous method of devoting his mind and life to the improvement of the land, Mr Coke caused a vast permanent increase of wealth, and therefore of labour and subsistence, and therefore of human life. In a single village, where he found 162 inhabitants when he entered on his property, he left 1000; and for many miles round, a country before poor and almost barren was left by him fruitful and wellpeopled. He found his own rental increased from £2200 to above £20,000; but that was of small account in his eyes, in comparison with the stimulus given to agricultural improvement by his example. The Holkham sheep-shearing, at which Mr Coke annually entertained 300 guests for several days, roused a fine spirit among the landed proprietors

of England and the farmers of Norfolk, and caused Mr Coke to be looked upon as one of the chief social benefactors of his time. While in the House of Commons, he was a sturdy Liberal. When the Reform Bill passed, he thought he might be spared from the political world, aged as he then was. He was always called 'the first commoner of England;' but, in 1837, when eighty-five years of age, he was made Earl of Leicester. He reached the age of ninety, dying in June 1842.-There were benefactors of Mrs Flaherty's order in the cause of agricultural improvements during this period. Dr Swiney, resident in Camden Town, an eccentric gentleman in some respects, did an act of sober goodness in leaving £5000 to the trustees of the British Museum, for the establishment of a lectureship on geology; and another £5000 to the Society of Arts, to provide, once in every five years, 100 guineas, to be presented, in a goblet of equal value, to the British freeholder who should reclaim the largest extent of waste lands. Dr Swiney died in 1844.-In 1846 died Mr Peter Purcell of Dublin, who was mainly instrumental in forming the Royal Agricultural Improvement Society, and who did in Ireland, on a smaller scale, what Mr Coke was doing in England. He became wealthy through the improvement of land-caring less for his wealth for its own sake, than as a proof open to all eyes of the direction in which the welfare of Ireland lay. He withdrew from politics, in which he had once been as much involved as any man, and engaged as many of his neighbours as he could in the interests of improved husbandry. More and more labourers were employed; the political temper of his neighbours improved; he grew wealthy; and when he was gone, all men saw what a benefactor he had been.-When Mr Coke was called the first commoner of England, the Marquis of Westminster was believed to be 'the richest subject in the empire.' His importance in our eyes arises, not from the amount of his wealth, but from the mode in which its increase was provided for during this period. The Pimlico estate, before considered a vast property, now has upon it the new squares of Belgrave and Eaton, with Eccleston Street, Wilton Place, and all the new city of palaces which foreigners now look upon as one of the marvels of London. The ultimate rental of this district is scarcely calculable. The Marquis of Westminster had besides a noble library, including a mass of valuable ancient manuscripts, and one of the finest picturegalleries in the kingdom, which was liberally opened to the public. The Marquis of Westminster was a steady Whig for the last forty years of his life, after having entered the political world under the auspices of Mr Pitt. He was raised from his earldom to his marquisate by William IV. But among all of either title by whom he was preceded or may be followed, he will ever be distinguished by his creations on his Pimlico estate.

Throughout our history, some grateful mention has been made of the benefactors that society has lost during our period of thirty years. It is unnatural to conclude without some grateful mention of those who remained among us at the close of the period.

Yet how little can be said while they yet live! How presumptuous it seems to suppose that we can estimate their influence on society, or set forth what they have done! It is only with regard to a very few that even a word can yet be ventured—a few whose social influence was as unquestionable in 1846 as it can ever be to another generation. To a future generation must be left the duty and privilege of honouring a hundred more. We have seen something of what railways are likely to do in changing and advancing our civilisation. It is to the greatest of our engineers, George Stephenson, who was living at the expiration of this period, that this change is owing, more than to any other man. His achievement lies, too, exactly within our period; for it was in 1816 that Mr Stephenson took out a patent, in conjunction with Mr Dodd and Mr Losh, under which locomotives were set forth upon colliery railways near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Between that date and the close of our history, Mr Stephenson's plans and works have spread over the land, till there is probably hardly an individual in the kingdom whose existence is not in some way affected by what has been done.-Then, we have, instead of the cathedral of old, a palace of national council, which is the truest and fittest direction for the spirit of architecture to take in our age, and under our political constitution; and Mr Barry is our architect. In our splendid Houses of Parliament he has built his own monument; and if, as one of the arts of peace, architecture has risen and improved during the period, Mr Barry has been, by many other works scattered through our towns, the chief educator of the public taste.-In a widely different department of training, we have had a guide whose name should be remembered by the countrymen of Shakspeare. Mr Macready has led the nation back again from some foolish wanderings to the real Shakspeare. The Kembles presented the chief characters of Shakspeare with a glory which could not be surpassed; but Mr Macready has evidenced a faith in the popular mind for which the popular heart should be grateful. He has not only presented many characters in his own person with extreme intellectual power and skill, but he has brought these immortal plays before the public eye in their integrity, and trusted to the general mind to prefer them to meaner things. In painting we have Turner, whose life has been a plea for the study of nature instead of merely the old masters; and we have his works to shew how ever new nature is, when contemplated by a mind which owes its training to art, but not its conceptions.

May it not be said that this is the service which, in another department, has been rendered us by Wordsworth? We have a great gift in his lofty eloquence, and in his vindication of all human sympathies; but it appears probable that a future generation will be most grateful to him for having brought us up out of a misleading conventionalism in poetry, to a recognition and contemplation of nature in subject and in expression. It was long before the critical world could be disabused; but the effort was met by popular sympathy, wherever it could be reached, from the beginning; and the popular

place we assign him, and by whatever name we call him, Thomas Carlyle appears to be the man who has most essentially modified the mind of his time. Nothing like his mind was ever heard or dreamed of in our literature before; nothing like his mournful, grotesque, and bitterly earnest writing ever seen. Yet his writings, though widely are not universally read; and he has long wrought where his works have never appeared, and his name been barely heard. His cry of sympathetic suffering has entered into the heart of legislators; his scornful rebuke of injustice has opened the eyes of the class-blinded; his bitter ridicule of cant and factitious emotion has confounded the sectarianism and fashionable humanity of the day; and his broad and bold and incessant implication of human equality in all essential matters -if the skin be but white-has roused the clergy, and other orders of guides and instructors, to a sense of the claims of their clients. If we find, as we certainly do everywhere in our land, a nobler moral ideal in society, a deeper sympathy, a stronger earnestness, and some partial deliverance from factitious and conventional morals and manners, it is unquestionably traceable to Carlyle. His mournful and protesting voice is heard sounding through our more serious parliamentary debates; and it is the glance of his eye that has directed other eyes to the depths of social misery and wrong. Whether we call him philosopher, poet, or moralist, he is the first teacher of our generation.

At the close of our period, Maria Edgeworth was living. She it was who early and effectually inter

ested her century in the character and lot of the Irish; and she did much besides to raise the character of fiction, and to gratify the popular mind before Scott, and Bulwer, and Dickens occupied that field of literature. It was as the friend of little children, however, that Miss Edgeworth is most beloved, and will be most gratefully remembered. Her delectable Rosamond is worth a score of famed novel-heroes, and is surely destined to everlasting youth, with an ingenuousness that can never be sullied, and a vivacity that can never be chilled. Our restless and indefatigable Bulwer came next; and wherever English books are read his novels are found, and men and women are disputing whether they are harmless or much to be feared. His mind is evidently of so impressible and so eclectic a character, as to prevent its productions having a vital influence, and therefore it seems as if they need not be feared; while there is great value in his wonderful analyses and specimens of the mind of the time; the politic, the worldly, the sceptical, the artistical, the literary, the self-observant, the would-be philosophicalnearly all, perhaps, but the simple, the religious, or the truly philosophical. Bulwer has given us popular dramas too; and successful political pamphlets, and volumes of poems, and essays. Succeeding more or less in every walk, his best achievement, as many good judges think, is in his early series of essays republished under the title of The Student. However opinions may vary about the claims of particular works, there can be no doubt that Bulwer has largely occupied the mind and leisure of the public

CHAP. XVII.]

of his day.-Last and greatest among the novelists comes Charles Dickens-the Boz who rose up in the midst of us like a jin with his magic glass among some eastern people, shewing forth what was doing in the regions of darkness, and in odd places where nobody ever thought of going to look. It is scarcely conceivable that any one should, in our age of the world, exert a stronger social influence than Mr Dickens has in his power. His sympathies are on the side of the suffering and the frail; and this makes him the idol of those who suffer, from whatever cause. We may wish that he had a sounder social philosophy, and that he could suggest a loftier moral to sufferers; could lead them to see that 'man does not live by bread alone,' and that his best happiness lies in those parts of his nature which are only animated and exalted by suffering, if it does not proceed too far; could shew us something of the necessity and blessedness of homely and incessant self-discipline, and dwell a little less fondly on the grosser indulgences and commoner beneficence which are pleasant enough in their own place, but which can never make a man and society so happy as he desires them to become. We may wish for these things, and we may shrink from the exhibition of human miseries as an artistical study; but, these great drawbacks once admitted, we shall be eager to acknowledge that we have in Charles Dickens a man of a genius which cannot but mark the time, and accelerate or retard its tendencies. In as far as its tendencies are to 'consider the poor,' and to strip off the disguises of cant, he is vastly accelerating them. As to whether his delineations are true to broad daylight English life, that may be for some time to come a matter of opinion on which men will differ. That they are, one and all, true to the ideal in the author's mind, is a matter on which none differ; while the inexhaustible humour, the unbounded power of observation, the exquisite occasional pathos, and the geniality of spirit throughout, carry all readers far away from critical thoughts, and give to the author the whole range of influence, from the palace-library to the penny book-club.

It is something new in England to see a satirical periodical-a farcical exposure of the sins and follies of the time. We have one now. Some of the wits of London, with Douglas Jerrold at their head, set up a weekly commentary on the doings of London as seen by Punch; and there is no corner of the kingdom to which Punch's criticisms have not penetrated. The work has been very useful, as well as abundantly amusing; it has had its faults and follies, and has dropped some of them; and now, its objects of satire are usually as legitimate as its satire is pungent and well-tempered. It is something that the grave English have a droll periodical to make them laugh every week; and it is something more that the laugh is not at the expense of wisdom.

In the solemn and immortal labours of the laboratory and the observatory we have Faraday and Herschel yet busy. It is not for us to speak of the secrets of nature which they are laying open; and it is not for any one to compute what they have done, or to anticipate what they may do. Of one

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work of Sir J. Herschel's we may form some estimate--his Preliminary Discourse on Natural Philosophy. That treatise is enough to make any man with a mind and heart long to devote himself to the pursuit of physical science, as the high road to wisdom, from that moment onwards. His own devotion to it is an example and inducement to all who can follow. He went to the Cape, to set up his observatory-leaving behind all considerations but that of the advancement of science; and every step of his pilgrimage has set its mark on a future age. As for Faraday, we dare say only that he is penetrating into mysteries of existence of which his own vast faculties can hardly bear the contemplation, and which will therefore become fully comprehensible only to a future generation. Under his gaze and his touch, the solid material of the universe is all melting away; matter-according to the old and now vulgar idea of it-is dissolving itself into forces; and our feeble insight into nature would be blinded, and our weak grasp of reliance would be all cast loose, but for the great truth which presents itself more clearly through all changes-that immutable law rules everywhere, all-sufficing for our intellectual support and our ease of heart. If we cannot compute what has been done by the researches and discoveries of Faraday for the period through which we have passed, we can say nothing of how they will influence the next. We can only feel certain that, in as far as they must change the aspect of the universe, and give a new command over the conditions of organised life, they must largely affect the destiny of man, both in his intellectual progress and his social relations. It will be for the men of that future time to assign to Faraday his place in the history of his country and of his kind.

CHAPTER XVII.

N taking a review of any period within our own experience, every one of us is apt to exaggerate the gains of the time-its gains in knowledge, arts, and moral views. This arises in part from our confounding change or expansion in our own ideas with change in the world about us. Therefore, we are liable to be struck by an opposite view upon occasion; and, in contemplating the best things in the old world-not its arts and science, but the wisdom of its sages, and the mental condition and communion of its people-to doubt whether, after all, the human race has got on so very much as is commonly said. If we endeavour to keep our view extended, we shall not suppose that any critical or decisive advance can have been made by any section of the human race in a period of thirty years; and we shall look without pride or vanity, it may be hoped, upon such improvements as may be recognised; while the review of such improvements may be thoroughly delightful, as convincing us of that rapid partial advance towards