Berkeley, when he was recommended for promotion to the new Majesties. In the long-run, happily, it did him no harm; nor is there the least trace that he had any intention of turning the eyes of the young fervid English-Irish community towards the exiled Stuarts, who alone, sacred in their divine right, could have any claim upon the passive obedience of their hereditary subjects. His aim was honestly to prove "that there is an absolute unlimited non-resistance or passive obedience due to the supreme power, wherever placed in any nation;" and unappalled by the amazing contradiction of circumstances around him, he worked out his theory with a calm as perfect as if the social order of the empire had never been disturbed. A few months after this publication, he went to England for the first time, and was received with enthusiasm. The whole guild of literature seems to have opened its arms to the young philosopher. Steele on the one side, and Swift on the other, brought him into the heart of all the society of the day. Addison, at this or a subsequent time, was so much interested in him that he took the trouble of bringing about a meeting at his own house between him and Dr Clarke, in order to the discussion and reconciliation, if possible, of their differing views. Pope writes to him that "my Lord Bishop Atterbury was very much concerned at missing you yesterday," and entreats him to "provide your self of linen and other necessaries sufficient for the week; for as I take you to be almost the only friend I have that is above the little vanities of the town, I expect you may be able to renounce it for one week, and to make trial how you like my Tusculum, because I assure you it is no less yours, and hope you will use it as your own countryvilla in the ensuing season." Atterbury himself, a more congenial spirit, adds his praise of the young

adventurer in terms which seem high-flown to the sober ears of posterity. "So much learning, so much knowledge, so much innocence, and such humility, I did not think had been the portion of any but angels till I saw this gentleman," says the Bishop. Thus, universally admired and adopted by the wits, the young man's short career in "town" must have been a continued triumph. He published there the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous,' in which his new system of philosophy was once more set forth and elucidated to the world. The form of dialogue was one which pleased the age; but it has radical disadvantages at all times, and especially when dealing with a subject so difficult. The reader cannot but feel that the hapless interlocutor, set up there to be driven into one corner after another, compelled to make the most damaging admissions, and finally beaten and triumphed over, is in every respect a man of straw, rather enfeebling than strengthening, with his weak objections, the strain of the argument; nor are the dialogues so readable (although so evidently intended to be more readable) as the grave work which preceded them. What with this publication, and his warm reception by society, Berkeley's short stay in London must have been sufficiently full. He is said to have written several papers for the 'Guardian,' only one of which, however, can be identified as his. He was introduced and recommended specially, it would seem, by Swift, who was one of his many friends, to that strange hero of romance the Earl of Peterborough, then about to start upon a mission as Ambassador to the Court of Sicily and other Italian States, and became his secretary and chaplain. In the suite of this remarkable and eccentric personage Berkeley left philosophy and England, and went out, wandering on an errant course

which lasted for years, abroad into the world. He was still but nineand-twenty, and yet this is something like the end of his purely philosophical career. Hereafter the young man, afloat in the full tide of life, finds other pieces of work to do, and matters thrown into his hands of which he had not dreamed. His intellect goes on in the activity inseparable from such a nature; but the silence and the leisure have gone from him. Henceforward he is in a busier scene, amid influences more urgent and less subtle. And we do not suppose that any other philosopher has proved himself capable of thus setting his mark upon the most difficult of all sciences, and turning its stream into a new channel, before he had even attained the maturity of manhood. This Berkeley did while still under thirty; and thereafter went upon his way, not to forget or abandon the speculations of his youth, but yet to play the part of a man in a world too busy for philosophers, and to demonstrate what force of healthful vitality, what stout service and helpfulness, could exist in the prophet of Idealism, the destroyer of matter, the exponent of what, to so many sober-minded critics, has seemed the most fantastic of all creeds.

ous young soul, the very best and highest type of the adventurer, going blithely out to face the world and seek his fortune; and yet already the author of works, one of which had "made an epoch in science," and the other an epoch in metaphysics! Such wonders happen but rarely in this limited world. It is evident that he carried all that weight of learning lightly as a flower, and went away with the simplicity of genius, glad of opportunities of speaking French, and writing such letters to his "dear Tom" as any young Irish chaplain on his travels might have written. He was a week on the road between Calais and Paris in the stage-coach, but having "good company," did not mind. He was dazzled by the grandeur of everything he saw in Paris, finding there "splendour and riches" to pass belief, but "has some reasons to decline speaking of the country or villages that I saw as I came along." These reasons, as he afterwards permits us to divine, were "the poverty and distress," which he sadly allows to be enough "to spoil the mirth of any one who feels the sufferings of his fellow-creatures;" for we must not forget that it was the eighteenth century, and those awful seeds of oppression and wretchedness which produced the Revolution were already germinating. "I cannot help observing," he says, “that the Jacobites have little to hope, and others little to fear, from that reduced nation. The king, indeed, looks as if he wanted neither meat nor drink, and his palaces are in good repair, but through the land there is a different face of things." Evidently to the traveller matters appeared too serious to be talked of; and yet some eighty years passed before the awful explosion came !

The young Irishman, thus setting out upon his travels with a reputation already at a height which only one or two men in a century ever gain with manners and morals so high that only among the angels had Bishop Atterbury hoped to behold the like of him-with "every virtue under heaven" attributed to him by the most satirical of poets,was, in addition to all this, endowed with that beauty of form and face which does not always accompany beauty of character. He was "a handsome man, with a countenance full of meaning and benignity, remarkable for great strength of limbs, and of a very robust constitution." A natural, genial, joy

"at a

"I was present," he adds, disputation in the Sorbonne, which, indeed, had much of the French fire in it ;" and he goes on to say that he was about "to visit Father Malebranche, and discourse him on

certain points." Of this meeting a curious story is told. The priest was in his cell when the young clergyman, heretic in more than religious faith, went to see him. He was discovered "cooking in a small pipkin a medicine for a disorder with which he was then troubled an inflammation on the lungs. The conversation naturally turned on our author's system, of which the other had received some knowledge from a translation just published. But the issue of his debate proved tragical to poor Malebranche. In the heat of disputation he raised his voice so high, and gave way so freely to the natural impetuosity of a man of parts and a Frenchman, that he brought on himself a violent increase of his disorder, which carried him off a few days after." Thus Malebranche died of Berkeley in the most curious, tragi - comic way; and indeed few contrasts could be more striking than that of the old French priest in his cell, with his pipkin and his cough, shrill and worn, yet impetuous still, and the strapping young Fellow of Trinity, with the fresh winds blowing about him, and all his youthful powers in full vigour. He was a month in Paris, and made full use of his time; and his power of conversing with his fellowtravellers, and understanding disputations at the Sorbonne, full of French fire, is not one of the least of his acquirements. There are, alas! many fellows of colleges, men full of philosophy and fine attainment, who even in these travelling days might be found to hesitate at

such a test.

From Paris the travellers went on to Italy, daring the dangers of the Mont Cenis pass on New-Year's Day-an experience which Berkeley seems to have found appalling enough. "I can gallop all day long, and sleep but three or four hours at night," he writes, from the sunny side of the Alps, to his dear Tom. The account of his

repu

travels contains, of course, nothing new to the modern reader; indeed he acknowledges, even at that period, that "Italy is an exhausted subject." Yet he does not hesitate to give a sketch of Ischia to Pope, -one of those little bare, yet not unsuggestive, descriptions of the "delicious isle" in which the age abounded. To Dr Arbuthnot, another of the friends his tation had made for him among the wits, he sends his account of Vesuvius. Wherever he goes, it is with his eyes open, his mind intent upon the sight and understanding of all. This first expedition lasted not quite a year, but was immediately followed by a second, taken in charge of a pupil, a Mr Ashe, son of the Bishop of Clogher, who had previously been Provost of Trinity College. Between these two expeditions he had a fever, of which Arbuthnot writes to Swift with friendly playfulness. "Poor philosopher Berkeley has now the idea of health, which was very hard to produce in him," he says, "for he had an idea of a strange fever on him, so strong that it was very hard to destroy it by introducing a contrary one." Thus his friends, with kindly jeers, smiled at the Idealist; as indeed it has been his fate to be pursued with jeers, not kindly, from that time until now.

He was absent for four years on his second expedition, and, it is apparent, made himself acquainted with the depths of Italy as few men can, even at the present day. Nor was he so much occupied with his travels as to abandon speculation. On his way home, stopping at Lyons in one of the many pauses of those slow journeys, he composed what his biographer calls "a curious tract, 'De Motu,' which he sent to the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, the subject being proposed by that assembly." This paper "Concerning Motion" was afterwards published in London in the year 1721, and is in perfect agreement with the characteristic strain

-

of Berkeley's philosophy, his theory being that all motion centres in God, the one Great Mover of the universe. Even these abstruse reasonings, however, though carried on in conjunction with the cares of a traveller, were not sufficient to occupy his many-sided intelligence. In the same year, 1721, the period of the South Sea catastrophe, the eager Irishman, full of interest and concern in everything that affected his country, sent forth 'An Essay towards Preventing the Ruin of Great Britain,' which falls, with a mixture of quaint wisdom and simplicity, upon ears warped from the modesty of nature by those suggestions of political economy which were then unknown to the world. Berkeley's cure for the evils of his country is that simplest, most indubitable, and yet most impossible of cures that men should become better, wiser, and purer. "Whether the prosperity that preceded or the calamities that succeeded the South Sea project have most contributed to our undoing," he says, "is not so clear a point as it is that we are actually undone and lost to all sense of our true interest: nothing less than this could render it pardonable to have recourse to those old trite maxims concerning religion, industry, frugality, and public spirit, which are now forgotten, but, if revived and put in practice, may not only prevent our final ruin, but also render us a more happy and flourishing people than ever." The reader follows the argument with a certain reverential amusement, if we may use such words. This eighteenth century was the falsest and most artificial of ages, and yet what a depth of simplicity must have lain in the heart of a nation to which the philosopher could recommend, as to a primitive people, this noblest primitive remedy! Let every man become religious, modest, industrious, says the dreamer; where is the difficulty? - apart from any national crisis, is not this every

man's duty, every man's highest interest ?-and all will come right. The succeeding practical suggestions are even more utopian. He thinks "if the poor-tax was fixed at a medium in every parish, taken from a calculation of the last ten years, and raised for seven years by Act of Parliament, that sum (if the common estimate be not very wrong) frugally and prudently laid out in workhouses, would for ever free the nation from the care of providing for the poor, and at the same time considerably improve our manufactures. We might, by these means, rid our streets of beggars;" he adds, in his simplicity,

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even the children, the maimed, and the blind, might be put in the way of doing something for their livelihood. As for the small number of those who by age or infirmities are utterly incapable of all employment, they might be maintained by the labour of others; and the public would receive no small advantage from the industry of those who are now so great a burden and expense to it."

Had the philosopher lived to see the dreaded and hated workhouse of our own day, how strangely would he have been surprised by the result of his suggestions! He goes on to imagine how the same tax, "continued three years longer," might set our roads in order and render our rivers navigable; "so that in the space of ten years the public may be for ever freed from a heavy tax, industry encouraged, commerce facilitated, and the whole country improved"! Our genial reformer next proceeds to suggest

some reward or privilege to those who have a certain number of children," and that the public should "inherit half the unentailed estates of all who die unmarried of either sex"! Taxes upon "dead bachelors" he holds, with a delightful scorn of the creature, to be "in no sort grievous to the subject"! Nor does he let women altogether escape, though touching that chapter with

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a light hand, like the gallant gentleman he was. He would have sumptuary laws, restraining "the luxury of dress which giveth a light behaviour to our women." He would have order taken with public amusements, the drama reformed, the masquerade abolished. He would have "a pillar of infamy" to mark the memory of the swindler with an odious immortality. He would have a "parliament house, courts of justice, royal palace, and other public edifices built" suitable to the dignity of the nation, with decorations of pictures and statues, in order "to transmit memorable things and persons to posterity," to spirit up new arts, employ many hands, and keep money circulating at home;" though this project, he fears, would "be laughed at as a vain affair, of great expense and little use to the public." Last of all, he would encourage public spirit by "erecting an academy of ingenious men, whose employment it would be to compile the history of Great Britain, to make discourses proper to inspire men with a zeal for the public, and celebrate the memories of those who have been ornaments to the nation, or done it eminent service. Not to mention," he adds, with the quaint humour which now and then breaks in upon his grave argument, "that this would improve our language, and amuse certain busy spirits of the age, which, perhaps, would be no ill policy."

This essay holds no such important place among Berkeley's works as we give it here; and yet we know nothing which more illustrates the spirit of the man. Bits of true wisdom are in it, with interminglings of that fantastic theorising of which a "thinker" so called, seldom shakes himself absolutely free when he takes to planning for the good of the outside world; yet how different, even in his most fantastic moment, how modest and sober, is our Idealist in comparison with most intellectual dreamers! He was in London

at the time the essay was written, seeing around him on every side the consequences of the national mad

ness.

And yet he was in very fine company, and made much of in the brilliant world when he reappeared from time to time bringing tidings with him, as it were, from the ends of the earth. One of the places where he is most visible to us at this distance is in the little philosophical parties which gathered round the Princess of Wales in her opposition Court in Leicester Fields. She gave the philosophers one evening in the week, and found recreation in their learned talk. "Of this company were Dr Clarke, Hoadly, Berkeley, and Sherlock. Clarke and Berkeley were generally considered the principals in the debates that arose on these occasions; and Hoadly adhered to the former, as Sherlock did to the latter." Thus they discussed and rediscussed— Caroline, with her bright eyes, looking on, with the ready interest and keen wit which distinguished her. To such a little oasis of brightness and social enjoyment our wandering philosopher comes by times, gleaming out suddenly into the midst of the wit and the embroidery. But it never seems to have had the fascination for him that it had for Swift, nor did his lingering advancement and the unproductive character of royal friendship embitter the sweeter temper and gayer heart of Berkeley. He went back to Ireland in 1721, as chaplain to the LordLieutenant, without any apparent reluctance to leave the society even of Leicester Fields, and found there fortune and preferment awaiting him of which, probably, he had never dreamed.

The fortune came in the most curious way from a woman unhappily too well known to the worldthe hapless and foolish creature whom Swift's love and indifference drove to distraction and death. Poor Vanessa, tragical, self-willed, despairing woman, had seen young Berkeley with her terrible hero in