in argument, Burke a copious and splendid declaimer -Wilson's Shepherd might without exaggeration be put upon a level with all these remarkable characters. He talks as shrewdly as Socrates, as wittily as Falstaff, as weightily as Johnson, as splendidly as Burke; or, at least, the exaggeration of such assertions might pass without challenge. He does talk more shrewdly, wittily, weightily, and splendidly, than any man we have the pleasure of knowing. But the talk of these famous personages is all related to action or serious discussion-is the genuine utterance of the men in contact with facts, either engaged in the business of life or in the pursuit of truth. Something more is revealed by it than a kaleidoscope quickness and variety of intellect; it displays at once and subserves the will and the affections. Socrates talks cleverly, and gets his opponent generally into chancery-a feat which would raise him to the rank of a first-rate sophist; but we value him for his genuine earnestness in pursuit of truth, his plainness, his fearlessness, his candour, his pure and aspiring soul-dialectic is simply his instrument. Falstaff is witty, but not wittier than Sheridan or Hook: what we admire in him is the profound sincerity of his sensual abasement-the devotion of the whole man, wit, understanding, reason, conscience, to the pleasures

of the animal man-his utter insensibility to the higher claims and enjoyments of his humanity; it is a character, not a talker, that delights us in the fat knight. So in Johnson, and Burke, the talk is merely instrumental, symptomatic of a whole man talking. But in the Shepherd of the Noctes the talk is the be-all and the end-all; the man is a talker and little else; and we identify him with his talk almost as little as we do an actor with his part. This is partly owing to the form adopted: desultory talk "de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis" can never thoroughly develop a character-can do nothing but show a man's versatility of intellect and command of language. But it is also owing to the fact that one of the Shepherd's traits is the queerest and most grotesque vanity-almost the only trait borrowed from the original model; and that he is throughout represented as talking for effect, to show off his eloquence. We have not, consequently, a character completely developed, but merely a man who can assume all characters for the nonce; can be funny, pathetic, wise, descriptive, poetical, or sensual, just as the play requires. And he is so palpably acting that he tires us by his cleverness of assumption, just as a hired mountebank would tire us by insisting on showing off his powers of mimicry in conversation.

Another objection to the Noctes as a whole may be conveyed in the words of Mr. Foster, who, in his admirable life of Goldsmith, says "Of the many clever and indeed wonderful writings that from age to age are poured forth into the world, what is it that puts upon the few the stamp of immortality, and makes them seem indestructible as nature? what is it but their wise rejection of everything superfluous ?" We estimate works of art, as we estimate characters in life, more by their unity and completeness than by their richness and profusion of raw material. It is coherence, order, purpose, which make the difference between Nature and Chaos. And if all the wit, the wisdom, the geniality, and the imagination of the Noctes Ambrosianæ fail to secure them a place among English classics, it will be because these are reduced to no order, subordinated to no general purpose, organized into no whole. They will even then remain the very best magazine papers that were probably ever written.

The Spectator,

November 24, 1855.

THE "Cours de Philosophie Positive" is at once a compendious cyclopædia of science and an exhibition of scientific method. It defines rigorously the characteristics of the several orders of phenomena with which the particular sciences are concerned, arranges them in an ascending scale of complexity and specialty beginning with mathematics and ending with social physics or sociology, and assigns to each science its proper method in accordance with the nature of the phenomena to be investigated. The connexion between the sciences thus arranged is, that the laws of each preceding order of phenomena are operative in that which succeeds, but in combination with a new order of laws, the study of which constitutes the advanced science. As might be supposed, the sciences have historically developed themselves in accordance with this arrangement, the simpler and

more general first, the more complex and special afterwards. Thus we obtain not only a lucid and rational classification, but a logical genealogy and an historical law of evolution, forming a sure basis for education and a luminous indication of future progress. An arrangement so simple in its principle, so fruitful in its results, one may well be astonished at having had so many ages to wait for. It is, however, unquestionable that, though half-formed suggestions of such a classification are here and there to be found, and though Hegel in particular, proceeding on a totally different method, has reached an arrangement that superficially resembles M. Comte's, yet to the latter belongs the honour of having thoroughly worked out the conception, of having rigorously determined and decisively constituted the filiation, of having exhibited the relations between phenomena and method, and finally of having accurately conceived and initiated the crowning science of sociology, with its two departments of social statics and social dynamics, dealing the one with the conditions of the stability of human societies, the other with the laws of their progress. Because it is not merely a cyclopædia of scientific facts, but an exhibition of the methods of human knowledge and of the relations between its different branches, M. Comte