The Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson occupy the highest place in this department of our literature. In no other writings is it possible to find so much concentrated wisdom so happily expressed, so many well-known truisms clothed in new and attractive costumes. Emerson's originality consists more in the manner in which he presents a thought to our minds than in the matter which he offers for our consideration; "he evolves beautiful or apt figures and apothegms that strike at first, but, when contemplated, prove usually either true and not new, or new and not true." Let us hear what the critics say of him:

Says Lowell: "We look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom our age has produced, and there needs no better proof of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other minds. Search for his eloquence in his books, and you will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith of language, he belongs to a better age than ours, and might rub shoulders with Fuller and Browne. His eye for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like that of a backwoodsman for a rifle; and he will dredge you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as his I know not where to match in these days of writing by the page; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius."

Says Theodore Parker: "The essays in his books are separate, and stand apart from one another, only mechanically bound by the lids of the volume; his paragraphs in each essay are distinct and disconnected, or but loosely bound to one another. It is so with sentences in the paragraph, and propositions in the sentence. Take, for example, his essay on Experience; it is distributed into seven parts, which treat respectively of Illusion, Temperament, Succession, Surface, Surprise, Reality, and Subjectiveness. These seven brigadiers are put in one army, with

as little unity of action as any seven Mexican officers; not subject to one head nor fighting on the same side. The subordinates under these generals are in no better order and discipline; sometimes the corporal commands the king. But this very lack of order gives variety of form. You can never anticipate him. One-half the essay never suggests the rest. If we have no order, he never sets his method agoing, and himself, with his audience, goes to sleep, trusting that he, they, and the logical conclusion will all come out alive and waking at the last. He trusts nothing to the discipline of his camp; all to the fidelity of the individual soldier."

Says William T. Harris: "Every essay of Emerson is the result of much sifting and classifying. Seeing everything in its most universal aspects, as is habitual with him, it is quite natural that each suggests all to him. Accordingly, he resolutely excludes, by successive siftings, the matter that is less directly connected with his central theme, and retains only that which best illustrates his thought and builds it out into a solid structure.

But he dislikes the parade of method, and shuns what he has called the 'anatomy of thought.' He is more nearly allied to the seer as prophet than to the philosopher, perhaps, inasmuch as he goes beyond the revelation of the eternal beauty to the revelation of the good rather than of the true. He has translated for us the ethical code of the world, and published an edition of it for a people with a local self-government. No one has preached more solemnly to us of our duties in a free government. Trickery and cunning demagoguery-these have received his rebuke, but their presence has never made him despair of our civilization. His teachings have borne noble fruit in this direction, and I believe that every American has received some impulse from Emerson that gives him greater moral courage and causes him to deal with his fellow-men more frankly and generously than before. Self-respect has been taught us as the foundation of free Covernment"

We shall close this chapter with a short quotation from Emerson's essay on Experience:

The mid-world is best. Nature, as we know her, is no saint. The lights of the church, the ascetics, Gentoos and corn-eaters, she does not distinguish by any favor. She comes eating and drinking and sinning. Her darlings, the great, the strong, the beautiful, are not children of our law, do not come out of the Sundayschool, nor weigh their food, nor punctually keep the commandments. If we will be strong with her strength, we must not harbor such disconsolate consciences, borrowed too from the consciences of other nations. We must set up the strong present tense against all the rumors of wrath, past or to come. So many things are unsettled which it is of the first importance to settle,— and, pending their settlement, we will do as we do. Whilst the debate goes forward on the equity of commerce, and will not be closed for a century or two, New and Old England may keep shop. Law of copyright and international copyright is to be discussed, and, in the interim, we will sell our books for the most we can. Expediency of literature, reason of literature, lawfulness of writing down a thought is questioned; much is to say on both sides, and, while the fight waxes hot, thou, dearest scholar, stick to thy foolish task, add a line every hour, and between whiles add a line. Right to hold land, right of property, is disputed, and the conventions convene, and before the vote is taken, dig away in your garden, and spend your earnings as a waif or godsend to all serene and beautiful purposes. Life itself is a bubble and a skepticism, and a sleep within a sleep. Grant it, and as much more as they will, but thou, God's darling! heed thy private dream: · thou wilt not be missed in the scorning and skepticism: there are enough of them: stay there in thy closet, and toil until the rest are agreed what to do about it. Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shalt not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be better.

Human life is made up of two elements, power and form, and the proportion must be invariably kept, if we would have it sweet and sound. Each of these elements in excess makes a mischief as hurtful as its defect. Everything runs to excess: every good

quality is noxious, if unmixed, and, to carry the danger to the edge of ruin, nature causes each man's peculiarity to superabound. Here, among the farms, we adduce the scholars as examples of this treachery. They are nature's victims of expression. You who see the artist, the orator, the poet, too near, and find their life no more excellent than that of mechanics or farmers, and themselves victims of partiality, very hollow and haggard, and pronounce them failures,-not heroes, but quacks,-conclude, very reasonably, that these arts are not for man, but are disease. Yet nature will not bear you out. Irresistible nature made men such, and makes legions more of such, every day. You love the boy reading in a book, gazing at a drawing, a cast; yet what are these millions who read and behold, but incipient writers and sculptors? Add a little more of that quality which now reads and sees, and they will seize the pen and chisel. And if one remembers how innocently he begun to be an artist, he perceives that nature joined with his enemy. A man is a golden impossibility. The line he must walk is a hair's breadth. The wise through excess of wisdom is made a fool.

CHAPTER XI.

POLITICS AND POLITICAL ECONOMY.

Chief-Justice Fortescue-Difference between an Absolute and a Limited Monarchy-George Buchanan-De Jure Regni-Thomas HobbesThe Leviathan-Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarcha-John Locke on Civil Government-John Milton-Areopagitica-The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates-Eikon Basilike-Eikonoklastes-Milton and Salmasius -Party Literature in the Reign of Queen Anne-Daniel Defoe -True-Born Englishman-Defoe's Review-Dean Swift--Letters of M. B. Drapier-John Wilkes-The Letters of Junius-Edmund Burke -On a Regicide Peace-Hume's Political Essays-Dr. Johnson's Taxation no Tyranny-Thomas Paine-Common Sense-The Crisis -William Godwin-Dr. Adam Smith-Wealth of Nations-Benjamin Franklin-William Paley-The Doctrine of Malthus-Sadler on the Law of Population-Macaulay-Other Writers on Political Economy-Sir William Blackstone-Jeremy Bentham.

IN no country has the subject of political science received more careful or more profound attention than in England, and our literature boasts of many able works upon questions relating to matters of government and statecraft. Indeed, one of the earliest prose works in modern English belongs to this department. It was written by Chief-Justice Fortescue about the middle of the fifteenth century, and is entitled The Difference between an Absolute and Limited Monarchy. Judge Fortescue wrote also a Latin work on the same subject, but fuller and more complete, which he called De Laudibus Legum Angliæ. The chief object of the author in both of these works was to show the advantages of a constitutional form of government; and the immediate purpose for which they were written was for the "encouragement and direction of the Prince of Wales (Edward V.), and to kindle in him a desire to know and understand the laws." The worthy judge, comparing the