IMPROBABILITY OF ANY GREAT ADVANCE, ETC. 489 the high standard of conduct and feeling which it erects, and to teach them, more emphatically than by words, that their degree of happiness must of necessity be as low as their moral attainments are humble. Further, man, though he has been increasing in knowledge ever since his appearance on earth, has not been improving in faculty-a shrewd fact, which they who expect most from the future of the world would do well to consider. The ancient masters of mind were in no respect inferior in calibre to their successors. We have not yet shot ahead of the old Greeks in either the perception of the beautiful, or in the ability of producing it; there has been no improvement in the inventive faculty since the "Iliad" was written, some three thousand years ago; nor has taste become more exquisite, or the perception of the harmony of numbers more nice, since the age of the "Eneid." Science is cumulative in its character; and so its votaries in modern times stand on a higher pedestal than their predecessors. But though Nature produced a Newton some two centuries ago, as she produced a Goliath of Gath at an earlier period, the modern philosophers, as a class, do not exceed in actual stature the worse informed ancients, the Euclids, the Archimedeses, and Aristotles. We would be without excuse if, with the Bacon, Milton, and Shakspere of these latter ages of the world full before us, we recurred to the obsolete belief that the human race is deteriorating; but then, on the other hand, we have certain evidence that, since genius first began unconsciously to register in its works its own bulk and proportions, there has been no increase in the mass, or improvement in the quality, of individual mind. As for the dream that there is to be some extraordinary elevation of the general platform of the race achieved by means of education, it is simply the hallucination of the age, the world's present alchemical expedient for converting farthings into guineas sheerly by dint of scouring. Not but that education is good; it exercises, and in the ordinary mind develops, faculty. But it will not anticipate the terminal dynasty. Yet further, man's average capacity of happiness seems to be as limited and as incapable of increase as his average reach of intellect; it is a mediocre capacity at best; nor is it greater by a shade now, in these days of power-looms and portable manures, than in the times of the old patriarchs. So long, too, as the law of increase continues, man must be subject to the law of death, with its stern attendants, suffering and sorrow; for the two laws of necessity go together; and so long as death reigns, human creatures, in even the best of times, will continue to quit this scene of being, without professing much satisfaction at what they have found either in it or themselves. It will no doubt be a less miserable world than it is now, when the good come, as there is reason to hope they one day shall, to be a majority; but it will be felt to be an inferior sort of world even then, and be even fuller than now of wishes and longings for a better. Let it improve as it may, it will be a scene of probation and trial till the end. And so Faith, undeceived by the mirage of the midway desert, whatever form or name, political or religious, the phantasmagoria may bear, must continue to look beyond its unsolid and tremulous glitter, its bare rocks, exaggerated by the vapour into air-drawn castles, and its stunted bushes magnified into goodly trees, and, fixing her gaze upon the re-creation yet future, the terminal dynasty yet unbegun, she must be content to enter upon her final rest (for she will not enter upon it earlier), "at return of Him, the woman's seed,” "Last in the clouds, from heaven to be revealed In glory of the Father, to dissolve Satan, with his perverted world; then raise 2. TRACES OF THE OCEAN. Was it the sound of the distant surf that was in mine ears, or the low moan of the breeze, as it crept through the neighbouring wood? Oh, that hoarse voice of Ocean, never silent since time first began!— where has it not been uttered? There is stillness amid the calm of the arid and rainless desert, where no spring rises and no streamlet flows, and the long caravan plies its weary march amid the blinding glare of the sand, and the red unshaded rays of the fierce sun. But once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. It is his sands that the winds heap up; and it is the skeleton remains of his vassals-shells, and fish, and the strong coral-that the rocks underneath enclose. There is silence on the tall mountain-peak, with its glittering mantle of snow, where the panting lungs labour to inhale the thin bleak air,-where no insect murmurs and no bird flies, and where the eye wanders over multitudinous hill-tops that lie far beneath, and vast dark forests that sweep on to the distant horizon, and along long hollow valleys where the great rivers begin. And yet once and again, and yet again, has the roar of Ocean been there. The elegies of his more ancient denizens we find sculptured on the crags, where they jut from beneath the ice into the mistwreath; and his later beaches, stage beyond stage, terrace the descending slopes. Where has the great destroyer not been,-the devourer of continents, the blue foaming dragon, whose vocation it is to eat up the land? His ice-floes have alike furrowed the flat steppes of Siberia and the rocky flanks of Schehallion, and his nummulites and fish lie embedded in great stones of the pyramids hewn in the times of the old Pharaohs, and in rocky folds of Lebanon still untouched by the tool. So long as Ocean exists, there must be disintegration, dilapidation, change; and should the time ever arrive when the elevatory agencies, motionless and chill, shall sleep within their profound depths to awaken no more,—and should the sea still continue to impel its currents and to roll its waves,-every continent and island would at length disappear, and again, as of old, “when the fountains of the great deep were broken up," "A shoreless ocean tumble round the globe." 66 Was it with reference to this principle, so recently recognised, that we are so expressly told in the Apocalypse respecting the renovated earth, in which the state of things shall be fixed and eternal, that "there shall be no more sea?" or are we to regard the revelation as the mere hieroglyphic-the pictured shape-of some analogous moral truth? Reasoning from what we know," and what else remains to us ?-an earth without a sea would be an earth without rain, without vegetation, without life,—a dead and doleful planet of waste places, such as the telescope reveals to us in the moon. And yet the ocean does seem peculiarly a creature of time,—of all the great agents of vicissitude and change, the most influential and untiring; and to a state in which there shall be no vicissitude and no change, in which the earthquake shall not heave from beneath, nor the mountains wear down and the continents melt away, it seems inevitably necessary that there should be "no more sea.' XVII. HENRY HALLAM. HENRY HALLAM, son of the Dean of Wells, was born in 1778, and after a classical education at Eton was sent to Christ Church, Oxford. On completing his university career he joined the Inner Temple as a student of law, and was in due time called to the bar. His tastes, however, inclined him to a literary life, and an appointment which he fortunately obtained at an early period, as Commissioner of Audit, enabled him to gratify his inclinations. He was one of the early contributors to the "Edinburgh Review," and, like the rest, was satirized by Byron in his " English Bards and Scotch Reviewers; 66 66 an unfor tunate mistake which Hallam had made in one of his articles giving additional point to the poet's sarcasm. In 1818 he published his View of the State of Europe during the Middle Ages;" in 1827 his Constitutional History of England from the Accession of Henry VII. to the Death of George II.;" and in 1837 his "Introduction to the Literature of Europe in the Fifteenth, Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Centuries." These works have all been received with public favour, and have from the very first taken their place as standard authorities on the subjects of which they treat. They are distinguished by great learning and extensive research, and are written in a tone of impartiality which is not very general in the historical works of the present day. Hallam, in fact, unites many of the characteristic excellences of the historians of the last as well as of the present generation; he has much of the calm philosophic impartiality of the former, with the painstaking accuracy in verifying the minutest particulars on which the latter pride themselves. The style of Hallam's histories presents few attractions to any other than the historical student, it is in general clear and precise, but it is dry and rather uninteresting, presenting in this respect a marked contrast to the writings of the other great historian of this century, Macaulay. Hallam had the misfortune to lose two of his sons, young men of great promise; the oldest of them, who died in 1833, is well known to all readers of poetry as the accomplished youth in honour of whom Tennyson composed his "In Memoriam." The historian, after a long and studious life, died in January 1859. 1. GENERAL VIEW OF THE ADVANTAGES AND EVILS OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM.—("EUROPE DURING THE MIDDLE AGES," CHAP. II., PART II.) If we look at the feudal polity as a scheme of civil freedom, it bears a noble countenance. To the feudal law it is owing that the very names of right and privilege were not swept away, as in Asia, by the desolating hand of power. The tyranny which, on every favourable moment, was breaking through all barriers, would have rioted without control, if, when the people were poor and disunited, the nobility had not been brave and free. So far as the sphere of feudality extended, it diffused the spirit of liberty and the notions of private right. Every one, I think, will acknowledge this, who considers the limitations of the services of vassalage, so cautiously marked in those law-books which are the records of customs, the reciprocity of obligation between the lord and his tenant, the consent required in every measure of a legislative or a general nature, the security, above all, which every vassal found in the administration of justice by his peers, and even (we may in this sense say) in the trial by combat. The bulk of the people, it is true, were degraded by servitude, but this had no connection with the feudal tenures. The peace and good order of society was not promoted by this system. Though private wars did not originate in the feudal customs, it is impossible to doubt that they were perpetuated by so convenient an institution, which indeed owed its universal establishment to no other cause. And as predominant habits of warfare are totally irreconcileable with those of industry, not merely by the immediate works of destruction which render its efforts unavailing, but through that contempt of peaceful occupations which they produce, the feudal system must have been intrinsically adverse to the accumulation of wealth, and the improvement of those arts which mitigate the evils or abridge the labours of mankind. But as the school of moral discipline, the feudal institutions were perhaps most to be valued. Society had sunk, for several centuries after the dissolution of the Roman empire, into a condition of utter depravity, where, if any vices could be selected as more eminently characteristic than others, they were falsehood, treachery, and ingratitude. In slowly purging off the lees of this extreme corruption, the feudal spirit exerted its ameliorating influence. Violation of ADVANTAGES AND EVILS OF THE FEUDAL SYSTEM. 493 faith stood first in the catalogue of crimes, most repugnant to the very essence of a feudal tenure, most severely and promptly avenged, most branded by general infamy. The feudal law books breathe throughout a spirit of honourable obligation. The feudal course of jurisdiction promoted, what trial by peers is peculiarly calculated to promote, a keener feeling and readier perception of moral as well as of legal distinctions. And as the judgment and sympathy of mankind are seldom mistaken in these great points of veracity and justice, except through the temporary success of crimes or the want of a definite standard of right, they gradually recovered themselves, when law precluded the one and supplied the other. In the reciprocal services of lord and vassal, there was ample scope for every magnanimous and disinterested energy. The heart of man, when placed in circumstances which have a tendency to excite them, will seldom be deficient in such sentiments. No occasions could be more favourable than the protection of a faithful supporter, or the defence of a beneficent suzerain, against such powerful aggression as left little prospect except of sharing in his ruin. From these feelings, engendered by the feudal relation, has sprung up the peculiar sentiment of personal reverence and attachment towards a sovereign which we denominate loyalty; alike distinguishable from the stupid devotion of Eastern slaves, and from the abstract respect with which free citizens regard their chief magistrate. Men who had been used to swear fealty, to profess subjection, to follow, at home and in the field, a feudal superior and his family, easily transferred the same allegiance to the monarch. It was a very powerful feeling, which could make the bravest men put up with slights and ill-treatment at the hands of their sovereign; or call forth all the energies of disinterested exertion for one whom they never saw, and in whose character there was nothing to esteem. In ages when the rights of the community were unfelt, this sentiment was one great preservative of society; and, though collateral or even subservient to more enlarged principles, it is still indispensable to the tranquillity and permanence of every monarchy. In a moral view, loyalty has scarcely perhaps less tendency to refine and elevate the heart than patriotism itself, and holds a middle place in the scale of human motives, as they ascend from the grosser inducements of self-interest to the furtherance of general happiness and conformity to the purposes of Infinite Wisdom. 2. HOUSES AND FURNITURE OF, THE NOBLES IN THE MIDDLE AGES. (“EUROPE IN THE MIDDLE AGES," CHAPTER IX., PART II.) It is an error to suppose, that the English gentry were lodged in stately or even in well-sized houses. Generally speaking, their dwellings were almost as inferior to those of their descendants in capacity as they were in convenience. The usual arrangement consisted of an entrance-passage running through the house, with a hall on one side, a parlour beyond, and one or two chambers above; and |