of his race and Church:

"I do not attach much importance to the Act of James 1., who, in 1619, issued a proclamation reminding his English subjects of the obligation of keeping Lent; because his Majesty's object is clearly ascertained to have been to encourage the traffic of his countrymen, the Scotch, who had just then embarked largely in the herring trade, and for whom the thrifty Stuart was anxious to secure a monopoly in the

British markets.

"But, when, in 1627, I find the chivalrous Charles I., your martyred king, sending forth from the Banqueting-room of Whitehall his royal decree to the same effect, I am at a loss to trace his motives. It is known that Arch

bishop Laud's advice went to the effect of reinstating many customs of Catholicity; but from a more diligent consideration of the subject, I am more inclined to think that the King wished rather, by this display of austere practices, to soothe and conciliate the Puritanical portion of his subjects, whose religious notions were supposed (I know not how justly) to have a tendency to self-denial and the mortification of the flesh. Certain it is that the Calvinists and Roundheads were greater favourites at Billingsgate than the High Church party; from which we may conclude that they consumed more fish, a fact corroborated by the contemporary testimony of Samuel Butler, who says that when the great struggle commenced

"I will only remark, in furtherance of my own views, that the King's beefeaters and the gormandizing Cavaliers of that period, could never stand in fair fight against the austere and fasting Cromwel ians.

"It is a vulgar error of your countrymen to connect valour with roast-beef, or courage with plum-pudding. There exists no such association; and I wonder this national mistake has not been noticed by Jeremy Benthamn in his Book of Fallacies. As soon might it be presumed that the pot-bellied Falstaff, faring on venison and sack, could overcome in prowess Owen Glendower, who, I suppose, fed on leeks; or that the lean and emaciated Cassius was not a better soldier than a well-known sleek and greasy rogue who fled from the battle of Philippi, and as he himself unblushingly tells the world, left his buckler behind him: Relicta non bene parmulâ.

Among European denominations, in proportion as the Celtic infusion predominates, so in corresponding ratio is the national character for abstemiousness. Nor would I thus dwell I not about to draw a corollary, and show how on an otherwise uninteresting speculation were these secret influences became apparent at what is called the great epoch of the Reformation. The latent tendency to escape from fasting observances became then revealed, and what had lain dormant for ages was at once developed. off the yoke of Rome; while the Celtic races The Tartar and Sclavonic breed of men flung

remained faithful to the successor of the "Fish

erman," and kept Lent.

"The Hollanders, the Swedes, the Saxons, the Prussians, and in Germany those circles in which the Gothic blood ran heaviest and most

stagnant, hailed Luther as a deliverer from salt fish. The fatted calf was killed, bumpers of ale went round, and Popery went to the dogs. Half Europe followed the impetus given to free opinions, and the congenial impulse of the gastric juice; joining in reform, not because they loved Rome less, but because they loved substantial fare more. Meantime neighbours differed. The Dutch, dull and opaque as their own Zuiderzee, growled defiance at the Vatican when their food was to be controlled; the Belgians, being a shade nearer to the Celtic family, submitted to the fast. While Hamburg clung to its beef, and Westphalia preserved her hams, Munich and Bavaria adhered to the Pope and to sourcrout with desperate fidelity."

We have selected this specimen from the Reliques "almost at random; but it is one very characteristic of the Proutian and Irish school of humour as distinct from that of Peacock and the English school, or Aytoun and the Scotch. There is a wild hilarity about it,- -a deliberate dallying on the confines of nonsense, quite different at once from the English sprightliness of common sense, and the Scotch unctuous self-consciousness of critical humorous observation. Prout's genius, indeed, may be described in the words which he himself applies to his "Polyglot edition" of the Groves of Blarney, in Greek, Latin, French, and Italian. It is " a rare combination of the Teïan lyre and the Irish bagpipe of the Ionian dialect, blending harmoniously with the Cork brogue, an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt." With his various and grotesque pleasantry, however, Mahony combined an uncommonly shrewd sharpness of understanding, as well as a special literary talent of a high order, to which we owe his excellent serious translations. Among them, the best, we think, are his versions of the "Grenier," and "Les Souvenirs du Peuple," of Béranger; and of the Septimi Gades, Vides ut alta, and Sic te diva of Horace. The Venusian was his favorite out of all authors

living or dead. He translated him, quoted

him, and punned on him, through life, having an especial knack (which his friend and brother Fraserian Thackeray also had) of applying his sayings to every incident that turned up.

The "Reliques of Father Prout " were first collected and published in 1836. They were republished with additions during Mahony's absence from England in 1859, and without his having an opportunity of revising them, which is to be regretted.* Their appearance settled his claim to a place among scholars and humorists, and thenceforth his name was as well known in all literary circles of London where he would have cared to be heard of, as that of any man of his time. It is not in our power to trace his personal history in detail. He was a great deal abroad, and once held, for a short time, a collegiate situation of some kind in Malta. But his relations to his Church were not satisfactory. Whether the authorities at Rome hated his independence of opinion, his attacks on Ultramontanism and O'Connell, or whether they only did not like his free and easy life, his conviviality and cigars, we know not. Certainly, he became an unattached and unemployed priest, a half-pay soldier of the Church, minus the half-pay, and though always clad in black, of fashion more or less sacerdotal, he took his ease in his inn, and mixed his tumbler among the wits of the metropolis with perfect freedom. The "inquisitor of Saragossa" might be seen eating oysters in the Strand; the son of Loyola blowing a pleasant cloud in the Haymarket. Nevertheless, any low fellow taking liberties with Mahony's cloth, found himself most promptly put down. For the little Irishman had plenty of fire in him. And though a free-spoken and free-living man, who utterly despised humbug, and especially that species of humbug which is known as cant, the Father was too good a gentleman to tolerate the violation of any of the essential decorums of life.

and dined in the Palais-Royal or elsewhere. The loneliness and celibacy of his life developed a certain oddity which always belonged to him. His dress was curiously negligent. He looked up at you with his keen blue eyes, over his spectacles, turning his head on one side, like some strange old bird; told an anecdote, or growled out a sarcasm, or quoted Horace, with a voice still retaining a flavour of the Cork brogue; then making no salutation of any kind, and sticking his hands in his coat-pockets, he shot off, and his dapper little black figure disappeared round the corner. There was a halfcynical indifference to life, and even to literature, about the old Father in his last years; but, as the evening wore on, a strange little well of sentiment would bubble up in his talk, and remind you that he was the author of the "Bells of Shandon," as well as of endless epigrams. To a friend who dined with him in Paris last August, and who happened to speak of the splendour of the Madeleine, he said, "Yes; our Lord promised that she should be remembered wherever His gospel was preached; and she has the finest church in the finest city of the world." And when they parted, the little Father, with a half-humorous, half-melancholy smile, said, "You'll be doing me day!" The prediction was verified; for he did not live many months afterwards. He breathed his last in the Rue des Moulins, attended by a sister, who had come over to see him, and by his friend, the Abbé Rogerson; and was interred, amidst many marks of public respect, in his native city, beneath the Shandon spire, and within hearing of"The Bells of Shandon,

Which sound so grand on

The pleasant waters of the river Lee."

some

The task of executing what Plutarch calls. the σuykpois, the comparison between the humorists thus sketched, will not be a difficult one. We have indicated the features which they had in common, and we have glanced at the national differences between them, already. That their influence acted in much the same direction is perhaps the first thing to be remarked. They had all a kindness for the men of the past, and for the old models of thought and literature, and they all exposed and ridiculed the fleeting fashionable tastes of the hour. They were none of them mere γελωτοποιοι, mere laughter-makers, like the wags of the comic periodicals, but were capable of serious discussion, and of high-class work, such as translations and criticisms of the acknowledged masterpieces of the world. Aytoun's translations from the German are much es

teemed by German scholars; and Prout rendered two or three of Horace's Odes better than any contemporary. They had all a vein of poetry, and like the best satirists, could see the beautiful as well as the humorous side of life. But they all, entered into the humorous side of it with a hearty gusto, with a certain abandon which distinguishes their satire from the cold, sceptical, and sneering sort, as well as from the frivolity and thinness of the satire of fashionable novels. In solidity of brains and of reading, Peacock, we suspect, was the first man of the triad. He has most invention of the three. His English is clearer, purer, and of more sustained vigour, and his wit has more of the classical symmetry, finish, and condensation than that of the others. In fertility of fanciful epigram and illustration, in habitual liveliness, in diversity of reading and knowledge, the travelled Irish Jesuit bears away the palm. The Scot's gift for humour is as undeniable as that of either; but he has far more heavy pages than either, and less elasticity, brilliance, and fecundity of mind. His scholarship, also, was inferior to that of both, and his style, while less vivacious than Prout's, was less elegant than Peacock's. On the other hand, his "Lays" seized a particular view of his country's history, and presented it with an impressiveness which had more actual effect on his contemporaries than anything that either Prout or Peacock achieved. It would be ungracious, however, to push this special part of the comparison too far. Our object is rather to recommend all three of these brilliant writers to readers still unacquainted with them, not only as humorists doing honour to their generation, but as instructive types of the varieties of genius existing in these islands.

ART. IV.- The Ethics of Aristotle. Illustrated with Essays and Notes. By SIR A. GRANT, M.A., LL.D. London: Longmans & Co., 1866.

THE great merit of the work before us lies in its being a first, and in many respects a very satisfactory attempt, to exhibit in English one part of the Aristotelian philosophy in its connexion with the rest, and the whole in connexion with Platonism and the general course of philosophical speculation in Greece. It affords a corrective to the strange notion that Aristotle was a common-sense philosopher, uninfluenced by metaphysical "abstractions," and intelligible to those who are

wholly unversed in them. The saying that every man is born a Platonist or an Aristotelian has become almost a commonplace of literature. Its originator probably meant to express by it a distinction not so much of philosophical systems as of personal capacity; a distinction between the philosopher who is next of kin to the poet, and the one who is farthest removed from him. It is in the former sense, however, that it is generally received. It represents a current notion that there is a Platonic system and an Aristotelian, which are antagonistic; that the Platonic is "ideal," the Aristotelian " empirical." So erroneous a notion is in some measure excused by the difference of form with which the two philosophies are presented to us, but on closer examination even this difference does not appear so complete as at first sight.

Greek philosophy lived on discussion, and never took dogmatic form till its prophets had passed away. The dialogue was not a form into which the Platonic philosophy was artificially fitted. It was the reflex of that evolution by antagonism in which the philosophy originated. The same outward form is not retained by Aristotle, but the mode of philosophizing which it expressed is still unchanged. We have still the discussion going on under our eyes, but the speakers are not distinguished from each other. Under cover of the familiar Soke the philosopher pours out a string of detached propositions representing various points of view, without any express notice of their agreement or discrepancy, and the bewildered reader who fancies that he has reached his author's final meaning in one paragraph, finds it virtually contradicted in the next. It is as if the Platonic dialogue had been sawn into lengths," and all the callida junctura, given by the play of conversation, left out. As with the form, so with the substance. The organism, which in Plato is presented to us instinct with the gracious activity of life and growth, we find in Aristotle fixed in the rigidity of death, to be taken to pieces and pondered in detail by anatomizing posterity. But it is the same organism. There is no joint or member in the system of the master which does not reappear, stripped to the bone, in that of the pupil. The great doctrine that the real is the intelligible and the intelligible the real, however imperfectly developed, is the foundation of both. If Plato is " 'idealist," Aristotle is more. If Aristotle is limited and thwarted in his idealism by the want of formulæ more elastic than those proper to number and magnitude, he less frequently lapses into the false dualism of soul and body, mind and matter, ideas and

things, which made Plato, against his principles, a mystic, and which has clung like a body of death to Platonizing philosphy ever since.

The community of view between Plato and Aristotle is the necessary result of their common relation to the earlier philosophers, and specially to Socrates. By his search for definition, Socrates had established as the primary question for philosophy, What is the nature of the object of knowledge? The thought which knows being found to be an essential factor in the object known, this question necessitates the further one, What is the nature of the activity of thought? On these correlative questions all subsequent Greek philosophy turned, till under the Stoics and Epicureans it exchanged the task of understanding the world for that of making life bearable. As in a special sense their originator, Socrates is the father of Metaphysic and Logic.

This may seem strange credit to take to one who is popularly known as having brought down philosophy from heaven to earth, as having discarded all speculation about the nature of things," and directed man to know himself. It was, however, the very humility of his mission that forced him upon this high problem. In this lay its practical irony. He only wished to begin at the beginning; but in asking the most primary, and therefore apparently the simplest question, he was found to have raised the most profound. In and before his time there was abundant speculation in Greece as to nature and man's affairs. A sophist who had made the most of his opportunities who had had good report of the dicta of Democritus, and had studied the dramatists and political oratory of Athens-might reproduce in the Athenian marketplace a philosophy of nature adequate to Lord Bacon's, and a theory of human rights and happiness at least as good as some that find admiring acceptance in our House of Commons. Such a reproduction, however, would be stopped at the outset by the Socratic requirement of definitions, involving, as it did, the question, What do I know, and how do I know it? It is as if the popular philosophy of our time were to be interrupted in its "generalizations from experience" by the question, with which no Socrates has yet constrained it to deal, What constitutes experience? By a short review of the position which this question has held in the course of modern speculation, we shall gain a vantage-ground for considering its relation to the old.

The great difficulty which now, as in ancient Greece, besets the entrance on the true path of philosophy, is that of reducing the

"sensible thing" to its primary simplicity. Philosophy does not precede, but follows, that actual knowledge of things, which it is its office to analyse and reduce to its primitive elements. It finds man, not as a child first opening its eyes on the letters of the alphabet, but as the scholar no longer conscious of the letters as distinct from the ideas which they represent. It finds him, that is, no longer simply receptive of sensations, but spontaneously referring them as properties to things, and regarding these things, like the words in a sentence, as determined in import by their relation to each other. When philosophy speaks to him, then, of the "sensible thing," he thinks of it as the individual basis of definite properties, of which he believes himself to have a direct knowledge through the senses. As such it is treated in those best samples of popular philosophy, the writings of Locke and his followers. From this view of the office of sense, a certain view as to the action of thought and the generality represented by common nouns necessarily flows. If sense gives the knowledge of the thing, as a definite complex of attributes, nothing remains for thought but to detach these attributes from the sensible thing and from each other, and recombine them. The residuum of this process is the "universal," whether regarded as an essence in the real world, or as a property which can be separated in thought from other properties, and from the thing to which it really attaches.

A more thorough analysis of the act of sensuous apprehension leads to a different result. Such an analysis, though the way to it was indicated by Berkeley, was first really attempted by Kant. Berkeley showed conclusively that the "sensible quality" of Locke was simply a sensation. Sense, as such, gives nothing beyond itself; it tells nothing of a matter to which sensations are referable as secondary qualities. This is the sum of the Berkeleian philosophy, which, taken by itself, is simply a reproduction of the old doctrine of Protagoras, that the only reality is the momentary sensation, that each act of sense is the measure or test of truth. Just, however, as the modern sensationalist, having disposed of substance as a scholastic fancy, reproduces it under the name of a uniformity or permanent possibility of sensations, which, as sensations don't retain and compare themselves, presupposes a conscious subject to retain and compare them, so Berkeley reinstates the outward synthesis of sensations under the form of God, in whom they reside when we are unconscious of them, and throughout assumes the existence of a spiritual subject, without apparently observ