into futurity? have they any love of posthumous fame? have they any knowledge of God? have they ever reached, in their conceptions, the slightest traces of an hereafter? can they form the notion of duty and accountability? is it any violation of any one of the moral attributes of the Deity, to suppose that they go back to their dust, and that we do not? The comfortable Canon, with good capon lined, ignores the sufferings of the race he thus consigns to dust-and the mystery a single instance of brute misery presents,—the anomaly that seems to confront and confuse us (so long as we connect sorrow with sin and physical suffering with moral culpability, and admit the doctrine of Compensation) in every galled jade that winces, and every starved, hooted, pelted, offcast dog that crawls under a hedge to die.

The Immortality of the Soul was a foremost topic in the last series of papers Professor Wilson contributed to the magazine whose fortunes he made; and it is observable that he here gave no countenance to a notion he had rather favoured in earlier days, when exuberant in health and strength, and rioting in those animal spirits which made Kit North the very "king o' guid fallows, and wale of auld men." Sadder if not wiser grown, he holds out no such hopes for the bruteworld, in his Northern Days, as he had joyously affirmed in his Ambrosial Nights. Here is a passage in point from his penultimata: "We see how precisely the lower animals are fitted to the places which they hold upon the earth, with instincts that exactly supply their needs, with no powers that are not here satisfied." Such is the tone, grave, temperate, reflective, of the Dies Boreales, of Christopher under Canvas. One-and-twenty years before, Christopher in his Sporting Jacket had written of four-footed Fro,-" Not now, as fades upon our pen the solemn light of the dying day, shall we dare

to decide whether Nature-O most matchless creature of thy kind!-gave thee, or gave thee not, the gift of an immortal soul:""thou hast a constant light of thought in thine eyesnor wert thou without some glimmering and mysterious notions -and what more have we ourselves,—of life and of death!" etc. But more emphatically is the affirmative sanctioned in one and another of the Noctes Ambrosiana, by one and another of the convives. Thus, the Shepherd loquitur: "I hae never been able to perswade my heart and my understandin that dowgs haena immortal sowls." And then, pointing to Bronte "his sowl maun be immortal." "I am sure, James," rejoins Tickler, "that if it be, I shall be extremely glad to meet Bronte in any future society." "The minister wad ca' that no orthodox," resumes the Shepherd. "But the mystery o' life canna gang out like the pluff o' a cawnle. Perhaps the verra bit bonny glitterin insecks that we ca' ephemeral, because they dance out but ae single day, never dee, but keep for ever and aye openin and shuttin their wings in mony million atmospheres, and may do sae through a' eternity. The universe is aiblins wide aneuch." At another time the English Opium-eater is made to discourse on "an affecting, impressive-nay, most solemn and almost sacred feeling" which "is impressed on the sovereign reason,” in certain moods, "of the immortality of the brute creation-a doctrine which visits us at those times only when our own being breathes in the awe of divining thought, and, disentangling her wings from all clay encumbrances, is strong in the consciousness of her Deathless Me." And once again, but long afterwards, on the Shepherd's avowal, "Aften do I wonder whether or no birds, and beasts, and insecks, hae immortal souls," the same speaker is supposed to reply:

What God makes, why should He annihilate? Quench our

own Pride in the awful consciousness of our Fall, and will any other response come from that oracle within us, Conscience, than that we have no claim on God for immortality, more than the beasts which want indeed 'discourse of reason,' but which live in love, and by love, and breathe forth the manifestation of their being through the same corruptible clay which makes the whole earth one mysterious burial-place, unfathomable to the deepest soundings of our soul." Though we are very far from thinking with Professor Ferrier and others, that Mr. de Quincey's style is happily reproduced— scarcely would we say it is well parodied—in the Noctes, we may perhaps accept the tenor of these excerpts as not materially misrepresentative of what he might have said. The Shepherd sums up in his racy vernacular what the Scholar had been expressing philosophically: "True, Mr. de Quinshy, -true, true. .. Puir Bronte's dead and buried-and sae in a few years will a' Us Fowre be! Had we naething but our boasted reason to trust in, the dusk would become the darkand the dark the mirk, mirk, mirk." The summing up, if not absolutely and decisively in favour of these poor dumb mouths, which cannot plead their own cause in the "runningdown case" their trial presents, at any rate leans kindly towards them, and would fain cherish, if not a reasonable hope, still a hope of some kind—possibly quite irrational, but certainly very humane, persistent, and sincere.

Oh yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill. ..

That nothing walks with aimless feet;
That not one life shall be destroyed,
Or cast as rubbish to the void,
When God hath made the pile complete ;

That not a worm is cloven in vain ;
That not a moth with vain desire
Is shrivell'd in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain.

Behold, we know not anything;

I can but trust that good shall fall At last-far off-at last, to all, And every winter change to spring.

VIII.

Handy-dandy, Justice and Thief.

A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE.

γου

see how this world goes, is once and again one of poor raving Lear's incoherent yet pregnant exclamations to now sightless Glo'ster, too credulous and too cruelly outcast fathers, both of them. Glo'ster says he sees it feelingly. Lear tells him, in reply, a man may see how this world goes with no eyes-which is Glo'ster's case. "Look with thine ears: see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: Change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?"

Lear is for ever, in his wild ramblings, giving terse, pungent, mordant expression to thoughts extraordinary for acuteness and depth. But he seldom, among them all, surpasses this handy-dandy transformation scene, in respect of suggestive import and vivid presentment.

He develops the theme with exuberant earnestness of detail. The "rascal beadle" would fain commit the sin for which his "bloody hand" lashes his culprit. Change places—and handy-dandy, there is no knowing the whipper from the whipped. The beadle should strip his own back. The usurer hangs the cozener.