cated classes whose opinions proceed from a kind of political dyspepsia. It is natural that the majority of the literary order should view with dislike any further addition to the power of the body below them. The Semi-Liberals belong neither to the upper nor to the lower ranks; neither to the sons of heaven nor to the sons of earth. They are themselves kept back from power and distinction by the aristocracy above; they fear to be swamped altogether by the democracy below. Let us sympa

thise with the dilemma. It is perhaps difficult to say with whom they should unite. Years ago their course was not so difficult to steer. They devoted their keen swords to the service of Reform; led the van of Liberalism; and contributed not a little to turn the tide of public opinion into its present channel. In the palmy days of the Edinburgh, the most influential of the educated literary class were Liberals. Like the Whigs, they have since discovered that the champions of an oppressed cause sink into minor importance when the victory is won. Partly, too, it may be, a qualm of suspicion has come upon them as to the nature of the work they have been accomplishing. They thought they were labouring to remove a mill-dam, and lo! the Atlantic is upon them. Hesitatingly and tremblingly they determine to go no further. Mr. Bright is noisy and violent. The crowd which seemed pleasant to lead, is vulgar and offensive to mix with. The old waters of Abana and Pharpar are better after all.

There is much truth in the gloomy reflections of the Semi-Liberals. Those who have seen anything of the English middle and lower classes know that they are constituted by nature to accept an aristocracy of birth, and to rebel against all aristocracies of talent. The thinkers who most influence working men are not the thinkers who think most clearly, but those who think most strongly. At a certain feverish crisis in the progress of society, knowledge ceases to be necessarily power. The tumultuous fires

white heat the souls of the great masses, whom the clearer flame of science, economy, and learning cannot affect. The alarm of the Semi-Liberals, then, though excessive, is not unnatural. They undertook to sow the wind, and they find that they were well-nigh sowing a whirlwind. But, whether their alarm be excessive or justifiable, it must not be forgotten that no reaction caused by such men as these could fairly or without grave qualification be called a Conservative reaction. At best it is not a Conservative reaction, it is a political pause. For those who have been instrumental in effecting it are not to be confounded with the advocates of abuse. Their temporal interests are on the side of moderate progress. Their intellectual bias is in favour of freedom in everything, but especially of free thought. They have fought in days gone by, and are ready to contend again, for civil and religious liberty. They refuse to give their goodwill to the established order of things, when it has produced nothing but despotism and corruption. Italy, Hungary, Poland-these are the causes that consistently receive their sympathy and their support. Men like these may be timid and mistaken, but they never can be reactionaries.

England this last year has been pausing with them: but a great people cannot be said to be retrograding which is hourly drinking in all the lessons that experience can teach it. We are not rowing against wind and tide, or endeavouring to remount whence we have descended. We are resting on our oars-intent on the sights and sounds around us: and the great stream is bearing us gently and happily along upon its bosom. For it would be untrue to say that, because we make no conscious movement onward, our thoughts are not changing, growing, ripening. The country is gradually learning to understand, and here and there to sympathise with, the aspirations and ideas of other countries which are widely unlike our own. We are more tolerant towards forms of government which differ from

come almost a joke, has ceased at all events to be a bugbear. The ballot seems to thinking statesmen no longer to be a monstrosity, but to be merely a mistake. The antiquated and sentimental notion of the Divine right of kings, which long ago was beaten into silence, has at last nearly disappeared even from our pulpits. A new Divine right has made its way upon the stage, with the evident intention of replacing the old-the Divine right of the "fait accompli." We are gradually learning to comprehend that the voice of the people, if it is seldom the voice of God, is generally a voice that makes itself heard at last. We now see that a nation's resolute will, noble self-control, and moral strength, may win for it prizes which its armies could never have won, and Order and Law may lift their heads higher at the sight of revolution itself submitting to their own mild sway. Light has been thrown on the relations subsisting between subjects and their sovereign. The political value of social distinctions-the world's most important problem-is being tested at one and the same time in many places: and, whatever its solution, it can hardly fail to be without some influence on English minds. From France itself in the last two months we have received a solemn recognition of the value of constitutional government from the mouth of the most unconstitutional of monarchs. The country, it seems, is quietest and governed most cheaply where the people tax themselves; and it has been reserved for a foreign despot practically to remind us of the old maxim, that Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform, are three sisters who go hand in hand. The questions regarding capital and labour are likely to be solved in England sooner even than elsewhere, except, perhaps, in Italy; but the state of Paris and the South of France may recall to our recollection the unsentimental and homely truth, that, if the capitalist does not invariably understand his true interests, the labourer is not the best judge of what is good for labour, and that the

That 1861 has been a year of religious reaction is equally untrue. It has, indeed, been in England a year of considerable theological excitement. "Es

says and Reviews," a now famous volume, which was published in the spring of 1860, at the commencement of last winter began to fall into the hands of the bishops and country clergy. Great agitation followed in all parts of the country; and a storm of invectives, arguments, and confutation, was directed against the clerical writers who had taken part in its composition. We are not now concerned with the merits or demerits of the work, the opinions contained in which were at the time no novelties to many educated men.

But

at first it seemed likely that great injustice would be done to the authors by society at large. They were treated by many as if they were the preachers of some Methodist congregation of Little Bethel, who were paid only to teach what their audience chose; instead of being the ministers of a great and generous national Church, which, if its ministers could discover a new truth, would claim to share it with them. It was said, and said intemperately, that the Essayists were bound to leave the pale before they promulgated views contrary to the opinions of their fellowChurchmen. It would have been as wise and as just to insist that a man who was accused of a crime which he denied, should spontaneously try, condemn, and execute himself. By the customs of Japan a notorious offender is required to disembowel himself. It would be too much, every time an English incumbent passed through a phase of thought which he imagined inconsistent with his subscription to the Articles, that he should be considered a dishonoured man unless at

he performed this Japanese ceremony on his own person. Every man has a right to be relieved from the responsibility of being critic in his own case. No man is bound as a matter of honour to commit ecclesiastical suicide, or to anticipate a verdict of the law courts on his own views. Were it not so, a clergyman of talent and education would be driven into becoming a theological hypochondriac, eternally watching his own health, and examining the pulse of his own orthodoxy.

Our middle classes are sincerely attached to a few extremely popularised formulas which represent to their eyes the Christian faith. The Church since the last century has become less learned, though, at the same time, she has perhaps become more practical and active. The mass of her members have never heard of one half the controversies and dogmas for which there was formerly ample room within her bosom. That there should be a burst of excitement on the publication by clergymen of half a dozen disquieting Essays, was, then, extremely natural. It was true that many who abused, had never read them. One of the most extraordinary religious pecularities of Englishmen of the middle classes, is, that they are perfectly willing to condemn all reputed heretics unheard. Lord Shaftesbury, whose name will be ennobled for his philanthropy's, not his learning's sake, either distinctly asserts that " Essays and Reviews" are the organs of infidelity, or else distinctly encourages the uneducated audience whom he is addressing, in the delusion that they are as good judges of a polemical point as the divines and scholars of the Church. He protests against the tyranny of professors, much in the same way as Hyde Park orators protest against the tyranny of political economy. is quite prepared to have the questions raised in "Essays and Reviews" settled by himself and the working-men of England, without any appeal to dictionaries, histories, or commentators.

He

In

believed that Sanscrit, the superior language, is the language of gods and men. Prakrit, the inferior dialect, is the dialect of women and benevolent genii. Lord Shaftesbury apparently thinks that benevolent genii can do not only with an inferior language, but without knowledge of language altogether.

Happily, few educated Englishmen think on these subjects like Lord Shaftesbury. Protestantism, which implies the right of private judgment, does not fortunately imply that all private judgments are equally valuable. Appeals to popular passion and ignorance are everywhere beginning to be condemned. The agitation which seemed at first somewhat like a reaction against the right of free speech and free thought has almost passed away. People are ready to acknowledge that the Essayists should be met either on the fair field of argument, or on the impartial arena of a law court. While we write, the trial of an Essayist, deservedly, perhaps, the most unpopular, is actually pending. Whatever the wisdom of the Bishop of Salisbury's move, none can complain of its injustice. It is just and fair; law alone should decide whether a legal barrier has been overstepped. Whatever be the judgment of the law, the country will accept it in a spirit of liberality and toleration. Among the intelligent and educated there cannot now-a-days be a religious reaction; for religion stands in need of none. Among the less wise and the less tolerant, whatever opinions prevail, we may look to see an increasing love of justice and of fair play. A recent act of academical and pedantic bigotry, by which the most distinguished of the Essayists was deprived of his hardearned salary as Greek Professor on account of his opinions, was deservedly reprobated by public opinion, and by all the better portion of the press. In a word, Britain is not reactionary, because she desires above all things to know the truth and to be just.

THE removal, by death, of the man of most public station in Great Britain, would, at any time, be an event of national concern. But, when the exalted person so removed is such a man as the late Prince Consort, and when the time of his removal is such a time as the present, the feeling may well be as deep as the appointed signs of it will be extensive. It is not only that we must all be impressed by the thought that one of the highest rank in the realm has been struck down at the age of forty-two, in the full strength and comeliness of manhood. It is not only that the sympathy with family-grief, which we all yield whenever, within our own circles, we hear of the death of a good husband and father, will naturally be yielded, in larger measure than usual and over the whole land, when it is in the royal halls of Windsor that death has made the blank, and the lady so suddenly widowed is our honoured Sovereign, and the children left fatherless are those princes and princesses in whose characters and fortunes, from him who is the youthful heir to the throne down to the smallest prattler in the nursery, we and our posterity are collectively interested. There is more than this in the death of the Prince Consort.

Flattery attends the great; but so also does the crabbed suspicion that the great are flattered. Hence it may well be that, if sometimes a person in royal station is credited with more ability and worth than he possesses, at other times such a person may have to work against peculiar difficulties, and may not have his real merits so readily allowed as if they had been shown in less conspicuous circumstances. In the present age of the world it is perhaps against the grain with most of us to believe that a prince may be a superior man. The old kind of loyalty has so gone out, and the opposite, or the affectation of the oppo

site, is so common, that, in the case of a person of princely rank, we positively require greater evidence of trustworthiness than would satisfy us in other cases, before we yield that true respect in our private thoughts and our private talk which is so different a thing from ceremonious flexure of the body in public. public. Perhaps only the most gentlyconstituted minds are so free from the dread of sycophancy, as to be able, in such cases, to avoid the contrary error of churlishness.

That, notwithstanding all this, it should have been long a conviction, with those who had the best means of judging, that the late Prince Consort was really no ordinary man, but one whom natural endowment and culture, not less than the chance of position, had fitted for an influential part in affairs, and that this conviction should, of recent years, have been extending itself beyond the inner circles of British society and becoming a national tenet, are facts which argue that the conviction must have been well founded. His late Royal Highness came among us young and unknown, a prince from one of those German courts with which our relations of this sort had not been always fortunate. While making his reputation, and, in part, forming his character here, he had to labour under the disadvantage of being required to exercise, first of all, virtues which are merely negative. Not so much to act as to abstain from action, was what a natural British jealousy, never without lynx-eyed representatives, demanded, more especially at the outset, from the German Consort of our Sovereign. To have answered expectations in this respect as Prince Albert did answer them was much in itself. Abundantly creditable it would have been to the deceased Prince if we could now say nothing more of him than that, with

exemplary tact and dignity, he had, for two and twenty years, borne the honours and enjoyed the pleasures of his high rank, not starting aside in extravagant courses, nor causing such scandal and perplexity as, had they so come, it Iwould have been easier to resent than to remedy. When we think of what might have been, had our sovereign's choice of a partner been less happy, this may seem much. Positive virtues, certain sound and manly qualities, were required even for such negative excellence in so high a station. But to our notion of a man entitled, in the more perfect degree, to our respect and consideration, something more largely and decidedly positive is requisite. We ask that a man should have his own thoughts about things, that he should have a will and predilections of his own, that there should be something characteristic about him, affecting the society in which he lives and affecting it beneficially. In this respect Prince Albert far transcended that standard of mere royal nonoffensiveness with which we might have been contented. It was impossible to see him in any place of public resort— in the royal box at the Opera, listening good-humouredly to Ronconi, with his children around him, or at a conversazione of the Royal Society, examining a model of the Whitworth cannon and asking questions respecting it-without inferring, from his appearance, that he was a man of acute and strong intelligence, as capable as any within the whole circle of the British aristocracy of acting a well-reasoned part, and as likely, if there were occasion, to act it resolutely.

One even fancied that, at the rouse of some not impossible juncture of affairs, that brain and head might turn out, in some less reserved manner than hitherto, to be of importance to the nation. Then, we had only to remember of what stock he came, and how carefully he had been educated as a German student, to be aware that such an inference might probably be correct.

But

in aid of all this there were confirmations on every hand, settling the matter

appears, ever came in contact with his Royal Highness without carrying away an impression of his superior capacity and attainments; and the multiplicity of such impressions, made upon different kinds of persons, and sent by them through society, had amounted, in the end, to a considerable and still growing item in British public opinion. Now, to have been such a man, and to have done justice to such marked personal qualifications, so that they could have scope and assert themselves, without any transgression of limits which even the most scrupulous constitutionalism could reasonably find fault with, was a noteworthy solution of the problem of a

life. The late Prince Consort solved it with remarkable skill and persistency. No one can say of him that he was merely a cipher who satisfied by abstinence from offence. He chalked out a career for himself which the nation was willing to see him adopt and our institutions made legitimate, which was a career of great public effect and utility, to which there was really some need that a man of high rank and accomplishments should devote himself in this country, and in which none could have done so much as precisely the ConsortRoyal. He was not an idle man. His

days were full of occupations, of business of his own, and of engagements with others punctually kept. It was impossible that he should not be interested in our politics, and especially in our political connexions with Germany and the rest of the Continent; and we should think less of him if we did not believe that what he felt and thought on such subjects he found means of honestly and yet discreetly expressing where his views might be of weight. But from our party-politics in any public way he stood consistently and judiciously detached; and the work which he made his own, and which the nation was glad to see him making his own, was that larger kind of political work, unclaimed by either Whiggism or Toryism as such, which consists in the promotion of enlightened modes of thinking, and of