abridging, polishing the verses thus composed, the probability is that the morning's task was one of delight, and the evening's task one of pain. But without the evening's task, possibly the morning's task might not have secured to posterity the Monstrum sine labe, which Scaliger has declared Virgil to be. viction, conceived to be a prescience just as divine, comforts the grocer's apprentice in the next street, whose hymns to Mary, or Marathon, or the Moon, have been churlishly refused admission into the Poet's Corner of a Monthly Magazine. But, after all, a consolation for present disparagement or neglect, in The verse-maker's pleasure in his the persuasion, well or ill founded, verse intoxicates him. It is natu- of praise awarded by a future general that he should think that what ration, does not seem to me a very so pleased him to write, it ought to elevated source of comfort, nor do please others to read. If it do not I think it would be dearly prized please them, it is the bad taste of by a strong mind, which has mathe day it is the malice of coteries tured its experiences of mortal life, -the ignorance of critics. Pos- and trained itself to reflect upon terity will do him justice. And the scope and ends of an immortal thus the veriest poetaster takes re- spirit. Although most men desfuge in the thought of posterity, tined to achieve large objects comwith as complacent an assurance as could possibly cheer the vision of the loftiest poet. Indeed, if the loftiest poet had been sensible of pain as well as pleasure in his composition, his pain would have made him sensible of his faults; whereas the poetaster, in composing, feels only the unalloyed satisfaction of belief in his merits. And thus, having cited one traditional anec dote of the painstaking Virgil, I may add another-viz., that, far from deeming himself Monstrum sine labe, he considered his 'Eneid' not sufficiently corrected and perfected for the eye of posterity, and desired that it should be destroyed. I think, then, that a poet of some thought and modesty will hesitate before he admit as a genuine, solid, well-founded consolation for any present disparagement to which he may conceive his genius unjustly subjected, that belief in future admiration, which he must share in common with the most ordinary mortals who ever composed a hemistich. He can never feel quite sure that his faith in posterity is a sound one. Granted that he have an internal conviction, which appears to him a divine prescience, that posterity will reward him for the neglect of his own day; yet, if he will take the pains to inquire, he will find that an internal con mence their career with a rich share of that love of approbation which is harshly called vanity, yet in masculine natures there is no property which more refines itself into vapour, and fades away out of the character, when completed, compact, rounded, solidified, by its own evolutions in the lengthened course of its orbit, than that same restless gaseous effervescence of motive power which, at the onset of the career, while the future star is still but a nebula, bubbles and seethes from the crudity of struggling forces. That passion for applause, whether we call it vanity or by some nobler name, has done its work in the organisation of the man, when he has effected things that are substantially worthy of applause. And here I may observe that there are three causes of satisfaction in the creation of works designed for endurance, that are often confounded with the pleasure supposed to exist in the anticipation of the fame which may eventually honour the design. 1st, The satisfaction of art in the consultation of the elementary requisite of artistic construction; 2d, The satisfaction of what I call the intellectual conscience, and shall endeavour to define; 3d, The satisfaction of the moral conscience. 1st. Durability is the requisite of all constructive art; the artist intuitively aims at it in all his ideals of form, and the aim itself constitutes one of the steadiest, nor least vivid, of the Pleasures of Art. No great architect could feel much delight in his palaces if he built them of snow; and even should he build. them of marble, his anguish, as artist, would be keen if he discovered that he had committed some so great fault in mechanics, that his girders and columns were unable to support his dome, and in a few years his fabric would be a ruin. Neither could any great writer rejoice in designing works in which he knew that the principle of duration was violated or ignored. What is thus true as a source of satisfaction in art is, though in lesser degree, true also in action, wherever the action be that of a constructor. Strenuous endeavour, in all really great minds, aims at durability, wherever it seeks to construct. And in proportion to a man's belief in the worthiness of labours which necessitate the sacrifice of many fugitive joys, will be his satisfaction in the adoption of principles which tend to secure the result of those labours from decay. Nor is this all. In the very habit of consulting the object of permanence in the designs which he meditates, his whole mind ascends into a higher and calmer atmosphere of intellectual enjoyment; he is less affected by the cares and troubles of the immediate hour in his positive existence, and less mortified by any shortlived envy or neglect to which his intellectual or ideal existence is subjected. As the eye finds a soothing charm in gazing on extended prospects, so does the mind take pleasure in contemplating objects remote in time. "'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view." 2d. There is an intellectual as well as a moral conscience; and the content of both is serene and full in proportion as the attraction to things evanescent is counteracted by the attraction towards objects that endure. Hence genius is patient as well as virtue, and patience is at once an anodyne and a tonic-nay, more, it is the only stimulant which always benefits and never harms. 3d. There is a cheering pleasure to the moral conscience akin to that of beneficence, in the construction of intellectual works worthy of durationa satisfaction which every human being not indifferent to the welfare of his kind may reasonably conceive in the design of things that may contribute to the uses and enjoyments of succeeding generations. But all these three sources of gratification are wholly distinct from the vainer and ignobler calculations of reward for present labours in the imagined murmur of future plaudits. For, after all, perhaps the best of what a man of genius (whatever his fame may be) has accomplished, is never traced popularly or distinctly home to him. He suggests infinitely more than he can perform-what he performs is visible, what he suggests is undiscerned. Whether in science, or art, or action, he implants many an idea in other minds, which they develop in their own way, unconscious of what they owed to the originator. Can any living poet tell us, or divine himself what he owes to Shakespeare, to Homer, or perhaps to some forgotten ballad, chanted low by an old woman's cracked voice when he lay half asleep, half awake, and the shadows of twilight crept along his nursery-floors? Let me start a great thought-let me perform a noble action- and the effects thereof may continue, impelling wave after wave of the world's moral atmosphere till the last verge of time; but that I should publish the thought or do the action from a motive of reward in human praise, would neither evince a sublime generosity of mind, nor a prudent calculation of probable results. For whether the praise be now or a thousand years hence, it would still be but human praise; and if there would be something inherently vain in my nature, and vulgar in my ambition, did I make myself a mere seeker of applause now, I do not see that I should be more magnanimous because the applause thus coveted was a deferred investment. All I can see is, that I should be less rational; for at least applause now I can enjoy-applause when I am dead I cannot. Nor would it be a sign of a disciplined intellect to forget the unpleasant truth introduced by so vast a majority of instances-viz., that a man who cannot win fame in his own age, will have very small chance of winning it from posterity. True, there are some half-dozen exceptions to this truth among millions of myriads that attest it; but what man of common sense would invest any large amount of hope in so unpromising a lottery! Now, in proportion as some earnest child of genius and labour, with capacities from which renown emanates and travels as light does from a sun, nears the mystery of the grave, it is a reasonable supposition that his mind will more solemnly take into its frequent meditation the increasing interest of the mighty question to which the very thought of the grave invites all who have learned to think. Either he arrives at a firm conviction, or at least at a strong belief, one way or other or he remains in that indecision of doubt which distrusts a guide and disdains a guess. If his conviction or belief be that which I conceive to be exceedingly rare in men of genius, viz., that when the breath passes from his clay, his sense of being, his Ego, is eternally annihilated, and all of him that remain indestructible are what he in life despised as the meanest and rudest parts of him-viz., the mere elements of his material form escaping from his coffin to furnish life to some other material form, vegetable or organic, with which he can have no conscious identity, no cognate affinity,-I cannot conceive by what confusion of ideas he could rejoice in some remote honour paid to the Ego blotted evermore out of creation. I can understand that a man adopting this Sadducean creed might still care what his children, his friends might think of him when absorbed in the Néant or Nothingness which Danton understood by the word Death; because, though he may argue himself out of the perceptions of his soul, he has obeyed, perhaps to the last kiss of his faltering lip, the last wistful look of his glazing eye, the feelings of his heart; and it is his heart which bids him hope that the children he loves, the friends he regrets to leave, should, if but for their sakes, feel no shame in mourning him who so loved and cherished them. But an egotistical desire for mere fame continued after the Ego itself is annihilated—after children and friends are annihilated in their turn; a fame which, howsoever long it may endure, is but to be transmitted to races all as perishable in thought and spirit as himself, momentary animations of mere salts, and minerals, and gases-evanescent as Mayflies on a rivulet, and obeying but instincts as limited to the earth they scarcely touch ere they quit, as are an ant's to the wants of its toilsome commonwealth; a desire for posthumous fame, on the conditions founded on such belief, were a bloodless and imbecile vanity, to which a man worthy to win fame could scarcely bow even his human pride. -no be But if on this subject of spiritual immortality a man approach the grave with no conviction lief one way or other (simply in that state of sceptic doubt with which philosophy commences inquiry, and out of which into some definite conclusion or other it must emerge if it would solve a single secret or hazard a single guess into truth), then, I apprehend that the very coolness of his temperament would preserve him from any very eager desire for a thing so airy and barren- so unphilosophical in itself as the vague echo of a name. Minds belief, whether that of a Christian thus cautiously hesitating before or a deistical philosopher. For with they can acknowledge the substance either of the last this life is but an of proofs, are not likely to be the initiation - a probation; and the superstitious adorers of a phantom. life hereafter is not a spectral conLastly, if a man of strong mind tinuance of the same modes of beand bright imagination has come ing, but a fresh and strange existto the firm conviction or pervading ence - immeasurably, ineffably more faith that he begins after death to glorious, at least for those not conlive again in some region wholly demned to lasting punishments by remote from earth, with wholly the Divine Judge-and (where the new perceptions adapted to new philosopher ventures on speculadestinations, the desire of mere re- tions warranted to his reason, by nown on the spot to which for an analogies from natural laws) a state infinitesimally brief period of his of development and progress such being he has been consigned, may as becomes the sublime notion of a indeed be conceived, may at mo- being exalted from material into ments be even keen, but it will spiritual spheres. But the popular, not be constant, nor, when it stirs within him, be long indulged. For it could scarcely fail to become subordinate (in proportion to the height of his aspirations and the depth of his intellect) to the more important question how far he has been preparing and training himself, not for renown to the name which on quitting earth he will have more cast off and done with than Pythagoras had cast off and done with that of Euphorbus, but rather for new name and new rank in that great career which only commences when earth and its names are left. Thus the dream of fame, so warm and vivid in very early youth, gradually obtains its euthanasia among the finest orders of minds, in a kind of serene enthusiasm for duty. The more beautiful and beautifying is the nature of the man, the more beauty that nature throws into its ideals of duty. So that duty itself loses its hard and austere aspects, and becomes as much the gracious and sweet result of impulses which mellow into habits, as harmony is the result of keys and chords fitted and attuned to music. and indeed (with the exception of a few segregated sages) the almost universal idea of the classic ancients as to a future state even for the Blessed, was not one of progress and development, but af a pale imitation in the sunless Elysian fields of the pursuits which had pleased on earth. It is no wonder that Horace should exult to have built in his verse a monument of himself more perennial than brass; when, in his vision of the realms of Proserpine and the chosen seats of the Pious, Sappho still wailingly sings of her mortal loves, and Alcæus, in more ample strain, chants to his golden lyre the hardships of shipwreck and flight and war. To recall the span of life was the only occupation of eternity. The more contentious and strifeful the reminiscences invoked, the more agreeably they relieved the torpor of unwilling repose "Magis Pugnas et exactos tyrannos Densum humeris bibit aure volgus." Putting aside the speculative conjectures of their philosophers, the notions of a future state conceived by the ancients have no representation in any of the three Among the ancients, the peculiar sections of modern doctrine at religious conceptions of a future life which I have superficially glanced. seem to have given to the desire of They did not doubt with the moposthumous fame, a force, a fervour, dern sceptic-did not accept a nawhich it could scarcely draw from tural religion like the modern deist, any existent mode of psychological nor rely upon the distinct assur Thus, among the ancients of the classic world, as among our Teuton or Scandinavian forefathers, the life of ghost being little more than the pale reflection of the life of man, the man not unnaturally identified his ambition with that renown amongst men, the consciousness of which would form the most vivid of his pleasures, and afford him the highest rank, in the Realm of Shadow. It is not so to the psychologist, who associates his notion of immortal life with that of infinite progress, and lifts the hope of virtue farther and farther from the breath of man-nearer and nearer towards the smile of God. ances of a divine revelation, like include total change of earthly purthe modern Christian. They main- suits and ends - development and tained the continuance after death progress through the eternity he of an unsatisfactory, unalluring concedes to it. state of being, in which the mortal, conducted by Mercury to Charon's boat, was, in mind, desire, and thought, as in bodily form, but the ghost and larva of his former self. In the fields of Asphodel, nothing new, nothing more, was to be done throughout the flat waste of wearisome eternity - mortal life alone was the sphere of intellect and action. What, therefore, the mortal had done in life was all that the immortal could do throughout the endless ages.. And as the instinct of immortality is not, when it be profoundly examined, the mere craving to live on, but, with all finer natures, the craving to live worthily, hereafter as here; so, to genius the life even of Elysian fields being but an objectless, unprogressive existence, the very instinct of the only immortality in any way correspondent to its powers as well as to its aspirations served to intensify the desire of perpetuity for the things achieved in the sole sphere of life, wherein any thing at all could be achieved. And as the brightest joy the Elysian wanderer could experience was in the remembrance of his glories past, so the fame for glories past in his life of man formed a practical idea of enduring solace, even in the notions a heathen formed of his Let us consider! Suppose you were to say to an intelligent, aspiring child, at a small preparatory school, "The reward to which you must look forward, as inducement and encouragement to all your present toils and privations, is the renown you will leave in this little school when you have left it. No matter how repugnant now your lessons, no matter how severe your floggings, no matter how cruel the boys, nor how unjust the masteris it not a sublime consolation, a sustaining joy, that, fifty years after you have gone out of these narrow walls into the spacious life as spirit. Nor can even the world on which they open, other philosopher thoroughly escape the little boys, in skeleton jackets influence of the prevalent and po- like your own, will point to the pular tenets of his age. And thus name you have carved the old philosophers, in their re- desk, and say, 'He was one of jection of vulgar fables, and their more enlightened conceptions of I suspect the destinations of souls, did not, intelligent and could not, attain to the same answer, if permitted to speak spiritual elevation of thought as is frankly, "Sir, that is all very well; at this day mechanically attained but in itself such anticipation would by even the philosophical deist not deist not console me in my sufferings, who, in rejecting Christianity, at nor sustain me in my trials. Cerleast takes his start into specula- tainly I should be well pleased, tion from the height he quits. For while I am here, to be admired by his idea of a soul's destination will my schoolfellows and praised by us?"" on your that the child, being and aspiring, would |