riously recasting the structure of human society, could secure him,- that he himself had a suspicion that, to use the lan

age of a book he had been taught to make light of, his soul was thirsting for God, and groping after an eternal presence, in which he lived and moved and had his being. What is strange and almost burlesque, if it were not so melancholy, is the mode in which this moral crisis culminates. A few tears shed over Marmontel's Mémoires, and the fit passed

away:

all writers I have found a true description of
Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of
what I felt, were often in my thoughts, not at
this time (for I had never read them), but in a
later period of the same mental malady : —
"Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live."
In all probability my case was by no means so
peculiar as I fancied it, and I doubt not that
many others have passed through a similar
had given to the general phenomenon a special
state; but the idiosyncrasies of my education
character, which made it seem the natural

time to remove.

durable and distant, in which some progress might be always making, while it could never be exhausted by complete attainment. This did very well for several years, during which the general improvement going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to enjoyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indifferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Methodism usually are, when smitten by their first "conviction of sin." In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of it-generally answered to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond a year. self; but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the smaller vexations of tion of time had elapsed, a small ray of light When, however, not more than half that duralife, had no effect on it. I awoke to a renewed broke in upon my gloom. I was reading, accito the passage which relates his father's death, dentally, Marmontel's "Mémoires," and came the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be of all that they had lost. A vivid conception everything to them - would supply the place of the scene and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears. From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was gone. I was no longer hopeless; I In vain I sought relief from my favourite was not a stock or a stone. I had still, it books; those memorials of past nobleness and seemed, some of the material out of which all greatness from which I had always hitherto worth of character, and all capacity for happidrawn strength and animation. I read them ness, are made. Relieved from my ever now without feeling, or with the accustomed present sense of irremediable wretchedness, I feeling minus all its charm; and I became per-gradually found that the ordinary incidents of suaded, that my love of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in the condition I was.

consciousness of the woful fact. I carried it

with me into all companies, into all occupa-
tions. Hardly anything had power to cause
me even a few minutes' oblivion of it. For
some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker
and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's "Dejec-
tion" - I was not then acquainted with them
-exactly describe my case: -

"A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear."

effect of causes that it was hardly possible for I could, or if I was bound to go on living, I frequently asked myself, if when life must be passed in this manner.

I

life could again give me some pleasure; that I could again find enjoyment, not intense, but sufficient for cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation, in public affairs; and that there was once more excitement, though of a moderate kind, in exIt is clear that Mr. Mill felt the deep public good. Thus the cloud gradually drew erting myself for my opinions, and for the craving for a more permanent and dura-off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I ble source of spiritual life than any which had several relapses, some of which lasted the most beneficent activity spent in many months, I never again was as miserable patching up human institutions and labo-as I had been.

And the only permanent instruction | He still maintained that actions, and not which this experience left behind it sentiments, are the true subjects of ethiseems to have been curiously slight. It cal discrimination; but he discovered produced a threefold moral result,-first, that there was a significance which he a grave alarm at the dangerously under- had never before suspected even in senmining capacities of his own power of timents and emotions of which he conmoral analysis, which promised to un- tinued to maintain that the origin was ravel all those artificial moral webs of artificial and arbitrary. He did not painful and pleasurable associations with cease to declaim against the prejudices injurious and useful actions, respectively, engendered by the intuitional theory of which his father had so laboriously wov- philosophy, but he made it one of his peen for him during his childhood and culiar distinctions as an Experienceyouth; and further, two notable practi- philosopher that he recommended the cal conclusions,-one, that in order to fostering of new prepossessions, only attain happiness (which he "never wav- distinguished from the prejudices he ered" in regarding as "the test of all strove to dissipate by being, in his opinrules of conduct and the end of life"), ion, harmless, though quite as little the best strategy is a kind of flank march, based as those in ultimate or objective to aim at something else, at some truth. He maintained as strongly as ideal end, not consciously as a means to ever that the character of man is formed happiness, but as an end in itself,- so, he by circumstances, but he discovered that held, may you have a better chance of se- the will can act upon circumstances, and curing happiness, by the way, than you so modify its own future capability of can by any direct pursuit of it, and the willing; and though it is in his opinion other, that it is most desirable to cultivate circumstances which enable or induce the feelings, the passive susceptibilities, the will thus to act upon circumstances, he as well as the reasoning and active powers, thought and taught that this makes all if the utilitarian life is to be made enjoy- the difference between fatalism and the able. Surely a profound sense of the in- doctrine of cause and effect as applied adequacy of ordinary human success to to character. After his influx of new the cravings of the human spirit was light, he remained as strong a democrat never followed by a less radical moral as ever, but he ceased to believe in the change. That it resulted in a new self-interest principle as universally efbreadth of sympathy with writers like ficient to produce good government when Coleridge and Wordsworth, whose fun- applied to multitudes, and indeed qualidamental modes of thought and faith fied his democratic theory by an intellecMr. Mill entirely rejected, but for whose tual aristocracy of feeling which to our modes of sentiment, after this period of minds is the essence of exclusiveness. his life, he somehow managed, not very "A person of high intellect," he writes, intelligibly, to make room, is very true; "should never go into unintellectual and it is also very true that this gave a society, unless he can enter it as an aposnew largeness of tone to his writings, tle; yet he is the only person with high and gave him a real superiority in all objects, who can ever enter it at all." matters of taste to the utilitarian clique You can hardly have exclusiveness more to which he had belonged,- results which extreme than that, or a doctrine more enormously widened the scope of his in- strangely out of moral sympathy with the fluence, and changed him from the mere would-be universalism of the Benthamite expositor of a single school of psycholo- theory. In fact, as it seems to us, Mr. gy into the thoughtful critic of many dif- Mill's unquestionable breadth of philoferent schools. But as far as we can sophic treatment was gained at the cost judge, all this new breadth was gained at of a certain ambiguity which fell over the the cost of a certain haze which, from root-principles of his philosophy, — an this time forth, spread itself over his ambiguity by which he gained for it a grasp of the first principles which he still more catholic repute than it deserved. professed to hold. He did not cease to The result of the moral crisis through be a utilitarian, but he ceased to distin- which Mr. Mill passed at the age of guish between the duty of promoting 20 may be described briefly, in our opinyour own happiness and promoting any-ion, as this, that it gave him tastes far body else's, and never could make it in advance of his philosophy, foretastes clear where he found his moral obliga- in fact of a true philosophy; and that tion to sacrifice the former for the latter. this moral flavour of something truer and

66

wider, served him in place of the sub-narrow in his range of practical symstance of any thing truer and wider, dur-pathies, his name will long be famous as ing the rest of his life.

that of the most wide-minded and generThe part of the Autobiography which we ous of political economists, the most dislike least, though it is, on the whole, that on interested of Utilitarian moralists, and which we are most at one with Mr. Mill, the most accomplished and impartial of is the section in which he reviews his empirical philosophers. But as a man, short but thoughtful Parliamentary career. there was in him a certain poverty of naThe tone of this portion of the book is ture, in spite of the nobleness in him,— too self-important, too minutely egotistic, a monotonous joylessness, in spite of the for the dry and abstract style in which it hectic sanguineness of his theoretic is told. It adds little to our knowledge creed, -a want of genial trust, which of the Parliamentary struggles in which spurred on into an almost artificial zeal he was engaged, and nothing to our his ardour for philosophic reconstrucknowledge of any of the actors in them tion; and these are qualities which will except himself. The best part of the probably put a well-marked limit on the Autobiography, except the remarkable future propagation of an influence such and masterly sketch of his father, Mr. as few writers on such subjects have ever James Mill, is the account of the growth before attained within the period of their of his own philosophic creed in relation own life-time. to Logic and Political Economy, but this is of course a part only intelligible to the students of his more abstract works.

From The Economist.

THE AMERICAN EXCHANGE ON

ENGLAND.

On the whole, the book will be found, we think, even by Mr. Mill's most strenuous disciples, a dreary one. It shows that in spite of all Mr. Mill's genuine and generous compassion for human misery THE New York Daily Bulletin makes and his keen desire to alleviate it, his the following statement with reference relation to concrete humanity was of a to the future form of the New York Exvery confined and reserved kind, one change quotation on England. At presbrightened by few personal ties, and ent the quotation is of so many dollars those few not, except in about two cases, per 22/ 10s sterling, the par of exchange really hearty ones. The multitude was to being about 108, but by the new method him an object of compassion and of the quotation will be in dollars and cents genuine beneficence, but he had no pleas- to the £. ure in men, no delight in actual intercourse with this strange, various, homely The Act of Congress of March 3, 1873, world of motley faults and virtues. His regulating the relative value of the dollar and nature was composed of a few very fine the pound sterling goes into effect on the 1st threads, but wanted a certain strength of of January next; and in anticipation of the basis, and the general effect, though one agreed upon a method of quoting sterling exchange the leading foreign bankers have of high and even enthusiastic disinter-change which expresses the current value in estedness, is meagre and pallid. His tastes were refined, but there was a want of homeliness about his hopes. He was too strenuously didactic to be in sympathy with man, and too incessantly analytic to throw his burden upon God. There was something overstrained in all that was noblest in him, this excess seeming to be by way of compensation, as it were for the number of regions of life in which he found little or nothing where other men find so much. He was strangely deficient in humour, which, perhaps, we ought not to regret, for had he had it, his best work would in all probability have been greatly hampered by such a gift. Unique in intellectual ardour and moral disinterestedness, of tender heart and fastidious tastes, though

dollars and cents of the pound sterling. The following shows the method of quoting the value of the pound sterling at various periods under the new method, with the equivalent rates as quoted under the present method:

New

Method.

$4.70

4-705
4.71

Oid New Method. Method. $105.75

107-775 107.5375 103.

$4.785

Old Method. $107.6625

105.8625 4.79. •

105.975 4-795

4.715.
4.72

105.0875 4.80.

106.20

4.805

4.725.
4.73

106.3125

4.81.

103.115 103.225

105.425

4.815

1083375

4.735.
4.74

105.5375

105.05

4.745.

106.7625 4.83.

105.875 4.835

103.675 108.78375

105.9875 4.84.

4.75

4.755

4.76

107.10 4.845

107.325

10S.90 102.0125

109.125

4.765. 4.77

107.2125 4.85.

4.855
4.8645 par

107.55

With reference to the above question, jant result of this usage is an injurious Mr. Secretary Richardson has also ad-effect upon American credit, American dressed a circular to importers, exchange securities appearing at a discount even dealers, and the public generally in the when they are really above par; but United States, calling attention to the here more importance will be attached anomalies of the old system of reckoning to the business confusion and inconve4s 6d to the dollar, based upon a usage nience, which are extreme. We have dating back to an early period of colonial more than once suggested to the Comhistory, and the attempts to correct these mittee of the London Stock Exchange anomalies by expedients which have be- that the evil is one which loudly calls for come the source of new errors. It is remedy. Investors are sorely puzzled by in consequence of this suggestion that the calculation of what an American inthe New York merchants and exchange vestment will yield them; and the comdealers appear to have adopted the above parison with other investments, which resolution of a reform in the method of would often be so favourable to Ameriquoting the Exchange. A principal ca, is impeded. Of course, the calculaanomaly which Mr. Richardson points tions are made eagerly enough in brokers' out, however, is beyond the power of the offices, and there are tables and lists American Government to correct, as Mr. which an investor may consult; but all Richardson recognizes. This is the Eng- this is a very different thing from the lish Stock Exchange practice of quoting ready knowledge which the investing American securities at the exchange of public should have from a mere glance at 4s 6d to the dollar. The effect of em- a price-list and a knowledge of the rate ploying this fictitious par is, that American securities at par are quoted at 9 1-2 per cent. discount, and other quotations vary in proportion from the reality. From Mr. Richardson's view, the most import

of interest yielded. A favourable opportunity is now offered for making a reform, and we trust the Stock Exchange Committee will take it in hand at the earliest opportunity.

-

THE LAVENDER FIELDS OF HERTFORDSHIRE. The lavender plant grows wild in some parts of Italy and the island of Sicily, but it is uncertain at what period it was introduced into England. Shakespeare, in the "Winter's Tale," puts these words in the mouth of Perdita:

"Here's flowers for you;
Hot lavender, mint, savory, marjoram;
The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,
And with him rises weeping; these are flowers
Of middle summer."

True, the scene is laid in Bohemia; but it is
evident by the context that the plants named
were such as were usually to be found in an
English shepherd's garden as early as the time
of Elizabeth. Passing over the intervening
three centuries, let us come at once to the
subject of our sketch, the lavender fields of
Hertfordshire. An hour's journey by the
Great Northern Railway, through a charming
tract of country, past the historic houses of
Hatfield and Knebworth, which lie hidden by
trees on the traveller's right hand; over that
grand engineering mistake, the Welwyn Via-
duct, beneath which trickles the tiny river
Mimram, through Stevenage, where Lucas, the
hermit, wrapped in his dirty blanket, still re-
mains as when he served Charles Dickens as a
model for his Tom Tiddler - passing all these,
we at length find ourselves, as the train slack-

A

ens its speed, at the bottom of what seems to
be an extensive chalk pit. This is the northern
out-crop of the London basin; and the station
at which we alight as soon as the deep white
cutting is passed, is Hitchin. At this place,
some fifty years ago, the experiment was first
made by a Mr. Perks, of growing lavender as a
source of profit. So well did it succeed, that
there are now thirty-five acres of land in
Hitchin devoted to its culture, yielding suffi-
cient essential oil to produce upwards of two
thousand gallons of lavender annually.
visit to the fields and laboratory, during the
latter part of July or the beginning of August,
when the flowers are in full bloom, is in itself
worth the trouble of a journey to Hitchin; to
say nothing of the special attractions which the
neighbourhood offers to the botanist, geolo-
gist, and antiquary. The largest field is
situated at the western side of the quaint old
town, near the house in which George Chap-
man, the friend of Shakespeare and Ben Jon-
son, completed his translation of Homer.
The young plants are bedded out in Novem-
ber, at a uniform distance of one yard apart.
Formerly they were placed at only half that
distance; but it is found that a heavier yield is
produced from plants set a yard apart, than
from double the number at only eighteen
inches. When three years old, the plant is at
its best; and when it reaches the age of seven