leave on the sacred lawn of Osborne. This is just what a Yankee frigate would do if we were at war with them, and she managed to give our cruisers and crews the slip; she would delight in doing such things, not for the sake of the damage, but from the sheer innate impudence of Yankee frigates; and unless we have, as we ought to have, a fringe of artillery-militia all round the two big and the many small islands, there is nothing to prevent such insults. Not that Britannia's back would be broken by such treatment, but her nose would be pulled, and that is not a very pleasant idea for her dutiful children. But, as is the case with most over-statements, I concede to you a certain amount of truth. If you mean, by saying that we are a nonmilitary nation, simply this, that by ourselves we are not numerous enough to meet on the Continent the whole of France, Russia, or Germany in arms, I quite agree with you, for it is a mere question of available numbers; but I maintain that we might, without distressing ourselves, send fifty thousand splendid soldiers to any point of Europe, who would be an immense help to any power we were allied with, and give a great momentum to war. We know what Great Britain did even in alliance with the desultory Spaniards. She did not, it is true, confront the whole power of Napoleon, but she bore the brunt of most of it when the rest of Europe was prostrate; and when he failed in Russia, and there was more equality in numbers, we all know the style in which she overleapt the Pyrenees. Napoleon told John Bull he was an old woman, till he began to think seriously that he was so himself. He thought, I suppose, because Hercules once wore Omphale's petticoats, that he might without loss of strength; but then Hercules was beaten by beauty, and not by a captive enemy's cajolery. No, Hyperbolus, we are not a nation of shopkeepers, and I trust never will be, though the shopkeepers have the upper hand at present.

HYPERBOLUS. Your arguments seem to tend to this, you wish England to be a purely agricultural country, without trade, commerce, or manufactures,

just as it was when the Danes and the Normans used to leave their cards on our coasts, and we had no navy to receive them.

TLEPOLEMUS. I wish no such thing. I only wish to balance one power in the State with the other. We must have a navy, if we would be respected abroad; so long live the shopkeepers! We must have an army, if we would be safe at home and respect ourselves; even SO God speed the plough, and preserve to us the landed aristocracy!

HYPERBOLUs. I think it is rather an assumption on your part to consider the aristocracy as composed entirely of the landed classes.

TLEPOLEMUS. I assume no such thing; I merely maintain that the landed classes must be the nucleus of every aristocracy, that there can be no aristocracy without them; that the aristocracies of Venice and Carthage were therefore falsely so called and I maintain, moreover, that if this country is to be well governed, it ought to be governed in a great part by such an aristocracy, because they are the only class who have a real vital interest in the prosperity of the country; for the land does not belong to them so much as they belong to the land, and are bound by duties to the land.

HYPERBOLUS. But aristocracy means a government of the best. Why should you deem the possessors of land the best men? A man is not stronger, cleverer, more honest than others, because he possesses land. Perhaps he may be a little stronger or healthier, but he is certainly not more intellectual; and as it is head, and not arms and legs, that governs mankind, I do not see why a country should be ruled by its muscular sturdiness.

TLEPOLEMUS. A man who possesses land is stronger than others-at least it is his own fault if he is not-both in muscles, head, and heart; he is, perhaps, not what you call cleverer, but we shall come to that presently: he is more honest, or it is again his own fault if he is not; for his occupations present fewer temptations to dishonesty, and therefore he is the fittest man to govern.

HYPERBOLUS. But I say that the cleverest men ought to govern: *

me an aristocracy of intellect, if you must have an aristocracy.

TLEPOLEMUS. You are a very young gentleman. Never mind; you will get older quite soon enough. You want to be governed by an aristocracy of intellect? Do you mean newspaper editors?

HYPERBOLUS. I mean clever men generally.

TLEPOLEMUS. By which you mean not particularly clever men. But do you mean great scholars, or great scientific men, or great poets or historians?

HYPERBOLUS. Why not? It were far better to be governed by them than by fox-hunters, grangers, and ploughboys. I was struck with the remark of a popular writer, who said, with much more against our present system, that we ought to make kings of king-like men, and that such men as Burns ought to be put to govern mankind, instead of gauging barrels.

TLEPOLEMUS. Burns was a splendid fellow-one of nature's most glorious aristocrats, a man of men- but he would not have been a good governor, by reason of his being a genius: rather, I should say, his genius would have been in the way of his governing others, because it was in the way of his governing himself. It is the gift or the misfortune of genius to be absorbed in the feeling of the moment, to be filled with the vision of the moment; hence its miraculous conceptions and productions. And reverence for law and order is necessary to a statesman, though not to a genius; and how do we suppose that a man would care for Church and State, who politely desired those two authorities to go-no matter where, but well out of the way-while he went to his Anna? No, sir; Burns was a splendid fellow, but he would have repealed the malt-tax, the beer-tax, the tax on foreign wines, and all spirit duties, before he had been ten hours in office, without much consideration for the budget. You must give up Burns and poets in general, I think. Lamartine tried it; he let off one fine speech like a shower of rockets, and then he lapsed into impracticable schemes and obscurity. Poets are certainly not the men for our purpose.

HYPERBOLUS. But surely you would give great scientific men and philosophers more share in the government than they have at present?

TLEPOLEMUS. Perhaps to counterbalance the money interest-anything for that. But if I were obliged to look out for a dictator, I should not fix on a great philosopher. Why, it is related of one of the greatest, that finding the fire burning him one day, he rung the bell for the smith to be sent for to move the grate; and when bis servant suggested that moving his chair would do as well, was surprised by the novelty of the suggestion; the philosopher's mind being absorbed at the time in some immortal discovery. All philosophers, being special men, like your poets, are absorbed in their own special pursuits; therefore they do not make the best governors. There should, no doubt, be an element of the kind in an aristocracy.

HYPERBOLUS. What do you say to the artists?

TLEPOLEMUS. There you have touched me on a weak point. There should, doubtless, be a strong artistic element in an aristocracy; but an aristocracy of artists would not do of itself: artists being ambitious men, and all ambitious men being selfish, they would be all quarrelling among themselves, and would want a strong hand to keep them in order. You might as well talk of an aristocracy of fair women; one no doubt very nice to live under for the governed, but how would the governors, or rather governesses, agree? Artists are not endued with woman's tenderness for nothing; they bave other feminine qualities, which, although they fit them to rule in the realm of soul, disqualify them, to a certain extent, for the world of action. An aristocracy of artists will not do, though it is the nature and tendency of all real aristocracies to be artistic, as it is their nature to be military; and we find, as a matter of fact, that all the gentlemen delight to honour artists; and, however they may be above them in worldly station, bow low before their intellectual eminence. It is the low style of a monetary oligarchy to treat artists as house-painters; and in states where a democracy and a monetary oligarchy divide all the power, as in America,

art is hardly able to keep itself alive at all. The reason of this is, that Mammon has no fine semi-sensual, semi-intellectual tastes; his enjoyments are all gross, like his religion, which is a carnal and slavish one of rewards and punishments only. He hates all that is not useful-that is, which does not help wealth and mere animal comfort; so artists do not thrive under his wing. I never was more convinced I was right in my disapprobation of Mr Gladstone's rough-and-ready system of direct taxation, than when an advocate of it said to me, "Why, the rich must give up a few of their luxuries; they must buy fewer pictures ;" -as if, forsooth, the poor artists who painted the pictures had no right to live at all. Nothing is more false than saying that direct taxation is only a burden on the rich; the truth of the matter is, that the rich themselves do not feel it so much as some poor dependants on them, with whose services direct taxation obliges them to dispense; whereas indirect taxation is a burden on each man according to his means, and is fairly, and, what is a great thing, unconsciously paid by all; direct taxation relieving some classes of a burden they ought, as good citizens, to take their share of, but entirely ruining other classes, these not the richest, but those whom, like artists, Mammon pronounces to be useless to society. Give me an artistic aristocracy, but not an aristocracy of artists. Art needs shelter, and aristocracy or royalty is its appropriate protector; save it from democracy.

HYPERBOLUS. I think you would rather have art than political freedom.

The

TLEPOLEMUS. Men's ideas of freedom and tyranny are relative rather than absolute. Some feel it a tyranny when, by the independent spirit of their neighbours, sights of ugliness and sounds of discord are intruded on them, not to mention that which offends other senses equally delicate. other day I went to see a man, stigmatised by some people as a tyrant, make his triumphal entrance into the city of London. I stood in Trafalgar Square, but I could see nothing, for the view of the road he passed through was shut up by a hedge of overflowing omnibuses, cabs, tables, and

stands of different sorts, crowned by the heads of the people. If by a police regulation the people had all been obliged to stand on the ground, from the inclination of the square all would have seen well; as it was, only the foremost saw. It struck me the people who prevented me from seeing him were more tyrannical than the man I wanted to see as well as they. They got in my way; he did not. Now I know that Irenæus would be as much offended by an unsightly meeting-house opposite his church door, or the distant sounds of music proceeding, not even from the barrel, but from the nasal organ, as he would by a boneburning establishment under his diningroom window, would he not? When he was a Friend, he thought the decorous silence, the cúpnuía, so seldom broken, the least part of the service, and thought to himself that if "speech was silvern, silence was golden," when any enthusiastic member rose to unburden his heart. Did you not, Irenæus ?

IRENEUS. Yes! We cannot have liberty of the press and all that without paying for it, and we pay for it by being obliged to put up with some nuisance or other, which, in its small way, is a tyranny. Everything of that sort has two sides. I have observed this in travelling in Switzerland, where some cantons are Protestant, others Catholic.

The Protestants are certainly cleaner in their habits, but they are less polite and kind. The innkeepers of both cheat you: one class cheats by overcharging, the other by reckoning the change wrong; the selfishness of one is concealed, of the other open. The Catholic or the Lutheran Protestant takes his rifle down on a Sunday, and goes to a shooting-match; the Calvinist Protestant wears a long visage, and casts up his weekly accounts between the services. Both are equally worldly, but the worldliness takes a different complexion in each. In coming back from Switzerland, I passed by the Wirtemberg railway. I saw some most excellent third-class carriages glazed in and made into handsome rooms. I wondered at their being glazed in. People told me that the company wished to have them open, but the King, being a paternal governor, did not choose

that his subjects should get catarrhs or consumptions, and so ordered the company to cover and glaze their thirdclass carriages. Here we are not subject to the tyranny of kings, but we are to that of companies, who, as Lord Thurlow said of corporations, "have neither souls to be dd, nor bodies to be kicked:" nor are they even like the government of Russia, "un despotisme témperé par l'assassinat." I have sometimes been struck by the affectionate regard of despotic governments for men's lives. You have often seen in Germany the notice of a fine for those who can read, and the picture of a wheel-drag for those who can only run, at the tops of hills; threatening pains and penalties for not dragging the wheel. In England the railway companies certainly punish people for trespassing on the line, but I suspect this is rather because they might impede traffic than out of consideration for their carcasses. All is not gold that glitters, and all is not freedom in a free country.

TLEPOLEMUS. Well done, Irenæus; I did not expect this from you. But we were talking about an aristocracy of intellect. Your specially clever men, as we have seen, will not do, at least those we have enumerated.

HYPERBOLUS. But certainly you would have your governors the cleverest men of the nation-the men of most political talent.

TLEPOLEMUS. Unless you could insure political probity as well, you would soon degenerate into a bureaucracy of the worst kind. You know the whole sad history of Bacon, Lord Verulam; or if you do not, read Macaulay's Essays. The fact is, we are in danger of being tyrannised over by clever men. I am not going to say anything against education. Every man, woman, and child ought to be educated, and the State ought to insist upon it under pains and penalties, and the right that people have with us to bring up their children through a course of ignorance, as pests to society, is one of the tyrannies of our liberty; but this education ought to be for the sake of the heart more than of the head. I would rather teach the people religion

metaphysics; rather teach them and drawing than algebra or

the use of the globes. We especially want more music (in the Greek sense) in our British life; we want semi-intellectual pleasures for natures which are but semi-intellectual, to keep them from gross and debasing joys. Clever people have no right to monopolise everything; God did not make the world for clever people only. As He made His sun to shine and His showers to fall on the evil and the good, so did He intend His blessings to be shared by the learned and the ignorant, the bright and the dull. The sheep and the cows are less clever than the dullest of mankind, and yet they are allowed to graze and chew the cud, and are pronounced by the Divine fiat "very good," without the fear of some intellectual tyranny on four legs butting them out of their pastures. My great practical objection to be governed by what you call an aristocracy of intellect, or a committee of clever men, is, that they will never let well alone; and, thinking they can improvise improvement, they will never let improvement grow of itself, as it does in the course of nature, as moss grows round a stone which is left quietly in its place.

HYPERBOLUS. But if you move an old mossy stone from its place, it is all very well at the top, but look at the disclosures at its bottom: see what hideous insects instantly start into life, some with six legs, some with a hundred legs, some with no legs at all, and run about scared and furious in every direction. Surely if the stone had been "kept moving" by some reforming policeman they would never have collected there.

TLEPOLEMUS. They would only have been loose on society; that is all the difference. On earth, alas! we must have hideous things. They are best at the bottom of the stone, kept in quiet and darkness, with a good weight on them. It was remarked by the French papers at the Revolution of 1848 what frightful ruffians turned up, whose existence had never been suspected till they were seen rioting in the halls of the Tuileries. These are the sort of effects that clever men produce by their restless mania for perpetually stirring up society. All beauty grows in calm,

not in disturbance; and all order, which is the same thing in the Divine economy as beauty, obeys the law of crystallisation, and requires time and rest to arrange itself.

HYPERBOLUS. But if you have no clever men to reform, these institutions will get corrupt, just as stagnant water will, or a sea without a tide or

currents.

TLEPOLEMUS. There you are jumping to a conclusion. Clever men you must have, or rather wise men-men who should be, as it were, the gardeners of our institutions, pruning them at the right time, watering them, shutting them from the frost and droughts, tending them as if they loved them; for may not the State as well as the Church be brought under the consecrated similitude of a vine? As for you and your clever men, they would pull the plants up by the roots to clean the dirt away, and give them small chance of growing. I found out this mistake when a little boy, for I was given a garden of my own: in boyish impatience I was always taking up the seeds to see how they grew, while little sister, with feminine gentleness, only watered hers, and let them be. Little sister's seed-leaves were out first. I will willingly grant that a certain number of clever men must be in every good government, for in another view they are the very guano of the exhausted State; but you know that you would not get much of a crop if you smother your field in guano. Even so the air that we breathe is very good for us, because it is a mixture of oxygen and azote, with some other things. Make it all oxygen, and we could not breathe it at all; for even make it laughing-gas, with a double dose of oxygen, and it is somewhat too intoxicating; or if we did breathe it, it would, I reckon, make us into such fast men that we should live through our seventy years in as many minutes. Defend me from living in an atmosphere of cleverness, for I value my span of life and my quota of happiness. It would fatigue me as much as three balls of a night fatigue the chaperon of an indefatigable belle in her first season.

HYPERBOLUS. Well, then, it comes to this: your aristocracy, or government of the best, not being composed

of clever men principally, of whom is it principally to be composed of rich men?

TLEPOLEMUS. We agreed about that before. That would make it an oligarchy.

HYPERBOLUS. Of titled men, then? TLEPOLEMUS. What are titles? names given by governments, as universities confer degrees: the degrees are supposed to denote proficiency; the titles are supposed to denote something else either good birth, or honourable distinction, or money. They are nothing in themselves; their only value is in what they denote. John Bull has an overweening respect for titles; he would even sympathise with the sailor in Captain Marryat's novel, who stood in great awe of his wife because she was 66 a lady's lady's maid." And why so? Is it because they denote virtue, or honour, or valour, or wealth? I suspect it is because he thinks they denote the last. A barony or a baronetcy is a banknote payable at sight, and good for so much. This is why John respects handles to names, and seems to think that handles confer the same usefulness on men that they do on knives and forks, which would manifestly be unavailable without them, so that no railway board, or anything else of the kind, is complete that has not one or more hilted names on it. John Bull would have little sympathy with the pride of the Breton Rohans, the representative of which family used to say,

"Roy ne puis, prince ne daigne,

Rohan je suis ;'

indicating that he had blood and land, and did not care for a title, which might denote something else as easily. Titles mean something else, but are in themselves nothing; and their value depends on what they mean. I will admit both intellect and money, both journalists and shopkeepers, into our aristocracy, or rather the commonwealth connected with it; besides, we know the human heart, and we know that without a constitutional opposition men cannot be kept in order. A clergyman, a friend of mine, a strong Churchman, even so, knowing that he was human, said, "I rejoice in Dissenters, and would not be without