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known and loved or hated, is as nothing compared with those of equal or greater genius for whom it has found no place above obscurity.

Vasquez de Gama and Columbus changed the paths of commerce and its chief seats in Europe.* But their discoveries were inevitable and necessary, if the actual discoverers were not. It was an age of maritime adventure. For eighty years before De Gama's voyage, the Portuguese had laboured to find a road to the East Indies by the Southern Ocean; and Bartholomew de Diaz had already turned the Cape. Columbus was bound on the same popular errand by another road. He thought to find a Western passage to the Indies, relying on ancient authorities, rumours, and reasoning, which must have stimulated other minds. A long series of naval enterprises from that of Sebastian Cabot, who reached the continent of North America a year before Columbus entered the Gulf of Paria, to that of Magellan, who in the next generation sailed through the strait which bears his name-afford conclusive proof that the discovery of America was the inevitable result of its actual existence at one side of the Atlantic, and of the spirit which at the other side animated Europe towards the close of the fifteenth century.

But the Reformation,-was not it the work of a single man? On the contrary, the Reformation must have happened in England, in Bohemia, and in Switzerland, had Luther never been born; and it is hard to see how it could happen in them without easily finding a champion in Saxony, where so many things conspired to produce and favour it, from the Elector to the state of the Empire; and from Tetzel, the vendor of indulgences, to the state of the Papacy. The rolls of the English Parliament, the popular ballads, the writings of Wicliffe and Chaucer, must convince every careful student that from the death

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of Edward III., the temporal power and establishment of the Church in this island were doomed, so soon as any circumstance should separate the Crown from its alliance; and that its spiritual power was doomed so soon as the cessation of war should leave the nation free to accomplish a great revolution, to avail itself of the new lights of the age, to vent the moral indignation accumulating for three hundred years, and to bring to bear upon the realities of the next world the same zeal and inquiry which it showed in navigation respecting the distant realities of this world. Luther was but a single crater of a volcano which must have burst through a hundred smaller orifices, had not one chief vent been provided for its fury.

A great reformer is the best interpreter of his age and crisis. He owes his power chiefly to the fact that he better understands than other men its natural drift, or is more deeply and enthusiastically moved by the cause of the people he represents. Often he but foresees what he appears to the world to accomplish, confident of and proving the existence of law and sequence in the affairs of men. And often when the battle is over, and the conqueror is no more, the position of his followers is not that to which he led them, but that which the more lasting forces of society decide. The authority of Luther could not fix the creed of Protestantism. Napoleon I. carried the boundaries of France to the Elbe, but they are now what they would have been had no Corsican adventurer ever found his way to Paris. And not the will of Napoleon III., but the will of France upon the one hand, and of the rest of Europe on the other, and the balance of European power, will determine whether the French flag shall float over Antwerp, Coblentz, Genoa, and Alexandria at the end of the present century.

Nor is it in war, politics, commerce, and religion only, that we may trace the influence of paramount laws of human progress upon the appearance, bent, and consequence of genius, and even discern a regular sequence in the applications of the human intellect to the satisfaction of human wants, in the order of their urgency and importance. In its early life a nation can accomplish but few things at a time, and must do those things first for which there is the greatest need. It has to secure itself against its enemies, to form a polity, establish order, fix the rights of property, settle its code of morals and religious worship, to build, to till its fields, and manufacture as well as a rude people can, before it can have a literature or a literary tongue. The forests of Canada must be cleared before they can be cultivated or towns be built upon their ashes; and the woodman, the farmer, and the builder, the butcher and the grocer, must have houses and food before the author or the artist.

It is (says Hallam) the most striking circumstance in the literary annals of the dark ages, that they seem still more deficient in native than in acquired ability. It would be a strange hypothesis that no man endowed with superior gifts of nature lived in so many ages. Of military and civil prudence, indeed, we are not now speaking. But though no man appeared of genius sufficient to burst the fetters imposed by ignorance and bad taste, some there must have been who in a happier condition of literature would have been its

legitimate pride. We perceive, therefore,

in the deficiencies of these virtues, the effect which an oblivion of good models, and the practice of a false standard of merit, may produce in repressing the natural vigour of the mind.*

*

But, in truth, the cause of these deficiencies lay much deeper. 'The condition of literature' was the result of the condition of society. How could there be a burst of literary genius when the vernacular language was unfit for literary use, when the masses were engrossed in war or agriculture, when military and civil prudence' absorbed the minds of the chief laity; and the only educated portion of societythe clergy-lived in cloisters, wrote in Latin, were subject to rapine, had a daily round of sacerdotal and ministerial offices, were governed by theology in all their studies, and were not only the priests, but the schoolmasters, the physicians, and the lawyers of mankind?

The law especially demanded all the intellectual energies of our ancestors which theology could spare ; and Glanville, Bracton, Fleta, and Andrew Horne were of necessity much earlier products of the English mind than Gower and Chaucer, because protection and justice seem more necessary to men than refined amusement, and because ruder minds can supply the former than the latter. This phenomenon has exhibited itself in every country which has run a historical career. The Romans applied to Greece for help in law some centuries before they sought its art and literature,† and in America there were numerous native lawyers before there was one native author deserving of the name. Hence we need be at no loss to understand the futile complaint of Innocent IV., in 1254, to all the prelates of France, England, Scotland, Wales, Spain, and Hungary, that his ears had been stunned with reports that great multitudes of the clergy, neglecting

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theology, crowded to hear lectures on secular laws; and that bishops advanced none but such as were either advocates or professors of law.' Roger Bacon in the same age lamented that natural science had no followers, while those of civil law were numberless; and his own exception confirms the rule that the occupations and success of genius are determined not by, but for it, through conditions not beyond detection. Why did he strive in vain to found a school of physical inquiry? Why were the mental powers of Europe given for centuries either to forensic art, or to endless controversy respecting the nature of abstractions? Why did the second Bacon withhold his inductive power in a flattering Court, and on the eve of a revolution, from political speculation? What accounts for the late appearance of such philosophers as Newton, Davy, Faraday, Adam Smith, Bentham, and John Stuart Mill? The age must be ripe for the man. Roger Bacon's instance, a marvellous anomaly in history, proves the incapacity of the most powerful and fertile genius to lead the energies of a people into a channel for which they are unfitted by previous education, by hereditary and prevailing taste, by more urgent wants, fanciful or real, by personal interests, and by the general structure of society. On a threadbare and unprofitable argument the schoolmen of his epoch lavished an amount of intellectual activity and power which at a later period would have sufficed to rear a true and fruitful philosophy of nature. Necessity seems surely not too strong a term to designate the stress of all the forces which sway the movements of the human faculties. The dominant ideas and associations of the time and place, the help or hindrance which individual genius meets from other minds, the appliances at hand, the things already done, the reward and countenance, or the condemnation and organized resistance of the world around, are inevitable guides or masters. There could be no Demosthenes or Socrates without an Athens;

no

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Cicero without a Roman forum, a senate, and the aid of Greek philosophy. There could be no Shakspeare in a rude and illiterate, a priest-ridden or a puritanical age, nor among a fierce democracy or a servile populace, nor in a nation without a history and a heart, nor yet in one without some mixture of Paganism with Christianity. There could have been no Newton before Kepler, Galileo, and the telescope; no Adam Smith until trade, wealth, and civil liberty had reached a high development; no Mill before Adam Smith and Francis Bacon. Until the eighteenth century geology had neither eyes nor tongue; in the fourteenth, Davy, Herschel, and Faraday would have been alchemists, astrologers, sorcerers, or nothing; and before the twelfth a Walter Scott or Bulwer Lytton must have embellished lives of saints with marvellous fiction to achieve a literary reputation. In 1849, Garibaldi fought in vain; three years ago he would have died obscure; and without the Italy, France, and England of his time, his power would be less at this hour than that of any priest in Naples. What he might have been as the child of nature, we cannot guess; as the child of history, he is what he is. All the memories of his country, all the aspirations of his age for national and human freedom, have inspired his heroic soul.

These are but a few faint indications of the nature of the proofs that might be collected in a longer argument. They tend, it is hoped, to show that although the purposes and aims of society have become more numerous and its machinery more complex, yet individual energy does not disturb the order of history, and that the science contended for remains as possible when it has to account for great numbers of men, each with a definite function and a distinct character, as when the phenomena to which it is applied consist merely of a vast level crowd upon the one hand, and a few tyrants or protectors on the other. The time may come when an exhaustive analysis of the memorials of our race shall

But this view of history, as disclosing law and sequence throughout the progress of mankind, proceeds on a conception of the causes of the movement differing widely from the intellectual theory of a learned writer.* What the acquisitions of the human intellect, what the progress of knowledge would have been, without human interests and wants, without the passions, impulses, and hopes which actuate mankind, it is impossible even to surmise. We can frame no idea what motives would stimulate the labour and direct the inquiries of purely intellectual beings. In truth, civilization comes of a most promiscuous origin; and we can discover in the career of nations the co-operation towards a common end of the most heterogeneous forces. To make men noble and enlightened citizens of an opulent and happy commonwealth, is the work of civilization viewed as a result. But as a process what has it been? How has it been, in fact, accomplished? By men uncivilized

at first; by instinct and necessity, more often than by reason or forethought; by the conflict and eventual reconciliation of many passions and ideas; by courage, enterprise, and patient industry; by experience, suffering, a thousand failures, and by exhausting all the paths of error; by chivalry and commerce, war and peace; by the dispersion and aggregation of mankind, and the mixture of hostile races; by the overthrow of ancient empires, and the occupation of their seats, sometimes by fresh and vigorous barbarians, sometimes by the soldiers of a highly cultivated people; by crimes and virtues, sordid cares and generous aims; by homely affections and by public spirit; by faith and doubt; by learning and material wealth; by the useful and the sublime and beautiful; by soaring genius and by common sense. Such and so

various have been the human agencies which have contributed to the improvement of the human world. Beneath the seeming chaos of its current history, philosophy detects already some evidence of such general order and consequence for good, as a deeper faith in a superior Providence than in the human intellect might lead a plain man to expect.

T. E. C. L.