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have been or perhaps are now speaking face to face with him: while for us, chase it as we may, such scientific blessedness will too probably be forever denied!-But the thing we meant to enforce was this comfortable fact, that no known Head was so wooden, but there might be other heads to which it were a genius and Friar Bacon's Oracle. Of no given Book, not even of a Fashionable Novel, can you predicate with certainty that its vacuity is absolute; that there are not other vacuities which shall partially replenish themselves therefrom, and esteem it a plenum. How knowest thou, may the distressed Novel-wright exclaim, that I, here where I sit, am the Foolishest of existing mortals; that this my Long-ear of a Fictitious Biography shall not find one and the other into whose still longer ears it may be the means, under Providence, of instilling somewhat? We answer, None knows, none can certainly know therefore, write on, worthy Brother, even as thou canst, even as it has been given thee.

Miscellanies, vol. iii., p. 4.

A DESIDERATUM IN LITERATURE.

There is a great discovery still to be made in Literature, that of paying literary men by the quantity they do not write. Nay, in sober truth, is not this actually the truth in all writing; and moreover, in all conduct and acting? Not what stands above ground, but what lies unseen under it, as the root and subterrene element it sprang from and emblemed forth, determines the value. Under all speech that is good for anything there lies a silence that is better. Silence is deep as Eternity; speech is shallow as Time. Paradoxical does it

seem? Woe for the age, woe for the man, quack-ridden, bespeeched, bespouted, blown about like barren Sahara, to whom this world-old truth were altogether strange! Such we say is the rule, acted on or not, recognised or not; and he who departs from it, what can he do but spread himself into breadth and length, into superficiality and saleability: and, except as

filigree, become comparatively useless? One thinks, Had but the hogshead of thin wash, which sours in a week ready for the kennels, been distilled, been concentrated! Our dear Fenimore Cooper, whom we started with, might, in that way, have given us one Natty Leatherstocking, one melodious synopsis of Man and Nature in the West (for it lay in him to do it), almost as Saint Pierre did for the Islands of the East; and the hundred Incoherences cobbled hastily together by order of Colburn and Company, had slumbered in Chaos, as all incoherences ought if possible to do. Verily this same genius of diffused writing, of diffuse acting, is a Moloch; and souls pass through the fire to him, more than enough. Surely, if ever discovery was valuable and needful, it were that above indicated, of paying by the work, not visibly done! Which needful discovery we will give the whole projecting, railwaying, knowledge-diffusing, march of intellect and otherwise promotive and locomotive societies in the Old and New World, any required length of centuries to make. Once made, such discovery once made, we too will fling cap into the air, and shout' Io Paan! the Devil is conquered.'

Miscellanies, vol. iv., p. 103.

MEMOIRS OF A CONTEMPORARY.

On the whole, is there not, to the eager student of History, something at once most attractive and yet most provoking in all Memoirs by a Contemporary? Contemporaneous words by an eye-witness are like no other. For every man who sees with eyes is, approximately or else afar off,—either approximately and in some faint degree decipherable, or too far off, altogether undecipherable, and as if vacant and blank,the miraculous Daguerreotype-mirror,' above mentioned, of whatever thing transacts itself before him. No shadow of it but left some trace in him, decipherable or undecipherable. The poor soul had, lying in it, a far stranger alchemy than that of the electric-plates: a living Memory, namely, an Intelligence,

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better or worse. Words by an eye witness! You have there the words which a son of Adam, looking on the phenomenon itself, saw fittest for depicturing it. Strange to consider; it, the very phenomenon itself, does stand depictured there, though under such inextricable obscurations, short-comings, perversions,-fatally eclipsed from us for ever. For we cannot read it; the traces are so faint, confused, as good as non-extant to our organs: the light was so unfavourable,' the electric plate' was so extremely bad. Alas, you read a hundred autograph holograph letters, signed Charles Rex,' with the intensest desire to understand Charles Rex, to know what Charles Rex was, what he had in his eye at that moment; and to no purpose. The summary of the whole hundred autographs is vacuity, inanity; like the moaning of winds through desert places, through damp empty churches: what the writer did. actually mean, the thing he then thought of, the thing he then was, remain for ever hid from you. No answer; only the evermoaning, gaunt, unsyllabled woo-woo of wind in empty churches! Most provoking; a provocation as of Tantalus; for there is not a word written there but stands like a kind of window through which a man might see, or feels as if he might see, a glimpse of the whole matter. Not a jolt in those crabbed angular sentences, nay not a twirl in that cramp penmanship, but is significant of all you seek. Had a man but intellect enough,-which, alas, no man ever had, and no angel ever had,—how would the blank become a picture all legible! The doleful, unsyllabled woo-woo of church winds had become intelligible, cheering articulation; that tragic, fatal-looking, peak-bearded individual, 'your constant assured friend, Charles Rex,' were no longer an enigma and chimera to you! With intellect enough, alas, yes it were all easy then; the very signing of his name were then physiognomical enough of him!

Miscellanies, vol. iv., p. 225.

THE PERENNIAL INTEREST OF BIOGRAPHY.

Man's sociality of nature evinces itself, in spite of all that can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were there no other: the unspeakable delight he takes in Biography. It is written, 'The proper study of mankind is man ;' to which study, let us candidly admit, he, by true or by false methods, applies himself nothing loath. Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it, there is nothing else interesting. How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fellow-creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery: nay, not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it; so that we can theoretically construe him, and could almost practically personate him; and do now thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is, and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on! Observe, accordingly, to what extent, in the actual course of things, this business of Biography is practised and relished. Define to thyself, judicious Reader, the real significance of these phenomena named Gossip, Egoism, Personal Narrative (miraculous or not), Scandal, Raillery, Slander, and such like; the sum-total of which (with some fractional addition of a better ingredient, generally too small to be noticeable), constitutes that other grand phenomenon still called 'Conversation.' Do they not mean wholly: Biography and Autobiography? Not only in the common Speech of men; but in all Art too, which is or should be the concentrated and conserved essence of what men can speak and show, Biography is almost the one thing needful.

Miscellanies, vol. iii., pp. 1, 2.

Mournful, in truth, is it to behold what the business called 'History,' in these so enlightened and illuminated times, still continues to be. Can you gather from it, read till your eyes go out, any dimmest shadow of an answer to that great question: How men lived and had their being; were it but economically, as what wages they got, and what they bought with these? Unhappily you cannot. History will throw no light on any such matter. At the point where living memory fails, it is all darkness; Mr. Senior and Mr. Sadler must still debate this simplest of all elements in the condition of the Past: Whether men were better off, in their mere larders and pantries, or were worse off than now! History, as it stands all bound-up in gilt volumes, is but a shade more instructive than the wooden volumes of a Backgammon-board. How my Prime Minister was appointed is of less moment to me than How my House Servant was hired. In these days, ten ordinary Histories of Kings and Courtiers were well exchanged against the tenth part of one good History of Booksellers.

THE DAILY NEWSPAPER EDITOR.

Consider his leading articles: what they treat of, how passably they are done. Straw that has been thrashed a hundred times without wheat; ephemeral sound of a sound; such portent of the hour as all men have seen a hundred times turn out inane: how a man, with merely human faculty, buckles himself nightly with new vigour and interest to this thrashed straw, nightly thrashes it anew, nightly gets up new thunder about it; and so goes on thrashing and thundering for a considerable series of years; this is a fact remaining still to be accounted for, in human physiology. The vitality of man is great. Miscellanies, vol. iv., p. 158.