and growing in this universe, we may note such vicissitudes, 'and budding-times. Moreover there are spiritual budding'times; and then also there are physical appointed to nations.

Thus in the middle of that poor calumniated Eighteenth 'Century, see once more! Long winter again past, the deadseeming tree proves to be living, to have been always living; ' after motionless times, every bough shoots forth on the sudden, 'very strangely it now turns out that this favoured England 'was not only to have had her Shakspeares, Bacons, Sydneys, but to have her Watts, Arkwrights, Brindleys! We will honour 'greatness in all kinds. The Prospero evoked the singing of 'Ariel, and took captive the world with those melodies: the same 'Prospero can send his Fire-demons panting across all oceans; 'shooting with the speed of meteors, on cunning highways, from 6 end to end of kingdoms; and make Iron his missionary, preach'ing its evangel to the brute Primeval Powers, which listen and 'obey neither is this small. Manchester, with its cotton-fuz, 'its smoke and dust, its tumult and contentious squalor, is hide'ous to thee? Think not so: a precious substance, beautiful as 'magic dreams, and yet no dream but a reality, lies hidden in 'that noisome wrappage;-a wrappage struggling indeed (look 'at Chartisms and such like) to cast itself off, and leave the 'beauty free and visible there! Hast thou heard, with sound 'ears, the awakening of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at half past five by the clock; the rushing off of its thousand mills, like the broom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times ten 'thousand spools and spindles all set humming there, it is perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara, or more so. Cotton-spinning is the clothing of the naked in its result; the 'triumph of man over matter in its means. Soot and despair are 'not the essence of it; they are divisible from it,-at this hour, 'are they not crying fiercely to be divided? The great Goethe, 'looking at cotton Switzerland, declared it, I am told, to be of all 'things that he had seen in this world the most poetical. Whereat friend Kanzler von Müller, in search of the palpable pic'turesque, could not but stare wide-eyed. Nevertheless our World-Poet knew well what he was saying.'

'Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful man ; 'no romance-hero with haughty eyes, Apollo-lip, and gesture like 'the herald Mercury; a plain almost gross, bag-cheeked, potbellied 'Lancashire man, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of copi'ous free digestion;-a man stationed by the community to shave 'certain dusty beards, in the Northern parts of England, at a half'penny each. To such end, we say, by forethought, oversight, acci'dent and arrangement, had Richard Arkwright been, by the com'munity of England and his own consent, set apart. Nevertheless, in strapping of razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the con'tradictions and confusions attendant thereon, the man had notions in that rough head of his; spindles, shuttles, wheels and contrivances plying ideally within the same: rather hopeless-looking; which, however, he did at-last bring to bear. Not without difficulty. His townsfolk rose in mob round him, for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten wages; so that he had to fly, with broken 'washpots, scattered household, and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay 'his wife too, as I learn, rehelled; burnt his wooden model of his 'spinning wheel; resolute that he should stick to his razors rather: 'for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice to understand, packed her out of doors. O reader, what a Historical Phe'nomenon is that Lag-checked, potbellied, much enduring, much-in'venting man and barber? French Revolutions were a-brewing: 'to resist the same in any measure, imperial Kaisers were impo6 tent without the cotton and cloth of England and it was this 'man that had to give England the power of cotton.'

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Neither had Watt of the Steamengine a heroic origin, any 'kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this 'world were shooting their partridges; noisily, in Parliament or elsewhere, solving the question, Head or tail? while this man, 'with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret; or, having found it, was painfully 'wending to and fro in quest of a "monied man" as indispensa'ble man-midwife of the same. Reader, thou shalt admire what 'is admirable, not what is dressed in admirable. Thou shalt 'learn to know the British lion even when he is not throne sup'porter, and also the British jackass in lion's skin even when he 'is. Ah, couldst thou always, what a world were it! But has

the Berlin Royal Academy or any English Useful-Knowledge 6 Society discovered, for instance, who it was that first scratched 'earth with a stick; and threw corns, the biggest he could find, 'into it; seedgrains of a certain grass, which he named white or wheat? Again, what is the whole Tees-water and other breeding'world to him who stole home from the forests the first bison-calf, 'and bred it up to be a tame bison, a milk-cow? No machine of 'all they showed me in Birmingham can be put in comparison for 'ingenuity with that figure of the wedge named knife, of the wedges 'named saw, of the lever named hammer:-nay is it not with the 'hammer-knife, named sword, that men fight, and maintain any 'semblance of constituted authority that yet survives among us? 'The steamengine I call fire-demon and great; but it is nothing 'to the invention of fire. Prometheus, Tubal-cain, Triptolemus! 'Are not our greatest men as good as lost? The men that walk 'daily among us, clothing us, warming us, feeding us, walk 'shrouded in darkness, mere mythic men.

'It is said, ideas produce revolutions and truly so they do; 'not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical. In this clanging 'clashing universal Sword-dance which the European world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but one choragus, 'where Richard Arkwright is another. Let it dance itself out. 'When Arkwright shall have become mythic like Arachne, we 'shall spin in peaceable profit by him; and the Sword-dance, with 'all its sorrowful shufflings, Waterloo waltzes, Moscow gallop'ades, how forgotten will that be!'

'On the whole, were not all these things most unexpected, un'foreseen? As indeed what thing is foreseen; especially what 'man, the parent of things! Robert Clive in that same time 'went out, with a developed gift of penmanship, as writer or su 'perior book-keeper to a Trading Factory established in the dis'tant East. With gift of penmanship developed; with other 'gifts not yet developed, which the calls of the case did by and by develope. Not fit for book-keeping alone, the man was found 'fit for conquering Nawaubs, founding kingdoms, Indian Empires! In a questionable manner, Indian Empire from the

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other hemisphere took up its abode in Leadenhall Street, in the 'City of London.

'Accidental all these things and persons look, unexpected every one of them to man. Yet inevitable every one of them; 'foreseen, not unexpected, by Supreme Power; prepared, ap'pointed from afar. Advancing always through all centuries, in 'the middle of the eighteenth they arrived. The Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton-spinning, cloth-cropping, iron-forging, 'steam-engining, railwaying, commercing and careering to'wards all the winds of Heaven,-in this inexplicable noisy 6 manner; the noise of which, in Power-mills, in progress-of-the'species Magazines, still deafens us somewhat. Most noisy, 'sudden ! The Staffordshire coal-stratum, and coal-strata, lay 'side by side with iron-strata, quiet since the creation of the 'world! Water flowed in Lancashire and Lanarkshire; bitu'minous fire lay bedded in rocks there too,-over which how many fighting Stanleys, black Douglases, and other the like con'tentious persons, had fought out their bickerings and broils, not 'without result, we will hope! But God said, Let the iron mis'sionaries be; and they were. Coal and iron, so long close unre'gardful neighbours, are wedded together; Birmingham and Wol'verhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges, with their fire'throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose into day. Wet 'Mancunium stretched out her hand towards Carolina and the 'torrid zone, and plucked cotton there: who could forbid her, her 'that had the skill to weave it? Fish fled thereupon from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable keels. England, I say, dug out 'her bitumen-fire, and bade it work: towns rose, and steeple-chim'neys;-Chartisms also, and Parliaments they name Reformed.'

Such, figuratively given, are some prominent points, chief mountain-summits, of our English history past and present, according to the Author of this strange untranslated Work, whom we think we recognise to be an old acquaintance.

CHAPTER IX.

PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.

To us looking at these matters somewhat in the same light, Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Philippes, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days, and what not, are no longer inexplicable. Where the great mass of men is tolerably right, all is right; where they are not right, all is wrong. The speaking classes speak and debate, each for itself; the great dumb, deep-buried class lies like an Enceladus, who in his pain, if he will complain of it, has to produce earthquakes! Everywhere, in these countries, in these times, the central fact worthy of all consideration forces itself on us in this shape: the claim of the Free Workingman to be raised to a level, we may say, with the Working Slave; his anger and cureless discontent till that be done. Food, shelter, due guidance, in return for his labour: candidly interpreted, Chartism and all such isms mean that; and the madder they are, do they not the more emphatically mean, "See what guidance you have given us! What delirium we are brought to talk and project, guided by nobody!" Laissez-aire on the part of the Governing Classes, we repeat again and again, will, with whatever difficulty, have to cease; pacific mutual division of the spoil, and a world well let alone, will no longer suffice. A Donothing Guidance; and it is a Do-something World! Would to God our Ducal Duces would become leaders indeed; our Aristocracies and Priesthoods discover in some suitable degree what the world expected of them, what the world could no longer do without getting of them! Nameless unmeasured confusions, misery to themselves and us, might so be spared. But that too will be as God has appointed. If they learn, it will be well and happy if not they, then others instead of them will and must, and once more, though after a long sad circuit, it will be well and happy.

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