on by Gilbert Wakefield (1756-1801), the son of an English rector, who took orders in the Church, but left it from conscientious scruples. He was a very scholarly man, and published a translation of the New Testament, and An Inquiry concerning the Person of Christ.' An earnest creature, of sensitive excitable temperament, he felt warmly, and gave fearless expression to his convictions. He was prosecuted for his reply to the Bishop of Llandaff, and imprisoned for two years. He survived his imprisonment only a few months.

PHILOSOPHY.

In this generation the philosophy of Reid was upheld by Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), Professor of Mathematics, and subsequently, from 1785 to 1810, Professor of Moral Philosophy, in Edinburgh. He propounded little that was original in philosophy; his opinions were for the most part modifications of Reid; but as an expositor of philosophical doctrines, his reputation stands deservedly high. Most of his works were composed after his retirement from the Chair of Philosophy in 1810. A remark is sometimes made that his best works were his pupils; the plain paraphrase of which is that he was a person of stately manners and polished oratory, and -a rare thing then for a man in his position-a Whig in politics, and that several scions of the Whig nobility were placed in Edinburgh under his care. Along with a fine presence, Stewart possessed great natural eloquence. James Mill used to declare that though he had heard Pitt and Fox deliver some of their most admired speeches, he never heard anything nearly so eloquent as some of the lectures of Professor Stewart. While his account of Mind coincides in the main with Reid's, the statement and illustration of the doctrines, and the arguments on points of dispute, are his own. He is the most ornate and elegant of our philosophical writers. His summaries of philosophical systems are sometimes praised as being especially perspicuous and interesting. His manner as a controversialist is peculiarly agreeable when taken in contrast to the hard-hitting and open ridicule of such controversialists as Priestley: Stewart's copious lubricated eloquence is much better fitted to conciliate opponents than win assent.

Thomas Brown (1778-1820) was appointed colleague to Stewart in the Moral Philosophy Chair in 1810, and discharged the duties of the office till his death in 1820. Brown is an often-quoted case of precocious genius: he composed and published Observations. on Darwin's Zoonomia' before he had completed his twentieth year. He was one of the band of young men that originated the Edinburgh Review,' and he wrote a paper on Kant in the second number; but he took offence and seceded before the Review was

many months old. In 1805 he published an Inquiry into the Relation of Cause and Effect.' During the ten years of his professoriate, he published several poems, which possessed little origi nal merit, and soon relapsed into the province of the antiquarian. In his philosophy, Brown agreed with Reid and Stewart in ascribing an intuitive origin to certain beliefs, and differed from them in some minor points of nice distinction relating to external perception. He was a very popular lecturer: he was more sentimental than Stewart, his style was more florid, and his criticism of his predecessors was acrimonious and racy, not to say flippant.

The most influential and original philosopher of this generation was Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), the founder of the science of Jurisprudence, and the first to make a thorough application of the principle of Utility to practical affairs. The son of a London solicitor, he was sent to Westminster School, and to Oxford, and bred to the law; but, cherishing a strong repugnance to legal abuses, he refrained from the practice of his profession, and lived the life of a studious recluse.

His character and writings are very impartially discussed in a well-known essay by Mr John Stuart Mill (Dissertations,' vol. i.) "Bentham has been in this age and country the great questioner of things established. It is by the influence of the modes of thought with which his writings inoculated a considerable number of thinking men, that the yoke of authority has been broken, and innumerable opinions, formerly received on tradition as incontestable, are put upon their defence, and required to give an account of themselves." He "carried the war of criticism and of refutation, the conflict with falsehood and absurdity, into the field of practical abuses." Nor was he merely a negative, destructive, or subversive philosopher. His mind was eminently positive, constructive, synthetic. He never pulled down without building up. After showing that an institution was inconsistent with his fundamental principles, he always suggested a substitute that was consistent therewith. His method of procedure was more important than his results. His method "may be shortly described as the method of detail; of treating wholes by separating them into their parts, abstractions by resolving them into things,-classes and generalities by distinguishing them into the individuals of which they are made up; and breaking every question into pieces before attempting to solve it." The method was not by any means absolutely original; but "whatever originality there was in the method, in the subjects he applied it to, and in the rigidity with which he adhered to it, there was the greatest." Again, "the generalities of his philosophy itself have little or no novelty. To ascribe any to the doctrine that general utility is the foundation of morality, would imply great ignorance of the history of philo

sophy, of general literature, and of Bentham's own writings. He derived the idea, as he says himself, from Helvetius; and it was the doctrine, no less, of the religious philosophers of that age, prior to Reid and Beattie." As regards the results, those achieved in the field of Ethics are not nearly so valuable as those achieved in the field of Jurisprudence. [The value of Bentham's labours in Jurisprudence is universally admitted. Even his somewhat unfriendly critic Macaulay says, with characteristic sweep, that he "found jurisprudence a gibberish and left it a science."] In Ethics his conclusions are marred by the peculiarities of his own character. "Bentham's contempt, then, of all other schools of thinkers, his determination to create a philosophy wholly out of the materials furnished by his own mind, and by minds like his own, was his first disqualification as a philosopher. His second was the incompleteness of his own mind as a representative of universal human nature. In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off;" and he was deficient in the power by which one human being enters into the mind and circumstances of another. "His knowledge of human nature is wholly empirical; and the empiricism of one who has had little experience. He had neither internal experience nor external; the quiet, even tenor of his life, and his healthiness of mind, conspired to exclude him from both. He never knew prosperity and adversity, passion nor satiety. He never had even the experiences which sickness gives; he lived from childhood to the age of eighty five in boyish health. He knew no dejection, no heaviness of heart. He was a boy to the last. Other ages and other nations were a blank to him for purposes of instruction. He measured them but by one standard; their knowledge of facts, and their capability to take correct views of utility, and merge all other objects in it."-His style is much better in his early writings than in his later. His 'Fragment on Government,' published anonymously, was so well written that it was attributed to some of the greatest masters of style at the time. Even in the most involved of his later writings we meet with many happy turns of expression, and with imagery "quaint and humorous, or bold, forcible, and intense." His great fault is intricacy. The origin of this is well explained by Mr Mill: "From the same principle in Bentham came the intricate and involved style, which makes his later writings books for the student only, not the general reader. It was from his perpetually aiming at impracticable precision. Nearly all his earlier, and many parts of his later writings, are models, as we have already observed, of light, playful, and popular style: a Benthamiana might be made of passages worthy of Addison or Goldsmith. But in his later years and more

advanced studies, he fell into a Latin or German structure of sentence, foreign to the genius of the English language. He could not bear, for the sake of clearness and the reader's ease, to say, as ordinary men are content to do, a little more than the truth in one sentence, and correct it in the next. The whole of the qualifying remarks which he intended to make, he insisted upon embedding as parentheses in the very middle of the sentence itself. And thus, the sense being so long suspended, and attention being required to the accessory ideas before the principal idea had been properly seized, it became difficult, without some practice, to make out the train of thought."

With Bentham, Mr Mill ranks as the other great "seminal mind" of England in that generation the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Bentham's leading purpose was to provide good substitutes for the bad side in existing institutions. Coleridge insisted rather upon the good side, and the propriety of making the most of that. Coleridge was also the first great English champion of German transcendental philosophy. It was principally through conversation that he exercised his influence. To some extent, also, he disseminated his opinions in print, although he was too confirmed an opium-eater to be a persistent worker. In 1796 he issued nine numbers of a Radical weekly paper, called 'The Watchman'; in 1809-10 twenty-seven numbers of the 'Friend,'an unfinished project designed to convey a consistent body of opinions in Theology, Philosophy, and Politics; in 1816 The Statesman's Manual, or the Bible the best Guide to Political Skill and Foresight, a Lay Sermon'; in 1817 'A Second Lay Sermon,' on the existing distresses and discontents"; in 1817 'Biographia Literaria,' a history of the development of his own opinions; in 1825 Aids to Reflection.' His prose style is copious, and has something of the soft melody of his verse.

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To this period belong also two well-known names in Political Economy, the Rev. T. R. Malthus (1766-1836) and David Ricardo (1772-1823). Malthus's celebrated work on 'Population' appeared in 1798. Ricardo's 'Political Economy' was published in 1817. Both are moderately perspicuous writers, but neither of them possessed any special gift of style.

Archibald Alison (1757-1839), son of an Edinburgh magistrate, educated at Glasgow and at Oxford, latterly an Episcopal clergyman in Edinburgh, is known in letters as the father of the historian, Sir Archibald, and as the author of an Essay on Taste,' published in 1790, and in 1811 commended and adopted in its leading positions by the critical potentate, Francis Jeffrey. Alison denied that there is any intrinsic pleasure either in sound, in colour, or in form. He resolved the emotions of sublimity and beauty into associations with primitive sensibilities.

The 'Essay' is written in a very readable style for a work of abstruse analysis.

Another literary man of this generation, best known through his son, is Isaac Disraeli (1766-1848), author of 'Curiosities of Literature,' 'Literary Miscellanies,' 'Quarrels of Authors,' 'Calamities of Authors,' &c. His 'Literary Character,' an attempt to analyse the constituents of literary genius, was a favourite with Byron. In the writings of the elder Disraeli we meet with occasional touches of the felicity of expression so conspicuous in his more distinguished son.

HISTORY.

The most considerable history published in the early part of this period was Mitford's 'History of Greece.' William Mitford (1744-1827) was the son of an English proprietor near Southampton, served with Gibbon as an officer in the Hampshire militia, and sat for many years in Parliament. His History appeared in successive volumes at long intervals between 1784 and 1818. The writer was a stanch Conservative, and part of the success of the work, in those days of political apprehension, was due to the use he made of the proceedings and the disasters of the Grecian republics to point a moral against democracy. The work was very derisively reviewed by the young Whig Macaulay in one of his first efforts, and it was humorously pronounced by the Conservative De Quincey to be "choleric in excess, and as entirely partial, as nearly perfect in its injustice, as human infirmity would allow.' Mitford's style is in general verbose, periodic, and heavy. There is, however, a certain animation in his narratives of striking events; and his expression sometimes receives a warm colour from the strength of his feelings as a political partisan. He is included by De Quincey among "orthographic mutineers," eccentrics in the matter of spelling.

The history of Greece was written also by John Gillies (17471836), an alumnus of Glasgow, and travelling tutor to a son of the Earl of Hopetoun, who in 1793 succeeded Robertson as historiographer-royal for Scotland, and figured in the literary society of "Modern Athens" during the first quarter of this century.

His

History of Greece' was published in 1786. He published also translations from Aristotle, wrote upon Frederick the Great, and continued his history down to the reign of Augustus. All his works have been eclipsed, as regards both matter and manner.

MISCELLANEOUS.

William Cobbett (1762-1835) raised himself, by the force of his self-educated literary powers, from the station of a private soldier