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INFIRMITY OF RESOLUTION.

tress of the Emperor Valens when no longer guided by the wisdom and authority of his elder brother, and required by the ambassadors of the Goths to give an instant and peremptory decision as to their appeal : "he was deprived of the favourite resource of feeble and timid minds; who consider the use of dilatory and ambiguous measures as the most admirable efforts of consummate prudence.” Like the Greek sovran in a modern-antique play,

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The flower of his love never bloomed upright,
But was a parasite that loved to lean

On stronger natures, winning strength from them."

Schiller's English biographer discerns in him a consistency in action, and a firm coherence in character, which the changeful condition of his history rendered of peculiar importance : his resources, his place of residence, his associates, his worldly prospects, might vary as they pleased; the purpose of his life did not vary, but was ever present with him, to nerve every better faculty of his head and heart, to invest the chequered vicissitudes of his fortune with a dignity derived from himself. "The zeal of his nature overcame the temptations to that loitering and indecision, that fluctuation between sloth and consuming toil, that infirmity of resolution, with all its tormenting and enfeebling consequences, to which a literary man,* working as he does at a solitary task, uncalled-for by any pressing tangible demand, and to be recompensed by distant and dubious advantages, is especially exposed." Unity of aim,† aided by ordinary vigour of character, will generally ensure perseverance; a quality, adds Mr. Carlyle, "not ranked

* William Collins, the poet, is typical in this respect, His great fault, says Johnson, was irresolution; many were the works he designed, but the frequent calls of immediate necessity broke his scheme, and suffered him to pursue no settled purpose.

Rothschild's advice to young Buxton was, "Stick to your brewery, and you will be the great brewer of London. Be brewer, and banker, and merchant, and manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette."

CARLYLE ON COLERIDGE.

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among the cardinal virtues, but as essential as any of them to the proper conduct of life." The weakest living creature, he asserts, can, by concentrating his powers on a single object, accomplish something; while the strongest, by dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything.* In another of Mr. Carlyle's biographies a memorable picture is given of the irresolute "literary man," in the person of Samuel Taylor Coleridge-emphatically in his person, as indicative of character and mental habit. "The face was flabby and irresolute. . The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength. He hung loosely on his limbs, with knees bent, and stooping attitude; in walking, he rather shuffled than decisively stepped; and a lady once remarked, he never could fix which side of the garden-walk would suit him best, but continually shifted, in corkscrew fashion, and kept trying both." A heavy-laden, high-aspiring, and surely muchsuffering man: altogether what his critic elsewhere calls a foiled potentiality. Excel, in a manner, Coleridge undoubtedly did; but the excellence was ever of a kind to suggest how much greater it might have been, with stability at the base of his character. Being unstable, he did not, his genius and possibilities considered, excel. The excellence, of a rare degree and choicest kind, was potentially present; he had it in him; but the outcomings were shortcomings, the upshot was a mortifying disappointment of legitimately great expectations.

The latest gospel in this world, according to the ClothesPhilosopher of Weissnichtwo, is, "Know thy work and do it.” Know what thou canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules. We have Mr. Emerson's word for it, that each

"The drop, by continual falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock; the hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar, and leaves no trace behind. Few men have applied more steadfastly to the business of their life, or been more resolutely diligent than Schiller."-Life of Schiller, Part II.

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UNSTABLE AS WATER.

man has an aptitude born with him to do easily some feat impossible to any other. "Do your work. I have to say this often, but nature says it oftener." Blessed is he who has found his work, Mr. Carlyle exclaims, or proclaims; let him ask no other blessedness. "He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it." Chanter, ou je m'abuse, est ma tâche ici-bas, was Béranger's device.

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-Pol meo animo omnes sapientes

Suum officium æquum est colere, et facere,"

is the whole duty of man, or thereabouts, as understood by "the man in the play," as the phrase goes, in Plautus. Persius is philosophically didactic on the duty of sticking to one's ascertained duty; of having an object in life, and pursuing it.

"Est aliquid quò tendis, et in quod dirigis arcum ?
An passim sequeris corvos, testâve, lutove,

Securus quò pes ferat, atque ex tempore vivis ?" *

That ex tempore living is just the converse of living for all time. Its objects change with every day of its fickle course. It turns with every turn of the tide. Unstable as water, one's

name shall be written in water.

The Abbé d'Olivet says at the close of one of his artistic studies, that the fine arts attract large numbers of students and devotees, of whom by far the greater part, however devoted their application, will never achieve anything like excellence; while such as do excel, are able to do so in one kind only. Happy they who know what that one kind is! But he reckons it as rare, perhaps, to know one's talent as to have a really definite and defined talent at all. M. de Sacy winds up one of his critico-historical disquisitions with a characteristic Courage

* Thus Englished by Dr. Brewster :

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Say, hast thou fixed some certain mark in view?
This, do thy levelled shafts alone pursue?
Or vagrant follow'st thou, with pelting clay,
Each random crow that fortunes in thy way?
Does thy life one determined scope avow,
Or looks thy thought no further than the now?"

Satires of Persius, iii. 60.

WAVE-LIKE WAVERERS.

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donc! by way of self-communing, not to say self-satisfaction : Let me write criticism and biography; that is my vocation. And it is something to know what one can do, and to confine one's self to the doing of it-de s'y renfermer. So the late W. Lovell Beddoes sought to fortify himself in his literary pursuits by reflecting that a man must have an exclusive passion for his art, and all the obstinacy and self-denial which are combined with such a temperament, an unconquerable and always-enduring will, always working forward to the only goal he knows; and such a one, he insists, must never think that there is any human employment so good (much less suspect that there may be not a few better), or so honourable for the exercise of his faculties. "All my life long," says Philip van Artevelde,

"I have beheld with most respect the man

Who knew himself, and knew the ways before him,
And from among them chose considerately,
And, having chosen, with a steadfast mind
Pursued his purpose."

A commentator upon which passage has remarked how true it is, that, attractive though versatility be, concentration of energies upon some one good work is the master-key to the honour and respect of our fellows.

WAVE-LIKE WAVERERS. A SEQUEL TO
"UNSTABLE AS WATER.”

THE

JAMES i. 6, 8.

HE self-designed epitaph of a modern poet, "His name was writ in water," might stand for that by which the name of Reuben is noted for all time,-unstable as water. The instability, and the similitude, may remind us of a precept and a similitude in a canonical epistle; where whoso lacketh wisdom is enjoined to ask it of God, and to do so "nothing wavering; for he that wavereth (diakpivóμevos) is like a wave

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WAVE-LIKE WAVERERS.

(kλúdwv) of the sea, driven with the wind, and tossed."

Let not that man think that he shall receive anything of the Lord. And the Apostle adds, that a double-minded man is unstable (akaráσTaros) in all his ways. The blight of Reuben is upon him, so that he shall not, cannot excel.

St. Paul uses the wave-like phrase, where he speaks of those who are tossed to and fro (κλvdwvgóμevo) and carried about with every wind of doctrine (Eph. iv. 14). The image is, as in the prophet Isaiah, of the troubled sea, when it cannot rest. Nay, a smooth sea has its ripples. The ebb and flow of the tide imply wavelets at least, and these imply perpetual unrest. The wavering mind may vary in degree with the degrees of agitation on the surface of the sea; and he that wavereth may be like the wavelet that just ruffles that surface, or he may be like a billow that is driven with the wind, and tossed. Either way a waverer, he is either way wave-like.

A

Irresolution is figured under images the most diverse. victim to it likens himself, in an old play, to a heavy stone, rolled up a hill by a weak child: he moves a little up, and tumbles back again. We all, it has been said, feel a vigorous will to be a fine thing; and it is well called a stroke of nature in "the man in the play" (another man and another play), to hate a bird that does not know its own mind; so wearisome is it to be with people without any will of their own. "Volition is life: no one can be really great, whatever his other powers, without it." He shall not excel. Scott characterizes James the First as so utterly devoid of "firm resolve," which another Scottish bard has called "the stalk of carle-hempe in man," that even his virtues and good meaning became laughable, from the whimsical uncertainty of his conduct.* It is of

*In Peveril of the Peak Sir Walter lays stress on the capricious instability of character of the second Duke of Buckingham, and tells how discarded statesmen, and what would now perhaps be called Cave-ofAdullamites of all sorts, besides servile tools of administration and political spies, all regarded the Duke's mansion as neutral ground; sure, that if he was not of their opinion to-day this very circumstance rendered it most likely he would think with them to-morrow.

A more subtle if not elaborate study of the unstable man is seen in Sir

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