ELLESMERE. I agree to your theory, as far as openness of nature is concerned; but I do not much like to put that half-brute thing, courage, so high.

MILVERTON. Well, you cannot have greatness without it: you may have well intentioned people and far seeing people; but if they have no stoutness of heart, they will only be shifty or remonstrant, nothing like great.

ELLESMERE. You mean will, not courage. Without will, your open-minded, open-hearted man may be like a great, rudderless vessel driven about by all winds not a small craft, but a most uncertain one.

MILVERTON. No. I mean both: both will and courage. Courage is the body to will.

ELLESMERE. I believe you are right in that; but do not omit will. It amused me to see how you brought in one of your old notions-that this age is not contemptible. You scribbling people are generally on the other side.

MILVERTON. You malign us. If I must give any account for my personal predilection for modern times, it consists, perhaps, in this, that we may now speak our mind. What Tennyson says of his own land,

"The land, where, girt with friend or foe,
"A man may say the thing he will,-"

may be said, in some measure, of the age in which we live. This is an inexpressible comfort. This doubles life. These things surely may be said in favour of the present age, not with a view to puff it up, but so far to encourage ourselves, as we may by

seeing that the world does not go on for nothing, that all the misery, blood, and toil that has been spent, were not poured out in vain. Could we have our ancestors again before us, would they not rejoice at seeing what they had purchased for us: would they think it any compliment to them to extol their times at the expense of the present, and so to intimate that their efforts had led to nothing.

ELLESMERE. "I doubt," as Lord Eldon would have said no, upon second thoughts, I do not doubt. I feel assured that a good many of these said ancestors you are calling up would be much discomforted at finding that all their suffering had led to no sure basis of persecution of the other side.

DUNSFORD. I wonder, Ellesmere, what you would have done in persecuting times. What escape would your sarcasm have found for itself?

MILVERTON. Some orthodox way, I dare say. I do not think he would have been particularly fond of martyrdom.

ELLESMERE. No. I have no taste for making torches for truth, or being one: I prefer humane darkness to such illumination. At the same time one cannot tell lies: and if one had been questioned about the incomprehensibilities which men in former days were so fierce upon, one must have shown that one disagreed with all parties.

DUNSFORD. Do not say 66 99 one : I should not have disagreed with the great Protestant leaders in the Reformation, for instance.

ELLESMERE. Humph!

MILVERTON. If we get aground upon the Reformation, we shall never push off again else would I say something far from complimentary to those Protestant proceedings which we may rather hope were Tudoresque than Protestant.

ELLESMERE. No, that is not fair. The Tudors were a coarse, fierce race; but it will not do to lay the faults of their times upon them only. Look at

Elizabeth's ministers. They had about as much notion of religious tolerance as they had of Professor Wheatstone's telegraph. It was not a growth of that age.

MILVERTON. I do not know. You have Cardinal Pole and the Earl of Essex, both tolerant men in the midst of bigots.

ELLESMERE. Well, as you said, Milverton, we shall never push off if we once get aground on this subject.

DUNSFORD. I am in fault: so I will take upon myself to bring you quite away from the Reformation. I have been thinking of that comparison in the essay of the present with the past. Such comparisons seem to me very useful, as they best enable us to understand our own times. And, then, when we have ascertained the state and tendency of our own age, we ought to strive to enrich it with those qualities which are complementary to its own. Now with all this toleration, which delights you so much, dear Milverton, is it not an age rather deficient in caring about great matters ?

MILVERTON. If you mean great speculative mat

ters, I might agree with you; but if you mean what I should call the greatest matters, such as charity, humanity, and the like, I should venture to differ with you, Dunsford.

DUNSFORD. I do not like to see the world indifferent to great speculative matters. I then fear shallowness and earthiness.

MILVERTON. It is very difficult to say what the world is thinking of now. It is certainly wrong to suppose that this is a shallow age because it is not driven by one impulse. As civilization advances, it becomes more difficult to estimate what is going on, and we set it all down as confusion. Now there is not one "great antique heart," whose beatings we can count, but many impulses, many circles of thought in which men are moving, many objects. Men are not all in the same state of progress, so cannot be moved in masses as of old. At one time chivalry urged all men then the Church and the phenomena were few, simple, and broad; or at least they seem so in history.

ELLESMERE. Very true: still I agree somewhat with Dunsford, that men are not agitated as they used to be by the great speculative questions. I account for it in this way, that the material world has opened out before us and we cannot but look at that, and must play with it and work at it. would say, too, that philosophy had been found out; and there is something in that. Still I think if it were not for the interest now attaching to material things, great intellectual questions, not

I

exactly of the old kind, would arise and agitate the world.

MILVERTON. There is one thing in my mind that may confirm your view. I cannot but think that the enlarged view we have of the universe must in some measure damp personal ambition. What is it to be King, Sheik, Tetrarch, or Emperor, over a bit of a little bit. Macbeth's speech, "we'd jump the life to come," is a thing a man with modern lights, however madly ambitious, would hardly utter.

DUNSFORD. Religious lights, Milverton ?

MILVERTON. Of course not, if he had them: but I meant scientific lights. Sway over our fellowcreatures, at any rate anything but mental sway, has shrunk into less proportions.

ELLESMERE. I have been looking over the essay. I think you may put in somewhere that that age would probably be the greatest in which there was the least difference between great men and the people in general: when the former were only neglected, not hunted down.

MILVERTON. Yes.

. ELLESMERE. You are rather lengthy here about the cruelties to be found in history: but we are apt to forget these matters.

MILVERTON. They always press upon my mind. DUNSFORD. And on mine. I do not like to read

much of history for that very reason. I get so sick

at heart about it all.

MILVERTON. Ah, yes, history is a stupendous thing. To read it is like looking at the stars: we