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of doing this before any true progress could be hoped in metaphysical (or indeed in any) science was first clearly and powerfully urged by Bacon: he first showed the mighty sway over the human mind of those idols or prejudices which seem almost inherent in our nature: it was Locke who most triumphantly overthrew their wide and fatal dominion.

In 1690 Locke published his two Treatises on Civil Government,' which originally sprang out of his refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's once-celebrated book entitled 'Patriarcha,' an elaborate attempt to prove that the royal power is derived from the paternal authority, and is, consequently, like that species of rule from which it sprang, naturally unlimited. Filmer's proposition leads immediately to despotism, or rather to the impossibility of lawfully resisting, on the part of the people, the encroachments of despotism. The refutation of Filmer is more particularly confined to the first part of Locke's essay, in which he treats the question of the original right and origin of monarchical power, and inquires into the foundation of that right.

Having thus cleared the way, he proceeds to investigate and lay down the true principles on which he conceives all human society to be founded. He first discusses the state of nature, and the rights and obligations of men antecedent to the voluntary establishment of society. He then treats, in an admirable and conclusive manner, of the nature and rights of property, exhibiting in this part of his work a striking contrast to those authors whose useless subtleties and unnecessarily refined definitions had obscured a subject on which it is so indispensable for all men to form true and distinct conceptions. Labour he considers to constitute the true source of property, and to establish a natural and indefeasible right of the individual to the produce of his own exertions. He then traces the establishment of all government to the original or implied compact and consent of the members forming the primitive community, or by an uninterrupted adhesion of the members beginning from that period and remaining unbroken. In these reasonings he chiefly follows the arguments of Hooker, in his Ecclesiastical Polity.' The remainder of the work goes on to develop Locke's ideas - all of them bold, and some few perhaps untenable-respecting the rights and principles of communities: and though he generally agrees with Hooker, whose noble treatise has left very little to future investigators, at least as far as the limited nature of its subject extends, it is impossible not to be profoundly struck with the clear, acute, solid, and simple manner of his reasonings, or with the vigorous, idiomatic, and unpedantic style in which the arguments are conveyed.

This subject has been so fully and frequently discussed since Locke's time by men who have been able to throw upon it the light derived from practical experience of the real action of principles

which in his time had only begun to be investigated in theory, that this work will perhaps in future be rather referred to than studied as embodying all the arguments and proofs adducible on this subject; but however this may be, this portion of Locke's works must ever be considered as sufficient of itself to place his name very high among the ablest expounders and the boldest defenders of human rights and liberties.

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In the next work which we have to notice he will be found in a character not less worthy of our gratitude and respect: this is the Essay on Education.' "In this work," says Hallam, "which may be reckoned an introduction to that on the Conduct of the Understanding,' since the latter is but a scheme of that education an adult person should give himself, he has uttered, to say the least, more good sense on the subject than will be found in any preceding writer. Locke was not like the pedants of his own or other ages, who think that to pour their wordy book-learning into the memory is the true discipline of childhood. The culture of the intellectual and moral faculties in their most extensive sense, the health of the body, the accomplishments which common utility or social custom has rendered valuable, enter into his idea of the best model of education, conjointly at least with any knowledge that can be imparted by books."

Perhaps the most striking and not the least valuable peculiarity of Locke's treatise is the immense influence which he assigns in it to the power of habit in forming and modifying the characters of men. That he has a little over-stated and exaggerated the amount of this influence is incontestable, but we ought to remember that the effects of such an error, if applied in practice, could only be innocent, if not even beneficial. It is, of course, an error into which the theorist on education is always peculiarly liable to fall, and one which hardly a single writer on the subject of education has altogether escaped. Locke had no personal opportunities for studying, in the only way in which it can effectually be studied, the nature and characters of children. Those who have devoted themselves to this deeply interesting subject are unanimous in their opinion that the characters of children will often be found, even where all external circumstances are as far as can be appreciated identically the same, to retain intrinsic differences which can only be explained by the supposition that there exist at every age of life many and important varieties of character and intellectual constitution, in modifying which, education, however great its power, is very inefficient. Locke's system of education has been by many condemned as unreasonably severe; but those who complain of it should bear in mind that he never fails to inculcate the indispensable necessity of the feeling of disgrace as an element in all punishment and correction; a condition which effectually excludes the possibility of undue severity on the part of the instructor;

for the human mind has so instinctive an appreciation of what is just, that severity pushed beyond a certain limit would infallibly defeat its own object.

Nothing can surpass the soundness and good sense displayed in the infinite multitude of minute observations respecting the physical, moral, and intellectual treatment of children, with which this excellent treatise abounds: so numerous, indeed, are they, and so valuable, that, though few branches of science have been more seduously cultivated, particularly of late years, than education, the best writers on the subject would seem to have done little more than complete and extend the plan laid down by Locke, whose whole work "bespeaks an intense, though calm, love of truth and goodness; a quality which few have possessed more fully, or known so well how to exert, as this admirable philosopher."

Besides these works, Locke was the author of an 'Essay on the Reasonableness of Christianity,' and also of two vindications of the last-mentioned production, which we shall not stop to analyse, as the nature of its subject places it rather in the department of theology; and also because his reputation is rather founded on the works which we have noticed more at length.

The Treatise on the Conduct of the Understanding,' to which we have more than once adverted as having been intended to form an introduction to his great work, did not appear till after his death.

It is delightful to reflect that this great writer, whose mind was so acute and so vigorous, and who devoted all his energies to the furtherance of truth and goodness, was as amiable and venerable a man as he was an admirable author. His life was calm, happy, and laborious; and at his death, which happened in 1704, he left behind him, in his immortal works, a monument worthy of the continuer of Bacon, and of the friend of Newton.

CHAPTER XII.

THE WITS OF QUEEN ANNE.

Artificial School-Pope's early Studies-Pope compared to Dryden-Essay on Criticism-Rape of the Lock-Mock-heroic Poetry-Temple of Fame, &c. -Translation of Homer-Essay on Man-Miscellanies-The Dunciad→→ -Satires and Epistles. Edward Young-English Melancholy-The Univer. sal Passion-Night Thoughts-Young's Style-Wit.

POETRY, in order to address itself with success to the sympathies of the reader, must necessarily speak the language of the class for which it is written; and the more limited that class, the feebler, the

more monotonous will be the accents of the poet. Shakspeare wrote for all mankind; and every human being, whatever his age and country, will find in Shakspeare's works matter of interest, of instruction and delight. Pope and Swift wrote for an artificial and conventional society-not exclusively, it is true, for a court, but for what was then emphatically called the Town; and their writings speak the language not of the world, but of the city. The reader will find in them incessant strokes of worldly good sense and acuteness, a delicate and polished irony, a consummate neatness and distinctness of diction; but he will look in vain for any of the higher attributes of creative intellect: he will find a good deal of wit and ridicule; but he will find neither true passion, true humanity, true pathos, nor true humour; for humour is to wit what the pertinent, genial, and creative power of the galvanic pile is to the momentary and destructive shock of electricity; it is not the ray which dazzles, but the heat which glows and animates. Thus wit is a quality immeasurably inferior to humour: indeed, humour is itself the fulfilment and completion of wit, and the possession of the former quality necessarily implies the existence of the latter. Of mere wit, a single scene of Shakspeare often contains as much, scattered with a profuse and apparently unconscious hand, as would furnish forth whole libraries of the neat and antithetic literature of this period of Queen Anne: but in Shakspeare we remark not the wit, for its brilliancy is eclipsed by the much higher quality of humour; while in Pope or Swift or Addison the intellectual ingenuity appeals the more directly to our attention because it is unaccompanied by the higher quality.

At the head of this artificial school in poetry long remained Alexander Pope, born in 1688, and sprung, like so many of the most illustrious men of England, from the middle or citizen class. His constitutional ill health, and the weakness and deformity of his frame, precluded him from pursuing any of the usual paths to distinction, and in a manner assisted in giving to his mind its poetical direction. A great part of his youth was spent in the green shades of Windsor Forest, where his father possessed a country-house. Under circumstances so favourable to the development of the intellect—solitude, forced sedentariness, and that delicacy of organisation which so often accompanies physical weakness-Pope very early gave earnest of his future poetical powers. Self-educated, of immense literary industry, and of a character singularly reflective and sensitive, he had obtained literary reputation of no mean value at a period of life when boys in general are thinking of little else than robbing orchards and playing truant from school. Of this precocity of poetical development he often speaks himself:

"As yet a child, and all unknown to fame,

I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came."

At the age of sixteen Pope had already tried his strength in

various attempts of different kinds of verse, among the rest in the drama-a species of writing for which his genius so little qualified him, that we have probably no reason to regret that his good sense induced him to destroy these youthful essays in scenic composition. Unsuccessful as he probably felt them to be, such attempts could not fail to strengthen and practise him in the art of expression, to educate his ear, and to give delicacy and variety to his versification. Like the young swallow, whose instinct informs it of the period of migration, Pope had already felt the mysterious call of genius; and these uncertain efforts were but the hovering of the bird before it darts away upon its annual course the balancing of the unpractised pinion, and the fixing of the yet untried flight. His first publication was a small collection of Pastorals, which, as well as a number of imitations and translations of Chaucer, plainly indicated to the public that a new, great, and original author was about to rise upon the literary horizon. A profound and venerating admirer of the genius of his great predecessor, Dryden, it is not surprising that Pope's first literary efforts should have been made in the same direction: his boyish admiration had been gratified by the approbation of the patriarch of poetry, and by his prediction of the young acolyte's future glory; and it is no less natural that Pope's versification and style should be in some degree founded upon the practice of his illustrious predecessor. But there were essential differences between the manner of these two admirable writers-differences which must be accurately appreciated ere we can hope to form a just idea of their respective merits. In Dryden, a vigorous, careless, self-assured dexterity is perceptible, not accompanied with much passion, it is true, nor with much depth of sentiment, appealing only te the more obvious and direct sympathies of the human character, but imposing from the conscious ease which it indicates. In Pope we observe a greater degree of thought and reflection, a more refined acuteness of remark, and an almost fastidious neatness and polish of expression. Both poets are remarkable for the quality of good sense, and both are admirable for perfect clearness and distinctness of meaning; and if they sometimes fall into truisms and commonplaces, these are generally such as in themselves involve principles whose importance will excuse their frequent repetition, and are so adorned by happiness of illustration, that we forget the insipidity of the precept in the beauty of the language in which it is clothed.

Both poets are greater in the delineation of artificial life, in the analysis of human passions, human motives, and human conduct, than in the delineation of external nature, or the sympathy with unsophisticated humanity; but the force of Dryden rather consists in a kind of brave neglect of minuter shades of character, and a broad and manly touch of intellectual portrait-painting, while the figures of Pope are elaborated with the neat and discriminating

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