agriculturist in search of a farm would direct his attention far more profitably to the prairies, or the valleys of New Zealand, than towards the hoary summits of the Grampians.

The same question was revived on a more recent occasion by the proposal for supplying water to Manchester from Thirlmere. A great city must be secured from drought; but the invasion of one of the few districts of the kingdom, which are still preserved inviolate for the lover of nature, was a lamentable necessity. Mr. Mill has enforced the arguments urged by Mr. Forster against the dreaded projects of the engineer in an admirable passage :

A world from which solitude is extirpated is a very poor ideal. Solitude, in the sense of being often alone, is essential to any depth of meditation or of character; and solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations, which are not only good for the individual, but which society could ill do without. Nor is there much satisfaction in contemplating the world with nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature; with every rood of land brought into cultivation which is capable of growing food for human beings; every flowery waste or natural pasture ploughed up, all quadrupeds and birds which are not domesticated for man's use exterminated as his rivals for food, every hedgerow or superfluous tree rooted out, and scarcely a place left where a wild shrub or flower could grow without being eradicated as a weed in the name of improved agriculture.

We are passing through a phase of sore discouragement for British industry and commerce, a time when gaunt hunger and brooding discontent are stalking abroad, a time when the inequalities of fortune embitter the miseries of commercial failure and discredit.

Those who have seen their resources dwindling away in a succession of adverse years may perhaps find some comfort in the conviction that many disappointments await the founders of great fortunes.

The sumptuous mansion, lately risen from the ground, which has no associations, and cannot be occupied without a change in the habits and customs of a lifetime, is often found a burden rather than a satisfaction to its possessor.

Mr. Carlyle has

Cur invidendis postibus et novo
Sublime ritu moliar atrium ?

Cur valle permutem Sabinâ
Divitias operosiores ? 4

depicted with powerful touches the superior felicity of a life begun and ended in the same station, and amid the scenes which have been familiar from infancy:

The wealth of a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by. The herdsman in his poor clay shealing, where his very cow and dog are friends to him, and not a cataract but carries memories for him, and not a mountain-top but nods old recognition; his life, all encircled in blessed mother's arms, is it poorer than Slick's, with the ass-loads of yellow metal on his back?

4 Horace, Odes, Book III. Ode I.

A trained and philosophic mind finds deep pleasures in a contemplative existence. To the active, anxious, practical man of business a life of ease can seldom prove a life of happiness. He regrets, when it is too late, the power, authority, and influence he formerly wielded, and which he lost by his retirement from the sphere of his successful labours. The hopes he would fain rest on his successor are dashed aside by repeated examples of riches misapplied. The inheritance of wealth has rarely proved the source of pure and unalloyed happiness. It exposes the feeble to temptation; it casts on stronger natures a heavy load of responsibility.

THOMAS BRASSEY.

THE MIDWAY INN.

"The hidden but the common thought of all.'

THE thoughts I am about to set down are not my thoughts, for, as my friends say, I have given up the practice of thinking, or it may be, as my enemies say, I never had it. They are the thoughts of an acquaintance who thinks for me. I call him an acquaintance, though I pass as much of my time with him as with my nearest and dearest; perhaps at the club, perhaps at the office, perhaps in metaphysical discussion, perhaps at billiards-what does it matter? Thousands of men in town have such acquaintances, in whose company they spend, by necessity or custom, half the sum of their lives. It is not rational doubtless; but then 'Consider, sir,' said the great talking philosopher, 'should we become purely rational, how our friendships would be cut off. We form many such with bad men because they have agreeable qualities, or may be useful to us. We form many such by mistake, imagining people to be different from what they really are.' And he goes on complacently to observe that we shall either have the satisfaction of meeting these gentlemen in a future state, or be satisfied without meeting them.

For my part, I do not feel that the scheme of future happiness, which ought by rights to be in preparation for me, will be at all interfered with by my not meeting again the man I have in my mind. To have seen him in the flesh is sufficient for me. In the spirit I cannot imagine him; the consideration is too subtle; for unlike the little man who had (for certain) a little soul,' I don't believe he has a soul at all.

He is middle-aged, rich, lethargic, sententious, dogmatic, and, in short, is the quintessence of the commonplace. I need not say, therefore, that he is credited by the world with unlimited common-sense. And for once the world is right. He has nothing original about him, save so much of sin as he may have inherited from our first parents; there is no more at the back of him than at the back of a lookingglass—indeed less, for he has not a grain of quicksilver; but, like the looking-glass, he reflects. Having nothing else to do, he hangs, as it were, on the wall of the world, and mirrors it for me as it unconsciously passes by him, not, however, as in a glass darkly, but with

singular clearness. His vision is never disturbed by passion or prejudice; he has no enthusiasm and no illusions. Nor do I believe he has ever had any. If the noblest study of mankind is man, my friend has devoted himself to a high calling; the living page of human life has been his favourite and indeed, for these many years, his only reading. And for this he has had exceptional opportunities. Always a man of wealth and leisure, he has never wasted himself in that superficial observation which is the only harvest of foreign travel. He despises it, and in relation to travellers is wont to quote the famous parallel of the copper wire, which grows the narrower by going further.' A confirmed stay-at-home, he has mingled much in society of all sorts, and exercised a keen but quite unsympathetic observation. His very reserve in company (though, when he catches you alone, he is a button-holder of great tenacity) encourages free speech in others; they have no more reticence in his presence than if he were the butler. He has belonged to no cliques, and thereby escaped the greatest peril which can beset the student of human nature. A man of genius, indeed, in these days is almost certain, sooner or later, to become the centre of a mutual admiration society; but the person I have in my mind is no genius, nor anything like one, and he thanks Heaven for it. To an opinion of his own he does not pretend, but his views upon the opinions of other people he believes to be infallible. I have called him dogmatic, but that does not at all express the absolute certainty with which he delivers judgment. I know no more,' he says, 'about the problems of human life than you do' (taking me as an illustration of the lowest prevailing ignorance), ‘but I know what everybody is thinking about them.' He is didactic, and therefore often dull, and will eventually, no doubt, become one of the greatest bores in Great Britain. At present, however, he is worth knowing; and I propose to myself to be his Boswell, and to introduce him-or, at least, his views to other people. I have entitled them the Midway Inn, partly from my own inveterate habit of story-telling, but chiefly from an image of his own, by which he once described to me, in his fine egotistic rolling style, the position he seems to himself to occupy in the world.

When I was a boy, he said [which I don't believe he ever was], I had a long journey to take between home and school. Exactly midway there was a hill with an Inn upon it, at which we changed horses. It was a point to which I looked forward with very different feelings when going and returning. In the one case for I hated school-it seemed to frown darkly on me, and from that spot the remainder of the way was dull and gloomy; in the other case, the sun seemed always glinting on it, and the rest of the road was as a fair avenue that leads to Paradise. The innkeeper received us with equal hospitality on both occasions, and it was quite evident did not

care one farthing in which direction we were tending. He would stand in front of his house, jingling his money-our money-in his pockets, and watch us depart with the greatest serenity, whether we went east or west. I thought him at one time the most genial of Bonifaces (for it was his profession to wear a smile), and at another a mere mocker of human woe. When I grew up, I perceived that he was a philosopher.

And now I keep the Midway Inn myself, and watch from the hill-top the passengers come and go-some loth, some willing, like myself of old-and listen to their talk in the coffee-room; or sometimes in a private parlour, where, though they speak low and gravely, their converse is still unrestrained, because, you see, I am the Landlord.

Sometimes they speak of Death and the Hereafter, of which the child they buried yesterday knows more than the wisest of them, and more than Shakespeare knew. The being totally ignorant of the subject does not indeed (as you may perhaps have observed in other matters) deter some of them from speaking of it with great confidence; but the views of a minority would quite surprise you, and this minority is growing-coming to majority. Every day I see an increase of the doubters. It is not a question of the Orthodox and the Infidel, you must understand, at all, though that is assuming great proportions; but there is every day more uncertainty among them, and, what is much more noteworthy, more dissatisfaction.

Years ago, when a hardy Cambridge scholar dared to publish his doubts of an eternal punishment overtaking the wicked, an orthodox professor of the same college took him (theologically) by the throat. 'You are destroying,' he cried, 'the hope of the Christian.' But this is not the hope I speak of (as loosing and losing its hold upon men's minds); I mean the real hope, the hope of Heaven.

When I used to go to church-for my Inn is too far removed from it to admit of my attendance there nowadays-matters were very different. Heaven and Hell were, in the eyes not only of our congregation, but of those who hung about the doors in the summer sun, or even played leap-frog over the grave-stones, as distinct alternatives as the east and west highways on each side of my Inn. If you did not go one way, you must go the other; and not only so, but an immense desire was felt by very many to go in the right direction. Now I perceive it is not so. A considerable number of highway passengers, though even they are less numerous than of old, are still studious—that is in their aspirations—to avoid taking (shall I say delicately) the lower road; but only a few, comparatively, are solicitous to reach the goal of the upper.

Let me once more observe that I am speaking of the ordinary passengers-those who travel by the mail. Of the persons who are convinced that there never was an Architect of the Universe, and that Man sprang from the Mollusc, I know little or nothing: they mostly