feel the charms of beautiful scenery and stimulate the love for natural history do us a service which, if not the highest, is perhaps the most unalloyed by any mixture of evil. Kingsley would have avoided many errors and the utterance of much unsatisfactory dogmatism if he could have limited himself to such a duty. But to do so he must have been a man of narrower sympathies, less generous temper, and less hearty hatred of all evil influences. We could hardly wish him to have been other than he was, though we may wish that he had developed under more favourable circumstances. The weaknesses which marred his work and led to the exhaustion of his faculties were to be regretted, but were not such as to diminish the affection deserved by so cordial a nature. He is more or less responsible for those offensive persons, the Viking and the muscular Christian. The Viking, I suppose, must have been partly a humbug like other products of graphic history, and too much has been made of his supposed share in our ancestry. Kingsley had a feminine tenderness and an impatient excitability indicative of a different ancestry. He admires the huge, fullblooded barbarians, but only belongs to them on one side. He is as near to his delicate as to his muscular heroes, to Francis as to Amyas Leigh, and to the morbid poet, Vavasour, as to the more vigorous Tom Thurnall. In these days, when the Viking or Berserker element seems to be dying out of our literature, even this qualified and external worship of masculine vigour is valuable. There is something hectic and spasmodic about it, though it implies a homage to more healthy ideals. Kingsley, at any rate, hated the namby-pamby, and he tried, with too obvious an effort, to be simple and unaffected. His aims were thoroughly noble, though marred by his want of reserve and of intellectual stamina. He was too timid or too impatient to work out consistent theories or acquire much depth of conviction. But with all his shortcomings he succeeded in giving forcible utterance to truths of vital importance, and brought vividly before our minds problems which most urgently press for a solution more satisfactory than he was able to reach. Godwin and Shelley THE poetic and the metaphysical temperaments are generally held to be in some sense incompatible. Poets, indeed, have often shown the highest speculative acuteness, and philosophy often implies a really poetical imagination. But the necessary conditions of successful achievement in the two cases are so different that the combination of the two kinds of excellence in one man must be of excessive rarity. No man can be great as a philosopher who is incapable of brooding intensely and perseveringly over an abstract problem, absolutely unmoved by the emotion which is always seeking to bias his judgment; whilst a poet is great in virtue of the keenness of his sensibility to the emotional aspect of every decision of the intellect. For the one purpose it is essential to keep the passions apart from the intellect: for the other, to transfuse intellect with passion. A few of our metaphysicians have ventured into poetical utterance. Berkeley wrote a really fine copy of verses, and Hobbes struck out one famous couplet And like a star upon her bosom lay His beautiful and shining golden head— in a translation of Homer, otherwise not easily readable. Scott proposed to publish the whole poetical works of David Hume, consisting of a remarkable quatrain composed in an inn at Carlisle. I Here chicks in eggs for breakfast sprawl, The only exception to this rule in our literature seems to be Coleridge. Coleridge undoubtedly exercised a vast influence upon the speculation of his countrymen, whilst his poems possess merits of the rarest order. It is more worthy of remark that his poetry is most successful where it is most independent of his philosophy. In Christabel, The Ancient Mariner, or Kubla Khan, we can only discover the philosopher by the evidence of a mind richly stored with associations, and by the tendency to discover a mystical significance in natural objects. Some people would urge that his I Hume's biographer, Mr. Hill Burton, gives some other verses attributed to Hume; but the impartial critic must admit that they are of inferior merit. philosophy would have been improved if it had been equally free from poetical elements. In any case, Coleridge is an example of a combination of diverse excellence not easily to be paralleled. Another poet was supposed by some of his admirers to have similar claims upon our respect. Shelley seems to have thought himself as well fitted for abstract speculation as for poetry; and his widow declared that, had he lived longer, he might have "presented to the world a complete theory of mind; a theory to which Berkeley, Coleridge, and Kant would have contributed; but more simple, unimpugnable, and entire than the systems of those writers." The phrase is by itself enough to prove Mrs. Shelley's incompetence to form any opinion as to her husband's qualifications for this stupendous task. It is not by forming a patchwork of Berkeley, Kant, and Coleridge that a "complete theory of mind” is likely to be evolved; nor does it appear that Shelley really knew much about either of the latter writers; certainly, he has not given the smallest proof of a power of original speculation in such matters. And yet, though it would be absurd to treat Shelley seriously as an originator of philosophic thought or even as a moderately profound student of philosophy, there is no doubt that his poetry contains a philosophical element |