men's watery natures." But generally we acknowledge Englishmen to be, as compared with Germans, deficient in the widest philosophical power. Mr. Emerson looks for this as the only source of literary excellence, and finding it wanting in Englishmen, passes over their literature as a brilliant failure. He acknowledges it to have all the minor merits consistent with the absence of this highest excellence. "There is no end to the graces and amenities, wit, sensibility, and erudition of the learned class." But the artificial succor, he continues, which marks all English performance, appears in letters also; and he fears the same fault lies in their science. "English science puts humanity to the door; it wants the conviction which is the test of genius." "It stands in strong contrast with that of the Germans, those same Grecks who love analogy, and by means of their height of view preserve their enthusiasm and think for Europe." we are in a great measure preserved from an overwhelming poverty and narrowness of thought by the deep draughts we can drink from the abundant wells of German literature. But our anxiety to have practical demonstrable truths at least keeps us from a hundred delusions which, wearing the mask of sublimity, are infinitely more corrupting in their hollowness and imbecility, than a life-long study of Paley and Bentham. We can, at any rate, say that the English do not cast away their time on vague spiritual analogies, schemes of grandiloquent transcendentalism, and the inanities of spirit-rapping. We wish we could be more sure what is the point of view from which Mr. Emerson criticises us. To estimate the value of fault-finding, we must know the standard of excellence by which performance is judged. Mr. Emerson does not tell us exactly what his standard is, but we can make some guess at it when we see on what persons he bestows his praise. Most English only exception Mr. Emerson can find to the want of greatness in modern English writers, is to be discovered in the works of an author whose very name ninety-nine in a hundred will hear for the first time. Those who are acquainted with it will know it as the name of the translator of several works of Swedenborg, and the author of a book bearing the mysterious title, "The Human Body, and its Connection with Man." The following is the description of the one only writer who has been found faithful by Mr. Emerson in the fallen hierarchy of English literature: Far be it from any Englishman of the present day to deny that the English liter-readers will be surprised to hear that the ature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had a native boldness and force, a width of grasp and a depth of feeling which is only rarely rivalled in our own times. We should also be the first to acknowledge how far more truthful the tone of German thought is, how much more it attempts to embrace than what we are accustomed to in England. But then, if we acknowledge this, let us say something on the other side. Bacon and the men of his day lived in an age which cannot come twice to a nation-the age between the times of darkness, (if we please to speak of darkness only by the standard of the intellect,) of faith and love, and the times which now are, when reverence has died away, and facts are all in all. In that twilight great things were done in statesmanship, in literature, in science, and in art. But the greatness that was then visible was a greatness that contained the seeds of its own decay. The English mind did not, as Mr. Emerson seems to think, degenerate when it embraced the system of Locke; it merely followed the inevitable road on which it had entered. We cannot in these days think grandly, because we wish, above all things, to think clearly. Certainly the love of clearness and of intelligible results has in a curious manner made us suspicious of truth which we cannot instantly formularize, and we own that "Wilkinson, the editor of Swedenborg, the annotator of Fourier, and the champion of Hahnemann, has brought to metaphysics and to physiology a native vigor, with a catholic perception of relations, equal to the highest attempts, and a rhetoric like the armory of the invincible knights of old. There is in the action of his mind a long Atlantic roll not known except in deepest waters, and only lacking what centrality. If his mind does not rest in immovought to accompany such powers, a manifest able biases, perhaps the orbit is larger, and the return is not yet: but a master should inspire a confidence that he will adhere to his convictions, and give his present studies always the same high place." We need not linger any further over a book of which we have already noticed the leading features. With all its faults of exaggeration and indefinite aim, it is a on both sides of the Atlantic, and tend to promote that cordial understanding between all sections of the Anglo-Saxon race on which, in these days of despotism and confusion, the welfare of mankind so large book we most heartily welcome, glad to From Notes and Queries. IMPOSSIBILITIES OF HISTORY. "He stretched forth his right hand into the flames, and there held it so steadfast that all the people might see it burnt to a coal before his body was touched.”—P. 927, ed. Milner, London, 1837, 8vo. Or, as the passage is given in the last edition: "And when the wood was kindled, and the fire began to burn near him, he put his right hand into the flame, which he held so steadfast and immovable (saving that once with the same hand he wiped his face), that all men might see his hand burned before his body was touched." Acts and Monuments, ed. 1839, vol viii., p. 90. Burnet is more circumstantial: "When he came to the stake he prayed, and then addressed himself: and being tied to it, as the fire was kindling, he stretched forth his right hand towards the flame, never moving it, save that once he wiped his face with it, till it was burnt away, which was consumed before the fire reached his body. He expressed no disorder from the pain he was in; sometimes saying, 'That unworthy hand;' and of crying out, 'Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.' He was soon after quite burnt."-Hist. of the Reformation, vol. iii., p. 429, ed. 1825. Hume says: "He stretched out his hand, and, without betraying, either by his countenance or motions, the least sign of weakness, or even feeling, he held it in the flames till it was entirely consumed.”—Hume, vol. iv., p. 476. It is probable that Hume believed this, for while Burnet states positively as a fact, though only inferentially as a miracle, that "the heart was found entire and unconsumed among the ashes," Hume says, was pretended that his heart," &c. It I am not about to discuss the character of Cranmer: a timid man might have been roused under such circumstances into attempting to do what it is said he did. The laws of physiology and combustion show that he could not have gone beyond the attempt. If a furnace were so constructed. that a man might hold his hand in the flame without burning his body, the shock to the nervous system would deprive him of all command over muscular action before the skin could be "entirely consumed." If the hand were chained over the fire, the shock would produce death. In this case the fire was unconfined. Whoever has seen the effect of flame in the open air, must know that the vast quantity sufficient entirely to consume a human hand, must have destroyed the life of its owner; though from a peculiar disposition of the wood, the vital parts might have been protected. WAS there ever in this world such a castle; the chasm between the old and city to live in as Edinburgh? "And I forgot the clouded Forth, The gloom that saddens heaven and earth, new towns, showing its grassy slopes by day, and glittering supernaturally with lamps at night; the new town itself, like a second city spilt out of the old, fairly built of stone, and stretching downwards over new heights and hollows, with gardens intermixed, till it reaches the flats of the Forth! Then Calton Hill in the midst, Arthur's Seat looking over all, like a lion grimly keeping guard, the wooded Corstorphines lying soft on one side, and the larger Pentlands looming quiet in the distance! Let the sky be as gray and heavy as the absence of the sun can make it, and where have natural situation and the hand of man combined to exhibit such a mass of the city picturesque? And only let the sun strike out, and lo! a burst of new glories in and around. The sky blue as sapphire overhead; the waters of the Forth clear to the broad sea; the hills and the fields of Fife distinctly visible from every northern street and window; still more distant peaks on either horizon; and as day goes down, the gables and pinnacles of the old houses blazing and glancing with the setting sun! It is such a city that no one, however familiar with it, can walk out in its streets for but five minutes at any hour of the day or night, By HENRY COCKBURN. or in any state of the weather, without a 1856. new pleasure through the eye alone. We are sorry that this was all that Mr. Tennyson's experience of it enabled him to say about it. The east winds do bite there fearfully, and blow a dust of unparalleled pungency in your eyes as you cross the North Bridge; but with that single exception, unless you choose to add an incidental perfume that may not be pleasant in some streets, and the prevailing Calvinism of the whole place, what a city! Gray! why it is gray, or gray and gold, or gray and gold and blue, or gray and gold and blue and green, or gray and gold and blue and green and purple, according as the heaven pleases and you choose your ground! But take it gray, (and gray, if properly appreciated, is a fine sombre color, where is there such another gray city? The noble irregular ridge of the old town, with its main street of lofty antique houses rising gradually from Holyrood up to the craggy * Memorials of His Time. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black. "Edina! Scotia's darling seat! All hail thy palaces and towers!" Add to this the historical associations. | illustration in ancient Athens of what a Remember that this is the city of ancient town of moderate size could be and proScottish royalty; that there is not a close duce under very favorable conditions. or alley in the old town, and hardly a street That such a cluster of men as Pericles, in the new, that has not memories of the Socrates, Eschylus, Sophocles, Aristogreat or the quaint attached to it; that phanes, Plato, Alcibiades, Xenophon, and the many generations of old Scottish life others- -men of that class which we only that have passed through it have left every expect to see now far distributed over stone of it, as it were, rich with legend. space and time, nantes rari in gurgite To the English poet all this might be in- vasto-should have been all seen swimdifferent; but hear the Scottish poets: ming contemporaneously or nearly so in such a little bit of a pond as Athens was, and that this affluence in great men should have been kept up by so small a population for several generations, seems almost miraculous. The peculiar fineness of the Hellenic nerve may have had something to do with it; but the compactness of the place the circumstance of so many finely-endowed fellows being all thrown together precisely in such numbers as to have a daily sense of mutual companionship and competition this also must have had its effect. In Modern Athens the conditions of its ancient namesake are not all reproduced. To say nothing of any difference that there may be in point of original susceptibility between the modern and the ancient Athenian, is the salutation of Burns, brought from "Fitz-Eustace' heart felt closely pent; And raised his bridle hand, And, making demi-volte in air, Cried, Where's the coward that would not Modern Athens is unfortunately not a Fifty or sixty years ago, this city had the advantage of having only about eighty thousand people in it. For all comfortable, and for most good social purposes, that is about the extreme size to which a city should go. The size of London is preposterous. There can be no intimacy, no unity of interest in such a vast place. Ezekiel might be preaching in Smithfield, Camberwell might be swallowed up by an earthquake, and the people of St. John's Wood might know nothing of it till they saw it announced in the newspapers next morning. There can be no corporate life in London; since the days of the Gordon Riots it has never all been agitated simultaneously. We have an separate state, with separate interests and a separate power of legislation. There are no walls round the Edinburgh territory; nor have the Edinburgh people the privilege of making wars and concluding treaties with the rest of Great Britain, nor of meeting periodically on the Castle Esplanade to pass laws in popular assembly, and hear consummate speeches, beginning, "O men of Edinburgh!" But with many such differences, there are some similarities. Everybody knows or may know everybody else; everybody meets everybody else in the street two or three times every day; the whole town is within such a convenient compass that even to go from extremity to extremity there is no necessity for taking a cab unless it rains. It is a city capable of being simultaneously and similarly affected in all its parts; an idea administered to one knot of citizens is as good as administered to the whole community; a joke made on the Mound at noon ripples gradually to the suburbs, and into the surrounding country, before it is evening. Such is even the case now, when the population is 160,000; it was still better fifty or sixty years ago, when the population was only 80,000, and that population was more shut in within itself by the absence of telegraphs and railroads. Moreover, the eighty thousand people who were in Edinburgh fifty or sixty years ago, were people of a rather peculiar and yet rather superior mixture of sorts. There never has been any trade or manufacture to speak of in Edinburgh, nor much of the wealth or bustle that arises from trade and manufacture. For the roar of mills and factories, and for a society ranging correspondingly from the great millionaire uppermost to crowds of operatives below, all toiling in the pursuit of wealth, one must go to Glasgow. In Edinburgh, the standard of the highest income is much lower, and the standard of the lowest is perhaps higher, than in Glasgow; nor is wealth of so much relative importance in the social estimate. According to a rough, but still tolerably exhaustive classification, the society of Edinburgh, fifty or sixty years ago, as well as now, consisted of an upper stratum of lawyers and resident gentry, college professors and clergy, reposing on, but by no means separated from, a community of shopkeepers and artisans sufficient for the wants of the place. Let us glance successively at these various ingredients of Edinburgh society, adding a few particulars respecting each. (1) Lawyers and Resident Gentry.These two classes may be taken together as to a certain extent identical. From the time of the Union, such of the old nobility of Scotland as had till then remained in their native country, occupying for a certain part of the year the homely but picturesque residences of their ancestors in the old town of Edinburgh, had gradually migrated southwards, leaving but a few residuary families of their order to keep up their memory in the ancient capital of Holyrood and St. Giles. In the room of this ancient nobility, and, indeed, absorbing into it such families of the order as had remained, there had sprung up—as might have been expected from the fact that Edinburgh, though it had parted with its court and legislature, was still the seat of supreme Scottish judicature-a new aristocracy of lawyers. The lawyers-consisting, first of all, of the judges, with their incomes of several thousands a year; then of the barristers, older and younger, in practice or out of practice; and then of the numerous body of writers to the Signet, or law-agents— are now, and for the last century or more have been, the leading element in Edinburgh society. From the expense attending education for the profession, the members of it were generally scions of Scottish families of some rank and substance; and, indeed, it was not unusual for Scottish lairds or their sons to become nominally members of the Scottish bar, even when they did not intend to practise. The fact of the substitution of the legal profession for the old Scottish aristocracy, in the chief place in Edinburgh society, is typified by the circumstance that the socalled Parliament House, which is on the site of the ancient hall, where the Estates of the kingom sat when the nation made its own laws, is now the seat of the Scottish law-courts, and the daily resort of the interpreters of the laws. Any day yet, while the Courts are in session, the Parliament House, with its long oaken ante-room, where hundreds of barristers in their wigs and gowns, accompanied by writers in plainer costume, are incessantly pacing up and down, and its smaller inner chambers, where the judges on the bench, in their crimson robes, are trying cases-is the most characteristic sight in Edinburgh. There is nothing like it in Lincoln's Inn. Even now the general hour of breakfast in Edinburgh is determined by the time when the courts open in the morning; and dispersed through their homes, or at dinner parties, in the evening, it is the members of the legal profession that lead the social talk. Fifty or sixty years ago it was the same, with the addition that then the lawyers were perhaps more numerous in proportion to the rest of the community, and were more connected by birth and marriage with the Scottish nobility and lairds. (2) The Professorial and Academical Element.-As Edinburgh is a university town, as its University has always been celebrated, and as, owing to the comparative cheapness of living and education in Edinburgh, many families, after a resi dence in England or the colonies, have been attracted thither for the sake of the education of their sons, or, without going there themselves, have sent their sons there to be educated, the business of education has always been carried on there on an extensive scale. The teachers of the public and other schools have always formed a considerable and respectable |