to us the vast ocean of moral and intellectual being such as it really is, subject to æons of rise and fall, and not a steady onward current continually gaining ground; and, by so doing, administers a reasonable check to that ambitious tendency which elevates but often misleads us-an undiscriminating confidence in the destiny and powers of our species.

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A VISIT TO MALTA.

1857.

WHEN I visited the island, it was under the government of my old acquaintance Sir William Reid, the well-known author of the Law of Storms.' A noble specimen he was of the British veteran soldier of the better stamp. In saying this, I of course imply that he possessed, in addition to a high sense of honour, a courtesy of manner, gentleness, and consideration for others, which are essential to my conception of that character. But these, in him, were combined with somewhat rarer qualities. Possessed of varied accomplishments, and distinguished for general scientific knowledge, besides that of the very learned branch of his profession to which he belonged, he was withal a man of singular modesty ; almost too deferent to the opinion of others in trifles, and too diffident of his own; though he had a fund of quiet obstinacy, too, on points which appeared to him to involve a principle. He had the warmest love of justice in the abstract and (as happens not unfrequently with men of his stamp) when he judged wrongly, it was generally from the strong sense of some ulterior right, interfering with his perception of the immediate right. His sense of duty towards those whose government he administered, amounted almost to a passion: and so did his hatred of oppression exercised, or arrogance exhibited, towards them; the first happily rare in English dependencies, the latter only too common. I never saw his calm temper

moved except when speaking on that subject; and then the shrunken cheek would flush, and the dim eye dilate, as he dwelt on some outrage, as he deemed it, in word or conduct, committed towards the natives of his island, especially by persons placed too high for his authority to restrain. All that he could do for the Maltese, by encouraging their efforts at education, establishing libraries, promoting agriculture, and so forth, was most zealously performed; and it was evident that the Maltese loved him in return: but he wanted that versatility of mind and knowledge of men which were necessary to make him intimate with them; he laboured under the deficiency for which his countrymen are satirised, of enjoying or comprehending humour-that great solvent of antipathies and incompatibilities between men of different races. He had, too, another deficiency, far more common and less excusable, in men called to the multifarious duties of our foreign empire: to the best of my recollection he spoke no language but his own. There was something melancholy in the sight of that stooping and feeble, though gentleman-like, figure, with the halt of an old Peninsular wound, occupying in solitary grandeur (he was broken in health, and had been left lately a widower) a corner or two of that stateliest of palaces, built by the most luxurious bachelors of Europe for their Grand Master, the president of their noble club. But though ill calculated from health and temperament to keep up what is called the dignity of a governor, he was not the less a fitting representative of England's rule in its aspects of beneficence and equity, and consideration for the governed. It was also difficult to remember, when on familiar terms with him, that this quiet and unassuming man was in reality a singularly original observer, almost a discoverer, in science. During his long residence in the Bermudas,

he had wrought out in his own mind, and almost ripened, that theory of storms which seems to have been received as one of the latest acquisitions of the human intellect. It was amusing to go up with old King Eolus to his lofty citadel, the observatory at the top of the palace, far above the house roofs and church towers of rock-built Valetta, and hear him descant on weather, past and future. The wind, he would explain to my ignorance, is at SE., for instance, with a touch of sirocco-I am quite uncertain whether I remember my lesson accurately, but from certain calculable causes, it will veer in the night to the S., and so to the W., and in forty-eight hours we shall have something like a gale from the N. And as he said, so it would come to pass.

Sir William was a great reader of Scripture; and as some veterans are said to be specially partial to the warlike books of Joshua and Kings, so he, for his part, had certainly a predilection for those chapters which contain the narrative of St. Paul's tempestuous voyage. The first place he took me to in Malta was the well-known little bay, or rather creek, known by the name of the Saint. Under such guidance as his, the absolute and unmistakeable identity of the spot with that described in the Acts flashed irresistibly upon the mind, and all sceptical notions about an Adriatic Melita' were dispelled at once. There was the very point on which a vessel, driven along the northern side of the island by stress of 'Euroclydon,' and finding the precise soundings specified in the narrative, would naturally be driven. There was the creek with a shore,' almost the only beach of sand on that rocky line of coast. There was the place where two seas,' caused by the protrusion of an insulated rock just in the entrance of the bay, 'met,' close to the 'shore' aforesaid. Under his description, every incident of the tale seemed as if enacted before the

eye. We scarcely needed, to excite our imaginations, the singular experience which befel a friend of mine on this spot, when a serpent dropped from a fagot of brushwood which he had casually taken up. There could be no doubt in our minds that the Maltese had established a right to their old patron, whose favour they have thought proper to barter, of late years, for the more distinguished but less appropriate protectorate of the Virgin.

Another time we drove to Città Vecchia, the old capital and metropolitan seat, supposed, on mere guess of course, but not improbable guess, to have been inhabited by the 'chief man of the island whose name was Publius,' whose household expanded, according to tradition, into the early church of Malta, cut off in the dark ages by the Saracen irruption from the opposite continent. And thence we proceeded to the 'back' of Malta, its precipitous southwestern shore, rarely visited by the lazy denizens of the city. Malta, both in its external construction and in a geographical point of view, is a singular counterpart of the Isle of Wight. Its beds of modern limestone and shale dip north-eastward, sinking under the sea at Valetta and the neighbouring bays, which may represent Newport and Ryde. They crop out on the opposite or south-western coast, which consequently falls in a precipitous escarpment, from a height of 700 or 800 feet, exposing sections of the entire stratification of the island; sandstones and softer beds forming a little fringe of ' undercliff,' and resting on a fundamental formation of semi-crystalline limestone, broken into many a headland and cavern by the dash of the Libyan sea. The landscape of Malta is dull no doubt, featureless and tame; but there are minds on which colour makes a deeper impression than form; and there is something in the contrast between that burnt yellow soil, the intense white of the limestone