CHAP. XI.

THE HEBREW COMMONWEALTH.

"Our fathers find their graves in our short memories, and sadly tell us how we may be buried in our survivors. The Egyptian mummies which Cambyses or time has spared, avarice now consumeth; Mizraom cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for balsams." SIR THOMAS BROWN.

Many of the legal and moral rules which obtain in the most civilized communities rest upon brute custom, and not upon manly reason. They have been taken from preceding generations without examination, and are deeply tinctured with barbarity. They arose in early ages, and in the infancy of the human mind, partly from caprices of the fancy (which are nearly omnipotent with barbarians), and partly from the imperfect apprehension of general utility, which is the consequence of narrow experience. And so great and numerous are the obstacles to the diffusion of ethical truth, that these monstrous or crude productions of childish and imbecile intellect have been cherished and perpetuated, through ages of advancing knowledge, to the comparatively enlightened period in which it is our happiness to live."

AUSTIN-Province of Jurisprudence Determined.

NEXT to the British Museum, the places which especially arrested the attention of Peter Jones, during his visit to the metropolis, were the Houses of Legislature, the Courts of Law, Westminster Abbey and the Tower. He paced Westminster Hall, saw the Lord Chancellor presiding in the Court of Chancery, and the Judges in the Queen's Bench, the Common Pleas, and the Exchequer; and from the neighbourhood of Westminster Abbey he walked to the neighbourhood of St. Paul's, searching in a crowded vicinity for the brick buildings called Doctors' Commons, the homestead of the Ecclesiastical Courts.

This contrast brought vividly before him that separate jurisdiction of Church and State, the offspring of rude and remote times, which renders the Law of England so strange a compound of contradictory forms and different modes of administration; and created a longing in his mind to become familiar with the civil and ecclesiastical history of his country, that he might be able to trace institutions to their sources, and get at the reason of all that he saw.

Returning to Westminster Abbey, he was struck with the exquisite symmetry of Henry the Seventh's Chapel. Although his taste was uneducated, and much, therefore, of the beautiful escaped his observation, Peter Jones had a natural eye for the perception of grace in the works of his fellow-men; and what he missed, on a first visit, seldom failed to strike him on a second. Admiration seized him as he gazed on the lofty arches, the tracery, pendants, and ornamental work of the chapel-a noble adjunct to a fine and venerable edifice; and "pensive sadness" converted mere admiration into dumb emotion, as he gazed around, and saw those memorials of kings, queens, statesmen, warriors, orators, and poets, which constitute Westminster Abbey the chief Mausoleum of Great Britain. And amongst all those buried worthies, there was not one, in Peter's estimation, (reflecting general opinion,) that conferred such honour on the place as the bones of Newton. Peter Jones did not dare to entertain the hope that he would ever be able to read-far less to master-the works of Newton. Yet his spirit did homage to his memory; for he felt that the great philosopher had been instrumental in raising Him-even Peter Jones -to his present rank, as a rational creature. Yes! murmured Peter Jones, I am a poor, insignificant,

unknown fraction of the population of Great Britain; yet I share in the vast legacy left by Newton to the world and to man. For me, as well as for humanity, did he throw wider open the door of the universe, and exalt my conceptions of the Being that is throned in eternity

"Nature and Nature's laws, lay hid in night:
God said, let Newton be, and all was light."

No!-not all light," else would the work of the human Intellect be achieved, and there would be nothing left for it but to lie down, and sleep in peace. But enough to guide us on our journey through space and time, to point to the sources of those powers of nature, some of which have been secured to the service of man, and others remain to be detected and appropriated; and enough to enable us to carry on our survey of that trackless universe, stretched in bright yet dim obscurity before us!

At this moment, Peter Jones obtained a key to the solution of a problem which had vexed and tormented his mind. He had been trying to look back on the Elder World of Human Life. He had seen evidence of the perfection to which the ancient Egyptians had carried arts and manufactures three thousand years ago; and he began to be partly surprised and partly distressed, by the fact, that not only our couches, chairs, porcelain, but even our customs, and portions of our institutions, are but rude copies of very antique models. It is only since the commencement of the present century that the British Government has been able to obtain a systematic CENSUS of the people, although the practice of it was a portion of the social government of ancient Egypt. And while Peter Jones was admiring the Elgin and Phigalean marbles, he was partly offended

by the thought, that modern artists, with all the appliances of modern civilization, gaze upon them with a sort of fond despair, acknowledging their incapacity to rival the grace, beauty, and life, which beam from mutilated fragments, carved by Grecian artists, two thousand years ago. Westminster Abbey, with Henry the Seventh's Chapel, added to the intensity of the feeling of disappointment, with which Peter Jones compared ancient and modern ages. These noble Gothic edifices, England's antiquities, her historical evidences, were the work of those centuries which we deem rude, turbulent, and "dark;" and yet modern architects deem themselves to have accomplished a great work, when they can contrive a successful imitation! Wherein, then, does man the modern, differ from the man of former days? Is the Race substantially one whit farther advanced than it was hundreds or even thousands of years ago?

The walk amongst the tombs and monuments of Westminster Abbey solved for Peter Jones the distressing problem. Here reposed the bones of Isaac Newton-there was the statue of James Watt. These ancient Egyptians rivalled us in much of manufacturing skill, and were a NATION when Britain was a forest, the retreat of savage beasts and men. But they worshipped those hieroglyphic characters, the meaning of which we are now deciphering, and they trembled before the agencies of the natural world; while we have the printing press and the steam engine. The facile Greeks built noble temples, carved exquisite statues, and were versant in speculative subtlety, but they peopled the rivers, the woods, the hills, the earth, the air, the ocean, with gods in human form; while before the light of our science ghosts, fairies, and witches fly, stars reveal their

secrets, and rocks tell us of what took place on the earth ere there was a man to till the ground. The stern old Romans, conquerors of the world, started back with terror from the spot struck with the lightning, fencing it round as sacred to the deity, whose wrath it indicated, while we have seized the electric fluid, and transmit it at our pleasure to carry our thoughts! The world is old, very old, yet is the world but in its infancy. Gazing backward to remote times, and endeavouring to snatch a glimpse of empires that flourished and fell ere history arose to note their deeds, we might fancy that the human race has well nigh run out its career. Surveying the world that now is, and the career on which civilization has just entered, we cannot resist the conclusion that the human race has a great work to achieve, a mighty destiny to accomplish, of which, in our day, we see but the dawning. Each step in history seems a final one; and all previous empires have been broken up, as if darkness and the day of doom had come. Yet out of successive ruins have arisen successive and expanding powers. Matter cannot be annihilated, neither can mind; and all that is worth preservation in intellect and morals becomes immortal-that only perishes which has served its purpose; and it dies because it is worthy of death. This thought cheered the mind of Peter Jones-he belonged to a race essentially progressive.

Thus musing, he came to the CORONATION CHAIR preserved in Westminster Abbey, and examined, with a kind of "curious contempt," the rude stone enclosed within it, said to have been the one on which the kings of Scotland were crowned at Scone, and which Edward I. brought with him, as a token of his subjugation of the northern portion of the kingdom.