kills reason itself,

Many a man lives

God's image; but he who kills a good book, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye. a burden to the earth; but a good book is the precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life: 'Tis true no age can restore a life, whereof perhaps there is no great loss; and revolutions of ages do not often recover the loss of a rejected truth, for the want of which whole nations 'fare the worse. We should be wary, therefore, what persecution we raise against the living labors of public men, how spill that treasured life of man preserved and stored up in books, since we see what a homicide may be thus committed, sometimes a kind of martyrdom; and if it extend to the whole impression a kind of massacre, whereof the execution ends not in the slaying an elemental life, but strikes at that ethereal and soft essence, the breath of reason itself, slays an immortality rather than a life.

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"Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed upon Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed. It was from out the rind of one apple tasted that the knowledge of good and evil, as two twins cleaving together, leaped forth into the world. And perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good and evil, that is to say, of knowing good by evil. As, therefore, the state of man now is, what wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear, without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I can not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race where that immortal garland is to be run for not without dust and heat. Assuredly we bring not innocence into the world, we bring impurity much rather. That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary. That virtue, therefore, which is but a youngling in the contempla

tion of evil, and knows not the utmost that vice promises to her followers and rejects it, is but a blank virtue, not a grace; which was the reason why our sage and serious poet Spenser (whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas) describing true temperance under the person of Guion, brings him in with his palmer through the cave of mammon and the bower of earthly bliss, that he might see and know, and yet abstain.

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"If, therefore, ye be loth to dishearten utterly and discontent, not the mercenary crew and false pretenders to learning, but the free and ingenuous sort of such as evidently were born to study, and love learning for itself, not for lucre, or any other end, but the service of God and of Truth, and perhaps that lasting fame and perpetuity of praise which God and good men have consented shall be the reward of those whose published labors advance the good of mankind; then know that so far to disturb the judgment and honesty of one who hath but a common repute in learning, and never yet offended, as not to count him fit to print his mind without a tutor and examiner, lest he should drop a schism or something of corruption, is the greatest displeasure, and indignity to a free and knowing spirit that can be put upon him. What advantage is it to be a man over a boy at school if we have only escaped the ferula to come under the fescus of an imprimator?— if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the theme of a grammar lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser? He who is not trusted with his own actions, his drift not being known to be evil, and standing to the hazard of the law and penalty, has no great reason to think himself reputed in the Commonwealth wherein he was born for other than a fool or a foreigner. When a man writes to the world, he summons up all his reason and deliberation to assist him; he searches, meditates, is industrious, and likely consults and confers with his judicious friends; after all which is done, he takes himself to be informed in what he writes as well as that any writ before him; if in this, the most consummate act of his fidelity and ripeness, no industry, no former proof of his ability can bring him to that state of maturity as not still mistrusted and suspected, unless he carry all his

considerate diligence, all his midnight watchings, to the hasty view of an unleisured licenser, perhaps much his younger, perhaps much his inferior in judgment, and perhaps one who never knew the labor of book-writing."

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"And lest some should persuade ye, Lords and Commons, that these arguments of learned men's discouragement at this your order, are mere flourishes and not real, I could recount what I have seen and heard in other countries, where this kind of inquisition tyrannizes: when I have sat among their learned men (for that honor I had) and been counted happy to be born in such a place of philosophic freedom as they supposed England was, while themselves did nothing but bemoan the servile condition into which learning among them was brought; that this was it which had damped the glory of Italian wits; that nothing had been there written now these many years but flattery and fashion. There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo, grown old, a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican masters thought. And though I knew that England was then groaning loudest under the prelatical yoke, nevertheless I took it as a pledge of future happiness that other nations were so persuaded of her liberty."

"Lords and Commons of England! consider what nation it is whereof ye are the governors; a nation, not slow and dull, but of a quick, ingenious, and pressing spirit, acute to invent, subtile and sinewy to discourse, not beneath the reach of any point that

human capacity can soar to. * * * Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle, showing her mighty youth and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam; purging and unscaling her long-abused sight at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole voice of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love the twilight, flutter about, amazed at what she

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'Though all the winds of doctrine were let loose to play upon the earth, so Truth be in the field, we do injudiciously, by licensing and prohibiting, misdoubt her strength. Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? Her contending is the best and purest suppressing. He who hears what praying there is for light and clear knowledge to be sent down among us, would think of other matters to be constituted beyond the discipline of Geneva, framed and fabricated already to our hands. Yet when the new light which we beg for shines in upon us, there be who envy and oppose if it come not first in at their casements. What a collusion

is this; whereas we are exhorted by the wise man to use diligence, "to seek for wisdom as for hidden treasures," early and late, that another order shall enjoin us to know nothing but by statute! When a man hath been laboring his hardest labors in the deep mines of knowledge, hath furnished out his findings in all their equipage, drawn forth his reasons as it were a battle, scattered and defeated all objections in his way, calls out his adversary into the plain, offers him the advantage of wind and sun if he please, only that he may try the matter by dint of argument; for his opponents then to skulk, to lay ambushments, to keep a narrow bridge of licensing where the challenger should pass, though it be valor enough in soldiership, is but weakness and cowardice in the wars of truth. For who knows not that Truth is strong next to the Almighty? She needs no policies, nor stratagems, nor licensings to make her victorious; those are the shifts and the defenses that error uses against her power. Give her but room, and do not bind her when she sleeps."

Jeremy Taylor, the great ornament of English pulpit eloquence, is the successor of John Milton; yet no two writers, each being so admirable, can be more different. The Prelate, with his inimitable grace, his fertility, and his fancy; the Poet, with his fullness, his grandeur, and his force. They who would enjoy the pleasure of seeing the life and works of Bishop Taylor related and analyzed by a kindred mind, should read the charming work of my friend Mr. Willmott. I content myself with extracting one splendid passage from his sermon on the marriage ring.

"Marriage is the proper scene of piety and patience, of the duty of parents and the charity of relations; here kindness is spread abroad, and love is united and made firm as a center.

Marriage is the nursery of heaven. The virgin sends prayers to God, but she carries but one soul to him; but the state of marriage fills up the numbers of the elect, and hath in it the labor of love and the delicacies of friendship, the blessing of society and the union of hands and hearts. It hath in it less of beauty but more of safety than the single life; it hath more ease but less danger; it is more merry and more sad; is fuller of sorrows and fuller of joys; it lies under more burdens, but is supported by all the strengths of love and charity, and those burdens are delightful.

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Marriage is the mother of the world, and preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, and heaven itself. Celibole, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labors, and unites into societies and republics, and sends out colonies, and feeds the world with delicacies, and obeys their King, and keeps order, and exercises many virtues, and promotes the interest of mankind, and is that state of good things to which God hath designed the present constitution of the world.

Mr. Ruskin's name is not unworthy of being included in this illustrious catalogue. Nothing in modern literature was more remarkable than the appearance of the young Oxford graduate in the great field of art, attacking with fearless boldness all that had been consecrated by the veneration of ages; demolishing old idols, setting up new; often no doubt right, sometimes probably wrong; but always striking, always eloquent, always true to his own convictions and his own noble nature. I am too ignorant of his great subject to venture any opinion upon particular decisions; but it is certain that nothing but good can result from drawing, as he has done, the attention of the English public to the merits of their living countrymen, and sending the patrons of Art from the picture-dealer to the painter: nothing but good either to the taste or the heart from his own written pictures— holy, and pure, and bright, as those of his favorite Wordsworth. Many passages of "The Modern Painters" are really poems in their tenderness, their sentiment, and their grandeur. Who, except a poet, could put, as he has done, life into a flower, in his exquisite description of the Soldonella of the Alps, a coarse

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