head; but no man of genius is found prepared to prostitute his powers in garnishing its grossness.

The growing sense of responsibility now animating the literary class, is already exerting a most salutary influence. The press teems with works devoted to the solution of great social problems--a proof that literary men are no longer contented merely to amuse, but are now seeking to mend mankind. This altered phase of our literature is, we are proud to think, the product of our own age. A century ago it had no existence. The litterateurs of that time would readily with one consent have buried for the moment their mutual animosities, and united to pooh, pooh it from amongst them as unworthy of consideration. To have a care for the canaille was no business of theirs. To write for the improvement of the vulgar herd would have been preposterous. Literature was a heartless, soulless thing in those days: and such as it was then, such it was a century earlier still. John Foster has, with all his peculiar and gloomy power, drawn a picture of the appalling contrast between the mass of England's population in the Elizabethan age as compared with the great men of that world-renowned epoch of our national history. "There was," he says, "then perhaps a learned and vigorous monarch, and there were Cecils, and Walsinghams, and Shaksperes, and Spencers, and Sidneys, and Raleighs, with many other powerful thinkers and actors to render it the proudest age of our national glory. And we thoughtlessly admit on our imagination this

splendid exhibition, as in some manner involving or implying the collective state of the people in that age! The ethereal summits of a tract of the moral world, are conspicuous and fair in the lustre of the heavens, and we take no thought of the immensely greater proportion of it which is sunk in gloom and covered with fogs. The general mass of the population, whose physical vigour indeed, and courage, and fidelity to the interests of the country, were of such admirable avail to the purposes, and under the direction of the mighty spirits that wielded their rough agency-this great assemblage was sunk in such mental barbarism as to be placed about the same distance from their illustrious intellectual chiefs, as the hordes of Scythia from the finest spirits of Athens." Thanks to an extended culture, there is now no such marked disparity between teacher and taught, between sage and swain. If the swain has not quite shot up into the philosopher, he is at least capable of understanding him. We look upon this progress with unbroken, unalloyed delight. We are no believers in the sounding nonsense talked by the Twickenham bard about the dangerousness of a little knowledge. Nor do we homologate

a statement often in the mouths of the idolaters of the past, that what culture gains in breadth it will inevitably lose in depth-that in the rage for light literature and periodical reading, profound thinkers and profound thinking will disappear. We have often suspected, that those who are loudest in this outcry

belong to a class who measure profundity by bulk. Let a man only write some folio volume, and instantly he acquires a reputation for profundity, though inane prolixity and senility be apparent on every page; while if even a more than Plato were to communicate his thoughts through the medium of a magazine or a novel, these solemn fools would designate it a dissipation of your mental energies to trouble yourself with his divine philosophy.

We have a firm faith that God will never leave the world without its legitimate quota of profound thinkers; and if there be any truth in that fine fancy of the poet, found on all lips, which points us to the many mute, inglorious Miltons who walk our earth, what so likely as an extended culture to give to them a tongue and a voice, that thus they may make earth vocal with their melody, and gladden the world with their song? Talk not of the cumulative influences now at work to seduce the thinkers of the age from a profound into a superficial treatment of the problems they are called upon to solve. Every age has its temptations-earlier times were no more without them than our own. To our thinking, the alternating superstitious dread and senseless adulation to which the pioneers of thought were subjected, must have exerted a more wintry influence upon their spirits than any adverse influences their successors are called to combat. From the vague and imperfect knowledge of science, and the dim and shadowy conceptions of the material universe which filled their

minds, the thinking of those much-lauded times was necessarily as often puerile as profound. No man of letters need now, as many men of letters in those ages did, build up a seemingly goodly structure reflecting the highest lustre upon their ingenuity and acuteness, but which, from its utter want of any basis of facts, proved nothing better than a card-castle, which the first breath of the zephyr might blow into dust. With all due deference, then, to those who venerate with an idolatrous reverence the bulky tomes of our literary sires, we believe that in the present we shall find as profound thinkers as in any past time. Nor should such a statement be deemed at all extravagant: if, as Carlyle truthfully and humorously remarks, the world has been under way ever since Noah left the ark, we ought to have made some progress—at least, there should be no retrogression, no degeneracy. And we have only to scan our present position, to find there really has been none. We see no necessity for allowing the gloom which clouds the souls of some, as they contrast the past with the present, to cast its pall over our spirits. The bow of God and the everlasting arch of heaven's azure as really o'erspans our horizon as it did all our fathers. A question very naturally suggests itself here, To what do we owe this advancement of society-this progress of the race? We stay not to indicate all the varied elements which have combined to produce so gratifying a result. Our business now is with the purely literary element. That it has imparted

a very powerful and very salutary impetus to society, will, we presume, be disputed by none, except perchance the autocrat whose attempts to throttle it have been thwarted, or some college of cardinals who have beheld their darling dogmas toppling to their fall beneath its influence.

We know no more interesting study than tracing the progress of this power from its state of nonage to its present maturity and position. In its earlier and infantile condition, we find it alternately flattered and frowned upon by the great ones of the earth, as they imagined it either served or subverted their purposes -seconded or thwarted their ambition. Now, it has grown into an authority which, on occasion, makes the mighty of the earth tremble. Formerly statesmen could afford to dispense with the aid of literature, and could affect to despise its paper-shot; now there is no measure they can hope to carry until it has been thoroughly ventilated by the press. Formerly ecclesiastical corporations and ecclesiastical courts could riot, unchecked, in the caprices of tyranny or rapacity; now every indication of the exercise of the one, or the indulgence of the other, is instantaneously denounced by this subtle and lynx-eyed power.

Not the periodical press alone, but the novelist has found in these abuses material to interest the people while influencing authority. Conspicuous among those who have almost become a political power through the popular novel, is Charles Dickens. It may be a ques

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