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earth can show: the affection of brothers and of sisters, the self-sacrificing nobleness of friendship, the sacred beauty of a mother's love. But, leaving the question of friendship (which, indeed, holds, in its pure form, of the high and the immortal), we can not hesitate to place domestic feelings and spectacles, as such, among the natural productions of our planet; the loveliest perhaps we have to show, but of a beauty precisely analogous to that of the rose and the fountain, and essentially pertaining to time. By neglecting family duties, one becomes less than a man; by performing them never so well, he comes not to merit applause. Distinctive nobleness commences in the third circle. It is when one rises above self and family, and looks abroad on the family of mankind, that he takes the attitude which in a man is essentially great: when he no longer feels around him the little necessities which compel, or the little pleasures which allure, and yet is able to contemplate men as a great brotherhood of immortals, with a gaze analogous to that of Him in whose image he is made; when he passes beyond what he shares with the lower orders of creation, and soars to those regions where, as an intelligent, Godknowing creature, he may sit among the angels; when he can look on the world through the light of eternity; then it is that he does what it is the distinctive privilege and nobleness of man on this earth to do, what marks him as animated by those emotions to which, under God, humanity owes all it has achieved in time. All this is so plain, and so absolutely certain, that statement embraces proof.

What excuse, then, could be plead for a satire which endangered this peculiar nobleness of humanity, and perpetually read to man the lesson that he should mind himself, or, at most, his family, or, at very most, some interesting family which he fancied, much as he might rabbits or pigeons? A

very superfluous lesson, to be sure! For one man or woman who neglects self or family from actual desire to promote the welfare of the human race, ten thousand, at the very least, neglect the latter for the former. Human indolence and selfishness require no aid from satire to make men ever sink back into their own little circles, into their own little hearts! Go out to your lawn in the evening after a shower, when the earthworms are looking out, and commence to lecture them on the paramount importance of home duties: how it is proper to keep their holes tidy, and attend to the respectable upbringing of their children; how they have duties enough at their own doors, and it can not be too earnestly enforced on them that they ought not to look much toward the stars, just beginning to come out, and so very far away: but spare your sweet breath, and abandon the quite superfluous task of bidding men cultivate selfishness, and withdraw their eyes from looking in love toward the ends of the earth. Holy and beautiful are home duties, and home delights; these may nowise be neglected or scorned: but God did not kindle the smile of the winter hearth, or the warmer smile of the true wife; God did not fill home with the musical voices of children, and the thousand "hopes, and fears that kindle hope, an undistinguishable throng," that these should be his all to a man, that no voice should reach him from the outer world. These are a solace after his work, these are rewards of his toil, but these can never furnish him the tasks that mark him distinctively as a man. It is when we widen our sphere of vision and of love-a sphere which will go on widening to eternity, and not when we contract it-that we become noble and man-like.

We turn now to our cotemporary satire. Do we not meet, on all hands, with forms of ridicule-with quiet sneers,

with rude horse-laughter, with elaborate figures, of high broad brows, and breasts calm and cold as marble, and with signpainter daubs, that are human only in bearing human names, but otherwise as dead as spoiled canvas-all meant to raise the laugh against a philanthropy that would look abroad? We desire no stop to be put to the laughter; only let care be taken, lest while we laugh, our unconscious hearts are robbed of the purest spark of celestial fire lingering within. When we look at the delicate and living lines in the stately statue of a St. John, or at the mechanic movements, utterly removed from all possibility of sympathy, and to be condemned as abortive and inconceivable, by every canon of mere criticism, in a Mrs. Jellyby, let us beware lest we recoil too strongly from the finely and almost soundly satirized excess of the one, and from the hideous and unmitigated atrocity of the other, into what is, in the former, however painted, after all but human passion, or into what is offered as the right morality instead of the other, a silly and simpering good-nature, that never looks beyond its own little ring, and such objects as can look well, and draw mawkish tears in the pages of a novel. Let it be remembered, also, that whatever may be the case with morbid idiosyncrasy, it is in general the heat which warms most that casts its warming influence farthest; the man who loves all men, will have love to embrace his neighborhood. The cottages of Cardington did not suffer because Howard was visiting the sick-beds on the shores of the Bosphorus.

These words can not be considered uncalled for. Many, we fear, when their hearts, in the first ardor of youth, were beginning to expand with holy desires, that told of their brotherhood or sisterhood with earth's nobles and standard-bearers, have felt them contract again to the mere everyday feelings

of home and neighborhood, under the influence of such satire as we have been here indicating; satire which would laugh at Plato as he trod, afar from men, the lone mountains of thought, which would keep David ever at the sheepfold, and John ever at the net. We turn now from this view of the subject.

Philanthropy, we have said, has been attacked by Mr. Carlyle. It has been attacked with weapons of argument, and with those of fiercest scorn, declared "a phosphorescence and unclean," and rejected from among the agencies to be regarded with hope by those who desire the common weal. We consider him to have erred; but, well assured as we are that he loves men as only a mighty man can love, we deem any thing he may say on the subject worthy of attention, and we controvert his opinions with deliberation and care. By considering the case, too, in the precise light in which he views it, we come directly and conveniently to the heart of the whole question, to the determination of the relation borne by philanthropy to justice. This relation we shall endeavor to define with what we can attain of scientific accuracy.

With very much of what Mr. Carlyle says on the subject of the treatment of criminals, we perfectly agree; much, indeed, which he alleges can, we think, be shown to be correct and consistent, only when interpreted in accordance with our theory. But the difference between us is decided. Our view of the matter leads us to what seems a satisfactory defense of that philanthropy which Mr. Carlyle execrates; and when we discover his positive conception of the origin of human law, we can deliberately and decisively affirm our belief of its incorrectness. We plainly assert that every man who is punished by any constituted authority on this earth, who is put to death, or who is fined sixpence, can be so treated, reasonably and rightfully, solely because of the "effects," too varied to be

noted for the present, of his actions on his fellows and their prospects. Mr. Carlyle has these words:-" Example, effects upon the public mind, effects upon this and upon that—all this is mere appendage and accident." We deliberately think that, to constitute revenge, the true theory of justice between man and man, the human being must be at once an atheist and a savage, Mr. Carlyle speaks thus:-"Revenge, my friends!— revenge, and the natural hatred of scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to revancher one's-self upon them, and pay them what they have merited; this is for evermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in the mind of every man." And again, after one of his own burning metaphoric passages, in which a man, in the fury of passion, is represented as reasonably slaying another:-"My humane friends, I perceive this same sacred glow of divine wrath, or authentic monition at first-hand from God himself, to be the foundation for all criminal law," &c. We can no longer doubt that Mr. Carlyle's theory of law is that of revenge, and this we proceed to question. Let no one imagine, while we do so, that we impute to him all which may be logically extorted from his premises.

The explicative word of Mr. Carlyle's whole system of belief is "hero-worship:" the immense debt we nationally owe him, and the unsoundness which may, we think, be shown to characterize very much of what he has written, are alike traceable to his view of the individual man, and the relation he bears to his fellows. With his views here, his theory of human law accords, in perfect philosophic consistency. must, therefore, subject to an examination what we understand him to mean by "hero-worship." And we are the more willing to do so at this early stage of our progress, because we deem a conclusive exhibition of inaccuracy in his idea of man

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