which waits upon his steps is of degraded quality, or unworthy of the name, because it is expressed in the alacrity of the open and manly forehead, the willing sympathy, unshaded by fear and untainted by sycophancy, of the freeman's kindling eye? Shall we say that the workman no longer renders to his natural and equal master a service and homage, as precious and sincere as those of the serf who was predestined, ere his birth, to follow his chief whithersoever his bare will ordained, because the honeysuckles of his cottage wrap his own inviolable castle, and free-born children gambol round his knee? That he toils is no disgrace; it is appointed him by no injustice of man, but by the beneficent, though stern, decree of nature; and his evening may be as glad and tranquil when the day's work is over, his sleep as sweet ere he goes forth to labor, his self-respect, his independence, his bold uncowering truthfulness, in one word, his whole inheritance both of duty and reward, as rich in the essential bounties of freedom as those of his master. Some men must ever ride in the car of civilization, while others drag it. The old reins by which men were guided have been wrenched from the hands of the drivers; the drivers themselves have, in some places, been rolled in the dust, and trampled in their gore; but the fate of the French nobility is not necessarily to be universal; a strong and wise man can yet take the seat, and with new reins-the golden chords of love, the viewless chains of sympathy-still guide and control men; we see Budgett, a man born in poverty, do so with easy and natural effort. Why look back? Why not rather charge ourselves than our time? Why perpetually gaze with reverted visage on the coffined Past? That lingering red is not the flush of health, that tranquil and smiling slumber is not the repose of gathering energy; it is the stillness and rigid molding of death that are on that face; no resurrection ever

awoke a buried era: feudalism in all its aspects-its airy and gallant chivalries, its simple devotions, its conventual dream. ings with its Du Guesclins, its good Douglases, its kingly Abbot Samsons, its troop of fair ladies riding with golden stirrups to the crusade-has passed away to the very spirit and essence, and Democracy lays its iron roads across its grave. Many generations will gaze on the picture of the whole resusci tated life of the thirteenth century, as it has been painted in a boldness of outline and incomparable richness of color which must long defy the rounding finger and obscuring breath of time, by Mr. Carlyle; yet Abbot Samson had his hand-gyves in his dungeon, and no tongue dared to move in his presence. The man who will rule men in an era of freedom must dispense with these; and though the hero of Past and Present was assuredly born to be a prince and ruler, we can not but believe that men of his radical type are still extant and even common in England, and why obstinately close our eyes to the same power as his, when exhibited not in a mediæval monastery, but in a mercantile establishment of a working era. Of old, you might have obedience of serfs, but you had not freedom. In the modern time, when your masters are incompetent, you have a pretended though ignoble freedom on the part of servants, and no true obedience. Where you have competent masters and governed servants, both are free. Is it reasonable, then, and manly, to whine and whimper over our modern arrangements, as might a delicate-looking Puseyite curate, or to sneer at, and denounce, and turn away from them, as do very different men, instead of recognizing it as one great task and duty of our age to reconcile mastership with freedom, and valiantly setting about it? That Mr. Carlyle has written on these matters as he has done, may well excite surprise. We may have utterly misconceived the whole

purport and philosophy of his. history of the French Revolu tion, despite of what appears to us perfect clearness, and of what we know to have been enthusiastic and protracted study; but if we have any one decided idea as to the meaning of that book, or of what he says in his essay on Ebenezer Elliott, it is, that one great lesson he would enforce is, that the feudal nobility must either vanish, or show themselves possessed of per sonal powers to win the respect and affectionate obedience of men. Yet this duke appears to us to furnish an apposite and express illustration of such words. The world has seen strange things, but it may yet be worth its while to turn aside and contemplate Mr. Carlyle in the capacity of apologist for pithless personages still fondly called noblemen.

The true point of view from which to discern the essential type and distinguishing characteristics of Budgett is the mercantile; it is him in his true character you see, when you mark his intense delight as he moves among a group of active working-men, animating them by his presence, directing their movements, and thrilled with sympathy for honest exertion. But we must briefly glance at the other phases which his character displays: we must see him fairly out of the commercial atmosphere. And what aspect does he present to us? He comes out from the mine where he has been toiling so eagerly with the gold he has so manfully won. Has he the greedy, inhuman look of the miser, the small frostbitten eye of the niggard? He has worked hard, and the result we see in money the "beaverish" talent he certainly possesses Has his soul become beaverish too? No. He has still the boy's heart which throbbed with joy when he flung his boyish earnings, the thirty pounds which probably appeared to him then a greater sum than any he afterward possessed, into his mother's lap. Over the deep mine, far up in the taintless

azure, his eye has ever caught the gleam of treasure which might well purge his eyes in the glare of earthly gold. To make money has been his duty; he could not work to the measure of his abilities without that result; but to give is his delight and his reward. With the same tact which stood him in such good stead among his workmen and customers, he strikes out devices of good; with his native energy he carries them out. His positive expenditure in philanthropic objects is fully £2000 a-year. His mansion becomes a center of beneficent light for the whole district, in every direction the broken mists of ignorance and vice retiring. His heart is as warm, his hand as open, as if he had never known what it was to make a shilling; he shows himself worthy to be a steward of nature, with large gifts committed for disposal to his hand; he scatters bounty where his agency is unseen; he ever makes charity the handmaid of industry, never of recklessness or sloth; the blessed influence of generosity, tempered by justice and governed by strong intelligence, is felt over the district.

And now we shall look, for a few moments, into the sanc tuary of his home. We saw him take his early love to be his wife, in a little cottage in an English lane. As his other projects have prospered in his hands, his cottage has gradually changed its appearance; he is now in a commodious mansion, seated in the midst of broad pleasure-grounds, and commanding a wide prospect of that region which his presence has lighted with new comfort and gladness. In his family circle we find him displaying the same traces of original character which we have marked in his procedure elsewhere. His children are admitted to an unwonted intimacy and confidence. "They knew his business affairs intimately, and in every perplexing case he would gather them round him, with their mother and aunt, and take their advice. His standing council was formed

cerns.

of the whole family, even at an age when other fathers woulu think it cruel and absurd to perplex a child with weighty conWe do not remember to have ever met with an instance precisely corresponding to this. And its effects are all benign. He seems to have attained that perfection of domestic rule, where kindness is so governed by sagacity, that severity is banished, yet every good effect of severity won. The sympathy which he meets among his workmen, and which lends. an aspect of noble work and noble governance to his whole business establishment, pervades, with a still finer and more tender warmth, the chambers of his home; his children go hand-in-hand with him in his plans of improvement, the willing instruments in all his philanthropic devices. And he feels that he has their sympathy in higher things than these; we hear him expressing the conviction that they are all going along with him on the way to heaven. This is the final touch of joy that can gild a Christian home, a ray of heaven's own glory coming to blend with, to hallow, to crown the blessings of earth. Be it a delusion or not, one would surely wish to "keep so sweet a thing alive:" if it is a fond, enthusiastic dream, so perfect is the smile of happiness on the dreaming face, that it were surely kind to let the sleeper slumber on. He believes that all his family will again gather round him on the plains of heaven: that the flowers which now shed fragrance through his life will continue to bloom beside immortal amaranths; that the voices which are now the music of his being will mingle with the melodies of his eternal home; that the light of those smiles which greet his approach to his threshold, and which now make summer in his heart, will blend with the light that fadeth never. We shall not say that his hopes are vain : his children are his friends, and friendship lives in the spirit-land.