seventeenth of the thirty-nine articles. The dialectician armed with superficial history for the past, and with his eyes wide open on the present, may easily, if he should have nothing better to do, seem to grind the ideas of Progress to powder. Has strength of mind grown stronger? he asks. For what proportion of the world's inhabitants have the marvellous mechanical inventions of our scientific age lightened the day's toil? Is it only that a greater proportion lives the same life of drudgery? Is the small area of the globe that we call civilised more humane, prosperous, peaceful, at this very hour than the Roman Empire was under Severus Antoninus centuries ago? A radical Suffolk vicar of bold intelligence, and a wide traveller, found his way to Egypt (1870), and drew an incidental picture that gave social complacency a start. It is now winter. Hodge turned out this morning long before daylight. He is now working in a wet ditch up to his ankles in mud all day long, facing a hedge bank. This is a job that will take him three or four weeks. It is winter work, in out-of-the-way fields; and no one will pass in sight all day. He will eat his breakfast of bread and cheese alone, seated on the damp ground with his back against a tree, on the lee-side; and his dinner of the same viands, in the same place, and with the same company. And what will he be thinking about all day? He will wish that farmer Giles would let him have one of those old pollards on the hedge bank. He could stay and grub it up after work of moonlight nights. It would give a little firing, and his missus would be glad to see it come home. Things are getting unneighbourly dear, and he will hope that farmer Giles will raise his wages a shilling, or even sixpence a week. Times are very hard, and folk must live. He will hope that baby will soon be better. He will hope his wife may not be laid up this winter as she was last. That was a bad job. He got behind at the mill then. Tom and Dick have been without shoes ever since, and he can't say how the doctor's bill is ever to be paid. He will wish he could buy a little malt to brew a little beer. He shouldn't make it over-strong. He doesn't hold with that. . . . As he trudges home you see that his features are weather-beaten and hard. His back is bent; his gait is slouchy; his joints are beginning to stiffen from work and rheumatism. His life is dreary and hard, and so is his wife's. She, too, is up before daylight; and her candle is alight for some time after he has laid down his weary limbs, and sleep has brought him forgetfulness. She has some damages to repair, and some odd things to do, which must be done before to-morrow morning, and which she had no time to do during the day. She is now seated for the first time since five o'clock in the morning, with the exception of the short intervals when she snatched her humble meals. She has to look after the sick baby, and the other children; and to look in occasionally on her sick neighbour. Achmed is a child of the sun, that sun his forefathers worshipped, and whose symbol he sees on the old temples. Every day of his life, and all day long, he has seen him Not as in northern climes, obscurely bright, pouring floods of light and gladness about him, as he pours floods of life into his veins. The sunshine without has created a kind of sunshine within. It has given him plenty of fête-days and holidays. It has made his muscles springy, his joints supple, his step light, his eye and wits and tongue quick. He is not without his troubles. The Khédive and his people will take all that his land produces, except the doura, the maize, the cucumbers, and the onions that will be barely sufficient to keep himself and his family alive. He will get bastinadoed into the bargain. It always was so, and always will be so. Besides, is it not Allah's will? 1 When this vein has been worked to the dregs, when you have shown, if you can, that it is all chimera and illusion, yet let us remain invincibly sure that Progress stands for a working belief that the modern world will never consent to do without. It may be true that the telephone and the miracle 1 Egypt of the Pharaohs, by F. Barham Zincke. of Marconi are not the last words of civilisation, nor are mechanical inventions of its essence. Let us look beyond. The outcast and the poor are better tended. The prisoner knows more of mercy, and has better chances of a new start. Duelling has been transformed from folly to crime. The end of the greatest of civil wars always the bitterest of wars-was followed by the widest of amnesties. Slavery has gone, or is going. The creatures below man may have souls or not-a question that brings us into dangerous dispute with churches and philosophies either way, the spirit of compassion, justice, understanding is more steadily extending to those dumb friends and oppressed servitors of ours, who have such strange resemblances to us in form, faculty, and feeling. These good things the decline of theologic faith has not impeded, and the votaries of human perfectibility are not likely to let us pause. An enterprising youth, emerging from collegiate visions into the rough paths of real life, was not likely to take reflective stock of the wide world into which he had been thrown to sink or swim. He has something else to think of than the Time Spirit-an ennobling conception, yet an elusive force. Seen or unseen, whether its main confluence or the tributaries that swell its volume and compress its course one way or another the Time Spirit makes itself his master, and is in truth his mirror. CHAPTER III PROFESSION A Town is the True Scene for a Man of Letters.-HUME. He begins to perceive that books and systems are not things to be learned in themselves, but are only so many different object-glasses, through which we can look at things.—PATTISON. THE young graduate, born with a political frame of mind, who towards 1860 found himself transported from Oxford in pursuit of a literary calling, had little choice but journalism. By political temper I mean the same thing as was intended by one of the best students and writers of that time when he said: “Literary opinions hold very little place in my life and in my thoughts. What does occupy me seriously is life itself and the object of it." For this temper journalism is a natural profession, and it offers the temptation of a decent livelihood at short notice, though the too fastidious moralist, if he likes, may mourn that one of the two gravest of all decisions in life is so often settled by reason of gold and silver. The notion has long since passed that to accept money for writing is a traffic that partakes of the sin of Simony. It had been intended that when I was of due age I should go into orders, but life at Oxford had shaken the foundations. For teaching, experience with a youthful pupil whom I accompanied for some months to Paris discovered to me that I had no liking and little aptitude. In later days it was my long-enduring regret that I had not made my way to the Bar, with its immense opportunities, its honourable prizes, its fine gymnastic in combined common sense, accurate expression, and strong thought. But I had no prospects or connections, so I only read for a time in chambers, was called, and purchased wig and gown. I was consoled by assurances that prizes are vastly outnumbered by blanks, and that the average income at the Bar is lower than the earnings of the rural labourer. Experience again justified old Johnson's sensible observation, that a man doubtful of his dinner, or trembling at a creditor, is not much disposed to abstract meditation or remote inquiries, though for that matter Collins, who prompted Johnson's saw, wrote at least one exquisite piece of verse that we would not willingly exchange for many leagues of bookshelf close packed with abstract meditation and remote inquiry. Journalism was left, if I should find that I had the vocation. We promptly cast behind us the lesson that we had just learned from Aristotle about the Sophist being a man who took money for teaching what looked like wisdom. but was not wisdom. Journalism is a profession with drawbacks of its own. It is precarious in a sense that does not affect the lawyer, the schoolmaster, the doctor, the clerk in holy orders, the soldier, or the sailor. For the writer routine does nothing the more it does for him, to be sure, the worse for his writing. Incidents of human life that in other walks are only interruptions, to him may be ruin. If his knack, whatever it amounts to, should cease to please, he starves; if his little capital of ideas wears itself out, he is dispatched as monotonous and tiresome; if the journal to which he is attached changes hands or changes principles or expires, he too may expire. I say nothing of the temptation lurking in these irregularities for men of defective quality to ill-starred Bohemian ways, that waste priceless time, impoverish character, and |