which curtains this viewless, unimaginable phantom we are to bow down in grim silence, for that we should have anything to say to it is impossible: on this we are to do our best to concentrate our thoughts, when we feel ourselves in need of tender consolation or moral support: to this we are to refer the stricken children of mortality, as they cry out in their anguish day after day,

"For never morning wore To evening, but some heart did break."

What a blessed thing to be able to go to the bereaved mother beside the empty cradle, or the desolate young widow as she presses her head against the vacant chair, and whisper in soothing tones, "My poor friend, think upon the Unknowable!" If we listen, however, to the rival faction, all this about the big U is nonsense. The sovereign thing, according to these, is the big H. HUMANITY,-"the continuous sum-total of all convergent beings," is the genuine deity, and Comte is his prophet. Brothers and sisters, they cry, what matters the little fleeting existence of any of us? We may come, and we may go, but the Race goes on for ever. What nobler future can any one desire, or conceive of, than to live hereafter in the books he has written, the sermons he has preached, the chairs and tables which his hands have fabricated? You may have your individual trials and disappointments, but here is the true balm for sorrow -here is the glory that gilds the doom of inevitable annihilation. In the time of tribulation, and in the hour of death, think upon the ever-evolving Organism of the Race, the concrete Ideal of Humanity, the Sum-Total into which the élite of men and beasts is subjectively

sublimed,-think upon this, and depart in peace!

Scarcely have we made our escape from the noisy conflict of these factions, than we are accosted by a grave philosopher, who, looking, like Lord Chancellor Thurlow, wiser than it is possible for any human being to be, recalls us from visionary abstractions to the solid ground of fact, and assures us that the real object of worship and trust is Nature-of course with the big N, in which much of the virtue lies. Cast your net wide, he urges, and take in the entire physical universe. Bring it to the philosophical font, and boldly baptise it with the name before which the world has hitherto worshipped; call it God! Seeing us a little startled at this audacious transfer of the name of the Holiest, he hastens to point out to us its advantages. You obtain, he says, a deity which the senses can perceive and the hands can manipulate. You get a comprehensible theology; for as soon as Nature is called God, all the natural sciences, chemistry, astronomy, geology, and so forth, at once become branches of divinity. Adoration is made easy. You have only to feel admiration of natural beauty, and thereby you become worshippers in the temple of the Highest. And if you want a church, why there are all the scientific societies to choose among: join any one of them, and there you are. If we still hesitate, and hint that a religion, a theology, a church, and a worship from which God has disappeared, is rather like the play of "Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark," when Hamlet himself has been left out, and that Nature, when enthroned on the altar before which we are to worship, looks too much like a lay-figure, a puppet, and a sham; we are graciously en

couraged to accept the travesty by the assurance that Nature really dresses up very well in the properties of the discarded theism, and that as soon as we become accustomed to see her in her borrowed robes, we shall find that she looks the part admirably, and gives every satisfaction.

Such are the sceptical theories which are offered to us in place of the old faith and the old religion, -the theories by which the new lights of humanity propose to guide and sweeten our lives, and to cheer and sustain us in death. Dr Tulloch, as it becomes a grave theologian, brings to bear against them his heavy artillery: we, having no dignity to maintain, prefer like skirmishers to hover round their skirts, and discharge against them

the lighter missiles of banter and ridicule. For as we compare them, one after another, with the grand explanation of the mystery of our Being which Revelation has set before us, we cannot help feeling that a shout of laughter is their most appropriate welcome

"Risum teneatis, amici?"

For ourselves, we can honestly avow, that even were there nothing more serious to fear than the risk of being ridiculous, we should take good care to pass them by on the other side. Like the man in the Gospel who, after his experience of old wine, had no taste for the new, we too should turn away from these immature and frothy liquors, saying, "The old is better."

THERE is perhaps no town in the world of which so much has been written and said as Venice. Other cities of the world have inspired the historian and the artist even in their ashes, and possess the unfailing interest and admiration of mankind and some still sway the minds of men with a curious domination which seems something more than the mere effect of a collection of many minds, and feels like an actual personal influence. Rome and Florence in the one case, London and Paris in the other, are great and living potencies whose power no one can contest. But Venice has something of an additional and almost more subtle charm. Her great historical importance, her power as a school of art, are not less than those of her illustrious rivals in the past; but beyond these there is a personal charm, so to speak-an enchantment which is more individual than either. It is not because she is the city of the Doges, not for the sake of Bellini and Titian, not even for the devotion of that prophet whose name of Ruskino is a household word with every sacristan in the capital of San Marco. Great are these attractions to the reasonable and well-regulated mind, as well as to the cultured and aesthetic traveller. But there is still a class whose enthusiasm is not reasonable, to whom Venice is like a beloved woman, dear not because she is good or great, not because of her pedigree or her qualities, but for herself, which is the most subtle charm of passion. There is something in the gleam of her sea-streets, in the clear whiteness, perfected by tints of roses, in which every palace stands up between

sea and sky, with a quiver of sweet reflection and an intense purity of atmosphere beyond the power of words to express, which charm the very soul of the beholder. Pictures, churches, architecture are but secondary to this charm. The Tintorets, the Titians, the splendid Veroneses may leave the heart of the pilgrim cold; the charm of Giovanni Bellini (a greater wonder) may not move him; he may do little more than gape at the Carpaccios, even though he is assured that they are the best pictures ever painted; and he may find Venetian churches ugly, as many of them are to eyes accustomed to Gothic grace and loveliness;-but yet, if he is like the wedding guest in the "Ancient Mariner," the man to whom it is appointed, Venice will be to him something that no other place is a presence, an influence, the most living of abstractions. That gentle old doyen of her lovers, the late Rawdon Brown, who came to Venice for two or three days and stayed forty years and more, declared that he never in all that time acquired the calm of custom in respect to the city of his heart. She was always new to him, as if he saw her for the first time. The mingled surprise and rapture, which is the privileged mood of youth, kept this old man always young, and startled him as with a new sensation every time he came suddenly round the corner of his little canal and big faded palace face to face with Venice. "Out of Venice I may be happy; here I am blessed," says an Italian adorer whose words are more effusive than the Englishman's. Such a feeling cannot exist without call

ing forth a great deal of nonsense, for rapture in all languages is apt to sound silly even to those who share it; but the sentiment is very real, even though its expression may often be foolish.

The Grand Canal flows past the windows; gondolas, sometimes with unseen loungers under the black felze, the dark figures of the rowers relieved against the green water, sometimes uncovered, with open-air groups, and all the pretty colours of spring toilets reflected in the rippled surface-shoot past and disappear. Now and then a clumsier barca laden with wood, or a black hull heavy with water, a floating tank, goes slowly by. From time to time comes pulsing along (but neither smoking nor screeching, for the devil is not so black as he is painted) the vaporetto, the steam-launch, most terrible of all innovations, which the Venetians love. Each moment another and another shining crest of steel, breasting the water like a swan, glides into the minute space framed by the window. No sound except the soft plash of the oars, the voices at the traghetto, softened by the air and sunshine, is in the whole shining world about. Opposite, on the little paved square at the corner of a small canal, there are a stream of passing figures going and coming over the bridges, and under the two trees which unfold their big crumpled leaves, day by day turning from brown to green; all is sunshine, quiet, tranquil movement life abundant and bright. The conventional sentiment of sadness with which right-minded persons, who think as they are taught to think, regard Venice, is, of all things in the world, the most alien to the brightness of everything around the dazzling of the dazzling of the lights upon the water, the endless succession of moving ob

jects, the sense of enjoyment on all sides. When every ripple is like the facet of a diamond dispensing light, when not a moment passes without some novelty in the stream of passers-by, when the wind blows light yet fresh from the lagoon, and the brilliant sails of the trading boats show like a pageant in the distance, and all the lively, homely craft that ply about the adjoining coast cluster their masts together round the Dogana, between us and San Giorgio blazing red and white in the sun, it would be curious to know wherein the sadness lies. To be sure, it is a pity that half the palaces of the old nobles should be turned into warehouses of antiquities, and that the Loredans and Vendramins should have given place to the Jews. It would be a pleasure to take down the inscriptions of the Venice glass companies and the old furniture shops, and to make a bonfire of the hideous board marked with the more hideous name of GUGGENHEIM. But these are mere details which affect a fastidious temper and eye, but which the healthy spectator dismisses without much difficulty. Perhaps at no period was Venice perfect as the dilettante delights to think she may once have been. It may be reasonably doubted whether a universal blaze of fresco would have been more beautiful to look upon than the weather-beaten fronts which afford so many soft tones of colour due to the pencil of time alone; and whether the stir of new-making, the scaffoldings, and all the attendant evils of works in progress, would have pleased the traveller better than the evils of to-day.

Putting aside, however, all the litanies both of praise and lamentation that have been addressed to Venice, and taking for granted that wonderful combination of nat

ural beauty, and the noblest effects of art, which have turned so many heads, it is very curious to note the difference between the influence and character of this wonderful city and that of the other great Italian towns which have fulfilled, like her, a great career, and, like her, are still living and potent, though so far removed from the circumstances and conditions of life in which their greatness was acquired; Florence, for instance, which is her fittest parallel, as great in art, and, if not so remarkable in history, at least always an important actor in the affairs of the world until Fate gave her over to Grand Dukes and decay. Rome, the mistress of the world, has many additional qualifications which bear comparison, and none of the other cities of Italy have had the enduring greatness of these two princely communities, which stand foremost in the history of civilisation and the arts. Both Republics, with a show of democracy covering that rule of the strongest which is by some theorists considered the best of all governments, but which is subject, above all others, to perpetual change and catastropheboth founding their wealth, their power, their magnificence upon the work of their own hands, greedy of wealth and glory, of conquest and acquisition, and little scrupulous how these advantages were attained-both great in natural energy, in the skill which Italian hands first of all modern nations have acquired, and the genius to which every quality is subject, the force of invention, combination, creation out of nothing, which is the highest endowment of man. In all these points, the two great Italian cities are alike; the people are alike also in their intense enthusiasm for their dwelling-place, and their determination to make, each of their

own town, the noblest, greatest, and most beautiful in the world.

These are resemblances so great that it is extremely confusing to the student to discover how great a difference exists in the records and in the character of the two States. In Florence, history is a succession of great biographies. When the traveller, full of memories and associations, enters her venerable streets, they are all already set forth in his imagination with the great images that have made them dear. There passed the dream-life of the 'Vita Nuova,' a vision, yet real; there Beatrice walked with her companions, and the young Dante stood in rapture to see her pass. There the great Frate swayed the soul of Florence, and made the proud city tremble before his prophetic warnings, till she turned upon him and burned him, as a warning, in her turn, to reformers too zealous and preachers too convincing. There all the homely painters lived and worked -now at a bridge, now at a fair Madonna-with many a cheerful jest and happy thought. There the Greek amateurs feasted and studied, and brought back pagan vice along with the marbles and gems of the Old World. There Michael Angelo stalked about the streets, bidding St George march and St Mark speak, where they stand in their niches, as we see them to-day; and there Macchiavelli pondered, sarcastic, with that smile disdainful, mournful, about his lips, which is called cynical the smile of that toleration which means despair. We jostle them as we walk about, even with Murray in our hands. If Murray is not at hand, the 'Inferno,' the Vita Nuova,' Vasari,-a host of chroniclers,will do better. The place is so populous that we have scarcely room for them in our thoughts.