sequence is that of late years the improvement of agriculture, the restoration of country houses, and a more active participation in rural interests and pursuits, have become engrossing objects of life to the best portion of the French aristocracy. Alexis de Tocqueville applied himself early, and with increasing success, to this laudable and dignified task. He sought in the first place to heal the breach made by the Revolution of 1789 between the cottage and the château, some traces of which were perceptible at his first election in 1837. The simplicity of his manners, the entire absence of any tinge of pride or pretension in his intercourse with persons of all ranks, the genuine interest he felt in their concerns, the patience with which he was ever ready to listen to them, and the readiness with which he placed the stores of his own wisdom and judgment within their reach, inspired the peasantry before long with unfeigned confidence and affection. He practised to the letter, as Father Lacordaire has observed, the divine command Whosoever will 'be chief among you, let him be your servant.' Speaking of him to a stranger, one of the Norman farmers said, The people ' are very fond of M. de Tocqueville, but it must be confessed 'he is very grateful for it.' In 1848, on the proclamation of universal suffrage, the whole population of the district voted by acclamation in his favour. While the election was going on, as he leaned exhausted with fatigue against a door-post, one of the peasants, not personally known to him, came up with Norman frankness and said, 'I am surprised, Monsieur de Tocqueville, that you are tired, for did not every one of us 'bring you here in his pocket?' He was wont to say that in the hearts of these honest fellows the honour and virtue of the French character had taken refuge, that 'Maître Jean' and Maître Pierre,' the worthies and notables of the village, were the only titles of dignity which no revolutions could obliterate; and that his peasant neighbours were the only people with whom he cared to converse beyond the circle of his intimate friends. This relish for the homely fare of a rural district was greatly augmented by his inexhaustible sense of the humorous. His biographers appear to have thought it inconsistent with the dignity of a philosophic Academician to admit his love of fun. When a thing presented itself, as it not uncommonly did, to his mind in a droll aspect, his merriment was unquenchable. He was, what is every day becoming more rare, especially in France, a hearty laugher; indeed his laugh, musical and cheerful as his voice, sometimes got the better of him and could not be stopped. It partook of the intensity of all the emotions which alternately swayed his sensitive and delicate nervous organisation.

Thus it was that in his own home, without the smallest attempt to humour the democratic passions of his neighbours, he did practically subdue them. He became precisely what he admired in the position of the landed gentlemen of England, independent of the State, independent of the people, but ready and willing to serve the State and to serve the people in all honour. Under these circumstances he devoted himself to the literary task he had marked out, of tracing the Revolution to its true sources: and the originality of his mind can hardly be more demonstrated than by the fact, that after all the innumerable commentaries and histories of the French Revolution which have appeared, Alexis de Tocqueville presented to the world an entirely new view of it.

The publication of this book in 1856 was followed, in 1857, by his journey to England, to which we have already alluded. The reception he met with here was in fact the last triumph of his life. He was received on all sides with demonstrations of respect and affection; and when the time came for his return to Normandy, the Lords of the Admiralty, hearing that there was no direct steam communication from England to Cherbourg, placed a small vessel at his disposal, which landed him within a mile or two of his own park. At that time nothing appeared to indicate that his life, always precarious, was in any immediate danger. He lived by nervous power, and that seemed unexhausted; indeed, it had repeatedly carried him through dangerous and acute disorders. But in the summer of 1858 a more serious accident showed his lungs to be affected. In the autumn he was ordered to a milder climate than that of his own well-beloved domain. He repaired to Cannes, accompanied by the devoted partner of his life, and by one or two of his nearest relatives and friends. For a time he imagined that the affection of the lungs had been overcome. But in spite of the illusions which attend the closing stages of pulmonary disease, it soon became obvious that life was ebbing away. He received with piety the last sacraments of the Church; for though faith, like every other gift of his nature, had been with him a matter of internal edification rather than of outward display, he had never ceased to entertain the most serious attachment to the Christian religion, and to that Church in which he was born. On the 16th April, 1859, he expired. By his own express desire his mortal remains were interred in the churchyard of Tocqueville, and were attended to the grave by an immense assemblage, not of those who admired him for his genius, but of those who loved him for his goodness; and a plain cross of wood, after the fashion of the country, marks the spot where whatever of him was mortal lies.

ART. VI.—1. Essays and Reviews. 8th edition.

2. Sermons on the Beatitudes.' By the Rev. Dr. MOBERLY: with Preface in Answer to Essays and Reviews.' 1860.

3. Certain Characteristics of Holy Scripture, with special reference to Essays and Reviews.' By the Rev. J. B. CAZENOVE. 1861.

4. A Brief Defence of Essays and Reviews. By the Rev. Dr. WILD. 1861.

6

5. Specific Evidences of Unsoundness in Essays and Reviews.' By the Rev. Dr. JELF.

1861.

6. Statements of Christian Doctrine and Practice. From the Published Writings of Professor JOWETT. 1861.

THE

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HE history of religious panics would form a curious chapter in the annals of mankind,-a chapter conveying many lessons, both of humiliation and of consolation. The memory of the scholar leaps back to the earliest on record, the agitation which seized the Athenian people on the morning after the mutilation of the Hermæ. 'When we review the whole course of these 'proceedings,' says the Bishop of St. David's*, at a distance 'which secures us from the passions that agitated the actors, we may be apt to exclaim: "In all history it will be difficult to find ""such another instance of popular frenzy." The Bishop, however, immediately corrects himself by the recollection that these 'are the very words in which Hume spoke of our own Popish Plot.' He might correct himself still further by recalling the various panics through which the religious public of England has passed during his own lifetime. He must remember the wild alarm which pervaded the academical and ecclesiastical world in 1834, at the prospect of the admission of Dissenters to the Universities, and which deprived the greatest college in Cambridge of the services of her most illustrious scholar and teacher. He must remember the consternation occasioned by the schemes for Church Reform, which agitated the public mind from 1833 to 1836, and almost drove from his position the most eminent schoolmaster of our time. He must remember the religious terror which in 1839 drew forth the House of Peers in a stately procession to Buckingham Palace, to protest against the scheme of education now universally recognised by Church and State.

* Thirwall's Hist. of Greece, vol. iii. p. 397.

He must remember the two Hampden controversies of 1836 and 1847, which, but for the firmness of the Prime Minister of the day, would have succeeded in excluding first from the Chair of Divinity at Oxford and then from the episcopal throne of Hereford, one of the most Conservative bishops of the present bench. He must remember the Gorham controversy, which threatened to expel first one section and then the other of the two main sections of the clergy from the pale of the Establishment in 1850. He must remember the panic of the Papal Aggression in 1851, when grave and courtly dignitaries lost their heads on public platforms, when bishops and chapters were deluged with addresses, and responded with unanimous protests, against the Pastoral of the Flaminian Gate. He will remember, and every one of our readers, on looking back to the journals, periodicals, and placards of the time, will see, how in each of these cases the Church of England, if not Christianity itself, was declared to be shaken to its foundations. He may thankfully reflect that from each successive conflict both the Church and the Christian religion have emerged, certainly not destroyed, in most cases purified and strengthened.

Through one of these hurricane latitudes, he and we have just been passing, during the last two months.

It will be our object calmly to review the rise of the storm, from the little cloud not bigger than a man's hand' to the black and portentous tempest which has swept across the whole heaven. And if, as may be inferred from our recital of the like meteorological phenomena in the annals of past time, it may be inferred that we take a less excited view of the present emergency than some of our contemporaries, it must not be inferred that we regard it with indifference or with levity. In most of the panics at which we have glanced, there was a serious as well as a trivial side of the agitation. The mutilation of the Hermæ might be an accident. But it was connected with the same train of events which led on the one hand to the Thirty Tyrants, and on the other to the death of Socrates. Titus Oates was an impostor; but the designs of James II were real. The Bampton Lectures of Dr. Hampden were not what they were represented to be. But they indicated a change in the relations of dogmatic theology to religion, which has since that time become a recognised and accomplished fact. Papal Aggression was a mere flourish of Italian rhetoric. But the general reaction of a large part of the religious sentiment of England and of Europe towards Rome was undoubted.

It will be our duty on the present occasion first to distinguish the historical elements of the actual state of the case from the

mythical accretions which have grown up around it; and then to offer such general considerations as the whole transaction suggests to an impartial spectator.

I. In 1854 an enterprising publisher in London, with that unfortunate passion (as we cannot but think) which exists at present for the multiplication of periodical literature, started a series of Oxford' and Cambridge Essays,' to be contributed, with their names, by members of the two Universities. The speculation answered for a time. But after the appearance of four volumes, the demand or the supply failed, and the series came to an end. In this conjuncture it occurred, we believe, to one of the contributors that the publication might be continued, but in a more contracted form. For many years past there had floated before the minds of the more liberal-minded English Churchmen the vision of a journal which should treat of theological subjects in a manner resembling the free and scientific tone in which they are handled in France and Germany. Such a scheme was discussed in 1835* between Dr. Arnold and Archdeacon Hare. Whately, Hampden, and Pusey were proposed as possible contributors. One of its main objects was to make some beginnings of Biblical criticism, which, as 'far as relates to the Old Testament, was in England almost 'non-existent.' The scheme of a liberal Theological Review, thus long delayed, fructified in the minds of three or four of those who had already furnished essays to the extinct series, and the result was a volume which appeared in the early spring of 1860, under the title of Essays and Reviews.' Many scholars and divines were invited to contribute; but the number was, through various causes, reduced to seven,- who were mostly unacquainted with each other. The first Essay having been preached, in substance, as an Oxford University sermon in the previous year, was naturally ready before its companions, and hence its peculiar place. The last in the volume owed its position, no doubt, to the delays arising from the scantiness of leisure at the command of its able but over-tasked author. The order of the rest was equally accidental.

The volume, as we shall afterwards have occasion to remark, was as varied in character and as unequal in execution as might have been anticipated from a series published under these auspices. It was read at once by those students who took interest either in the subjects or the writers of the respective essays; and a few notices of it, containing the usual mild ad

*Arnold's Life and Correspondence, 8th ed. vol. i. p. 331.