every creed and age, have we may

dare to say,

men of in proportion to their devoutness-believed in such monitions; and that it is hard to see how any man could have arrived at the belief that a living person was working on him, and not a mere unpersonal principle, law, or afflatus-(spirit of the universe, or other metaphor for hiding materialism)-unless by believing, rightly or wrongly, in such monitions. For our only inductive conception of a living person demands that that person shall make himself felt by separate acts.

But against the second sentence we must protest. The question in hand is not whether this 'witness of the Spirit' is 'something more' than anything else. But whether it exists at all, and what it is. Why was the book written, save to help toward the solution of this very matter? The question all through has been -Can an immediate influence be exercised by the Spirit of God on the spirit of man? Mr. Vaughan assents, and says (we cannot see why) that there is no mysticism in such a belief. Be that as it may, what that influence is, and how exercised, is all through the de quo agitur of mysticism. Mr. Vaughan, however, seems here for awhile to be talking realism through an admirable page, well worth perusal (pp. 264-5). his grasp is not sure. We soon find him saying what More and Fox would alike deny, that 'The story of Christ's life and death is our soul's food.' No; Christ himself is would the Catholic Church and the mystic alike answer. And here again, the whole matter in dispute is (unconsciously to Mr. Vaughan) opened up in one word. And if this sentence does not bear directly on that problem, on what does it bear? It was therefore with extreme disappointment that on reading this, and saying to ourselves, 'Now we shall hear at last what Mr. Vaughan himself thinks on the matter,'

Yet

we found that he literally turned the subject off, as if not worth investigation, by making the next speaker answer, à propos of nothing, that the traditional asceticism of the Friends is their fatal defect as a body.' Why, too, has Mr. Vaughan devoted a few lines only to the great English Platonists, More, Norris, Smith of Jesus, Gale, and Cudworth? He says, indeed, that they are scarcely mystics, except in as far as Platonism is always in a measure mystical. In our sense of the word they were all of them mystics, and of a very lofty type; but surely Henry More is a mystic in Mr. Vaughan's sense also. If the author of Conjectura Cabbalistica be not a mystical writer (he himself uses the term without shame), who is?

We hope to see much in this book condensed, much modified, much worked out, instead of being left fragmentary and embryotic; but whether our hope be fulfilled or not, a useful and honourable future is before the man who could write such a book as this is, in spite of all defects.

*

*

*

Since the above was written, Mr. Vaughan's premature death has robbed us of a man who might have done brave work, by lessening, through his own learning, the intellectual gulf which now exists between English Churchmen and Dissenters. Dîs aliter visum. But Mr. Vaughan's death does not, I think, render it necessary for me to alter any of the opinions expressed here; and least of all that in the last sentence, fulfilled now more perfectly than I could have foreseen.

BURNS AND HIS SCHOOL.*

FOUR

faces among the portraits of modern men, great or small, strike us as supremely beautiful; not merely in expression, but in the form and proportion and harmony of features: Shakspeare, Raffaelle, Goethe, Burns. One would expect it to be so; for the mind makes the body, not the body the mind; and the inward beauty seldom fails to express itself in the outward, as a visible sign of the invisible grace or disgrace of the wearer. Not that it is so always. A Paul, Apostle of the Gentiles, may be ordained to be 'in presence weak, in speech contemptible,' hampered by some thorn in the flesh-to interfere apparently with the success of his mission, perhaps for the same wise purpose of Providence which sent Socrates to the Athenians, the worshippers of physical beauty, in the ugliest of human bodies, that they, or rather those of them to whom eyes to see had been given, might learn that soul is after all independent of matter, and not its creature and its slave. But, in the generality of cases,

* NORTH BRITISH REVIEW, No. XXXI.-1.-'Elliott's Poems.' London, 1833.-2. Poems of Robert Nicoll. Third Edition. Edinburgh, 1843.-3. 'Life and Poems of John Bethune.' London, 1841.-4. Memoirs of Alexander Bethune.' By W. M'Combie. Aberdeen, 1845-5. 'Rhymes and Recollections of a Handloom Weaver.' By William Thom, of Inverury. Second Edition. London, 1845.-6. The Purgatory of Suicides.' By Thomas Cooper. London, 1845.-7. 'The Book of Scottish Song.' By Alexander Whitelaw. Edinburgh, 1848.

physiognomy is a sound and faithful science, and tells us, if not, alas! what the man might have been, still what he has become. Yet even this former problem, what he might have been, may often be solved for us by youthful portraits, before sin and sorrow and weakness have had their will upon the features; and, therefore, when we spoke of these four beautiful faces, we alluded, in each case, to the earliest portraits of each genius which we could recollect. Placing them side by side, we must be allowed to demand for that of Robert Burns an honourable station among them. Of Shakspeare's we do not speak, for it seems to us to combine in itself the elements of all the other three; but of the rest, we question whether Burns be not, after all, if not the noblest, still the most loveablethe most like what we should wish that of a teacher of

men to be. Raffaelle the most striking portrait of him, perhaps, is the full-face pencil sketch by his own hand in the Taylor Gallery at Oxford-though without a taint of littleness or effeminacy, is soft, melancholy, formed entirely to receive and to elaborate in silence. His is a face to be kissed, not worshipped. Goethe, even in his earliest portraits, looks as if his expression depended too much on his own will. There is a selfconscious power, and purpose, and self-restraint, and all but scorn, upon those glorious lineaments, which might win worship, and did; but not love, except as the child of enthusiasm or of relationship. But Burns's face, to judge of it by the early portrait of him by Nasmyth, must have been a face like that of Joseph of old, of whom the Rabbis relate, that he was mobbed by the Egyptian ladies whenever he walked the streets. The magic of that countenance, making Burns at once tempter and tempted, may explain many a sad story. The features certainly are not perfectly regular; there

is no superabundance of the charm of mere animal health in the outline or colour: but the marks of intellectual beauty in the face are of the highest order, capable of being but too triumphant among a people of deep thought and feeling. The lips, ripe, yet not coarse or loose, full of passion and the faculty of enjoyment, are parted, as if forced to speak by the inner fulness of the heart; the features are rounded, rich, and tender, and yet the bones show thought massively and manfully everywhere; the eyes laugh out upon you with boundless good humour and sweetness, with simple, eager, gentle surprise a gleam as of the morning star, looking forth upon the wonder of a new-born worldaltogether

A station like the herald Mercury,

New lighted on a heaven-kissing hill.

Bestow on such a man the wittiest and most winning eloquence-a rich flow of spirits and fulness of health and life—-a deep sense of wonder and beauty in the earth and man-an instinct of the dynamic and supernatural laws which underlie and vivify this material universe and its appearances, healthy, yet irregular and unscientific, all but superstitious-turn him loose in any country in Europe, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, and it will not be difficult, alas! to cast his horoscope.

And what an age in which to be turned loose !-for loose he must go, to solve the problem of existence for himself. The grand simple old Scottish education which he got from his parents must prove narrow and unsatisfying for so rich and manifold a character; not because it was in itself imperfect; not because it did not contain implicitly all things necessary for his 'salvation'-in every sense, all laws which he might require for his after-life guidance; but because it con