m I diffident of power to
succeed? Cheer me with flattery. Am I issuing from a bath? Shampoo me.

The point of view under which we contemplate the Romans is one which
cannot be dispensed with in that higher or transcendental study of
history now prompted by the vast ferment of the meditative mind. Oh,
feeble appreciators of the public mind, who can imagine even in dreams
that this generation--self-questioned, agitated, haunted beyond any
other by the elementary problems of our human condition, by the awful
_whence_ and the more awful _whither_, by what the Germans call the
'riddle of the universe,' and oppressed into a rebellious impatience by

'The burthen of the mystery
Of all this unintelligible world,'

--that this, above all generations, is shallow, superficial, unfruitful?
That was a crotchet of the late S. T. Coleridge's; that was a crotchet
of the present W. Wordsworth's, but which we will venture to guess that
he has now somewhat modified since this generation has become just to
himself. No; as to the multitude, in no age can it be other than
superficial. But we do contend, with intolerance and scorn of such
opposition as usually we meet, that the tendencies of this generation
are to the profound; that by all its natural leanings, and even by its
infirmities, it travels upwards on the line of aspiration and downwards
in the direction of the unfathomable. These tendencies had been
awakened and quickened by the vast convulsions that marked the close of
the last century. But war is a condition too restless for sustained
meditation. Even the years _after_ war, if that war had gathered too
abundantly the vintages of tears and tragedy and change, still rock and
undulate with the unsubsiding sympathies which wars such as we have
known cannot but have evoked. Besides that war is by too many issues
connected with the practical; the service of war, by the arts which it
requires, and the burthen of war, by the discussions which it prompts,
almost equally tend to alienate the public mind from the speculation
which looks beyond the interests of social life. But when a new
generation has grown up, when the forest trees of the elder generation
amongst us begin to thicken with the intergrowth of a younger shrubbery
that had been mere ground-plants in the aera of war, _then_ it is, viz.,
under the heavenly lull and the silence of a long peace, which in its
very uniformity and the solemnity of its silence has somet