they are not generally admired, being didactic in style,
bare, and obscure. Among his best known publications are his volume
"Nature," and his lectures, "The Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth
Century," "The Superlative in Manners and Literature," "English Character
and Manners," and "The Conduct of Life." In 1850 appeared "Representative
Men," embracing sketches of Plato, Swedenborg, Montaigne, Shakespeare,
Napoleon, and Goethe.

Such are the days,--the earth is the cup, the sky is the cover, of the
immense bounty of nature which is offered us for our daily aliment; but
what a force of illusion begins life with us, and attends us to the end!
We are coaxed, flattered, and duped, from morn to eve, from birth to
death; and where is the old eye that ever saw through the deception? The
Hindoos represent Maia, the illusory energy of Vishnu, as one of his
principal attributes. As if, in this gale of warring elements, which life
is, it was necessary to bind souls to human life as mariners in a tempest
lash themselves to the mast and bulwarks of a ship, and Nature employed
certain illusions as her ties and straps,--a rattle, a doll, an apple, for
a child; skates, a river, a boat, a horse, a gun, for the growing
boy;--and I will not begin to name those of the youth and adult, for they
are numberless. Seldom and slowly the mask falls, and the pupil is
permitted to see that all is one stuff, cooked and painted under many
counterfeit appearances. Hume's doctrine was that the circumstances vary,
the amount of happiness does not; that the beggar cracking fleas in the
sunshine under a hedge, and the duke rolling by in his chariot, the girl
equipped for her first ball, and the orator returning triumphant from the
debate, had different means, but the same quantity of pleasant excitement.

This element of illusion lends all its force to hide the values of present
time. Who is he that does not always find himself doing something less
than his best task? "What are you doing?" "Oh, nothing; I have been doing
thus, or I shall do so or so, but now I am only--" Ah! poor dupe, will you
never slip out of the web of the master juggler?--never learn that, as
soon as the irrecoverable years have woven their blue glory between to-day
and us, these passing hours shall glitter and draw us, as the wildest
romance and the homes of beauty and poetry? How difficult to deal erect
with them! The events they bring, their trade, entertainments, and gossip,