cts you with his theories on philology and
scansion--with his amended translation of a hexameter in Persius, and
his new reading of a line in Theocritus; the bagman is all for 'the
shop;' the policeman is redolent of the 'lock-up house 'and 'your
wertchup;' the tailor is profoundly knowing on the 'sweating system;
'the son of Crispin vows and protests there's 'nothing like leather.'
All these _minus_ signs have a tendency to cancel each other: and thus
the equation of life is worked out. Society has been said to have at
all times the same want--namely, of one sane man, with adequate powers
of expression to hold up each object of monomania in its right
relations. 'The ambitious and mercenary bring their last new
Mumbo-Jumbo--whether tariff, railway, mesmerism, or California--and by
detaching the object from its relations, easily succeed in making it
seen in a glare, and a multitude go mad about it; and they are not to
be reproved or cured by the opposite multitude, who are kept from this
particular insanity by an equal frenzy on another crotchet. But let
one man have the comprehensive eye that can replace this isolated
prodigy in its right neighbourhood and bearings, and the illusion
vanishes--the returning reason of the community thanks the reason of
the monitor.' There is perhaps nothing which more urgently calls for
such a controlling and overseeing mind, to curb eccentric excesses,
and to restore equilibrium of action, than philanthropy itself. In the
enthusiasm of its impulses, it thinks it can afford to sneer at
political economy, and that it is right to wander at its own sweet
will, benevolently defying the remonstrances of all who have a method
to propound, a science to explain, a system to uphold. Though the
heart be large, yet the mind--as Nathaniel Hawthorne somewhere
observes--is often of such moderate dimensions, as to be exclusively
filled up with one idea; and thus, when a good man has long devoted
himself to a particular kind of beneficence, to one species of reform,
he is apt to become narrowed into the limits of the path wherein he
treads, and to fancy that there is no other good to be done on earth
but that selfsame good to which he has put his hand, and in the very
mode that best suits his own conceptions. 'All else is worthless; his
scheme must be wrought out by the united strength of the whole world's
stock of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a position in the
universe. Moreover, powerful tr