tune
for themselves.

COLLOQUY XV.--THE CONCLUSION.

_Montesinos_.--Here Sir Thomas is the opinion which I have attempted to
maintain concerning the progress and tendency of society, placed in a
proper position, and inexpugnably entrenched here according to the rules
of art, by the ablest of all moral engineers.

_Sir Thomas More_.--Who may this political Achilles be whom you have
called in to your assistance?

_Montesinos_.--Whom Fortune rather has sent to my aid, for my reading has
never been in such authors. I have endeavoured always to drink from the
spring-head, but never ventured out to fish in deep waters. Thor,
himself, when he had hooked the Great Serpent, was unable to draw him up
from the abyss.

_Sir Thomas More_.--The waters in which you have now been angling have
been shallow enough, if the pamphlet in your hand is, as it appears to
be, a magazine.

_Montesinos_.--"_Ego sum is_," said Scaliger, "_qui ab omnibus discere
volo_; _neque tam malum librum esse puto_, _ex quo non aliquem fructum
colligere possum_." I think myself repaid, in a monkish legend, for
examining a mass of inane fiction, if I discover a single passage which
elucidates the real history or manners of its age. In old poets of the
third and fourth order we are contented with a little ore, and a great
deal of dross. And so in publications of this kind, prejudicial as they
are to taste and public feeling, and the public before deeply injurious
to the real interests of literature, something may sometimes be found to
compensate for the trash and tinsel and insolent flippancy, which are now
become the staple commodities of such journals. This number contains
Kant's idea of a Universal History on a Cosmo-Political plan; and that
Kant is as profound a philosopher as his disciples have proclaimed him to
be, this little treatise would fully convince me, if I had not already
believed it, in reliance upon one of the very few men who are capable of
forming a judgment upon such a writer.

The sum of his argument is this: that as deaths, births, and marriages,
and the oscillations of the weather, irregular as they seem to be in
themselves, are nevertheless reduceable upon the great scale to certain
rules; so there may be discovered in the course of human history a steady
and continuous, though slow development of certain great predispositions
in human nature, and that although men neither act under the law of
instinct, like brute an