ct down and straightway forgets where he put
it, what it was for, or what manner of fact it was, and goes serenely on
with his argument as if no such fact existed. Some of his facts are of
such a nature that the pity is not that he occasionally forgets them,
but that he ever remembered them. To show that old truths are "now
proved to have been lies," he quotes,--

"Doubt that the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move,
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love,"

and adds this comment,--"Well, we know now that the sun does not move,
and that the stars are not fire; that the voices of the learned, who
held up these things as immutable truths, were unconsciously lying after
all." Yet any astronomical horn-book would have told our philosopher,
that, if one scientific theory is firmly founded on truth, it is that
the sun does move; and for the matter of the stars, it is as likely to
be fire as anything else. "William Penn," he says elsewhere, "is now
tainted, and Washington suspected." By whom? and of what?--will this new
historian inform us? "Great artists think differently, as witness
wondrous Giotto, the shepherd boy, and our own clever, but mediocre
Opie." A man may mistake a mediocre painter for a great artist and only
err in judgment, but that he should in the same breath proclaim him to
be both is a marvel of stultification. "All men are not born equal," he
says, presumptuously dabbling in politics and drawing his feeble bow
against the Declaration of Independence,--"all men are not equally wise,
gifted, clever, strong, handsome, or tall. The brains of one nation and
the brains of one man are superior in weight, form, and activity to the
brains of another nation or another man." "The framers of the celebrated
American Declaration knew just as well as we do that they were preaching
a doctrine of romantic falsehood." A moment or two after this fine
philosophical distinction and this courteous and eminently Gentle
assertion,--but quite long enough for him to have forgotten both,--he
makes another affirmation, that equality exists "in the grave and in the
church." How, then? Are men equally wise, gifted, clever, strong,
handsome, or tall in church? "A hundred years after death we may weigh
the dust of the greatest hero, and it is no more than that of the
poorest beggar; and the name that remains is as light and useless as the
dust." But if the great hero were very strong and tall and th