the calm philosophic mind, than
any one then eminent in literature; he overflowed with what Mr. Greg
describes as the highest kind of wisdom; his moral pretensions were
austere, lofty, and unbending to a fault. No man of any time would seem
to have been better entitled to a place among the Wise and the Good whom
nations ought to seek out to rule over them. Yet this great man was one
of the very worst statesmen that ever governed France. The severe
morality of the student was cast behind him by the minister. He did not
even shrink from defending, from considerations of political
convenience, the malversations of a colleague. The pattern of wisdom and
goodness devised and executed a cynical and vile intrigue, from which
Sir Robert Walpole would have shrunk with masculine disgust, and that
would have raised scruples in Dubois or Calonne. Finally, this famous
professor of political science possessed so little skill in political
practice, that a few years of his policy wrecked a constitution and
brought a dynasty to the ground.

All these political regrets and doubts, however, cannot lessen or affect
our interest in those ingenious, subtle, and delicate speculations which
Mr. Greg called _Enigmas of Life_. Though his _Creed of Christendom_ may
have made a more definite and recognisable mark, the later book rapidly
fell in with the needs of many minds, stirred much controversy of a
useful and harmonious kind, and attracted serious curiosity to a wider
variety of problems. It is at this moment in its fifteenth edition. The
chapters on Malthus and on the Non-Survival of the Fittest make a very
genuine and original contribution to modern thought. But it is the later
essays in the little volume that touched most readers, and will for long
continue to touch them. They are as far as possible from being vague, or
misty, or aimless. Yet they have, what is so curiously rare in English
literature, the charm of reverie. As the author said, they 'contain
rather suggested thoughts that may fructify in other minds than distinct
propositions which it is sought argumentatively to prove.' They have the
ever seductive note of meditation and inwardness, which, when it sounds
true, as it assuredly did here, moves the spirit like a divine music.
There is none of the thunder of Carlyle (which, for that matter, one may
easily come in time to find prodigiously useless and unedifying); there
is not the piercing concentrated ray of Emerson: but the co