ense is the experience of every day. Discovery is something
against the experience of every day. No wonder, then, that when Galileo
proclaimed a great truth, the universal cry was, "Pshaw! common-sense
will tell you the reverse." Talk to a sensible man for the first time on
the theory of vision, and hear what his common-sense will say to it. In
a letter in the time of Bacon, the writer, of no mean intellect himself,
says: "It is a pity the chancellor should set his opinion against the
experience of so many centuries and the dictates of common-sense."
Common-sense, then, so useful in household matters, is less useful in
the legislative and in the scientific world than it has been generally
deemed. Naturally, the advocate for what has been tried, and averse
to what is speculative, it opposes the new philosophy that appeals to
reason, and clings to the old which is propped by sanction.

LOVE, AND WRITERS ON LOVE.

My warm, hot-headed, ardent young friends, ye are in the flower of your
life, and writing verses about love,--let us say a word on the
subject. There are two species of love common to all men and to most
animals,--[Most animals; for some appear insensible to the love of
custom]--one springs from the senses, the other grows out of custom.
Now, neither of these, my dear young friends, is the love that you
pretend to feel,--the love of lovers. Your passion, having only its
foundation (and that unacknowledged) in the senses, owes everything else
to the imagination. Now, the imagination of the majority is different
in complexion and degree in every country and in every age; so also, and
consequently, is the love of the imagination. As a proof, observe that
you sympathize with the romantic love of other times or nations only
in proportion as you sympathize with their poetry and imaginative
literature. The love which stalks through the "Arcadia" or "Amadis
of Gaul" is to the great bulk of readers coldly insipid or solemnly
ridiculous. Alas! when those works excited enthusiasm, so did the love
which they describe. The long speeches, the icy compliments, expressed
the feeling of the day. The love madrigals of the time of Shenstone,
or the brocade gallantries of the French poets in the last century, any
woman now would consider hollow or childish, imbecile or artificial.
Once the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young
friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall prob