al sphere, by an Addison,
by a Steele; but now in their society he finds a man whose type of
thought is far more agreeable to him.

Shaftesbury, whom I need only mention to recall a great thinker to the
mind of every well-informed man,--Shaftesbury lived at a time when much
disturbance reigned in the religion of his native land, when the
dominant church sought by force to subdue men of other modes of thought.
State and morals were also threatened by much that must arouse the
anxiety of the intelligent and right-thinking. The best counter-action
to all this, he believed, was cheerfulness; in his opinion, only what
was regarded with serenity would be rightly seen. He who could look
serenely into his own bosom must be a good man. This was the main thing,
and from it sprang all other good. Spirit, wit, and humor were, he held,
the real agencies by which such a disposition should come in contact
with the world. All objects, even the most serious, must be capable of
such clarity and freedom if they were not bedizened with a merely
arrogant dignity, but contained within themselves a true value which did
not fear the test. In this spirited endeavor to become master of things
it was impossible to avoid casting about for deciding authorities, and
thus human reason was set as judge over the content, and taste over the
manner, of presentation.

In such a man our Wieland now found, not a predecessor whom he was to
follow, nor a colleague with whom he was to work, but a true elder twin
brother in the spirit, whom he perfectly resembled, without being formed
in his likeness; even as it could not be said of the Menaechmi which was
the original, and which the copy.

What Shaftesbury, born in a higher station, more favored with worldly
advantages, and more experienced by travel, office, and cosmopolitan
knowledge, did in a wider circle and at a more serious period in
sea-girt England, precisely this our friend, proceeding from a point at
first extremely limited, accomplished through persistent activity and
through ceaseless toil, in his native land, surrounded on every side by
hills and dales; and the result was--to employ, in our condensed
address, a brief but generally intelligible term--that popular
philosophy whereby a practically trained intelligence is set in decision
over the moral worth of things, and is made the judge of their aesthetic
value.

This philosophy, prepared in England and fostered by conditions in
Germany, was