as stamped with an iron heel upon the head of the
filthy abortion, and put an end to its crawlings. There is not one
subject the author handles bearing on life, of which he does not
take a degrading view."

Mr. Napier seems to have asked him to write on the book, and
Sedgwick's article, the first he ever wrote for a review, eventually
appeared (1845),--without, it is to be hoped, too much of the raging
contempt of the above and other letters. "I do feel contempt, and,
I hope, I shall express it. Eats hatched by the incubations of a
goose--dogs playing dominos--monkeys breeding men and women--all
distinctions between natural and moral done away--the Bible proved
all a lie, and mental philosophy one mass of folly, all of it to be
pounded down, and done over again in the cooking vessels of Gall and
Spurzheim!" This was the beginning of a long campaign, which is just
now drawing near its close. Let us at least be glad that orthodoxy,
whether scientific or religious, has mended his temper. One among
other causes of the improvement, as we have already said, is probably
to be found in the greater self-restraint which comes from the fact of
the writer appearing in his own proper person.

VALEDICTORY.[1]

[Footnote 1: On the writer's retirement from the editorship of the
_Fortnightly Review_, in 1882.]

The present number of the Review marks the close of a task which was
confided to me no less than fifteen years ago--_grande mortalis cevi
spatium_, a long span of one's mortal days. Fifteen years are enough
to bring a man from youth to middle age, to test the working value of
convictions, to measure the advance of principles and beliefs, and,
alas! to cut off many early associates and to extinguish many lights.
It is hardly possible that a Review should have been conducted for so
considerable a time without the commission of some mistakes; articles
admitted which might as well have been left out, opinions expressed
which have a crudish look in the mellow light of years, phrases
dropped in the heat or hurry of the moment which one would fain
obliterate. Many a regret must rise in men's minds on any occasion
that compels them to look back over a long reach of years. The
disparity between aim and performance, the unfulfilled promise, the
wrong turnings taken at critical points--as an accident of the hour
draws us to take stock of a complete period of our lives, all these
things rise up in private and interna