uncontrolled by their fellows, a permanent influence upon the fortunes of the race. But the proper inquiry for science is, not what may be conceived, but what has really taken place. Have men of extraordinary power, as a matter of fact, determined their own career, and the contemporary and subsequent condition of the world? Or can it be shown, on the contrary, that antecedent and surrounding circumstances have uniformly determined the quality of genius which has made itself known and felt, and the direction which it has taken; and that its permanent effects fall likewise within the cognizance of science?

Take, for example, Julius Cæsar. Is he an unaccountable phenomenon? Did his will or genius overthrow the Commonwealth and introduce autocracy? So Brutus thought when he endeavoured to restore the Republic by the death of the usurper. But modern philosophy would convince us that Cæsar could no more have destroyed the Republic, than Cato and Cicero could save it, or Brutus and Cassius restore it; and that if Cæsar owed his abilities to nature, we must ascribe the use he made of them, and his supremacy at Rome, to its previous history, and the times he lived in. The Republic was destroyed already before Cæsar had attained to manhood; and we can trace a clear connexion between the character and situation of the founders of the city, the military career of their descendants, the decline of industry and patriotism in a later age, the rise of individuals such as Marius, Sylla, Catiline, and Cæsar, and of such as Cato, the representative of an ancient cause.

When the conquests of the Romans had spread beyond Italy, and no formidable rival kept the safety of the Commonwealth in mind; when the soldiers had been but too naturally corrupted by debauchery in Asia, and the citizens by idleness and public maintenance at home, or by the bribes of wealthy candidates for office; when, too, the laws and administration depended on the votes of men who were Roman citizens only in name, 'the public assemblies became so many conspiracies against the State; the soldiers were no longer the soldiers of the Commonwealth, but of Sylla, of Marius, of Pompey, and of Cæsar; and as the Republic was fated to destruction, the only material question

was who should have the credit of overthrowing it."* Order could only be restored by some one who could make himself master of all the factions; a general wish for such an arbiter was generated; and, as Hume expresses it, the greatest happiness the Romans could look for was the despotic power of the Cæsars.+

At the end of the second Punic war, when the dictatorate ceased for a hundred and twenty years, a Cæsar could no more have made himself the sovereign of Rome than could a Scipio ; no more than the Duke of Wellington could have made himself the monarch of Great Britain after the victory of Waterloo. But revolution, faction, and anarchy ever create, first their leaders and then their conquerors; and the passions, emergencies, and opportunities of disorderly and desperate times place a ladder to bad eminence under the feet of men like Cæsar, Cromwell, and Napoleon, who, in a tranquil and patriotic State, would have been good and peaceable citizens. Had O'Connell been born the year he died, he might have proved a blessing to Ireland, and an object of admiration and esteem in England. England has at this hour her guiltless Cromwells as well as her Wellesleys and Nelsons. A nation cannot be permanently great which has not at all times in reserve a stock of genius, energy, and resolution; which has not many children always ready for any emergency and every opportunity. Happy is the nation which, like England, has its quiver full of them. That England always has this vital element of greatness, every crisis in her history proves the Great Rebellion, the war with France, the Indian mutiny; and in civil life, the literature, philosophy, commerce and invention of the last three hundred years, have proved it.

Mankind in the mass want leaders always, and they may count on such as they will follow. They want them in the ship, the regiment, the factory, the shop, at school, in Parliament, in courts of justice, in science and opinion; and they have them. It is the wants, the feelings, the temper, and the condition of

9-11.

* Montesquieu. Declension of the Roman Empire. Translation. Chapter

† Essay iii.

the crowd that determine the calling, the station, and the following of the individual. England evokes her Pitts, Wellingtons, and Peels; and France her two Napoleons. And the number of great men, good and bad, whom the world has known and loved or hated, is as nothing compared with those of equal or greater genius for whom it has found no place above obscurity.

Vasquez de Gama and Columbus changed the paths of commerce and its chief seats in Europe. But their discoveries were inevitable and necessary, if the actual discoverers were not. It was an age of maritime adventure. For eighty years before De Gama's voyage, the Portuguese had laboured to find a road to the East Indies by the Southern Ocean; and Bartholomew de Diaz had already turned the Cape. Columbus was bound on the same popular errand by another road. He thought to find a Western passage to the Indies, relying on ancient authorities, rumours, and reasoning, which must have stimulated other minds. A long series of naval enterprises-from that of Sebastian Cabot, who reached the continent of North America a year before Columbus entered the Gulf of Paria, to that of Magellan, who in the next generation sailed through the strait which bears his name-afford conclusive proof that the discovery of America was the inevitable result of its actual existence at one side of the Atlantic, and of the spirit which at the other side animated Europe towards the close of the fifteenth century.

But the Reformation,-was not it the work of a single man? On the contrary, the Reformation must have happened in England, in Bohemia, and in Switzerland, had Luther never been born; and it is hard to see how it could happen in them without easily finding a champion in Saxony, where so many things conspired to produce and favour it, from the Elector to the state of the Empire, and from Tetzel, the vender of indulgences, to the state of the Papacy. The rolls of the English Parliament, the popular ballads, the writings of Wicliffe and Chaucer, must convince every careful student that from the death of Edward III., the temporal power and establishment of the Church in this

* The ports of the Mediterranean were deserted as soon as those on the western coast of Europe were opened to fleets from both the Indies.'-Heeren's Historical Researches. General Introduction.

island were doomed, so soon as any circumstance should separate the Crown from its alliance; and that its spiritual power was doomed so soon as the cessation of war should leave the nation free to accomplish a great revolution, to avail itself of the new lights of the age, to vent the moral indignation accumulating for three hundred years, and to bring to bear upon the problems of the next world the same zeal and inquiry which it showed in navigation respecting the distant realities of this world. Luther was but a single crater of a volcano which must have burst through a hundred smaller orifices, had not one chief vent been provided for its fury.

A great reformer is the best interpreter of his age and crisis. He owes his power chiefly to the fact that he better understands than other men its natural drift, or is more deeply and enthusiastically moved by the cause of the people he represents. Often he but foresees what he appears to the world to accomplish, confident of and proving the existence of law and sequence in the affairs of men. And often when the battle is over, and the conqueror is no more, the position of his followers is not that to which he led them, but that which the more lasting forces of society decide. The authority of Luther could not fix the creed of Protestantism. Napoleon I. carried the boundaries of France to the Elbe, but they are now what they would have been had no Corsican adventurer ever found his way to Paris. And not the will of Napoleon III., but the will of France upon the one hand, and of the rest of Europe on the other, and the balance of European power, will determine, whether the French flag shall float over Antwerp, Coblentz, Genoa, and Alexandria at the end of the present century.

Nor is it in war, politics, commerce, and religion only, that we may trace the influence of paramount laws of human progress upon the appearance, bent, and consequence of genius, and even discern a regular sequence in the applications of the human intellect to the satisfaction of human wants, in the order of their urgency and importance. In its early life a nation can accomplish but few things at a time, and must do those things first for which there is the greatest need. It has to secure itself against its enemies, to form a polity, establish order, fix the

rights of property, settle its code of morals and religious worship, to build, to till its fields, and manufacture, as well as a rude people can, before it can have a literature or a literary tongue. The forests of Canada must be cleared before they can be cultivated, or towns be built upon their ashes; and the woodman, the farmer, and the builder, the butcher, and the grocer, must have houses and food before the author or the artist.

'It is' (says Hallam), 'the most striking circumstance in the literary annals of the dark ages, that they seem still more deficient in native than in acquired ability. It would be a strange hypothesis that no man endowed with superior gifts of nature lived in so many ages. Of military and civil prudence, indeed, we are now speaking. But though no man appeared of genius sufficient to burst the fetters imposed by ignorance and bad taste, some there must have been who in a happier condition of literature would have been its legitimate pride. We perceive, therefore, in the deficiencies of these virtues, the effect which an oblivion of good models, and the practice of a false standard of merit, may produce in repressing the natural vigour of the mind."*

But, in truth, the cause of these deficiencies lay much deeper. 'The condition of literature' was the result of the condition of society. How could there be a burst of literary genius when the vernacular language was unfit for literary use, when the masses were engrossed in war or agriculture, when 'military and civil prudence' absorbed the minds of the chief laity; and the only educated portion of society-the clergylived in cloisters, wrote in Latin, were subject to rapine, had a daily round of sacerdotal and ministerial offices, were governed by theology in their studies, and were not only the priests, but the schoolmasters, the physicians, and the lawyers of mankind?

The law especially demanded all the intellectual energies of our ancestors which theology could spare; and Glanville, Bracton, Fleta, were of necessity much earlier products of the English mind than Gower and Chaucer, because protection and justice seem more necessary to men than refined amusement,

* History of Literature, chapter i. part 1.