difficulty in the discharge of such a trust makes this book vivid and impressive beyond his former volumes, although it lacks the dramatic element. We do not keep the weary watch on the rampart of Jellalabad for the army that is no more ; and when O'Connell is saved by a flaw we do not learn how the error which had escaped the Iaw~officers and the judges, the Irish bar, and the cunning prisoner himself, was detected by a young lawyer in London who had nothing to do with the case, and whose fortune it made to this day.
Gneist pleasantly describes us as floundering in a transit of socialism. What he calls "Uebergang in das Jahrhundert der Socialreformen und der Socialbills," Dr. Bright designates as the democratic age. To call it the liberal age would be to court a party triumph ; and we should have to define liberty, which resembles the camel, and enjoys more definitions that any other object in nature. Democracy, if not the most scientific notation, is the one that divides us least. The two ideas are not always kept apart, and a veil hangs over the question how they come out in respect of class government, equality, imperialism, education, toleration, slavery, nationality, federalism, conquest, the right of minorities, the reign of the higher law. Zeller has thought it worth his while to open the Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie with the admonition that history should explain as well as narrate. The advice is not addressed" to the master of University, who knows the unpolitical cause of much political effect, and always looks beneath the surface of vacant debates for the derivation, if not for the original root of things. But he never sails under the bare poles of theory, and pronounces as little as he can upon party dogmatism. He shows himself a partisan like Keble when he asked whether Disestablishment was not just ; or Quesnay when he said, "Quand on parle pour la raison et la justice, on a bien plus d'amis qu'on ne croit." He deserves the high praise that he will not satisfy inferior minds of his own or any other way of thinking. For the sincere liberal he is full of weighty lessons, meaning by sincere one who knows
