uture and with the co-agencies from the unintelligible present. The
fervour and the strife of human thought is but the more subtle for
being less derived from immediate action, and more so from hieroglyphic
mysteries or doubts concealed in the very shows of life. The centres of
civilization seethe, as it were, and are ebullient with the agitation of
the self-questioning heart.

The fervour is universal; the tumult of intellectual man, self-tormented
with unfathomable questions, is contagious everywhere. And both from
what we know, it might be perceived _a priori_, and from what we see, it
may be known experimentally, that never was the mind of man roused into
activity so intense and almost morbid as in this particular stage of our
progress. And it has added enormously to this result--that it is
redoubled by our own consciousness of our own state so powerfully
enforced by modern inventions, whilst the consciousness again is
reverberated from a secondary mode of consciousness. All studies
prosper; all, with rare exceptions, are advancing only too impetuously.
Talent of every order is almost become a weed amongst us.

But this would be a most unreasonable ground for charging it upon our
time and country that they are unprogressive and commonplace. Nay,
rather, it is a ground for regarding the soil as more prepared for the
seed that is sown broadcast. And before our England lies an ample
possibility--to outstrip even Rome itself in the extent and the grandeur
of an empire, based on principles of progress and cohesion such as Rome
never knew.

FURTHER NOTES FOR ARTICLE ON MR. FINLAY'S HISTORY.

_Civilization._--Now about prisoners, strange as this may seem, it
really is not settled whether and how far it is the duty in point of
honour and reasonable forbearance to make prisoners. At Quatre Bras very
few were made by the French, and the bitterness, the frenzy of hatred
which this marked, led of necessity to a reaction.

But the strangest thing of all is this, that in a matter of such a
nature it should be open to doubt and mystery whether it is or is not
contradictory, absurd, and cancellatory or obligatory to make prisoners.
Look here, the Tartars in the Christian war, not from cruelty--at least,
no such thing is proved--but from mere coercion of what they regarded as
good sense the Tartars thought it all a blank contradiction to take and
not kill enemies. It seemed equal to taking a tiger laboriously and at
much risk