ng the world to rights once more, there rose before them glimpses of
an Arcadian ideal. Country life--the primaeval calling of men--how
graceful and pure it might be! How graceful--if not pure--it once had
been! The boors of Teniers and the beggars of Murillo might be true to
present fact; but there was a fairer ideal, which once had been fact, in
the Eclogues of Theocritus, and the Loves of Daphnis and Chloe. And so
men took to dreaming of shepherds and shepherdesses, and painting them on
canvas, and modelling them in china, according to their cockney notions
of what they had been once, and always ought to be. We smile now at
Sevres and Dresden shepherdesses; but the wise man will surely see in
them a certain pathos. They indicated a craving after something better
than boorishness; and the many men and women may have become the gentler
and purer by looking even at them, and have said sadly to themselves:
"Such might have been the peasantry of half Europe, had it not been for
devastations of the Palatinate, wars of succession, and the wicked wills
of emperors and kings."

LECTURE III--THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES

In a former lecture in this Institution, I said that the human race owed
more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian
era. It may seem a bold assertion to those who value duly the century
which followed the revival of Greek literature, and consider that the
eighteenth century was but the child, or rather grandchild, thereof. But
I must persist in my opinion, even though it seem to be inconsistent with
my description of the very same era as one of decay and death. For side
by side with the death, there was manifold fresh birth; side by side with
the decay there was active growth;--side by side with them, fostered by
them, though generally in strong opposition to them, whether conscious or
unconscious. We must beware, however, of trying to find between that
decay and that growth a bond of cause and effect where there is really
none. The general decay may have determined the course of many men's
thoughts; but it no more set them thinking than (as I have heard said)
the decay of the Ancien Regime produced the new Regime--a loose metaphor,
which, like all metaphors, will not hold water, and must not be taken for
a philosophic truth. That would be to confess man--what I shall never
confess him to be--the creature of circumstances; it would be to fall
into the same fallacy of spo