conomy
of time.'

CORRESPONDENCE WITH HALLAM

Among the recorded fragmentary items of 1830, by the way, he read Mill's
celebrated essay on Coleridge, which, when it was republished a
generation later along with the companion essay on Bentham, made so
strong an impression on the Oxford of my day. He kept up a
correspondence with Hallam, now at Cambridge, and an extract from one of
Hallam's letters may show something of the writer, as of the friend for
whose sympathising mind it was intended:--

Academical honours would be less than nothing to me were it not for
my father's wishes, and even these are moderate on the subject. If
it please God that I make the name I bear honoured in a second
generation, it will be by inward power which is its own reward; if
it please Him not, I hope to go down to the grave unrepining, for I
have lived and loved and been loved; and what will be the momentary
pangs of an atomic existence when the scheme of that providential
love which pervades, sustains, quickens this boundless universe
shall at the last day be unfolded and adored? The great truth
which, when we are rightly impressed with it, will liberate mankind
is that no man has a right to isolate himself, because every man is
a particle of a marvellous whole; that when he suffers, since it is
for the good of that whole, he, the particle, has no right to
complain; and in the long run, that which is the good of all will
abundantly manifest itself to be the good of each. Other belief
consists not with theism. This is its centre. Let me quote to their
purpose the words of my favourite poet; it will do us good to hear
his voice, though but for a moment:--

'One adequate support
For the calamities of mortal life
Exists--one only: an assured belief
That the procession of our fate, howe'er
Sad or disturbed, is ordered by a Being
Of infinite benevolence and power,
Whose everlasting purposes embrace
All accidents, converting them to good.'[49]

Hallam's father, in that memoir so just and tender which, he prefixes to
his son's literary remains, remarks that all his son's talk about this
old desperate riddle of the origin and significance of evil, like the
talk of Leibnitz about it, resolved itself into an unproved assumption
of the necessity of evil. In truth th