Bacon, though the practical introducer of the analytical method, had not yet come under its sway, and was nearly as free, and nearly as comprehensive too, as Aristotle himself. And Milton also, to say nothing now of his immense capacities, was a man more of the ancient than of the modern world. The Tractate on Education shows this. To superadd to a classical training which included Vitruvius and Columella in prose, and Hesiod and Manilius in poetry, a full amount of pure mathematics, with fortification, architecture, "enginry," and navigation, can only mean one thing- namely, that the knowledge of these subjects which Milton would have required was essentially different from what would now be insisted on. Goethe was a universalist of a most remarkable type. As an art-critic and a natural philosopher he was little, if at all, inferior to himself as a poet. If the Farbenlehre has not done all that he meant it to do, it has at any rate been a manual of great practical value, and Sir Charles Eastlake translated parts of it for purely artistic purposes.

conversation. The gains achieved by the collective intellect of the race entail, as it were, a compensatory loss upon the individual. Looking back upon the greatest names of past ages, one is driven to admit that their universality, if due in part to their own transcendent gifts, was due also in part to a backward state of science and to inexact method. Of all men in all ages who have been able to lay claim to cyclopædic knowledge, Aristotle is the head and chief. In all branches of science that were known in the fourth præ-Christian century he was proficient. Gray the poet used to say that, in reading Aristotle, we feel as if we were reading a table of contents. He sketched the outlines of 255 political constitutions. His Rhetoric, Logic, and Ethics have been text-books almost ever since they were written, and they are so still. Within the last few years a man of science has devoted an elaborate book to the consideration of his physical works alone, and these embrace Physics, Astronomy, Zoology, Comparative Anatomy, and Psychology. "His seal," to use the words of Sir William Hamilton, "is on all the sciences; and his speculations have mediately or im- But three-fourths of a century have mediately influenced those of all subse- passed since even Goethe was in his quent thinkers." But then Aristotle lived prime, and during those years the fields of in an age when even a mind like his con- knowledge have been developing in all diceived of the investigation of nature much rections more widely and more quickly as a mathematician conceives of a problem than in any former age. Living, then, as involving the search after some unknown we do in a time when the natural developquantity. He would suppose the law of ment of the scope of the intellect has been nature to be so and so, and then, applying abnormally stimulated, we are compelled this law to any or all of the phenomena to recognize the need of specialization, within his observation, see if it corre- whether for purposes of teaching or of responded with them or not. It is clear that search. We have seen that the tendency the region of synthesis would be far more of subdivision is to curtail freedom in the congenial to universal, undivided study, growth and use of the mental faculties, to than the reign of analysis can be. Given induce poverty and comparative narrowan equal degree of intellectual and imagin-ness in mental production. This is the acative power, the synthetic thinker would count on the side of loss; let us see what be less trammelled by facts which interfere there is to be said on the side of gain, and with his theory or law. In going down- how far a balance may be struck. In a wards from the law to the facts, there is word, then, if we lose scope and freedom greater practical opportunity for neglect- by curtailment and division, we gain in ing to observe facts which do not fit in accuracy and clearness. The minute accuwith the assumed law, and less chance of racy of modern verification makes the being delayed in the process of investiga- ground solid as science advances; and if tion. With the analytical method, also, it is true that science "moves but slowly, came in the first real comprehension of slowly," it is no less true that her progress what it is scientifically to observe and to is sure. The subdivision of labour gives record. It is the modern labours of the us, in fact, all that can by possibility be retort, the microscope, the telescope; the given by way of compensation for the one modern piles of social, vital, and commer- great loss, the high standing-point and cial statistics, all of which are forms of ob- wide freedom of universal knowledge. It servation; the modern collections of plant, is the very cradle of sound criticism, for and mineral, and animal-that now im- as each worker understands his own field periously demand a division of intellectual of knowledge better and better, there labour as one of its absolute conditions. grows up an increasingly large body of

men well qualified to chastise the charlatan | than explained. Our object at least is not and unveil the impostor.

to explain, but to note how conspicuous a feature the periwig is in our literature for a hundred years and more.

What is chiefly wanted in order to minimize the evils of division is interchange of thought, and improvements in All typical extravagances and absurdithe machinery of interchange. Much has ties of fashion have the luck of becoming been done already in this direction by badges of respectability through mere magazines and periodicals, themselves sub- lapse of time. If ever elderly housewives divided and classified into departments come to wear in permanence the monwhich would have severely puzzled the strous conglomeration of sausages which editors of the Tatler, Spectator, or Guar- for some time has graced the heads of our dian. More may yet be done by deepening ladies, it will be only following precethese existing channels of thought; more dent. The periwig first appears in print still by simplifying as far as can be done as a fantastic fashion, but as time flows on the terminology of science, and by a judi- we recognize it as the battle-field of Concious and early introduction of some skeleton form of scientific training into school routine. After all, the man who may be most sure of reaping the best results of both the wide and the special, the universal and the divided, in knowledge, is he who to a thorough acquaintance with his own branch of science adds the opportunity of conversing with men equally thorough in theirs. Unus homo, nullus homo is a true antithesis. And, conversely, the man of special knowledge in some one distinct department of learning, who is also a man of parts, may become by converse with his peers something intellectually resembling the best men of an elder timeno more an isolated unit, but a host in

himself.

From The Saturday Review.
PERIWIGS.

"It is a wonder," says Pepys, "what will be the fashion, after the plague is done, as to periwigs; for nobody will dare to buy any hair for fear of the infection, and that it had been cut off the head of people dead of the plague." A very awkward question, one would have thought, for all wearers of periwigs, but which had no practical issue. The subject of dress, viewed on its psychological side, presents no phenomenon equal to the periwig. That the whole thought and cultivation of civilized Europe should agree for three or four generations to conceal the mapping out of its brains under an impossible bush of borrowed hair shaving off a natural decoration of which mankind is instinctively as vain as of any other personal advantage, the very delight and plaything of the toilet, to assume in its stead a monstrous formality whose greatest success could only betoken fashion and expense is a fact to be indicated rather

servatism; until not to wear the wig of
your order was flat rebellion against hu-
man authority, if not against Providence
itself. The wig comes to be the crowning
test of good sense and citizenship of a
man's taking the place and accepting the
responsibilities of rank and calling. Who
would have expected such a weight of
sober gravity such an odour of sanctity
indeed as hung around the last bishop's
wig in our remembrance to descend on
the peruque, from the early notices of it;
as won by Sir Fopling, for instance, who
represents the follies of the age:
From one the sacred periwig he gained
Which wind ne'er blew nor touch of hat pro-

faned,

Another's diving bow he did adore
Which with a shog casts all the hair before,
Till he with full decorum brings it back
And rises with a water-spaniel shake.

Or by the critics of the foremost benches:
But you, loud sirs, who through your curls look
big,

Critics in plume and white vallancy wig,
Who lolling on our foremost benches sit
And still charge first, the true forlorn of wit,
So may your hats your foretops never press,
Untouched your ribbons, sacred be your dress,
&c.

Akin to these was the bush of hair under
which the beaux buried themselves; "lay
hid," as Swift said, "under the penthouse
of a full-bottomed periwig," elsewhere
called the "seducing full-bottom" from
its terrible effects on ladies' hearts. Yet
how soon the foppish periwig had become
indispensable to all ages we gather from
the failure of any attempt to discard it.
Sir Godfrey Kneller painted Wycherley's
fine head with its scattered grey hairs,
but the old man could not bear it, and the
painter had to draw a wig to it.

In a very little time we find the fullbottom no longer seducing ladies, but playing a graver part. A writer in the

Guardian (1713) remarks on the general question of dress, that some lay all the stress of beauty on their face and exert all their extravagance in the periwig (which we gather to be a growing index of the mind). Thus "the full-bottom, formally combed all before, now denotes the lawyer and politician; the smart tye wig, with a black ribbon, shows a man of fierceness of temper; and he that burdens himself with a superfluity of white hair, which flows down the back and mantles on the shoulders, is generally observed to be less curious in the furniture of the inward recesses of the skull." Such was the wig worn by the heroes of the stage who "sweat beneath the weight of a nodding plume of swan's feathers," and had their faces half hid beneath an enormous bush of white horsehair, and such the powdered curls the scent of which Mascarille invites the Précieuses to inhale :

country squire, of a bulk and stature larger
than ordinary, habited in a red coat flung
open to show the waistcoat, while the
periwig fell in a very considerable bush on
each shoulder, who in a manner took up
the whole Mall, the spectators making way
for him, while he cocked his hat and
marched directly for Westminster. We
can sympathize with those squires whose
consequence demanded something hand-
some for state occasions, but whose good
sense forbade its daily wear on their own
ground. London must have seemed to
them an opportunity for airing the costly
splendour; while none but the town-bred
could keep their taste sensitive to the
shifting changes, the gradual retrogression
from eyebrow to ear tip, the snips, twists,
and turns of flow and curl, so
as to be
aware what was in the mode and what
outrageous.

One cause of the change of form in the periwig, beyond the caprice of fashion, was the struggle perceptible in each rank to escape the shape assigned to it by a sort of sumptuary law and rise into the wig of the rank above it. Each calling seemed to settle at first into the periwig most expressive of its functions; but no man is content only to represent his calling; he aims to clothe himself according to his personal pretensions. In other words, dress is self-assertion; and therefore in a dressy age it was difficult to reconcile the demands of society with those of the individual. The essayists were bent in a body on keeping the man down. They enlarge not amiss on the folly of foppery in the more solemn characters of life to which gravity of appearance is essential. What should we think of a physician, they ask, prescribing in a bag wig, or a serjeant pleading in the Court of Common Pleas in his own hair instead of a nightcap periwig?

It is in the transitoriness of each periwig that Addison learns to see the end of them all. In turn they give a grace; but because this grace is perpetually superseded, he foresees that they will make a very poor figure, and perhaps look monstrous, in the eyes of posterity. He illustrates this conclusion by the experiences of a lawyer on the Western circuit, who at every stage comes upon some fashion more obsolete than the fast. At Staines he observes a young fellow with a tolerable periwig had it not been covered with a hat shaped in the Ramilie cock. The greatest beau at the next county sessions was dressed in a most monstrous flaxen peri- Naturally the world was most inexorawig that was made in King William's ble to the clergy; in whom we note a reign. "The wearer going it seems in his constant rebellion against the grizzle which own hair" between each assize, and only was pronounced their only wear, and assuming the wig at six months' intervals whose very name must have shocked the to meet the judges. As he gets further beau parson, Mr. Jessamy, who is held up west he fancies himself in King Charles's to our contempt. "His very grizzle," we reign, till he comes upon one gentleman accoutred in a "nightcap wig," not, we gather, quite so many years out of date, but really more ridiculous because the wearer looked with contempt on the rustics, and resolved to live and die in the mode.

The squirearchy generally seem to have affected the biggest and most flowing periwigs. The Tatler (1809) describes a

are told, "is scarce orthodox, for though it would be open schism to wear a bag, yet his wig has always a bag-front, and is properly cropt behind, that it may not eclipse the lustre of his diamond stock buckle." The sporting parson errs in another direction, "and gives his brown scratch bob a shake" as he ascends the reading-desk. The pretty preacher, a coxcomb in style, shows his weakness in

the smug wig which supersedes the orthodox grizzle. Even those who submit to it without murmuring do not come off unrebuked. They must hug their chains; that is, comb and curl them. The country parson, negligent of appearances, is shown up for allowing the faculty of curling, supposed inherent in the grizzle, to descend into the band which appears in full buckle beneath it.

ers.

clown, we are told, whose mind is a blank, may at any time change his long lank greasy hair in the Middle Row for a smart bag, or a Jemmy scratch. The gentlemen who draw the pen from behind their right ear at seven o'clock, to clap on a bag wig and sword to appear at the play as fine gentlemen, are sneered at. Parsons, lawyers, doctors, come in for it as each by turns casts a sheep's eye towards the forbidden distinction, and join in the general struggle to wear the wig which other people think you have no right to wear.

There is something quaint in the entire change of style in the wig permitted to grace some particular occasion. The Man in Black who figures in the Citizen of the World wears a grey wig, combed down "in imitation of hair," until the lovemaking draws towards a climax, when, to expedite matters and fit him for the dénouement, Beau Tibbs sets him off with

The cit has a wig of his own or rather two wigs, one for weekday and one for Sunday, round which his wife ties her pocket-handkerchief in fear of rain. He is represented when travelling as substituting for it a linen nightcap, professedly as cooler on the road, but really on economical grounds, that his wig may appear in full buckle for the benefit of his customBut the wisest cit is reproved in that he does not hold down his sons to the same modest restrictions that constitute his own respectability. The office of the wig was clearly to keep people in their a pigtail wig-a mistake, as the event places. Instead of this, as time went on, proved, as inducing an ill-timed self-asserit became the indicator of change. We tion. All had prospered with the pawnread some forty years later in the history broker's widow up to a fatal difference of our subject how Senex is shocked at upon the carving of a turkey. She began the subversion of ranks to which he be- with the wing: he pertly interposed to comes alive in a visit to Sir Timothy (a suggest the leg. She holds her ground, man of fashion), who in his presence re- he his, till the temper of both parties gives ceives visits from his doctor and his tailor. way. "I hope I am not to be taught at The one, a well-looking man of fifty, in a this time of day," cries the lady. "Madhandsome suit of trimmed black and large am," interrupts he, "we are never too old deep-bottomed wig, satisfied all his ideas. to be instructed." "Old, sir," cries the "Ay, thinks I, this gentleman is perfectly justly exasperated widow; "when I die in character, and is, I daresay, a sensible of age I know of some that will quake for person, by so close an adherence to pro- fear." And the match was broken off. priety a reflection broken in upon by It is observable how soon the idea of Sir Timothy with "So, Skirts, have you the wig as an imitation of hair disappears. brought the breeches home?" Then in The same wig might play different parts, comes Dr. Styptic, further to upset the as the Frenchman's, which naturally was critic's equanimity, with his hair nicely a "flowing Bob, but, by the addition of two dressed and bagged. "I should have pos- tails, sometimes appeared as a Major; itively taken him for a Frenchman of fash- but the "famous actor who attempted ion or a figure dancer on the stake." Just to treat his wig as hair, to disorder it as then arrives Sir Timothy's nephew from an artifice to raise terror, drew down the Westminster, in his gown and tye wig. censure of the critics upon him :"Well,' says I to myself, thank Heaven here is a man not ashamed of appearing in character.' But the young gentleman was not seated above three minutes before he pulled off his wig in the presence of the whole company, and showed as smart a head of hair in the Tyburn taste as could be found within the bills of mortality.

As time advances we perceive all ambition that the periwig can satisfy centring in the bag wig. Here the Conservative instinct is most keenly and savagely on the alert. It is the object of longing for which each party is in turn snipt. The

The player, after having acted that noble scene in the second act of Macbeth in so fine a manner that one would almost imagine with the poet the player must have been a murderer to represent one so well, goes out to execute the supposed murder. After a short space he returns as from the fact, but though the expression of his face is still remarkably excellent, one cannot but smile to observe that he has been employing himself behind the scene in putting his wig awry and untying one of the ties of it. The audience knew the thing too well for what it was to do otherwise than laugh that the horror that has produced that expression of fear

should also have untwisted one of the tails of his | itself into favour by imitating the wig periwig. through the friendly aids of powder and The openness of the wig to practical jokes pomatum, bags and tails. In 1756 we find is not brought out as much as we should a paper on the increase of taxation, in have expected in the polite literature of which an honest peruke-maker, lamenting the period, probably because it was too the decline of his calling, is driven to prodelicate ground. We read, indeed, of one pose a poll-tax upon all that wore their old bachelor, the sport of a party of romp-own hair. "For," said he, "we have ing girls, who, amongst an infinity of tricks, spirit off his wig, and convey it from one to another out of sight till he is forced to sit down bareheaded for the evening; and of another who, visiting an old maid, gets mauled by her pets, and finally has his wig snatched off by the monkey and flung into the fire, whence he was happily nimble enough to snatch it with no other injury than the singeing of the foretop; a grievance which draws from him the resolution that the next woman that makes him ridiculous shall be a young one. After all, a pate bald as a cannon-ball was probably too familiar a spectacle at the domestic hearth to excite much attention even when out of place.

never had good times since wigs were out of fashion. What rare days were those in Queen Anne's reign when the nobility and gentry wore large flaxen flows of thirty guineas apiece! As you may see by my Lord Godolphin's monument in Westminster Abbey, a Prime Minister's wig could not be made, I am sure, under fifty guineas."

After all there is something to be said for the periwig. It is the best substitute yet found for brains. A certain percentage of mankind will be fops, and the ideal fop shows better in the wig than in the beard, which by imparting an empty unsupported ferocity sets the whole countenance at odds. We see much in the argument of Simon Sleek, who treats dress from head to foot as the equivalent for wit the same who had thrown together some hasty observations upon stockings, of which his friends told him he need not be ashamed-that it is intolerable for a blockhead to be a sloven; and though everybody cannot fill his head with reasoning, it is in any one's power to wear a

As time wears on, our reading shows the beginning of the end. The hair appears on the scene as an innovation, and meets with very little favour. The young man who discards his wig is declared to look like his footman. In fact, the gloss of natural hair was regarded with suspicion. Lanky and greasy are the civilest terms applied to it. The coachman in the Rivals announces that the exciseman has taken pretty periwig. to his carrots. The hair had to smuggle |

PREVIOUS to the outbreak of the war between France and Germany the Prussian and Bavarian governments were involved in litigation on the subject of the ownership of certain pictures; the former claiming to have restored to them certain portions of the Munich Gallery which they affirmed had been unrighteously acquired from the old Düsseldorf Collection; the latter disputing the validity of the Prussian demands. The settlement of this dispute is due to the withdrawal of Prussia from the contest, the authorities at Berlin, no doubt, considering it unseemly to proceed any further in the matter after Bavaria had joined its fortunes to those of the rest of the German Federation.

It has been stated on semi-official authority that a claim will be made on the part of Prussia to some of the pictures belonging to the old electorate of Cassel, and still preserved in the national collections of France. Academy.

A FRENCH correspondent of the Pall Mall Gazette gives a list of the statues inside the Cathedral of St. Denis which have been injured by carelessness, bombardment, or pillage. The most curious accident is certainly that which happened to St. Denis. The statue of the good saint, who is popularly supposed to have crossed a river with his head under his arm, was decapitated by a shell. The statue of Catherine de Medicis has two fingers cut off and stolen, and a gash from a sabre on her hands. Henry II. has lost not only two fingers, but the big toe of his right foot; Charles VI. his right hand; Duguesclin the hilt of his dagger; Charles V. both hands and his sceptre; Charles Martel a finger; Pepin le Bref has had his sceptre broken; and Louis XVI., besides receiving a cut across the nose, has been deprived of both his thumbs.