frequent mention of that tree in the Old Testament; and asserting that when all other plants were destroyed by the Flood, and their kinds preserved only in their seeds, the Cedars of Lebanon remained uninjured under the waters. A wild legend

of the Rabbis tells of a branch of the Tree of Life that was planted on Adam's grave,* and a wilder fiction of Christian fancy has traced to the wood which that branch produced, the centre cross of Calvary's three.

Whately accepts and expounds with characteristic literalness the divine endowment of the Tree (whether its fruits or its leaves) with some property of warding off death; ascribing to it the medicinal virtue, when applied from time to time, of preventing, or curing, the decay of old age; and he assumes our first parents to have been in the habit of using it-" as doubtless they had, since there was nothing to prevent them "—and so argues that could they have continued the use of such a medicine, they would have continued exempt from decay and death; but ceasing to do so, they would die at last, though their constitution had been so far fortified, as to ensure for them, and for their nearest descendants, by transmission, a life much longer than our natural term-this vital force of longevity, by hypothesis due to the medicinal virtue of the Tree of Life, only wearing out gradually, in many successive generations. Jeremy Taylor's argument is, that as everything with a beginning can have also an ending, and shall die, unless it be daily watered with the purls flowing from the fountain of life," therefore God provided a tree in Paradise to have supported Adam in his artificial immortality-immortality not being in his nature; for man was always the same mixture of heat and cold, of dryness and moisture; "ever the same weak thing, apt to feel rebellion in the humours, and to suffer the evils of a civil war in his body natural: and, therefore, health and life was to descend upon him from heaven, and he

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* Another legend tells how to King Solomon was offered

"an apple yet bright from the Tree

In whose stem springs the Life never-failing which Sin lost to Adam when he
Tasting knowledge forbidden, found death in the fruit of it."

was to suck life from a tree on earth; himself being but ingrafted into a tree of life, and adopted into the condition of an immortal nature." It may be compared in its effects and elevating power to the mythological tree commemorated in Southey's Paraguay poem,

"A wondrous Tree there grew,

By which the adventurer might with foot and hand
From branch to branch his upward course pursue;
An easy path, if what were said be true,

Albeit the ascent was long; and when the height
Was gain'd, that blissful region was in view."

Milton exalts the height of the Tree of Life above all the trees of the Garden—“ the middle tree and highest there that grew"-on which account, seemingly, the arch-fiend and archfelon selects it for his seat aloft, and there he

"Sat like a cormorant : yet not true life

Thereby regain'd, but sat devising death

To them who lived; nor on the virtue thought

Of that life-giving plant, but only used

For prospect what, well used, had been the pledge
Of immortality."

Spenser had anticipated Milton in strains that live, touching the Tree of Life,—that goodly tree "loaden with fruit and apples rosy redd, as they in pure vermilion had been dide;" and

"happy life to all to which thereon fedd
And life eke everlasting did befall :

Great God it planted in that blessed stedd
With His Almighty hand, and did it call
The Tree of Life;'

and from it flowed, as from a well, a trickling stream of balm, "most soveraine and dainty deare:" "life and long health that gracious ointment gave, and deadly wounds could heale" -though of the leaves of that tree of life, of power for the healing of the nations, Spenser takes no account, comparable though they be, in comparative mythology, with that Indian blooming bower

"Whose every amaranthine flower

Its deathless blossom interweaves
With bright and undecaying leaves."

Both trees being eventually forbidden, we are sometimes uncertain which of the two the poets refer to, or whether confusedly to both at once, in such lines as those of Longfellow on "the hunger and thirst of the heart, the frenzy and fire of the brain,

"That grasps at the fruitage forbidden,
The golden pomegranates of Eden,
To quiet its fever and pain."

Such fever and pain the suffering author of Small Books on Great Subjects endured, in wistful speculations on high matters metaphysico-theological, from which, in that sick-room, there was no escape for that restlessly inquiring spirit, as there might have been in active life. "But in utter loneliness the mind turns inward to search into its own nature and prospects; and this research shakes the mortal case shrewdly. Few can comprehend this, and I who feel it can hardly describe; but I certainly feel that those who eat largely of the tree of knowledge will surely die, and that soon." Here was a pained recognition of the Miltonic maxim that to be weak is miserable; with a painful failure to recognize the maxim ascribed to Bacon, though not to be found in his works, unless indirectly, that knowledge is power. Rather, such knowledge intensified and aggravated the sense of weakness.

The mysterious vendor of la peau de chagrin, in Balzac, instructs the purchaser in what he calls "un grand mystère de la vie humaine,”—to wit, that man exhausts himself by acting out the verbs VOULOIR and POUVOIR, whereas SAVOIR leaves his feeble organization in a perpetual state of calm. Nor is the calm a mere stagnation. Knowledge is power. What a world of essay-writing has been lavished on that apophthegm, first and last. Quanti est sapere! had Terence exclaimed of old. Man is finite and crippled on all sides, says Newman, and frailty in one kind causes frailty in another: 66 Deficient power causes deficient knowledge, deficient knowledge betrays him into false opinion, and entangles him in false positions." There is an apologue by one of our old friends in council which is designed to show the exceeding

misery of man, and how much too small he is for his place, that he should go on suffering all this misery (in one particular instance) for thousands of years when a little knowledge would have raised him above it. Many such evils, it is contended, moral, intellectual, and physical, a little more knowledge would dispel. Mr. Carlyle has said, "Power is the one thing needful, and that Knowledge which is Power: thus also Intellect becomes the grand faculty, in which all the others are wellnigh absorbed.” A man, says Bacon, is but what he knoweth. The diffused knowledge of an age of school boards may not rank very high as a motive power; and indeed we are told that knowledge has become, in its lower forms, so common, and is spread so widely, that it is no longer looked on as something precious-at least for his own sake. It is easy, Mr. Stuart Mill replied, to scoff at the kind of intelligence which is thus diffusing itself; but it is intelligence still. "The knowledge which is power, is not the highest description of knowledge only any knowledge which gives the habit of forming an opinion, and the capacity of expressing that opinion, constitutes a political power.” Mr. Lister's Conservative parson quotes against his Whig peer the "approved axiom" that knowledge is power, and objects that surely you give a dangerous power to the people, if you augment their knowledge. And Arlington grants that by giving them knowledge we augment their power; but not that we render it more dangerous. "You say true-Knowledge is power;' it is and ought to be power, and God forbid that it should ever cease to be so !— Are there no dangers to be apprehended from ignorance? The uneducated may equally be led by the mischievous." Parson Dale, of Caxtonian celebrity, is more vivacious in his opposition to the aphorism in dispute: to his thinking, it either says a great deal too much, or just nothing at all. Grant that it is undeniable: does it prove much in favour of knowledge? is not ignorance power too? All evil is power, and does its power make it any the better? Fanaticism is power-and a power that has often swept away knowledge like a whirlwind; as where the Mussulman burns the library of a

world. "Hunger is power. The barbarians, starved out of their forests by their own swarming populations, swept into Italy and annihilated letters. The Romans, however degraded, had more knowledge, at least, than the Gaul and the Visigoth." The theme is pursued through many variations; one of its moral aspects being, that a man of very moderate intelligence, who believes in God, and suffers his heart to beat with human sympathies, will probably gain in ordinary life a vast deal more power than knowledge ever gives to a rogue. Randal Leslie is the accomplished advocate and persevering actor-out of the maxim that knowledge is power; and it is only for a time that Randal Leslie is successful. All too soon in his course he has to argue with himself,-"If power is only to be won" by sinister use of knowledge, (and of what use is knowledge if it be not power?) "does not success in life justify all things? and who prizes the wise man if he fails?" He has entered life with no patrimony but knowledge. He has to turn knowledge from books to men; for books may give fame after death, but men give us power in life. He finds himself at last standing very near to fortune and to power; and "I owe it but to knowledge," he muses,-"knowledge of men-life—of all that books can teach us." Despising literature, save as means to some end of power, Randal Leslie is presented to us as "the incarnation of thought, hatched out of the corruption of will." His "arid self-seeking looked to knowledge for no object but power." Satan has been defined Intellect without God; and there is more of the satanic than the divine in this representative young man.

But however much abused or perverted may be the maxim, the truth it enforces is a vital one; and the saying of Imlac the sage holds good, that knowledge will always predominate over ignorance, as man governs the lower animals. When the Abyssinian prince asks him what he has found to be the effect of knowledge, and whether European culture makes its favoured nations happier than African ignorance can, Imlac is cautious and hesitating in his reply; but he can at least allege that knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure-a fact