THE CHILD'S CONFESSION. THERE went a little scholar

With slow and lagging feet
Towards the great church portal
That opened on the street.
Without, the sun was shining;
Within, the air was dim;
He caught a waft of incense,
A dying note of hymn.
He drew the crimson curtain,
And cast a look inside,
To where the sunbeam lightened
The form of Him who died,
Between St. John and Mary
On roodloft crucified.

The curtain fell behind him,
He stood a little while,
Then signed him with the water,
And rambled down the aisle.
Behind a great brown pillar
The scholar took his stand,
And trifled with the ribbon

Of the satchel in his hand.
His little breast was beating;

His blue eyes brimming o'er; Like April rains, his tears

Fell spangling on the floor. An aged priest was passing;

He noticed him, and said, "Why, little one, this weeping, This heavy hanging head?" "My father, O my father!

I've sinned," said the child,
"And have no rest of conscience
Till I am reconciled.

Then list to my confession".
He louted on his knee-
"The weight of my transgression
Weighs heavily on me."
But then a burst of weeping

And sobs his utterance broke,
The priest could not distinguish
A single word he spoke.
In vain were all his efforts,
For wildly tossed his breast;
He could not still the tumult,

With hands upon it pressed.
Then said the pastor gently,
"You have a little slate;
Write on it the confession

You are powerless to relate."
The child his satchel opened,

And strove his sins to note,
But still the tear-drop dribbled,
As busily he wrote.

Now when the tale was finished,
He held it to the priest
With sigh, as from the burden
He felt himself released.

A DOUBTER'S HYMN.
GOD of the Heart! whose love immense
In each of us half quenched unseen
Darts its pure light at times between
The prison bars of sin and sense,
We know Thou art, for there did move,
In guise of mortal nature, One,
Flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone,
Whose life and death were naught but love.
Durst we, then, hope that we, who plod
Up the steep path of wrong or right,
Yet bear within our hearts a light,
The earnest of the perfect God?
God of the Mind! whose power is given
To some of us in part to trace
The glories of Thy hidden face,
The secrets of the earth and heaven,
No man hath ever known Thee quite;
We pant, O God! we pant to find
Some great apostle of the mind,
To lift the veil and show us light.
But no; by turns we fling away

Each faithless guide, and learn that he
Who fain would pierce the mystery,
Himself must grope to find the day.
And must we then in doubt and fear
Watch on, watch ever for each star
That glimmers on us faint and far,
And know the dawn will not appear?
And is the dream that human kind
Is marching on from age to age,
To claim its perfect heritage,
Mere vision of an idle mind?
We know not, but for him, we know,
Who loveth and who prayeth well,
Some flash of God's own truth shall quell
The doubts that bow his spirit low.
Then bate not what thou hast of breath;
In thee hath dwelt, and yet shall dwell,
O man! a love that knows not Death,
And reaches past the grasp of Hell.
In thee shall dwell, it may befall,

The knowledge of the truth of things,
The mind to hold high communings
With Him who is the Cause of all.
NEW COLLEGE, OXON

Spectator.

From the Spectator, 16 May. LORD BROUGHAM. PROBABLY the hugest human phenomenon of our century has passed away in the death of Lord Brougham. He was the Demiurgus of Liberalism during the early part of the century, and brooded over the various germs of intellectual, moral, and political innovation, widely scattered and much needed in that day, with a rich fecundity of result the benefits of which the present generation are by no means likely ever adequately to appreciate. He was in restless energy rather a hundred men than one, and, moreover, for all the unity of design, the intellectual unity, that he gave to the various branches of his political activity, he might really have been a hundred men not even bound up in one. By this, we mean that his energy in one department did not so interpenetrate and flavour his energy in others as to make one feel its individual origin and singleness of conception. There was rough force, extraordinary vitality, immense vigour of handling in all he did; but the scientific mind never betrayed itself in the statesman; the judicial mind scarcely gleamed out in the biographer or historian; the metaphysician was hardly seen in the lawyer; nor even the popular leader in the constitutional theorist. Brougham was a big miscellany of useful forces, in which the modern doctrines of correlation, the doctrine that any one form of force is absolutely interchangeable with every other, could by no means be detected. True, the measure of his restless strength was nearly the same in every direction, but there was little trace of co-ordination and reciprocal influence among the various departments of his wonderfully miscellaneous energy. Like a besom, his multitudinous intelligence was composed of an immense number of almost equally strong fibres, with which it was possible to sweep a great surface of ground greatly in need of such sweeping; but the bond between these fibres seemed to be rather the comparatively mechanical one of a common sheath or socket in the same energetic character, than that perfect permeation of one faculty or acquirement by all the others which goes to make up what is called the highest culture of accomplished men. He wrote freely and at large on education, history, biography, law, science, natural theology, every branch of politics; he wrote on one branch of classical study, the oratory of Greece and Rome, with as much shrewdness and minuteness of treatment as he ever devoted to any subject of study; he published at least one anonymous

romance; and he spoke probably much more even than he wrote; but while he never touched a subject in his earlier days without leaving the impression of force behind him, there is scarcely a single speech or writing of Lord Brougham's except, perhaps, speeches of a purely professional character, like that on Queen Caroline, which would carry with it the sense of completeness, exhaustiveness, perfection. Indeed, he might have sanely said of himself what the man in the Gospels said insanely,

that his name was Legion. Legion as a reformer in an age when almost everything is wrong, may be all the more useful for his multiplicity of inchoate energies; and no group of men, even though combining Brougham's various powers, could have done so much to bring home to the public the manifoldness of the mischiefs under which England groaned, and of the remedies for which it craved, as the single reformer Brougham; for his name was a thread which united in the popular imagination the various topics of which he treated. But such a one, though the best of all reformers to stir public indignation at the rank crop of evils, is not the one best fitted to perfect the cure even of any; and the movements which Brougham's hundredhanded genius started, it needed minds of a more limited but also more finely chiselled type to mature. Nothing impresses one more in the career of this wonderful man than that he never gained by age a single compensation for the loss of the force of youth. He lost in impetus without gaining in judgment. He lost in versatility without gaining in accuracy. He lost in fire without gaining in serenity. He lost in intensity without gaining in comprehensiveness. He lost in bitterness without gaining in suavity. Finally, he lost in terror without gaining in command. The great advantage of age over youth is in the power it acquires of co-ordinating all its acquisitions, and turning variety of experience into moral wisdom. But Lord Brougham's huge and multitudinous energies seem to have been too hasty ever to have furnished his inner spirit with the materials for this large moral assimilation. As his moral nature never gained that mild and venerable benignity which is so great a charm of old age, so his intellectual nature never gained the lucid and temperate power of impressive survey, which is its greatest privilege. The one often exists without the other, as, for example, in Brougham's great contemporary, Lord Lyndhurst, who had the last in all its splendour; but Brougham displayed neither. His latest efforts in the annual addresses to

"the first gentleman of his age' was pleased under his own hand to intimate that it suited his disposition no longer to maintain even the thin covering of decency which he had hitherto suffered to veil the terms of their union; he announced that they should now live apart; and added, with a refinement of delicacy suited to the finished accomplishment of his pre-eminence among gentlemen, that he pledged himself never to ask for a nearer connection, even if their only child should die; he added, with a moving piety, which God forbid!' in case it might be imagined that the death of the daughter was as much his hope as the destruction of the mother. The separation thus delicately effected made only an apparent change in the relative position of the parties. They had before occupied the same house, because they had lived under one roof, but in a state of complete separation; and now the only difference was that, instead of making a partition of the dwelling, and assigning her one-half its interior, he was graciously pleased to make a new division of the same mansion, giving her the outside, and keeping the inside to his mistresses and himself.”

In the two sentences we have italicized, at all events in the first of them, Brougham's ferocity of contempt blazes out in its full power. Sometimes, we think it a little overreaches itself in grasping after new forms of reiteration, and we fancy that in the latter of these sentences there is a flavour of extravagance which rather injures the intensity. Vanity, which was terribly strong in Brougham,—perhaps as strong as any hate, now and then weakened the intellectual expression of that hate. He makes his hero in Albert Lunel pray, in an agony of fear, "for omniscience and omnipresence," that he may know what people are saying of him. We should imagine that the idea had actually suggested itself to his own mind, but that the fear was not fear of the kind which he imputes to his

Lord Brougham has left us a character of himself under the thin disguise of the Baron de Moulin, which illustrates this one of his defects, while exaggerating, we think, others of them, and it is so curious that we will extract it here. The character is introduced with a discussion of the Baron's attentions to a great beauty, the wife of another: —

"But how did she and he go on? I suppose she relished him?'-'As who does not? His various learning; his brilliant wit; his drollery, for it now soars to the Attic heights and now sweeps the Doric levels; his grave, serious, even severe, though God wot never ascetic moments; his liveliness, alternating with sarcasm, like the clouds which course along the sky, now hiding and now revealing the sun, now screening us from his glare, and now descending in tempests of thunder-all this must have made a strongish impression on a very clever woman, though he has absolutely none of the qualities which win the ordinary female mind; he is plain, nay, as near being ugly as any intelligent countenance will allow; he sings not, plays not, paints not, dances not; he neither hunts, nor hawks, nor shoots; he gambles not; and he dresses so that were he to appear in our salons at Paris, he must either serve a long noviciate, or attain high station, or make some happy hit that all can talk about-else success he never could have; add to all which, manners, though high enough bred, yet abrupt, a temper not under strict control, and as much pride as falls to one man's share.'- " Is he amiable in other respects?' asked Lord Mornton; for somehow he holds himself so much aloof, that the more one sees of him the less one knows of him.'-Amiable it is quite impossible any one can be with his hot temper, and the sin raging in him without control whereby our first parents fell. But he is also revengeful, and I should say could forgive more easily than he can forget.'- Do you hold him selfish?'-In the utmost sense of the word. I don't mean to say he is incapable of generosity; he is of course generous, because he is proud, and cannot stoop to reckon pounds, munificent by force of being magnificent, would shillings, and pence, (louis et livres). He is give to deserving objects rather than to others, but must give to some, that he may be above counting cost, and also make men feel grateful and dependent. But I think he despises, perhaps hates, all he confers favours upon.""

The exaggerated vanity of the first part of