I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,

When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes, and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transformed to frogs
Railed at Latona's twin-born progeny,

Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearls to hogs,
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.

This retaliation shows more disturbance of spirit than is becoming; but to infer from such language the existence in the writer of "a malignity at whose frown hell grows darker," is absurd. These jealous incompetents had, in their judgment, hurled him down into a muddy pit of error and wickedness, from the glorious peak of truth and greatness on which, in his own judgment, he was perched and the vehemence of his scorn simply measures the intensity with which he resents their injustice and replaces himself on his height. The true Milton is less expressed in his rousing polemic invectives, the trumpet blasts of his embattled spirit, than in the melodious passages of meditative reminiscence and description in which the affections of his natural character exhale.

As one who long in populous city pent,
Where houses thick and sewers annoy the air,
Forth issuing on a summer's morn to breathe
Among the pleasant villages and farms

Adjoined, from each thing met conceives delight,
The smell of grain, or tedded grass, or kine,
Or dairy, each rural sight, each rural sound;
If chance with nymph-like step fair virgin pass,
What pleasing seemed, for her now pleases more,
She most, and in her look sums all delight.

Deserted, blind, old, even harshly treated by his ungrateful daughters, composing his immortal poem, he depicts himself as singing,

With mortal voice, unchanged

To hoarse or mute, though fallen on evil days,
On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
In darkness, and with dangers compassed round,
And solitude. Yet not alone while thou

Visitst my slumbers nightly, or when morn
Purples the east- still govern thou my song,
Urania, and fit audience find, though few.

In this spirit he made his age sublime as he had made his manhood heroic. Such steady approving respect had he for himself as he grew lonelier in his age, such grand memories of his bygone deeds, such high imaginative communion with the present and the future, that we cannot hesitate to apply to him his own words descriptive of the Saviour:

And he still on was led, but with such thoughts
Accompanied of things past and to come
Lodged in his breast, as well might recommend
Such solitude before choicest society.

And so he died. And when strangers from distant lands linger in the chancel of Saint Giles at Cripplegate, as they read the inscription on his tomb they forget the surrounding roar of London. They find it difficult to think of him as sleeping there. They feel that he is truly interred in a monument which is co-extensive with the civilized world.

PASCAL.

PASCAL was a personality apart, with ideas proud as his intellect, with faith apparently humble and sincere as his heart, but in reality more wilful than natural, and underarched by a scepticism awful to himself. This sceptical character of his mind is conclusively shown by Cousin in his celebrated report to the French Academy on the "Thoughts"; and later editors of his posthumous writings have brought to light the unscrupulous changes and suppressions practised by the first editors. Dr. Lelut has demonstrated, in his instructive treatise, "L'Amulette de Pascal," the deeply diseased condition, in his later years, of both the body and the mind of this great unfortunate genius.

With a nervous system overcharged with force and out of equilibrium, the brain expending an abnormal share

II* *

OF THI

UNIVERSIZ

of his vitality, his strange precocity deprived him of boyhood. While others of his age were happy at their sports, he was by himself, earnestly grappling with the deepest questions, now wresting brilliant secrets from science with joy and glory, now musing over the darker problems of human nature, pale, weary, sad, hopelessly baffled in reason, imperiously remanded by his education and his heart to faith. He early became an invalid, and was scarcely ever after free from pain. As time wore on his state grew worse. His excessive mental labors shattered his constitution. A morbid depreciation of the worth of all worldly aims gradually possessed him. He became extremely unhappy, not merely in his outward relations but also in his speculations. His vast genius, out of tune and balance, saw disproportion, misery, and frightful mystery everywhere. He furnished another exemplification of the truth that great men, unless blessed with health, are more unhappy than others, because their transcendent powers are intrinsically less harmonized with their earthly conditions. Their faculties overlap the world, and the superfluous parts, finding no correspondent object, no soothing returns, are turned into wretchedness. Pascal asks, “ Shall he who alone knows nature alone be unhappy?" Yes, if knowledge of nature be the pioneer of discord and rebellion against nature. Only let love for what is known and conformity to it keep even pace with knowledge, and the more one knows the happier he will be. But there is danger with great genius, especially if there is any disbalancement in it, that perception will generate undue feeling, feeling out of tune with the facts, and therefore a source of irritable wretchedness.

This is clearly to be seen in the case of Pascal himself. He wore an iron girdle stuck full of steel thorns, which he pressed into his side whenever worldly thoughts allured him. "Seek no satisfaction on earth," he said; "hope nothing from men; your good is in God alone." A true religious philosophy would rather say, Seek a relative satisfaction in every normal fact of nature, every finite manifestation of the will of God; never despair of your fellow

men.

Whatever the God of nature has made is good;

whatever the God of grace does is well. The sound master of moral insight labors to ennoble human nature and life by every possible imaginative aggrandizement and exaltation. The school represented by Pascal strives to demean human nature and life by every possible imaginative impoverishment and degradation. This direful mistake is committed in the imagined interest of a supernatural antidote for the bane of a ruined world. It aggravates the evils it seeks to cure, by exciting what needs to be soothed, namely, the friction of man with his fate.

The noble but overstrung sensibility of Pascal is shown by the fact that once, when Arnauld seemed to prefer peace to truth, the shock of grief and pain was so great that he fainted away. To read his meditations on the nature and state of man, is like wandering through some mighty realm of desolation, where gleams of light fall on majestic ruins, lonely columns, crumbling aqueducts, shattered and moss-grown temples. His logic, his vigor, his irony, did shining and permanent service to morality in the Provincial Letters. But in his "Thoughts" a dark tinge of disease, a perverse extravagance, vitiate the unquestionable originality, and give the whole strain of argument an unsoundness as gloomy and pervading as the intellect is powerful and the rhetoric brilliant. sees man suspended between the two abysses of infinity and nothingness. He never wearies of varying the melancholy antithesis of the sublimity and the contemptibleness of man, the grandeur and the misery of our nature and lot. Man is a chimera, an incomprehensible monster, a contradiction, a chaos, judge of all things, victim of all, depositary of truth, sewer of error, the brother of the brutes, the equal of the angels, the glory and the scum of the universe. He is a closed and inexplicable enigma,

He

unless we accept the scheme of Christianity in the dogmatic exposition of the Catholic Church. Original sin is the key to the otherwise incomprehensible riddle. The violence of its fall in Adam crushed human nature into a mass of piteous and venerable ruins, an incongruous collection of suns and dungheaps.

The genius of Pascal is displayed in the magnificence

of his lamentations, the gorgeous ornaments with which he enhances the degeneracy he describes. His disease is revealed in the dismal melancholy he throws over all, and in the perverse factitiousness of his remedial devices. "Vulgar Calvinism," Hallam says, "exhibits man as a grovelling Caliban, Pascal paints him as a ruined archangel." But both endeavor to exaggerate the evils of our nature and deepen the darkness of our state, in order to lend increased preciousness and splendor to the supernatural remedy. This method surely violates the moderation of nature, the sanity of reason. Imagination is given us to secure equilibrium in our powers and conditions, to bring in ideal compensations for actual defects, to harmonize our nature and lot. It is a dreadful abuse to employ it to multiply incongruities and annoyances, enlarge existing disbalancements, and intensify the discords already experienced. To see the truth and conform to it what is out of proportion, is the final cure for every human ill. To aggravate a malady, half supposititious, so as to give imaginary value to some artificial panacea, is the method of quacks and dupes.

the scene

The soul of Pascal was a lonely battle-field, of a struggle between opposite tendencies, which must sometimes have been as terrible as it was noiseless and hidden. His logical acuteness and intrepidity penetrated sophisms, and exposed the innumerable difficulties and perplexities of human life in their most formidable array; while his fears, affections, weakness, made him cling to the Catholic creed. His sublime imagination pictured man as a grain of dust on the earth, the earth itself as a grain of dust in the bosom of nature, the eternal silence of whose boundless spaces was frightful to him. Disease made deeper encroachments on his digestive organs and on his brain. He was weary of the struggles of the few for glory, sick of the insincerity and frivolity of the many; and often said, "I shall die alone." Although he was never personally a misanthrope, his fearful insight of the frenzied self-love, the folly, vanity, flippancy, and falsehood of common men painfully alienated him from them. He says, "If all men knew what others say of them, there