cially interesting to persons who, for example, have a passion for flowers. Yet the favoured island has more to contend with in the shape of severe frosts, than may be generally supposed. We thus read:

The gar

"Floriculture is rather a favourite pursuit among all ranks. dens of the gentry are of no great extent, but they are often well stocked with beautiful and valuable plants; and there are few cottagers who do not consider a little flower-plat almost indispensable in front of their dwellings. It is, indeed, in this department of gardening that the many advantages of our climate are fully displayed. Several of even the hardy flowers require less care with us than they do in England; and a variety of tender ones are grown in the open air which would hardly endure the same exposure in the warmest spots of Devonshire and Cornwall.

"In this island, when the temperature falls to six degrees below the freezing-point, the season is considered unusually severe; consequently, many of the Cape heath and hardier geraniums, as well as a number of shrubs and plants natives of Australia, of the central parts of America, and other warm climates, easily survive our ordinary winters in sheltered situations, sometimes without any injury whatever. The Bath scarlet geranium, for instance, has for years together been seen clothing cottage-walls to the height of ten or twelve feet with its dazzling blossoms. The cobæa scandens, maurandia barclayana, and other creepers of a similar nature, are found still more hardy, and spring up naturally from seed at the foot of the walls against which they are planted. Fuchsias grow with surprising luxuriance, the stronger sorts soon becoming shrubs of most inconvenient size, unless trained to a single stem like standard roses. Shrubby calceolarias last many years; even the tender heliotropium peruvianum continues to produce its fragrant flowers till late in November, and though cut down by a slight frost, will often spring up again from the root in the following spring.

"It is true that the extraordinary winters of 1837-8 and 1840-1 proved fatal to many of the most interesting exotics which had for years been the pride of our gardens. The geraniums and Cape heaths, and most of the Australian shrubs, either died to the ground or were completely destroyed. During the last winter, the myrtle itself, and the coronilla, were in many gardens severely injured, perhaps in some instances killed. The beautiful clianthus puniceus, which had generally survived in 1838, perished this year in every garden. What, however, fortunately renders it probable that seasons like that we have just experienced only happen in these islands after long intervals, is the fact that every plant was destroyed by a species of leptospermum, which had long been quite common in our shrubberies as a hardy evergreen, and of which some specimens must have previously withstood the frosts of nearly fifty winters.

"For the culture of roots and bulbs we enjoy remarkable advantages. The periods of frosty weather are, even in the worst seasons, of such short duration, that the ground seldom freezes more than an inch or two in depth, and a slight covering of snow is sufficient to keep away the frost altogether; so that the situation of such plants below the surface of the

soil insures in almost every case a complete protection from the cold. But it is especially in the culture of those kinds whose period of rest is the summer season, and which vegetate principally during the cool and rainy months of the years, that our climate claims a superiority almost unequalled north of the Mediterranean. As hardy plants in their torpid state are indifferent to the cold of winter, so these, finding our summer sufficiently warm and dry to induce that state of perfect rest essential to their health, are indifferent as to any deficiency in its temperature, compared with that of the same season in other countries; while the mildness and moisture of our autumn and winter and the earliness of our springs are admirably adapted to perfect their growth and insure a rich display of bloom. Among the most interesting flowers belonging to the class of winter-growing plants, are the innumerable species of ixia, sparaxis, and other cognate genera of Cape bulbs. The greater part of those hitherto introduced appear to thrive in nearly the same perfection and beauty as in their native soil; all of them perfecting their seeds, and some propagating in this manner almost like weeds. Many fine sorts are frequent in cottage-gardens; where, though treated with no particular care, they emulate the commonest flowers in health and luxuriance."

In conclusion, we have to say, that the island which stood by England, that is, by Hampden and Pym,-when Jersey sided with the unfortunate, the misled, and the prerogative Charles, has met with an earnest and an able historian in Mr. Duncan; and that if every island and section under the sway of Queen Victoria were with such zeal described and embalmed, Great Britain and the world would be the better for it.

ART. VII.-A Letter to the Right Honourable Thomas Babington Macaulay. By BASIL MONTAGU, Esq. Q. C.

IN the good old times, which we are all fond of eulogizing, it was the fashion to settle opinions at the point of the sword, to kill the disputant who would not be convinced, and to knock out the brains of a heathen, if he refused to embrace the mild doctrines of Christianity; and even Justice relinquished her balance, and gravely sat as umpire while guilt cleared itself, not by her wise decision, but by single combat. In a similar spirit, two centuries ago, as if the parties had only just emerged from barbarism, learned and pious men assailed each other with every species of scurrility and violence. And this spirit was revived in some of our Reviews, where great acuteness and sterling wit were debased by the alloy of personal and political rancour, and men assembled round a new periodical, not as philosophers in search of truth, but as eager spectators of a bull-fight or passage at arms, to see who was gored and tossed, or who was laid prostrate and silenced for ever; where the first men

in the country were, to use the technical phrase, "cut up," they were indeed cut up-not

"Carv'd like a dish to set before the gods,

But hew'd like carcases to throw to hounds."

A change has come over the spirit of our literature. In our enlightened times, a difference of opinion "need not to be patroned by passion, but can stand the issue of a temperate dispute.'

The author of the critique, in the Edinburgh Review, of Montagu's Life of Bacon, has written, as he naturally would write, in this better spirit, with a scholar-like and gentle civility, which will not blame me if I speak of his valuable essay with freedom, differing with him, as I do, upon many material points.

I should long since have submitted my thoughts to his, and to public consideration, if I had not for many years been engaged upon a work upon the conduct of the understanding, which I was compelled to suspend that I might obey the command of Lord Bacon. "For my good name and reputation I leave it to men's charitable speeches, to foreign nations, and the next ages." Having, after ten years' labour, secured to myself the consciousness that I had assisted in the inquiry which he thus left to posterity, I had renewed my labours, when the Review appeared. I was for a time compelled to be silent; but it was pain and grief to me.

I will now endeavour to rectify what I conceive to be the few mistakes, amidst the many beauties with which the review abounds. How admirable is the description in the review of the philosophy of Bacon, compared with the philosophy of Plato!

"Of all the sciences, that which Bacon seems to have regarded with the greatest interest was the science which, in Plato's opinion, would not be tolerated in a well-regulated community. To make man perfect was no part of Bacon's plan. His humble aim was to make imperfect men comfortable. The beneficence of his philosophy resembled the beneficence of the common Father, whose sun rises on the evil and the good-whose rain descends for the just and the unjust. In Plato's opinion, man was made for philosophy; in Bacon's opinion, philosophy was made for man; it was a means to an end; and that end was to increase the pleasures, and to mitigate the pains of millions who are not, and cannot be, philosophers. The aim of the Platonic philosophy was to exalt man into a god; the aim of the Baconian philosophy was to provide man with what he requires while he continues to be man.

"The philosophy of Plato began in words and ended in words-noble words indeed-words such as were to be expected from the finest of human intellects exercising boundless dominion over the finest of human languages. The philosophy of Bacon began in observations and ended in acts.

"We have sometimes thought that an amusing fiction might be written, in which a disciple of Epictetus and a disciple of Bacon should be introduced as fellow-travellers. They come to a village where the small-pox

A

has just begun to rage; and find houses shut up, intercourse suspended, the sick abandoned, mothers weeping in terror over their children. The stoic assures the dismayed population that there is nothing bad in the small-pox, and that to a wise man diseases, deformity, death, the loss of friends, are not evils. The Baconian takes a lancet and begins to vacci

nate.

"They find a body of miners in great dismay. An explosion of noisome vapours has just killed many of those who were at work; and the survivors are afraid to venture into the cavern, The Stoic assures them that such an accident is nothing but a mere àоnроnyμevоv. The Baconian, who has no such fine word at his command, contents himself with devising a safety lamp.

"They find aship wrecked merchant wringing his hands on the shore. His vessel, with an inestimable cargo, has just gone down, and he is reduced in a moment from opulence to beggary. The Stoic exhorts him not to seek happiness in things which lie without himself, and repeats a whole chapter of Epictetus. The Baconian constructs a diving-bell, goes down in it, and returns with the most precious effects from the wreck.

"It would be easy to multiply illustrations of the difference between the philosophy of words and the philosophy of works."

Such are a few of his beautiful observations upon the Baconian philosophy.

How beautiful, too, are his remarks upon the distinction between the real foresight and imagination of Bacon.

sense.

"The poetical faculty was powerful in Bacon's mind; but not, like his wit, so powerful as occasionally to usurp the place of his reason, and to tyrannize over the whole man. No imagination was ever at once so strong and so thoroughly subjugated. It never stirred but at a signal from good It stopped at the first check from good sense. Yet, though disciplined to such obedience, it gave noble proofs of its vigour. In truth, much of Bacon's life was passed in a visionary world, amidst things as strange as any that are described in the Arabian Tales.' Yet in his magnificent day-dreams there was nothing wild-nothing but what sober reason sanctioned. He knew that all secrets feigned by poets to have been written in the books of enchanters are worthless when compared with the mighty secrets which are really written in the book of nature, and which with time and patience will be read there. It was here that he loved to let his imagination loose. He loved to picture to himself the world as it would be when his philosophy should, in his own noble phrase, 'have enlarged the bounds of human empire.'

"We might refer to many instances, but we will content ourselves with the strongest, the description of the House of Solomon' in the New Atlantis.

"By most of Bacon's contemporaries, and by some people of our time, this remarkable passage would, we doubt not, be considered as an ingenious rhodomontade-a counterpart to the adventures of Sinbad or Baron Munchausen. The truth is, that there is not to be found in any human

composition a passage more eminently distinguished by profound and serene wisdom. The boldness and originality of the fiction is far less wonderful than the nice discernment which carefully excluded from that long list of prodigies everything that can be pronounced impossible; everything that can be proved to lie beyond the mighty magic of induction and of time. Already some parts, and not the least startling parts, of this glorious prophecy have been accomplished, even according to the letter; and the whole, construed according to the spirit, is daily accomplishing around us."

How accurate is this distinction! The invention—the foresight -and the imagination of Bacon are not blended together. The rays are separated into their distinct colours, and each ray appears in its own peculiar beauty.

Invention, or the discovery of the properties of creatures and the names by which they are called-the occupation of Adam in Paradise, is the object of the Novum Organum; not, indeed, to discover the properties of any particular creature, but the mode by which the nature of all creatures may be invented. "If," he says, "the utility of any particular invention can affect mankind so much as to make them think him more than human, who could, by any single benefit, oblige the whole species; how much more noble must it appear to discover some one thing, by which all others may readily be discovered!"

Foresight, or the anticipation of future discoveries, was the peculiar property of Bacon's mind. He stood on an eminence, and truths yet below the horizon were refracted to him.

It is hence that in the physical and in the moral and political world, his speculations have assumed the form of prophecies; as in the physical world, when he predicted the mode by which the laws of the heavenly bodies would be discovered, by observing the laws of the bodies terrestrial. His words are,

"Whoever shall reject the feigned divorces of superlunary and sublunary bodies; and shall intentively observe the appetences of matter and the most universal passions which in either globe are exceeding potent, and transverberate the universal nature of things, he shall receive clear information concerning celestial matters from the things seen here with us, and contrariwise from these motions which are practised in heaven, he shall learn many observations which now are latent, touching the motion of bodies here below, not only so far as their inferior motions are moderated by superior; but in regard they have a mutual intercourse by passions common to them both."

How beautifully is this confirmed by the inquiries of his illustri

ous successor.

"Newton retired from the University to avoid the plague, which raged with great violence. Sitting under a tree in an orchard, an apple fell