Register. The very slam (Johnson pronounces the word low-but we can't help it-will he find us one more expressive ?)-the very slam of the door, as she leaves us for the morning, bespeaks a thanksgiving for her temporary escape. Her whole life is nothing but a series of unexpected reprieves.

We are, too, to our shame be it spoken, sadly given to what Scott calls "bedgown and slipper tricks." We love, when we settle ourselves for the evening, to kick our boots to one end of the room, and fling our coat to the other; to envelope ourselves in our "robe de matin ;" thrust our weary toes into the last new pair of slippers wrought for our especial wearing by-never mind whom; wheel our easy chair full in front of the fire; set our feet each upon its peculiar hob; fold our arms, and resign ourselves to all the luxuries of a brown study. Most devoted lovers are we of that dabbling with visionary bricks and mortar, called "castlebuilding"-a very Alnaschar in chambers; and, to enjoy it in its full perfection, we know no better recipe than that which we have just written. Many an evening hour do we thus while away-and, alas! not a few morning ones into the bargain. It is a sort of intellectual intoxication from which we recover with a sigh, but, thank Heaven! without a headache.

lated, even by the balloons and railroads of the nineteenth century. But now-now that we are in London, where the whole end and scope of human existence is to make every thing out of every body-where each man's hand is against his neighbour's pocket, and each man's tongue crieth "give, give," as unceasingly as the two daughters of the horse-leechnow it is, indeed, inestimable. Cheap tailors, and manufacturers of improved steel pens, with polysyllabic names, may indeed cram our letter-box with puffs and circulars, but they neither grieve our eyes nor vex our heart. Furniture-brokers, men of lounging chairs and library tables, and they of "Israel's scattered race," whose traffic lies in decayed habiliments, ascend our stairs but to tramp down again unprofited; and economical tea-dealers leave their cards in vain.

66

There is a thorough independence in this mode of life which we prize beyond measure; no gossipping neighbours to watch our out-goings and in-comings-to number our downsittings and up-risings;-no code of domestic law save our own good will and pleasure-a most un-Medic-andPersian legislator;-no chidings for coffee grown cold, and legs of mutton done to rags. Do we chance to feel convivially disposed, and let the stars "begin to pale their ineffectual fires" before we turn our thoughts bed-ward? There is no drowsy domestic kept up to grumble at our long-protracted absence. Are we, as saith the bard of the Seasons, falsely luxurious," and indulge in a more than usually extended snooze? There are no household arrangements to be interrupted by our somnolence. We have none but the "blessed sun himself" to rebuke us, and he does it with such warmth, and yet with such gentleness, that we are always thoroughly ashamed of our own laziness, and register a most serious resolution to " reform it altogether." But alas! man is weak, and bed is pleasant; "a little more sleep and a little more slumber" has been the cry of other voices besides that of the hero of "the sluggard;" the very Druid, from whose animated appeal to early rising we have just quoted, was wont to let the noonday beam surprise him between the

here is a stillness, too, about us

which is most refreshing, after the turmoil and din of the crowded thoroughfares which surround us at so slight a distance. The iron tongue of a neighbouring clock, and the voice of an antiquated watchman corroborating its announcements, are the only sounds which break our evening still ness. Here, and alas! here only, does that venerable and ill-used race of men exist in undiminished dignity-here only do they gossip-here only do they tread their peaceful rounds, till, unable any longer to resist the influence of the narcotic deity, they coil themselves up in the warmest corner of some secluded staircase, to dream of the days when Peel ate pap, and the new police were unimagined.

Often, when we have closed our books for the night, do we throw open our window, and, gazing around on the many cells of the great legal hive in which we are but a drone, busy ourselves in picturing to our mind's eye the various occupations of their tenants. That light on the left gleams from the chambers of an eminent lawyer, who, on the verge of the grave, and wealthy as the most grasping avarice could wish, is yet ever to be found poring over his musty parchments, with as deep and anxious an interest as though they were the indentures of his own salvation, instead of the melancholy records of some client's ruin. In yonder garret wakes a young student, without wealth, without friends, with nothing but his own ardent aspirations to support him; sacrificing youth, and health, and happiness, in the pursuit of honours which he is never destined to attain-of that wealth which, if it come at all, will come only when all the treasures of the fabling East would be but a pro

fitless burden-a splendid mockery! A merry writer has spoken but a melancholy truth when he says, " I would rather hear many a legend with a terrific-sounding name, than the true history of one old set of chambers."

Could we be mistaken? We thought we heard the chorus of a song. Ah! there is a merry party" rousing the night with a catch" in yonder corner. Gay, careless souls-choice spirits all

fellows of infinite jest and excellent fancy systematical eschewers of Coke upon Littleton, whose impudence or whose interest may yet instal them in some snug sinecure, when the lonely student is at rest in his unnoticed and untimely grave. But the night-breeze comes chillingly off the river-nay, yonder bell warns us that it is already morning. We will watch no longer.

To bed, then, to rest undisturbed by the scratchings and nibblings of the crafty rat or timorous mouse-what should such things do here?—unwaked by the discordant love-tale of the amorous grimalkin, who chooses, like Philomel, the still calm hour of night to "unburthen her full soul,"-unwearying wanderer of housetops, unshrinking traveller of gutter and parapet, doomed to wail beneath the trysting chimney the absence of the fickle and perfidious tom. "To sleepperchance to dream"-lapped in Elysian visions of admiring judges and overpowered jurymen, envious leaders, enraptured juniors, and ecstatic attorneys, silk gowns, and special retainers. Alas! but in a few short hours to be recalled by the voice of Mrs Mary Popkins, to the unwelcome but irresistible conviction that we are only

ONE OF THE BRIEFLESS.

IN the first volume of the Denkwürdigkeiten und Vermischte Schrif. ten of Varnhagen Von Ense, published at Mannheim in 1837, is contained a memoir of the philosopher and physician Johann Benjamin Erhard, of which we propose to give our readers an outline, in the hope that a picture of a course of life, and of habits of thought which may be new to many of them, will be neither uninteresting nor uninstructive. There are limits to the fusion of national characteristics, and the mutual understanding which civilisation tends to produce; and to see the cities of many men is no longer to learn their thoughts. In the days of Ulysses, the peculiarities of foreigners lay upon the surface, and a few days or hours enabled him to understand the easy and hospitable Phoenicians, the hungry Læstrygones, whose giant queen his messengers saw, κατὰ δ ̓ ἔφυγον αὐτὴν, and the danger o the dreamy land where

Round about the keel, with faces pale, Dark faces pale against that rosy flame, The mild-eyed, melancholy Lotus-eaters

came.

Like a wise man, he took strangers as he found them; and, in truth, there was no difference between himself and those whom he met with, so wide or so puzzling as the gulf which separates the mind of the bookish German thinker from that of the plain Englishman. In this country we are wont to live and exert ourselves in various ways, to infer consequences from certain admitted premises, and even, if such is our fate, to write in prose or verse; but it must be confessed, that we do these things without comprehending them in a systematic classification according to the powers on which they depend, or looking into ourselves for the forms under which we act and think. Of the few who may at present study philosophy in England, we do not speak; but it is certain, that, in educated society and in general literature, no traces are to be found of the vast revolution in philosophy, which, from the time of Kant, has penetrated the whole framework of life and language in Germany. Philosophy has indeed there created

a language of its own-a vast magazine of formal terms, under which every particular may be included; so that all may write if they cannot think scientifically, or with a show of science. And genuine thought is, as might naturally be expected, far more common than with us.. Knowledge is, to a German scholar, the great object of life; cogitat, ergo est, if, indeed, existence may, in all cases, be predicated of him; for he has a self-reproducing consciousness, first of his being, then of his consciousness of being, again of his cognizance of this consciousness, and so on for ever; perhaps it would be safer to say simply cogitat; while our beloved countryman, who never doubts that he is, or speculates upon who he is that doubts not, may be contented to abandon the premise, and take up the simple inference est. Which is better, the form without matter, or the matter without form, the active blind, or the far-sighted cripple, we are not called upon to judge, though we might suggest, with Esop, the advantage of a combination of faculties and reciprocal counteraction of defects: at present, we proceed without further preface to the biography of a man, who seems to have lived only to speculate, and to practise the results of speculation.

The memoir before us is an autobiography with a supplement, preface, and dedication to Hegel, by Varnhagen Von Ense, who anticipates a preliminary objection, which probably few of our readers would think of making. After remarking that the philosophy of Kant, in Erhard's days the brightest light existing, has now [Varnhagen is writing about the year 1824] been altogether extinguished in science, as well as in its influence on life, he proceeds thus,

"It will be suspicious to call back the attention of an advanced generation of high claims and rich endowments to an earlier step of knowledge, of which the majority is generally little willing to retain the remembrance or recognise the value, unless assistance is sought through the medium of a justifying criticism." The philosophy of Kant, then, was obsolete fifteen years ago; while with us, at the

present day, a student of the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft is esteemed an advanced scholar, if he has the good luck to escape the reputation of a dangerous innovator. The writer is, however, stating a mere truism, in the tone in which a geologist might apologize for an account of the Plutonian and Neptunian controversy. Our readers, who may think it strange that a biography should be suppressed, because the speculative opinions of its subject are out of date, will be glad to know that this preliminary difficulty is overcome by a consideration of the enlarged and liberal views of the Hegelians, "who look so benevolently on the steps of the general advance which they have left behind them."

In the preface, Varnhagen speaks of the great burst of German literature about the beginning of the nineteenth century, of which the main cause was, as he justly says, "the philosophy which, in this point of view, properly commences with Kant; and, consequently, all that concerns his age will long remain an object of attention and interest to posterity. Therefore the writings and influence, not only of the great masters, but of those who stood second or third, who present themselves to us as a class highly deserving of honour, and as examples of living and of authorship, often belong to the first rank, will find increasing interest hereafter; and we may hope, with the works of Kant, of Fichte, and their equals, to see also the writings of Mendelsohn, Garve, Maimon, Reinhold, and especially of Erhard, who was not the least among them, collected and published as proofs of the most varied, honest, philosophical labours; nay, much of this kind might be received and guarded even with greater care, by those who are further removed than it was by contemporaries, or than will now be practicable for those who are still near to them." Whether the hope expressed in this somewhat long-winded sentence has been, or is likely to be fulfilled, we know not; though we have unbounded faith in the fecundity of German publishers. We had rather read the biographies of Erhard and the rest, than their works, especially when written, as in the present instance, by themselves.

Johann Benjamin Erhard was born on the 8th of February, 1766, in the

venerable city of Nuremberg, now the Pompeii, as it has been quaintly called, of the middle ages, and once the toyshop of Europe. His father, Jacob Reinhard Erhard, was a wire-drawer by trade, and an amateur of various arts and sciences by inclination. He excelled in playing on the bugle, and "Heaven," says his son, "could have conferred upon him no higher grace than a virtuoso for his son: but it did not turn out so, and I had not the smallest inclination to the pursuit. He gave himself all possible trouble with me, but it was soon evident that I was not destined for a virtuoso." The labours of the good Jacob were not, however, entirely thrown away. "I got so far as to learn to sing the gamut, and to tune an instrument. This is a proof of what persevering toil in instruction can effect; for I well remember that I could not at first distinguish, whether a note sung after my father was the same or different. The sensation of greater or less exertion of the organs of voice and raising of the larynx, by which I finally, after my father's utterance of the note, hit it, was to me the measure of high and low notes; and at last I felt whether I sang the same note with him or not. I did not, however, require this labour which it cost me to distinguish high from low notes, to distinguish the specific kind of sound. I never, after once hearing an instrument, confused it, without seeing it, with another. The sensation, therefore, by which we distinguish a higher from a lower note, must be different from that by which we distinguish like and unlike sounds, as, for instance, of trumpets and flutes, and must depend upon different parts of our organ of hearing."

We have quoted this passage as a characteristic and amusing specimen of Erhard's speculative nature, and of the unhesitating seriousness with which he narrates and discusses the minutest facts relating to himself. Yet it is not selfishness or vanity, which he feels, but genuine scientific interest. Cosmopolitan, as the botanist or the geologist may be, he is not ashamed to concentrate his attention on the Flora or the stratification of his country, or province, or county; and to Erhard, his own idiosyncrasy, the elements of his empirical Ich, form the province which he is peculiarly called upon to examine, and to communicate

his discoveries to the world, which he doubts not, will be as ready to learn, as he is to teach "How the foundations of his mind were laid." We can discover few traces of self-applause, and none of self-depreciation; there is no comparison with others, no fear of censure. We own that his person ality appears to have been his hobby, but only as philosophers will have a predilection for some special application of their principles. His zealous and yet passionless self-contemplation, reminds us of a medical student of whom we have heard, who, having a leg amputated, dissected it himself, and gave his friends a lecture on it, in which he barely hinted at the muscular swell of the calf, and the delicate fineness of the ancle.

We are not aware of any autobiographer, except Mr Tristram Shandy, who begins his adventures earlier; and there is this remarkable difference between them, that Tristram was, as infants usually are, a passive subject under the various mistakes of Dr Slop, the curate, and Susanna; and but little affected in mind by the misfortunes which befell his name and his person; while Johann, whose mind was everything to him, was deliberately forming and instructing it. He says, that his recollections in some things run back into his first year, and in his second are in many things only uncertain, because, up to his fourth year, he was liable to confuse dreams with waking perceptions. He sometimes had disputes with his parents, whether circumstances had taken place, of which he was thus persuaded. The tendency clung by him in later years, and occasioned him great discomfort. He infers, from the vividness of these impressions, that, in the case of a diseased condition of the sensorium, which weakens the memory, a dream may sometimes be the cause of insanity.

Our young philosopher was taught by his father to despise the fear of ghosts, though he at first appears to have believed in their existence-for his maternal grandmother was remarkable for seeing them; and, which was more remarkable, was so free from fear of them, that she recounted their visits to her as coolly and indifferently, as a call from a neighbour. "I was so curious," says Erhard, "to test her statements by experience,

that in my third year I often slept with her, to see the ghost; but it never showed itself when I was there, and I consequently believed that I had gained the victory over her be lief." We hope parents will henceforth teach their two-year-old offspring, who now waste their time in playing and prattling, and are a prey to the most uncritical credulity, to test the statements of their grandmammas about "Jack and the Bean-Stalk," or "Little Red Riding Hood," by experience, and to gain victories over their belief. Not that the victory in this case was decided, for the dexterous old lady, by dint of long practice, was enabled to trip up the vigorous young controversialist, and asserted that he had with him an invisible good spirit, which the ghost was afraid of. "Thus,” he soberly reflects, "I learned early," (i. c. in his third year, which, for so abstract a proposition may be called decidedly early), "that it is absurd to try to contend by experience against assertions, which would destroy the conditions of possible experience; for they may always be defended by an assumption as absurd as the assertion itself. . . . . I never again tried the experiment of wishing to see any thing, which, if I saw it, could only denote the loss of the use of my understanding." We really think his understanding was perfectly safe, when in its long petticoats, as it were, it had so fully ascertained the conditions of possible experience.

But pride will have a fall. When he had attained the maturity of three years, even the cautious Johann fell into an error, which, at the distance of forty years, he remembers with the deepest remorse. What was it? Did he steal lumps of sugar, or scream to frighten his nurse, or try to drink out of the spout of the kettle? As it must be told, we will give our readers his own candid confession, hoping that their own consciences are free from similar burdens. "When I was full three years old, I was sent to a common school. Here I believed the common dogmas" (of Christianitycredulous infant!) "as easily as I disbelieved the ghosts; for my father had not declared himself against them. With humiliation, I yet remember that I found nothing revolting in the proposition, that a man who doubted the creed of St Athanasius" (which, no