fearless, straightforward, and uncalculating Englishmen.  At the same time, if ever that continental vice should attack our national character, we have two well-known essays in our ethical and casuistical literature that may with perfect safety be pitted against anything that either France or Italy has produced.  Even if they are but a master’s irony, let all ambitious men keep Of Cunning and Of Wisdom for a Man’s Self under their pillow.  Let all young men who would toady a great man; let all young ministers who would tune their pulpit to king, or court, or society; let all tradesmen and merchants who prefer their profits to their principles—­if they have literature enough, let them soak their honest minds in our great Chancellor’s sage counsels; and he who promoted Anything and dubbed him his Darling, he will, no doubt, publish both a post and a title on his birthday for you also.

2.  ‘What religion is he of?’ asks Dean Swift.  ‘He is an Anythingarian,’ is the answer, ’for he makes his self-interest the sole standard of his life and doctrine.’  And Archbishop Leighton, a very different churchman from the bitter author of the Polite Conversations, is equally contemptuous toward the self-seeker in divine things.  ’Your boasted peaceableness often proceeds from a superficial temper; and, not seldom, from a supercilious disdain of whatever has no marketable use or value, and from your utter indifference to true religion.  Toleration is an herb of spontaneous growth in the soil of indifference.  Much of our union of minds proceeds from want of knowledge and from want of affection to religion.  Many who boast of their church conformity, and that no one hears of their noise, may thank the ignorance of their minds for that kind of quietness.’  But by far the most powerful assault that ever was made upon lukewarmness in religion and upon self-seeking in the Church was delivered by Dante in the tremendous third canto of his Inferno:—­

         Various tongues,
   Horrible languages, outcries of woe,
   Accents of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
   With hands together smote that swelled the sounds,
   Made up a tumult that for ever whirls
   Round through that air with solid darkness stain’d,
   Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies. 
   I then, with error yet encompass’d, cried,
   ’O master!  What is this I hear?  What race
   Are these, who seem so overcome with woe?’
   He then to me:  ’This miserable fate
   Suffer the wretched souls of those who lived
   Without or praise or blame, with that ill band
   Of angels mixed, who nor rebellious proved,
   Nor yet were true to God, but for themselves
   Were only.  Mercy and Justice scorn them both. 
   Speak not of them, but look and pass them by.’ 
   Forthwith, I understood for certain this the tribe
   Of those ill spirits both to God displeasing
   And to His foes.  Those wretches