impossible. Washington was only the sword with which Franklin and the spirit of revolution worked out their purposes; and a sword should be nothing but a sword. The moment soldiers come to direct the intellect of their age, they make a sorry business of it. Napoleon himself did. Frederick did. Even Cæsar failed. As to Alfred the Great, he was not so much a general fighting with generals, as a universal genius warring with barbarism and adversity; and it took a load of sorrow to make even him the demigod he was.

"Stand upon the ancient ways," says Bacon, "and see what steps may be taken for progression." Look, for the same purpose (it may be said) upon the rest of the animal creation, and consider the qualities in which they have no share with you. Of the others, you may well doubt the greatness, considered as movers, and not instruments, towards progression. It is among the remainder you must seek for the advancement of your species. An insect can be a provider of the necessaries of life, and he can exercise power, and organize violence. He can be a builder; he can be a soldier; he can be a king. But to all appearance, he is the same as he was ever, and his works perish with him. If insects have such and such an establishment among them, we conceive they will have it always, unless men can alter it for them. If they have no such establishment, they appear of themselves incapable of admitting it. It is men only that add and improve. Men only can bequeath their souls for the benefit

of posterity, in the shape of arts and books. Men only can philosophize, and reform, and cast off old customs, and take steps for laying the whole globe nearer to the sun of wisdom and happiness: and in proportion as you find them capable of so hoping and so working, you recognize their superiority to the brutes that perish.

XIV.-A WALK FROM DULWICH TO BROCKHAM.

IN A LETTER TO A FRIEND.

With an original Circumstance or two respecting Dr. Johnson.

DEAR SIR,

As other calls upon my pilgrimage in this world have interrupted those weekly voyages of discovery into green lanes and rustic houses of entertainment, which you and I had so agreeably commenced, I thought I could not do better than make you partaker of my new journey, as far as pen and paper could do it. You are therefore to look upon yourself as having resolved to take a walk of twenty or thirty miles into Surrey, without knowing anything of the matter. You will have set out with us a fortnight ago, and will be kind enough to take your busts for chambermaids, and your music (which is not so easy) for the voices of stage-coachmen.

Illness, you know, does not hinder me from walking; neither does anxiety. On the contrary, the more I walk, the better and stouter I become; and I believe if everybody were to regard the restlessness which anxiety creates, as a signal from nature to get up and contend with it in that manner, people would find the benefit of it. This is more particularly the case if they are lovers of nature, as well as pupils of her, and have an eye for the beauties in which her visible world abounds; and as I may claim the merit of loving her heartily, and even of tracing my sufferings (when I have them) to her cause, the latter are never so great but she repays me with some sense of sweetness, and leaves me a certain property in the delight of others, when I have little of my own.

"Oh that I had the wings of a dove !" said the royal poet; "then would I fly away and be at rest.” I believe there are few persons, who having felt sorrow, and anticipating a journey not exactly towards it, have not partaken of this sense of the desirability of remoteness. A great deal of what we love in poetry is founded upon it; nor do any feel it with more passion, than those whose sense of duty to their fellowcreatures will not allow them to regard retirement as anything but a refreshment between their tasks, and as a wealth of which all ought to partake.

But David sighed for remoteness, and not for solitude. At least, if he did, the cares of the moment must have greatly overbalanced the habits of the poet. Neither doves nor poets can very well do without a

companion. Be that as it may, the writer of this epistle, who is a still greater lover of companionship than poetry (and he cannot express his liking more strongly) had not the misfortune, on the present occasion, of being compelled to do without it; and as to remoteness, though his pilgrimage was to extend little beyond twenty miles, he had not the less sense of it on that account. Remoteness is not how far you go in point of ground, but how far you feel yourself from your common places. Literal distance is indeed necessary in some degree; but the quantity of it depends on imagination and the nature of circumstances. The poet who can take to his wings like a dove, and plunge into the wood nearest him, is farther off, millions of miles, in. the retreat of his thoughts, than the literalist, who must get to Johnny Groat's, in order to convince himself that he is not in Edinburgh.

Almost any companion would do, if we could not make our choice, provided it loved us and was sincere. A horse is good company, if you have no other; a dog still better. I have often thought, that I could take a child by the hand, and walk with it day after day towards the north or the east, a straight road, feeling as if it would lead into another world.

"And think 'twould lead to some bright isle of rest." But I should have to go back, to fetch some grown friends.

There were three of us on the present occasion, grown and young. We began by taking the Dulwich

stage from a house in Fleet street, where a drunken man came into the tap, and was very pious. He recited hymns; asked the landlady to shake hands with him; was for making a sofa of the counter, which she prevented by thrusting his leg off with some indignation; and being hindered in this piece of jollity, he sank on his knees to pray. He was too goodnatured for a Methodist; so had taken to stiff glasses of brandy and water,

"To help him to support uneasy steps

Over the burning marle."

He said he had been "twice through the gates of hell;" and by his drinking, poor fellow, he seemed to be setting out on his third adventure. We called him Sin-bad. By the way, when you were a boy, did you not think that the name of Sindbad was allegorical, and meant a man who had sinned very badly? Does not every little boy think so? One does not indeed, at that time of life, know very well what to make of the porter Hindbad, who rhymes to him; and I remember I was not pleased when I came to find out that Hind and Sind were component words, and meant Eastern and Western.

The stage took us to the Greyhound at Dulwich, where though we had come from another village almost as far off from London on the Northern side, we felt as if we had newly got into the country, and eat a hearty supper accordingly. This was a thing not usual with us; but then everybody eats “in the