polity from their most rude beginnings to their greatest perfection, and pursuing the gradual development of some master-principle through all the stages of its progressthese are studies which would interest a rational being, even if he could never draw from them any practical inference for the government of his own conduct, or the improvement of the society he belonged to-nay, even if he belonged to another species and was merely surveying the history and the state of human society as a curious observer, in like manner as we study the works of the bee, the beaver, and the ant. How prodigiously does the interest of such contemplations rise when it is the political habits of our own species that we are examining, and when, beside the sympathy naturally felt in the fortunes of our fellow creatures of other countries, at every step of our inquiry we enjoy the satisfaction of comparing their institutions with our own, of marking how far they depart from the same model, and of tracing the consequences of the variety upon the happiness of millions of beings like ourselves! How analogous is this gratification to the kindred pleasure derived from Comparative Anatomy, which enables us to mark the resemblances and the differences in structure and in functions between the frame of other animals and our own!

From the contemplation of political truths our minds rise naturally, and by a process also of legitimate reasoning like that which discovers those truths, towards the great Creator of the universe, the source of all that we have been surveying by the light of science, the Almighty Being who made the heavens and the earth, and sustains the frame of the world by the word of His power. But he also created the mind of man,-bestowed upon him a thinking, a reasoning, and a feeling nature,-placed him in a universe of wonders, -endowed him with faculties to comprehend them, and to rise by his meditation to a knowledge of their Great First Cause. The Moral world, then, affords additional evidence of the creating and preserving power, and its contemplations also raise the mind to a communion with its Maker. Shall any doubt be entertained that the like pleasing and useful consequences result from a study of Man in his political capacity, and a contemplation of the structure and functions of the Political world? The nice adaptation of

our species for the social state; the increase of our powers, as well as the multiplication of our comforts and our enjoyments, by union of purpose and action; the subserviency of the laws governing the nature and motions of the material world to the uses of man in his social position; the tendency of his mental faculties and moral feelings to further the progress of social improvement; the predisposition of political combinations, even in unfavourable circumstances, to produce good, and the inherent powers by which evil is avoided, compensated, or repaired; the singular laws, partly physical and partly moral, by which the numbers of mankind are maintained, and the balance of the sexes preserved with unerring certainty ;-these form only a portion of the marvels to which the eyes of the political observer are pointed, and by which his attention is arrested; for there is hardly any one political arrangement which by its structure and functions does not shed a light on the capacities of human nature, and illustrate the power and the wonders of the Providence to which man looks as his Maker and Preserver. Such contemplations, connected with all the branches of science, and only neglected by the superficial or the perverted, are at once the reward of philosophic labour, the source of true devotion, the guide of wise and virtuous conduct. They are the true end of all our knowledge, and they give to each portion of it a double value and a higher relish.

The last-but in the view of many, probably most men, the most important-advantage derived from the sciences, is their practical adaptation to the uses of life. It is not correct-it is the very reverse of the truth-to represent this as the only real, and, as it were, tangible profit derived from scientific discoveries or philosophical pursuits in general. There cannot be a greater oversight or greater confusion of ideas than that in which such a notion has its origin. It is nearly akin to the fallacy which represents profitable or productive labour as that kind of labour alone by which some substantial or material thing is produced or fashioned. The labour which of all others most benefits a community, the superior order of labour which governs, defends, and improves a state, is by this fallacy excluded from the title of productive, merely because, instead of be

stowing additional value on one mass or parcel of a nation's capital, it gives additional value to the whole of its property, and gives it that quality of security without which all other value would be worthless. So they who deny the importance of mere scientific contemplation, and exclude from the uses of science the pure and real pleasure of discovering, and of learning, and of surveying its truths, forget how many of the enjoyments derived from what are called the practical applications of the sciences, resolve themselves into gratifications of a merely contemplative kind. Thus, the steam engine is confessed to be the most useful application of machinery and of chemistry to the arts. Would it not be so if steam navigation were its only result, and if no one used a steam boat but for excursions of curiosity or of amusement? Would it not be so if steam engines had never been used but in the fine arts? So a microscope is a useful practical application of optical science as well as a telescope and a telescope would be so, although it were only used in examining distant views for our amusement, or in showing us the real figures of the planets, and were of no use in navigation or in war. The mere pleasure, then, of tracing relations, and of contemplating general laws in the material, the moral, and the political world, is the direct and legitimate value of science; and all scientific truths are important for this reason, whether they ever lend any aid to the common arts of life or no. In like manner the mental gratification afforded by the scientific contemplations of Natural Religion are of great value, independent of their much higher virtue in mending the heart and improving the life, towards which important object, indeed, all the contemplations of science more or less directly tend, and in this higher sense all the pleasures of science are justly considered as Practical Uses.

JOHNSON.

THE materials for writing the Life of Dr. Johnson are certainly more abundant than for the biography of any other distinguished person: not even excepting him whose Confessions reveal all that he himself could recollect, and chose to record of his own history; or him whose incessant activity and multiplicity of connections, left fourscore volumes of his published works, and twenty of his private correspondence. We owe the great riches of the English Author's remains to the curiosity excited by his lively and pointed conversation, and the happy accident of his living for the latter part of his life in the society of a person eminently qualified, both by his tastes and his habits, to afford that curiosity an almost unlimited gratification. In the grateful remembrance of all who relish the pleasures of refined social intercourse, with the name of Johnson is associated that of Boswell, as indissolubly as are those of Plato and Xenophon with the more remarkable name of Socrates in the minds of all who love philosophy: and there is perhaps added a zest to the collections of the English writer which the Athenian records possess not; we see the amiable and lively historian figuring always in the group with his more stern idol, affording relief, by contrast, to the picture of the sage, and amusing by his own harmless foibles, which he takes a pleasure in revealing, as if he shared the gratification he was preparing for his unknown reader. His cleverness, his tact, his skill in drawing forth those he was studying, his admirable good humour, his strict love of truth, his high and generous principle, his kindness

towards his friends, his unvarying but generally rational piety, have scarcely been sufficiently praised by those who nevertheless have been always ready, as needs they must be, to acknowledge the debt of gratitude due for perhaps the book, of all that were ever written, the most difficult to lay down once it has been taken up. To the great work of Mr. Boswell, may be added some portions of Sir John Hawkins's far inferior, and much less accurate biography; the amusing but also somewhat careless anecdotes of Mrs. Piozzi, formerly Mrs. Thrale, and above all, the two interesting works of Madame D'Arblay, the celebrated Miss Burney, her own autobiography, and the life of her father. These works, but the two last especially, abound in important additions to that of Mr. Boswell; and what relates to Dr. Johnson certainly forms the principal value of them both.*

In estimating the merits of Johnson, prejudices of a very powerful nature have too generally operated unfavourably to the cause of truth. The strongly marked features of his mind were discernible in the vehemence of his opinions both on political and religious subjects; he was a high tory, and a high churchman in all controversies respecting the state; he was under the habitual influence of his religious impressions, and leant decidedly in favour of the system established ånd protected by law. He treated those whose opinions had

* We must, however, not pass over the light, somewhat lurid it must be owned, which the autobiography sheds on the habits and effects of a court life; the dreadful prostration of the understanding which may be seen to arise among at least the subordinate figures of the courtly group. I own that I cannot conceive this to be the universally resembling picture. My own experience and observation of many years, some of them passed in near connexion with our court, leads me to this conclusion. It must be added in extenuation of the absurdities so often laughed at in Boswell, that this amiable author furnishes quite her fair proportion of the matter of ridicule. Such weakness as marks many of her sentiments, such Zeeply seated vanity as pervades the whole, not only of her own, but of her father's memoirs, which are in truth an autobiography as much as a life of him, cannot certainly be surpassed, if they can be matched, in the less deliberate effusions of Mr. Boswell's avowed self-esteem.

VOL. II.

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