At least his manners suffer not to guess
That anything he views can greatly please.
Perhaps we have borrowed this from the Chinese-

Perhaps from Horace: his " Nil admirari”
Was what he call'd the "Art of Happiness;"
An art on which the artists greatly vary,
And have not yet attain'd to much success.

At one of Boswell's Easter-Sunday dinings with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Williams, he maintained that Horace was wrong in placing happiness in Nil admirari, for that he, Bozzy, thought admiration one of the most agreeable of all our feelings, and regretted that he had lost much of his disposition to admire, which people generally do as they advance in life. "Sir," said Johnson, "as a man advances in life, he gets what is better than admiration -judgment, to estimate things at their true value." Boswell, however, insisted that admiration was more pleasing than judgment, as love is more pleasing than friendship. Father Prout contends, that in the catalogue of pleasurable sensations which help to make life endurable, we should place in the very highest rank "that delightful and exalted feeling which in psychology is termed Admiration." He holds the legitimate indulgence of that faculty to constitute a most refined species of intellectual enjoyment-not the less to be prized, for that the objects which call it forth happen to be scarce, and that opportunities are seldom afforded of yielding up the soul to its delightful influence. And he points out that the sentiment of Admiration has worked itself into individual nomenclature on two occasions: viz., in the case of St. Gregory, "Thaumaturge," and in that of an accomplished cavalier, who burst on the close of the sixteenth century as "the Admirable Crichton." Sydney Smith, again, who in one of his Moral Philosophy Lectures rebukes "a certain manner of viewing and discussing all questions in a frivolous, mocking manner," as if the "able men" who may be found to indulge in this "habitual levity" had looked through all human knowledge, and found in it nothing but what they could easily master, and were entitled to despise,-in another lecture preaches up with all his might "an honest and zealous admiration of talent, and of virtue," wherever found; and asserts, that in all ages of the world, the ablest men have been the first to express their admiration of excellence; and that while they themselves were extending the triumphs of the human understanding, they worshipped its power in other minds, with veneration bordering upon idolatry. A doctrine happily in accord with Wordsworth's teaching, that

We live by Admiration, Hope, and Love;
And, even as these are well and wisely fixed,
In dignity of being we ascend.

NIL ADMIRARI.

BY PÊLE-MÊLE.

NIL ADMIRARI prope res est una Numici
Solaque quæ possit facere et servare beatum.

NOT TO ADMIRE is all the art I know

To make men happy and to keep them so―

HORAT., lib. i. ep. vi.

Plain truth, dear Murray, needs no flowers of speech;
So take it in the very words of Creech.

POPE, ep. vi.

LONG ago Mr. Carlyle uttered the complaint that Wonder is, on all hands, dying out; that it is the sign of uncultivation to wonder. Of unwise admiration, says he, in another place, much may be hoped, for much good is really in it; but unwise contempt is itself a negation; nothing comes of it, for it is nothing. Again, and elsewhere: "Is not this habit of sneering at all greatness, of forcibly bringing down all greatness to one's own height, one chief cause which keeps that height so very inconsiderable?" So, too, in the critique on Goethe's Mephistopheles we read that this mocking spirit "has the manners of a gentleman" and "knows the world"-that his wit and sarcasm are unlimited; that the cool heartfelt contempt with which he despises all things, human and divine, might make the fortune of half a dozen "fellows about town.' Mr. Carlyle would, indeed, be one of the last to deny that there are things in this world to be laughed at, as well as things to be admired; and he expressly affirms that his is no complete mind, that cannot give to each sort its due. Nevertheless, contempt, he maintains, is a dangerous element to sport in; a deadly one, if we habitually live in it. Be Goethe's Mephistopheles what he may, Milton's Satan at least professes with pride a yet living spirit of admiration. Though he has lost much lustre of his native brightness, lost to be beloved of God, "I have not lost," he says,

To love, at least contemplate and admire,

What I see excellent in good, or fair,

Or virtuous; I should so have lost all sense.

Coleridge, in his lecture on the "Tempest," tries to show how well the poet prepares the way for that plot against the life of Alonzo, which was to be wrought out by the "murder of sleep." Antonio and Sebastian had at first no such intention: it was suggested by the magical sleep cast on Alonzo and Gonzalo; but they

are previously introduced, he observes, "scoffing and scorning at what was said by others, without regard to age or situation-without any sense of admiration for the excellent truths they heard delivered." There are some spheres, Mr. Hawthorne remarks, the contact with which inevitably degrades the high, debases the pure, deforms the beautiful; and it must be a mind of uncommon strength, and little impressibility, that can allow itself the habit of such intercourse and not be permanently deteriorated. "And yet the Professor's tone [as thus described] represented that of worldly society at large, where a cold scepticism smothers what it can of our spiritual aspirations, and makes the rest ridiculous. I detested this kind of man; and all the more because a part of my own nature showed itself responsive to him." All the more because conscious of a tendency which, under such tuition, might result in the mind being forced to declare, in its own despite,

-I find nothing great :

Nothing is left which I can venerate.

Speaking of Strauss it is that an Edinburgh Reviewer says that an iconoclast, however stolid, could hardly take up his hammer to shiver to atoms the most exquisite forms of sculpture with the feelings of a common stonemason; and that it would be difficult to conceive the existence in all the world of another human being to match Strauss in the nil admirari vein-in the power of preserving a stoical apathy in the presence of (to say the least) the divinest conceptions of uninspired genius; or one who is so utterly a stranger to that enthusiasm which must enter as an integral element into the constitution of a critic, if he is to be equipped for the discharge of any of the more elevated functions of criticism. Finely and feelingly has Mr. Henry Taylor observed, that admiration is never thrown away upon the mind of him who feels it, except when it is misdirected or blindly indulged. There is perhaps nothing, in his opinion, which more enlarges and enriches the mind than the disposition to lay it generally open to impressions of pleasure from the exercise of every species of talent; nothing by which it is more impoverished than the habit of undue depreciation. "What is puerile, pusillanimous, or wicked, it can do us no good to admire; but let us admire all that can be admired without debasing the dispositions or stultifying the understanding." Dr. Arnold, in 1835, writing to an old pupil abroad, supposes that Pococuranteism is much the order of the day amongst young men; and says, "I observe symptoms of it here, and am always dreading its ascendency, though we have some who struggle nobly against it. I believe that Nil admirari, in this sense, is the Devil's favourite text: and he could not choose a better to introduce his pupils into the more esoteric parts of his

doctrine." And therefore did Arnold always look upon a man infected with this disorder of anti-romance, as on one who had lost the finest part of his nature, and his best protection against everything low and foolish.

Mr. Kingsley makes his Alton Locke utterly shocked at Cambridge contempt and unbelief as to everything beyond mere animal enjoyment, and here and there the selfish advantage of a good degree. The undergraduates seemed, he says,* if one could judge from appearances, to despise and disbelieve everything generous, enthusiastic, enlarged. Thoughtfulness was a "bore;”—earnestness, "romance." Well may Mr. Hannay's Eustace Conyers, when no longer a youngster, bless the fortune which gave him an early friend, who fed all that was positive, and fresh, and tender in him, and did not make the green leaves of his nature shiver and curl up in the cold air of doubt, or spot them with the slimy droppings of a sneering tongue. "Even ambition is wanting in the youth of the new generation. They shake their wise heads, and ask, What does it matter? Talk to them of fame, and they sneer. Talk to them of love, and they sneer and yawn." On another occasion, however, this author epigrammatically intimates that "from nil admirari to worldly ambition is only a short step. It is an exchange of passive selfishness for active selfishness-that's all.” Mr. Hannay is too familiar with the Horatian phraseology to pervert the Horatian sense of nil admirari. And there is yet another passage in his book which deals with it more precisely in its original import; where, arguing that quiet repose in the tropics is not, after all, the element of the children of the Northern Star, he goes on to say, "Nil admirari has been tried by us, and we cannot manage it; let us be thankful for the same. Three centuries' study of the classics has persuaded some of us that we can achieve the Horatian calm. But we make poor Horatians; where Horace was tranquil, we are only bored." Once again, in the more popular, if less precise, usage of the term, he hits out at "disciples of nil admirari, languid, godless, soulless creatures, who believe nothing and hope nothing; dull cynics-sneerers without wit," &c. &c. By all such writers of heart and spirit, the proceeds of nil admirari are rated as worse than nil.

Horace and Creech! Thus do ye teach? What idle speech!
Pope and could you Sanction it too? "Twill never do.

One idle pen Writes it, and ten Write it agen.

Sages require Much to admire, Nought to desire.

God! grant thou me Nature to see Admiringly.

Lo! how the wise Read in her eyes The mysteries!†

*Or said. For we have not seen his last edition-in which the Cambridge section of his Tailor-Poet's career is said to have been re-written.

† W. S. Landor.

When Guy is about to leave Bracebridge Hall for the army, his father the squire takes him aside, and gives him a long exhortation; the drift of which is, that he should scout that affectation of cold-blooded indifference said to be cultivated, at that time, by the young British officers, among whom it was a study to "sink the soldier" in the mere man of fashion. "A soldier," says the old squire, "without pride and enthusiasm in his profession, is a mere sanguinary hireling. Nothing distinguishes him from the mercenary bravo but a bravo but a spirit of patriotism, or a thirst for glory. It is the fashion, now-a-days, my son, to laugh at the spirit of chivalry; when that spirit is really extinct, the profession of the soldier becomes a mere trade of blood."

The nil, or vanishing point, of admiration, is, or used to be considered and cultivated scrupulously as bon ton. "Mr. Dorritt," says intolerable Mrs. General, "I have conversed with Amy several times since we have been residing here [at Venice] on the general subject of the formation of a demeanour. She has expressed herself to me as wondering exceedingly at Venice. I have mentioned to her that it is better not to wonder."-But let us cite illustrations from fact as well as fiction on this high-and-dry doctrine and practice.

Francis Horner sums up a panegyric of his friend Thomson-a name of note, like Horner's own, in the early annals of the Edinburgh Review-by saying, "Then his temper is so manly and cheerful; and, with all his seeming calmness and suspense, has a sufficient portion of that vice of admiration, which it is the fashion to quiz, but which I am old-fashioned enough to be very unwilling to dispense with."

Dr. Chalmers thus writes, in 1806, of a fellow-traveller by coach from Carlisle: "He had the tone and confidence of polished life, but I never in my life witnessed such a want of cordiality, such a cold and repulsive deportment, such a stingy and supercilious air, and so much of that confounded spirit too prevalent among the bucks and fine gentlemen of the age. They give no room to the movements of any kind or natural impulse, but hedge themselves round by sneers, and attempt to awe you into diffidence by a display of their knowledge in the polite world."

It gives the consummate finish to Susan Hamilton's social successes, in Mrs. Gore's tale, that she eventually overcomes, in the nil admirari atmosphere of her married life in London, her rustic Laxingtonian habit of being astonished. "Whatever Lady Leighton might say (and her ladyship's sayings were often of an unprecedented nature)-whatever the Tottenhams might do (and their doings defied calculation), she had schooled herself to look on with an unmarvelling eye, if not with an unheightened complexion." Nothing now surprised her, unless the facility with Feb.-VOL. CXLIV. NO. DLXXVIII.

Q