we eat grossly. We have no scruples about it. We are ravenous and voracious, and feel no self-reproach. I am inclined to think that good cookery might do at least as much for the morals of the country as gymnastics. Dine in Paris on fourteen courses, and you feel lighter and brighter when you have finished than when you began; "do justice," as the phrase is, to an English dinner of the old fashioned sort, and, without the liberal assistance of sherry and champagne, you are too stupid to talk of anything except local politics and the state of the crops. French wines will never become popular in this country till we get French cooks. The ethics of dining is a neglected branch of the science of morals which urgently requires investigation. Meantime, let men remember that excessive eating is a foul and disgusting vice; its evil effects may be less obvious than those of excessive drinking, but they are not less real, perhaps they are not less serious. All the finer sensibilities of the soul, all moral grace and beauty, are perhaps more certain to perish in the glutton than even in the drunkard.

The moral degradation which comes from another "fleshly lust" - physical indolence -it is less easy to define. Most of us may thank God that the very circumstances of our life keep us safe from this sin. Few men can help working; most men have to work hard. But sluggishness, an indisposition to make any exertion unless compelled to make it, is sometimes to be met with even in this restless and active age, and in every social condition. I mean that there are people who can never be induced to put out their strength, and who never do anything with their might." We all know men who continue to the end of their days "unfulfilled prophecies;" who have shown in their youth the promise of high achievement, and perhaps the sign of genius, but who leave the world with their fortunes unmade, or their poems unwritten, or their schemes of philosophy unorganized, or their social and political reforms unattempted. Such men are often illustrations of the failure that is the inevitable penalty of indolence. Its moral effects are not less disastrous.

As for some of the tests of sluggishness which are often to be found in good books written for young people, it is difficult to see their value. I cannot perceive, for instance, what virtue there can be in getting up several hours before daylight in the month of January. To make early rising, for its own sake, one of the cardinal virtues, has always seemed to me utterly preposter

ous. Why should we not wait, as Charles Lamb puts it, till the world is "aired" before we venture out? If a man can do more work in the day when he lies till halfpast seven, than when he gets up at halfpast five, if he is better tempered at breakfast-time, if his mind is fresher and his heart kindlier, for the rest of the day, it passes my comprehension why he should turn out at the earlier hour. Some people think he ought; and I have honestly tried to discover some intelligible explanation of what seems to me this singular article of faith, but I cannot. If through rising late on weekdays, a man has to hurry away to business without family prayer, if his temper is ruffled morning after morning by the haste and disorder in which it involves him; if he gets up so late on Sunday that he has to make a violent effort to reach his place of worship in tolerable time, and gradually comes to think that he is quite early enough if he is in his seat five minutes after service has begun, then of course he is to be blamed; but though I have a real respect for traditional wisdom, I have never been able to understand why a man should get up at unseemly hours in the night for the mere sake of doing it.

There is a Sluggishness, however, which is fatal to manly energy and Christian earnestness. Some men fall into such physical habits that they never seem to be fairly awake. Hard work of every kind, whether of muscle or brain, they systematically evade. They "take things easy." They "do not excite themselves." They think they are very harmless, and even very praiseworthy people; and do not see that indolence has grown upon them till the soul is no longer master of itself, or of the body which ought to serve it. The immorality of their life it may perhaps be impossible to make clear to them; but they may be made to perceive that habits which destroy all intensity, and depth, and vehemence of religious feeling must involve them in guilt. Every spiritual impulse is enfeebled, every devout affection is deadened, every act of worship is made a weariness by the sluggishness into which they have permitted themselves to sink. The fiery chariot in which the soul should rise triumphantly to heaven in exulting praise and rapturous adoration has had all its splendours quenched; now and then they may be feebly stirred by the fervour and passion of men of nobler temper, but it is only for a moment; "of the earth, earthy," they have become incapable of the diviner movements and joys of the spiritual life.

Very wonderful is the intimate connection, the subtle interaction between the forces of our physical and moral nature. It is one of the chief mysteries of our mysterious being. But it is not a mystery merely; it is a fact of infinite practical significance which cannot be ignored without grave peril. The intelligent recognition of it would save many good people from much sorrow, as it would save others from grievous sin. I should like to have the "Diaries" which record the spiritual experience of certain excellent persons, illustrated with notes by wise physicians who had known them intimately. Periods of spiritual desertion, when "the light of God's countenance" was hidden from them, apparently without any reason, might receive a very instructive explanation. It might be found that God had been less arbitrary, or as they would say less sovereign, in his treatment of them than they supposed. I once tried whether the strange vicissitudes of glory and gloom which occurred in the interior life of an eminently good man could be accounted for by the physical causes which his own diary suggested; and though the materials at my command were, of course, very imperfect, as I had never known him, and could only infer what his physical history was from accidental and fragmentary hints occurring here and there among the record of his labours, his thanksgivings, his confessions, and his bitter cries to God for the restoration of spiritual joy, the attempt was not altogether unsuccessful. A wise discipline of the body would free many a devout soul from the evil thoughts with which it is haunted, and which are supposed to come from evil spirits, from the gloomy fears which are interpreted as signs of a deep-rooted unbelief, and from the despondency which is regarded as the result of the Divine displeasure.

Let no one suppose that I ascribe to merely physical causes all the unspeakable joy and al the unspeakable agony which find a place in the spiritual history of every man who is endeavouring to live, and move, and have his being in God. This material universe may be an illusion; its stars and suns, its mountains and oceans, may all be a mere fleeting show, projected by the action of the powers of my own inexplicable nature, and without any solid and substantial being; but that my soul is saddened and blessed by its failures and triumphs, by the eclipse of the divine glory, and by the recovery of the beatific vision this I cannot doubt. It is, however, equally certain that body and soul, flesh and spirit,

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are so strangely blended, that the lights and shadows which chase each other across our interior life, do not all come from the upper heavens. By honouring the laws of our physical nature, some of us might come to live a more equable spiritual life.

As for "fleshly lusts" which betray us into sin, the line of duty is simple and definite we must "abstain "from them. Every man must learn for himself where his own danger lies, and then must resolve, at whatever cost, to have done with his sin. Our choice lies between yielding to the degrading bondage which has made us despise ourselves, and a life inspired with the Holy Ghost, a life of strength, joy, and blessedness. It is of no use to try to pray, unless we "abstain" from that which makes prayer dull and heartless, and renders us incapable of receiving the very blessings we ask for. It is of no use to try to meditate on the majesty and goodness of God, unless we "abstain" from that which almost incapacitates us for lofty meditation, and which, if for a moment we are swept upwards among the harps and songs of angels, sinks us down at once into our earthly dust again. For some men to rise to a nobler life it may be quite as necessary to eat less as to pray more; to spend less time over their wine as to spend more time over their Bible; to ride, to walk, to run, to bathe, as to engage in regular and earnest Christian work.

We wait for the redemption of our body; but we must not wait for the Resurrection to liberate us from "fleshly lusts:" these "war against the soul;" and unless they are resolutely resisted and subdued, the soul may be in peril of final destruction.

R. W. DALE.

From the Saturday Review.

AMERICAN LITERATURE.

PERHAPS almost the last person in the United States from whom we could expect an impartial and correct account of the late civil war is Mr. Horace Greeley. As one of the most extreme and active members of the party whose exertions for nearly twenty years had been incessantly directed to break up the Union, and who, after the affair of Fort Sumter, suddenly became the most violent of Unionists - the party to whose intemperate language was owing th

greater part of that bitterness of feeling which, long before the election of Mr. Lincoln, had wholly alienated the Southern people from their confederates, and who had carried their political hostility so far as to send a band of fillibusters to attempt an insurrection in Virginia - he is inevitably disqualified from understanding either the legal or moral strength of the unsuccessful side. Having, moreover, during the whole of the period in which the causes that led to secession were at work beneath the surface of social and public life, been utterly separated in sentiment and purpose from the vast majority of the Northern people, he is equally unable to give a true account of the temper in which they entered upon the war, and of the motives which actuated them. The history of such a quarrel from the point of view of a fanatical Abolitionist is necessarily very inaccurate. But we are bound to admit that in most cases Mr. Greeley has done his best to be courteous and generous if not impartial. In recording the downfall of the Confederacy, and the surrender of Lee, Mr. Greeley's language is more becoming and in better taste than that of many Northern writers of less extreme opinions; and he pays an honourable tibute to the devoted heroism of the Virginian army. But the parts of the volume which possess the most intrinsic value are those few passages which relate to political events and tendencies which the Abolitionist enthusiast, from his very want of sympathy with the common feelings of his countrymen, observed and has remembered more accurately than others. Early in the contest the well-known "Manhattan" asserted to the great indignation of Northern sympathizers, that the Union would in no case be dissolved; that, if the South were victorious, the Northern States would end by seeking admission into the Southern Confederacy. It is curious to find this opinion confirmed by one who could have no sort of sympathy with the feeling which he admits to have been general in the North. In this, as in most respects, Mr. Greeley is perfectly candid in his statements, however biassed in his judgments. Another evidence of his candour appears in a note at the end of the volume, in which he gives the comparative

numbers of prisoners held by both parties, and the proportion of deaths. He argues that the South did ill-use her prisoners wantonly, but his figures are against him. The percentage of deaths in the Federal prisons was about twelve; in the Confederate prisons about seventeen, according to the published statistics. Mr. Greeley makes the real figure nearer twenty. Now, considering the extreme difficulty which the Confederates found in providing even their army with necessaries, the barbarous conduct of the Federal Government in declaring medicines contraband of war, the unfavourable climate of great part of the South, and the healthy atmosphere and abundance of food, medicine, and comforts in the North, it may be inferred from these figures that, so far as their power extended, the Southerners must have treated their captives at least as well as the enemy. Here, then, we are indebted to Mr. Greeley for the facts which upset his own accusations; and throughout his work we find the same reason to believe in the perfect honesty of his narrative, however warped by his prejudices. This, the second and concluding part of his history, carries us from the fall of New Orleans to the surrender of Lee, containing four-fifths of the history of the war; but the earlier volume which dealt chiefly with political influences and with the preliminary history of secession, though of course more highly coloured by the writer's peculiar views, contained much more that might be of service to the historian or of interest to the politician. Mr. Greeley has no special qualifications for writing the history of military movements; but his account of a great public crisis in which he was an eager actor cannot fail to throw some light on his own side of the questions at issue.

The Mormon Prophet and his Harem * professes to be "the only authentic account of Brigham Young and his polygamous family, and of that complicated and incongruous system of social and political machinery called Mormonism." If Mrs. Waite really believes in her own pretensions, she must be remarkably behindhand in her acquaintance with the literature of her subject. Many much fuller and much more authentic accounts of all that the public of America or of Europe is interested in knowing about the Mormon chief and the peculiar

*The Mormon Prophet and his Harem, or an authentic History of Brigham Young, his numerous Wives and Children. By Mrs. C. V. Waite. Third Edition. Cambridge: Printed at the Riverside Press, and for Sale by Hurd & Houghton, New York. London: Trübner & Co. 1867.

community which has attained such a wonderful cohesion and prosperity under his government have been published on both sides of the Atlantic, and are accessible to every one. We have had very elaborate descriptions of Mormon life and society from the pens of accomplished and thoughtful travellers, who have given themselves some trouble to ascertain as far as possible, not only the facts for which they vouch, but the principles of administration and of doctrine which have enabled Brigham Young to form in the middle of the nineteenth century a community based on theocratic government, and to maintain among a people of European origin the polygamic institutions which have hitherto been confined to Oriental races. Captain Burton and Mr. Hepworth Dixon have, each from his own point of view, investigated at some length, and with something like philosophical impartiality, the extraordinary problems which the "social and political machinery" of Utah presents; while, on the other hand, we have from the Mormons themselves more than one explanation of their system, and at least one history of its practical development. But it is true that only one work, so far as we know, has yet appeared which deals with Mormonism in the same spirit in which Mrs. Waite regards it a shilling volume entitled, if we remember rightly, Female Life among the Mormons, and bearing a striking analogy, in many respects, to some of those professed revelations of the interior life of Roman Catholic convents in which Protestant fanaticism delights, and which the latitudinarian indifference of the general public confounds with the more ordinary productions of Holywell Street. Mrs. Waite's work has much higher pretensions, but it is quite as unworthy to be classed among authentic histories, or even among works of legitimate controversy. The temper of the writer is so manifest as to deprive her statements of all value. The book is fitly crowned by a chapter entitled "The Endowment," the first two or three pages of which will abundantly satisfy the reader who may be disposed to form his own opinion upon its merits.

The Dictionary of Congress is a very convenient volume of reference, containing biographical notices of all the Senators and Representatives of the United States from the meeting of the Colonial Congress down

*Dictionary of the United States Congress, Complied as a Manual of Reference for the Legislator and Statesman. By Charles Lanman. Third Edition, revised and brought down to July 28, 1866. Government Printing Office. London: Trübner & Co. 1866.

to the present day; the Articles of Confederation; the Constitution of the Union, with the various amendments passed down to the date of publication; notes of the Presidential elections, with the names of the electors; the organization of the Executive departments, the right of suffrage in the different States, and other useful information not easily accessible to European readers. It might, however, be made very much more useful by considerable enlargement and additions, without becoming at all inconveniently cumbrous. Its value would be greatly increased if some of the biographies were extended in length, if a short account of the constitutional system of the different States were inserted, and if that part which is immediately devoted to Congress five-sixths of the whole-contained a clear view of its rules and procedure, of its forms, and the meaning of the terms employed in the reports, some of which are peculiar to America, while others (as "the previous question!") are used in a sense, or have a practical significance, different from that which attaches to them in our own Parliamentary proceedings. The organization of the House of Representatives, which occupies so considerable a period at the commencement of each Congress, the powers of the Committees, the relations between the two Houses, and between Congress and the Executive, are all topics on which a succinct explanation would be very serviceable to nearly all English, and probably to most American readers of the newspapers, and which we are disappointed to find wholly untouched in this volume. If the next edition should be thus enlarged and completed, so as to form a real and efficient dictionary of reference upon American politics, the additional labour bestowed upon it would be amply repaid.

The Criterion is the title given by Mr. Henry Tuckerman to a series of essays of a quality somewhat higher than that of the usual magazine article, and resembling in style and matter those of Hazlitt and his contemporaries, rather than the flimsier productions of their successors. They are well written, and contain some pertinent observations and amusing anecdotes of various professions and phases of social life. Mr. Tuckerman is a master of the English language, and the purity of his style, rather than any affectation of antique mannerisms,

*The Criterion; or, the Test of Talk about Familiar Things. A Series of Essays. By Henry T. Tuckerman. New York: Hurd & Houghton. Boston: E. P Dutton & Co. Loudon: Sampson Low, Son, & Marston. 1866.