union club, and that none even came near him, except the late Charles Buller, wherein distinction in this and higher respects was already notable. The questions agitated seem occasionally to have touched on the political department and even on the ecclesiastical. I have heard one trait of Sterling's eloquence, which survived on the wings of grinning rumour, and had evidently borne upon the question of Church Conservatism in some form, Have they not-(or, perhaps, it was, has she [the Church] not)—a black dragoon, in every parish on good pay and rations-horse meat and men's meat, to patrol and battle for three things?' The black dragoon which, naturally, at the moment ruffled the general young imagination into stormy laughter, points towards important conclusions in respect to Sterling at this time. I conclude he had, with his usual alacrity and impetuous daring, frankly adoped the anti-superstitious side of things, and stood scornfully prepared to repel all aggressions as pretensions from the opposite quarter-in short, that he was already, what afterwards there is no doubt about his being, at all points a Radical, as the name or nick-name then wentin other words, a young ardent soul looking with hope and joy into a world which was infinitely beautiful to him, though overhung with falsities and foul cobwebs as world never was before. Overloaded, overclouded, to the zenith and the nadir of it, by incredible, uncredited, traditions, solemnly sordid hypocrisies and beggarly deliriums, old and new, which latter class of objects it was clearly the part of every noble heart to expend all its lightnings and energies in burning up without delay, and sweeping into their native chaos out of such a cosmos as this; which process it did not seem to him, then, could be very difficult, or attended with much other than heroic joy, and enthusiasm of victory or of battle to the gallant operator in his part of it. This was, with modifications such as might be, the humour and creed of college Radicalism five-and-twenty years ago."

Such is the author's outburst at finding Sterling chief among the young sons of unreflected eloquence, ridiculing the ministers of religion! From this point in the biography he adopts him as his own; and what he made of him we shall speedily see. In the "Arabian Nights" there is a pretty legend familiar to us all, of which we have been reminded by this narrative of Sterling and the author's comment appended to it. Once upon a time, to adopt the household phrase, there was a black African magician who voted the ecclesiastical foundations of the Caliphate to be a "solemn sordid hypocrisy," and the whole world to be mad save himself, who was determined to make bread out of it by turning it upside down, dethroning the sublime shadow of the prophet, and sweeping all the attendant, incredible, uncredited, traditions into their native chaos out of the cosmos of Bagdad. The sorcerer needed an ally, and as he sauntered through the streets of the sacred city he beheld a youth at play with his fellows. The youth was light-hearted, brilliant, full of witty

sayings, not particular in laughing at the beard of the caliph or at the name of the prophet, eager in his sport, neglectful of his proper duties, and the very joy of the comrades who listened to the sallies of his wit. The magician at once recognised the youth he required. Here was a brilliant mind not yet steadfastly fixed on all that alone was good, and the easier to be settled down to the pursuit of what was exactly opposite. "By all the cobwebbed lamps in Mecca (the sorcerer exclaimed), I have found the lad!" And straightway he stole him from his mother, plunged him deep into the glittering caverns of the earth, and kept the prospect and the purpose of heaven from his view. In the legend, Aladdin, the ingenuous boy, conquered the wicked sorcerer. Would it were so here! Sterling is the Aladdin, and Carlyle his seductive, frothy, evil genius. The latter, long waiting to destroy all that stands, and to station himself on the apex of the ruins as the accomplished artist of the astounding work, seizes here on the hand of the bright boy of the debating union, hugs him in a deadly embrace, turns him from all view of the empyrean, surrounds him with a halo of murkiness and mystification, and pulling him down into the lowest depths he exclaims-" Fair-haired and sparkling son!-thou and I have daring souls. Let us perform our mission, and give to all the world new lamps for their old !" The Aladdin of the story which is not romance seems to have often endeavoured to withstand the false enchanter who baptised him to this mission; but the magic was too potent to be resisted. By home hearth-sides, in sunny fields, at glistening banquets, and in the gas-lit streets, the poison was poured into his ear-the poison that killeth, and against which it is manifest that the poor victim often struggled in utter helplessness. The first meeting of the two was, however, long subsequent [to this period, when Sterling trifled away his Cambridge hours in ridiculing the best intentioned of men. The youth was as yet playing idly and wantonly on the pavé of Bagdad, and the grim wielder of destroying magic had not yet cast a shadow on his path. That darkness will fall all too soon and too fatally. In the meantime how sped the hours of the brilliant boy?

Having once more done the forbidden thing which, according to Mr. Carlyle, is so essential for the making of a true man-having renounced the law because, as we are told forsooth, the world was mad and its worships unworshipful— Sterling looked around him and asked the simple question-What was to be done? The young man who, according to his biographer, had not steady-pulling diligence for anything,

is very likely to ask such a question, and to refuse doing, even when a sphere for it is offered to him. Sterling had discovered that it was an "unblessed, untrue, world." What of that? He had found school-life the same and had ran away from it, pouring misery into the little household where a fond mother was yet weeping over the death of one of her little ones. And now, finding the world tumbling about " a waste weltering epoch," and full of phantasms echoing to "the temporary hallelujah of flunkeys," of course the logical and right conclusion was that Sterling should disappoint his friends and renounce the profession for which he was studying! Why not? says Mr. Carlyle; and he further asks, whether heroic souls are to be expected to sit down quietly and eat the insipid pudding set before them? To which we reply that certainly they will, unless their heroism be all a lacquered sham. The truly heroic soul will fight his battle of life on the ground and under the conditions laid down by the Almighty. He will look forward, indeed, and his prospective gaze may warrant him in shifting his ground in order the better to fulfil his assigned mission. But what sort of a soldier is he who would fling down his weapons in the melée, fold his arms, and run bewilderingly about, foolishly enquiring what he was next to do? Mr. Carlyle calls it the maddest of all possible worlds. As far as we can understand his theory thereon, if he have one at all, it would be a madder still could he have his way. He shakes the phials of his wrath and of his contempt upon all around him, bids us eat dirt, spurns us as we cross the threshold of a church, and would fain drag us by the neck to worship with him in " the cathedral of immensities!" He sees in his diseased and discoloured vision a world rushing on to ruin, and offers no remedy but through a course of preparatory destruction, which would in the end be much the same. Our system, religious, political, and social, is full of cobwebs, impeded by venerable dust, clogged by mud-its conductors are knaves, their employés incompetent. Mr. Carlyle does his little utmost to injure the whole, and then cries Shame! at its shattered condition. He stands, as it were, by the side of a line of railway—(where, by-the-bye, he is offending by the commission of trespass)-he sees a train advancing; the engines may be a trifle out of gear; the train may be a heavy one; the carriages may be somewhat shabby; the guards a little inclined to sleep rather than to watch-all these are things that may, can, and will be easily amended. Mr. Carlyle does what is in his power to prevent this consummation. He is bold enough to interfere with the signals-he hoists

"dangerous"-flings his hands in the air like a maniac, abuses the engineers, and shouts out to the passengers that they are all hurrying to perdition. The alarmed company, not knowing who the madman is, scream, in their turn, enquiries as to what is to be done? Done! cries the insane intruder: there is nothing to be done with a set of dupes who allow the management of the boiler to a set of dolts. As he thus speaks he flings a loose sleeper under one of the wheels-over goes the train—and, amid the wreck of crushed bodies and splintered carriages, the prophet of evil asks, with a smirk, whether he was not correct in asserting that the entire system was rotten and would eventually break up into fragments!

Well here we have Sterling off the line in place of going steadily on a-head. He and the law have parted for ever, and Mr. Carlyle chucklingly congratulates himself that his hero is shut out from the Church by his own expressions touching "black dragoons." He thinks he would have made a clever parliamentary debater. As that was an unattainable flight, Sterling accepted the office of secretary to a nondescript sort of parliamentary, or rather political, society. He exercised it for a brief season, dropped it or fell from it, and then turned to the very last thing which a man who needs being disciplined into steadiness of pursuit should turn to-periodical literature. His earliest attempts, and they were very graceful—as was to be expected from a young author of refined mind and honest and honourable principle, albeit something indolent and uncertain his earliest attempts appeared in 1828 in a new series of the Literary Chronicle. The old Literary had fought a hard fight with the then vigorous Literary Gazette, and had got fairly beaten. Poor Neale, Mrs. Hofland, J. W. Dalby, and John Doran, were among the last of its contributors. A closing series of papers by the latter was the last effort made at a rally. They had little further remarkable in them than that they were the somewhat tautologically called Recollections and Reminiscences" of a writer scarcely out of his teens. But whatever they might be, the author and his old fellow-contributors were swept away by the new literary cabinet formed by Sterling and his friends. The new venture fared no better than the old. The Athenæum was then purchased of Mr. Buckingham, and the Chronicle was absorbed therein. Sterling's contributions were distinguished for a rough brilliancy, but he was no business man. Mere ability of pen will not of itself make a journal flourish, and the consequence was that the affair was abandoned, and the Athenaum passed into hands practised in the ways that render

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speculations real, and knowing how to turn to profit both embarrassed periodicals and crystal palaces. How stood Sterling now?

"For the present his and these young peoples' (his literary friends) aim was, by democracy or what means there are, be all impostures put down, speedy end to superstition-[whereby we believe Mr. Carlyle means religion '-a gentle one if you can contrive it, but an end. Away with it in the name of God come out of it, all true men! Piety of heart, a certain reality of religious faith, was always Sterling's-the gift of nature to him which he would not and could not throw away; but I find at this time his religion is as good as altogether ethnic, Greekish-what Göethe calls the heathen form of religion. The Church with her Articles is without relation to him. And along with obsolete spiritualisms he sees all manner of obsolete thrones and bigwigged temporalities; and for them also can prophesy, and wish only a speedy down."

Such was Sterling; and the young democrat with his piety of heart and certain reality of religious faith-of which we are glad to say even the magician of the lamp could not entirely deprive him the young democrat, unstable of purpose still, had recourse to Coleridge who" sat on the brow of Highgate Hill," a "king of men," who could "profess himself an orthodox Christian, and say and print to the Church of England, with its singular old rubrics and surplices at Allhallowtide, esto perpetua." Coleridge was a prophet, as was and is Carlyle, though of a different quality; and the latter speaks of him as one of the irritabile genus might be expected to speak of a rival in the vaticinatory department. Coleridge at this time was living on the charity or friendship, or both, of a poor surgeon at Highgate. His children had been surrendered to the charitable feeling of the steady-working Southey! This was the man who was "cursed with a desolating radiance of speech." He ruled society by interminable phrases in which the chance was that there lay some wisdom, but it was hardly worth the looking for. Mr. Gilman's house at Highgate was his Dodona-oak-grove, where he sat "whispering strange things-uncertain (says his brother prophet, dealing equally extensively in mystification and painful long-windedness)uncertain whether oracles or jargon." There is, however, nothing in this entire volume so clever in its way as the portrait drawn of Coleridge. Like a daguerreotype, it is minutely faithful and supremely unpleasant. We will give some glimpses of him:

"The old man-he was now getting old-towards sixty, perhaps, and gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings-a life