of the Munster fairies, by the title of Donn Fierenach, or DON the truth-teller-a function curiously illustrative of the new view of Macbeth's witches. The tale is to this day commemorated by a hill in the county of Limerick, which bears that honourable appellation, and roofs the residence of the personage. Again, the dwarf stories published in Germany and Scandinavia turn all, or nearly all, upon money as the moral. The moral of the fairy tales of Ireland is, as invariably, a playful trick, a witty jest, a social lesson or an act of justice. Thus in the former of these races is discerned from the first—in due conformity with the unchangeability of the organism—that subterranean and metallic instinct which marked the merchants of the modern world. Does not the popular Utopia of the Celts-"the realm of féerie" presage, upon the same principle, its civilizers and organizers ?1

1 This destination makes already the progress in Italy predicted by a note in the fore part of this volume. The Gaul again triumphs in his chivalrous mission. Well done! illustrious nation, true liberator of humanity, in America as in Europe, in Italy as in Greece; and late as henceforth the protector of the infant peoples of Asia! The last of the land legs of Feudalism is disabled, and it may be hoped the water one will yield without violence.

To bring the English people to some sense of their place and peril, the first requisite was to divest them of that European prestige which made them models of government and champions of liberty; pretensions which the bustling mediocrities of the Continent served as claqueurs to the feudal oligarchy in confirming. But the juggle of English “liberty” and French "despotism" must have received a death-blow from the crucial case of Italy, and the English themselves begin to see through it at home. They seem already to distinguish the grand organization which gives the French army its prodigious powers and order. But as they do not reason like a Cuvier or an Owen, it will

be passed on them again, as in the Crimean war, for an exception. They see but little of the still more exquisite net-work of diplomacy which has been drawing for years back around the whole family, and which the Germans froath and flounder in with Hamlet's ribaldry and resolution, marching first upon Paris, then the Rhine, then staying at home. They have for ages been bantering French cookery and French fashions, without a dream that even these implied the organizing intellect; just as the savage or the child perceives but trifles or playthings in the fossil tooth or bone-joint which to the naturalist speaks a system. But to the sociologic naturalist, the composition of the French army has but the coarseness of texture that makes it sensible to the vulgar, in comparison with the machinery of the political administration.

This mechanism will become tangible by example to the English, in its formal application to liberated Italy. For without French organization nothing will have there been done. To leave the Italians to themselves, or give them Anglican parliaments, would be merely changing Gothic force and tyranny for fraud and anarchy. Moreover, France on her own account must keep them under her wing; the north Italians are mainly Celtic, though of a primitive or lower development, and thus will easily and normally coalesce with the family. Normally, for the old function of the nation is discharged, its successor in the new epoch being Russia and the Sclavic race. From the same policy of Celtic union, France must also insist on the admission, to the next regulative Congress, of Spain: she is surely as well entitled by resources and population, to say nothing of historic glories, as the equivocal and upstart Prussia. Through her, too, and her possessions, the humanity of Europe could save the wretched South Americans from their own anarchy and the new Northmen. This embodiment would also no doubt bring over England, who is the natural nexus between the Celtic and the Gothic races: her avowed policy, as well as logic, is to treat all things de facto, and so she passed to French from Austrian with the sole battle of Magenta. Thus the Teutons-disgorged of their medieval plunder, and reduced to live, like all honest people, on their own bottom-would subside to their still relatively high and useful place of exploration, action, acquisitionin a word, business. The organizing, the directive, and the decorative functions-all the graces and the grandeurs of civilization-would be left

the Celts. These nobler interests are fast sinking beneath the reigning commercialism towards a state more deeply savage than the primitive one of nature; a state in which the workmen of the head, as of the hand, would be the proletaires and paupers of illiterate cupidity. The ascendant of the race of intellect, and thus of taste, will arrest this, and inaugurate a civilization to which all previous were barbarisms.

This social advent is so urgent for the safety of England, and the need of it so incredible, because unflattering, to her people, that the writer is tempted by the residue of space to crown his various demonstrations by a final authority. The great Milton, who was a statesman and philosopher no less than poet, in his History of England, paints his countrymen as follows:

"For Britain (to speak a truth not often spoken), as it is a land fruitful enough of men stout and courageous in war, so it is naturally not over fertile of men able to govern justly and prudently in peace, [they] trusting only in their mother-wit; [men] who consider not justly, that civility, prudence, love of the public good, rather than of money or rank, are to this soil in a manner outlandish; .. [men], too, impolitic [ignorant of polity] and rude, if not headstrong and intractable to the industry and virtue either of executing or understanding true civil government. Valiant, indeed, and prosperous to win a field; but to know the end and reason of winning, injudicious and unwise: IN GOOD OR BAD SUCCESS, ALIKE UNTEACHABLE. For the sun, which we want, ripens wits as well as fruits; and as wine and oil are imported to us from abroad, so must ripe understanding, and many civil virtues, be imported into our minds from foreign writings and examples. We shall else miscarry still, and come short in the attempts of any great enterprise."

Here was as inspired a warning as even Milton ever uttered. And assuredly the nation who preconize this genius as having penetrated and portrayed with a fidelity almost divine the denizens of hell and heaven, whom he had never known or seen, will not venture to refuse him at least equal sagacity in judging of a people of whom he was, with whom he lived, and whom he lectured through all ranks, from the school boy to the monarch.

THE END.