energetic and beautiful imagination, together with a mastery of the rhythm and swell of impassioned speech, can prevent an invitation to the public to hearken to the raptures of intense personal attachment from seeming ludicrous and almost indecent. Whatever other gifts Comte may have had--and he had many of the rarest kind,--poetic imagination was not among them, any more than poetic or emotional expression was among them. His was one of those natures whose faculty of deep feeling is unhappily doomed to be inarticulate, and to pass away without the magic power of transmitting itself. Comte lost no time, after the completion of his _Course of Positive Philosophy_, in proceeding with the _System of Positive Polity_, to which the earlier work was designed to be a foundation. The first volume was published in 1851, and the fourth and last in 1854. In 1848, when the political air was charged with stimulating elements, he founded the Positive Society, with the expectation that it might grow into a reunion as powerful over the new revolution as the Jacobin Club had been in the revolution of 1789. The hope was not fulfilled, but a certain number of philosophic disciples gathered round Comte, and eventually formed themselves, under the guidance of the new ideas of the latter half of his life, into a kind of church. In the years 1849, 1850, and 1851, Comte gave three courses of lectures at the Palais Royal. They were gratuitous and popular, and in them he boldly advanced the whole of his doctrine, as well as the direct and immediate pretensions of himself and his system. The third course ended in the following uncompromising terms--'In the name of the Past and of the Future, the servants of Humanity--both its philosophical and its practical servants--come forward to claim as their due the general direction of this world. Their object is to constitute at length a real Providence in all departments,--moral, intellectual, and material. Consequently they exclude once for all from political supremacy all the different servants of God--Catholic, Protestant, or Deist--as being at once behindhand and a cause of disturbance.' A few weeks after this invitation a very different person stepped forward to constitute himself a real Providence. In 1852 Comte published the _Catechism of Positivism_. In the preface to it he took occasion to express his approval of Louis Napoleon's _coup d'état_ of the 2d of December,--'a fortunate crisis which has set aside the parliamentary system, and instituted a dictatorial republic.' Whatever we may think of the political sagacity of such a judgment, it is due to Comte to say that he did not expect to see his dictatorial republic transformed into a dynastic empire, and, next, that he did expect from the Man of December freedom of the press and of public meeting. His later hero was the Emperor Nicholas, 'the only statesman in Christendom,'--as unlucky a judgment as that which placed Dr. Francia in the Comtist Calendar.