It is recorded of St. Briccius, that when a boy he saw the devil behind the altar, noting the misdemeanors of people on a piece of parchment. This seems to have stirred in him a desire for parchment that he in turn might write; but so firmly did the devil by his teeth stick to the stolen goods, that on the achievement of mastery by his juvenile but saintly competitor, the horny, wicked head was knocked against the wall, at which painful juncture St. Martin, ever valorous, so conjured the devil that he caused him _willy nilly_ to blot out what he had written. What then, one wonders, was the devil’s code of which the people’s acts were breaches. What his diabolic, though discarded standard? The prescience of St. Briccius or St. Martin would doubtless be required to tell. But it is plain he too is fabled as possessed with desire to bend the will of men in obedience to some crystallized tradition, some extraneous rule. And yet, what is this principle of tradition, this authority-binding, which in this form and that defeats equally Fanny Burney or Gray, Shelley, Southey, or Selden? It is something which, no matter what its ineptness to the circumstances of the present, cannot yield; which is made up of the circumstances of the past, and has in its whole as much as in every shred the inevitability of the past, which pushes by informed private judgment and reason—perhaps on the wiser plea that, ourselves a product of the past, the accumulated and sifted wisdom of that past, the residue of eclecticism on eclecticism, must be most appropriate to guide; or else perhaps on the more foolish, that makes a creed osseous in one infinitely remote exercise of one man’s inspired thoughts. As if, in the latter alternative, the very strength was not the very weakness of the argument which reduces after all everything to single and perhaps sullied private judgment; and as if in the former the very strength was not again the very weakness of the argument which cuts off arbitrarily as the last point of systematized knowledge (more often not at the last) its own method of history. For does it not result that if it be truly said, there is nothing new under the sun, there must in all cases be selection, and if selection be thus the real principle of action, why is some portion of accessible knowledge, some portion even of _received_ knowledge, to be cast without the bounds of usable materials, as though to prohibit us too perchance, from strengthening that uniformity or preponderance in independent selections to which tradition owes its strength? Thirlwall may act as Pecock, and Beddoes as Fitzgerald—but both the virtue of action and the virtue of restraint are lost.