sphere, and becomes a hindrance where he might have been a help; and he wrongs the public, which lacks both the insight and the leisure to drag modest merit from its den and to look with an unwinking eye on the juggling glamoury of the bold pretender. But it is not only in the phases of individual character and the experiences of personal life that the validity of the Aristotelian standard of well-being is strongly asserted. In every sphere of existence through the various drama of the cosmos, we find the same principle in operation. And we may, without qualification, broadly pronounce that the world is a κόσμος, an ordered and garnished whole, only in so far as it is held together by the harmonizing law of the mean; otherwise it jerks asunder, and through violent excess bolts into chaos. Take what we call Health, for instance; what is it but the rhythmical medium, of normal pulse between the excess of fever and the defect of feebleness? which two extremes, as the common saying is, necessarily meet; for they are both equally removed from healthy life, and sisters-uterine to death and dissolution. Then, again, what is Beauty? A power which all feel, but few can define; neither shall I attempt to define it now. But one thing at least in reference to it is quite plain, that it is always a medium {165} betwixt two extremes, or, what comes to the same thing, a marriage of extremes. For by such a marriage, as we see in the commonest processes of chemical action, a mean product is produced of a comparatively mild and innocuous character. The corrosive acid or alkali is annihilated and a neutral salt comes to view. Exactly so in works of nature or art on which the imagination can pleasantly dwell. No extreme is beautiful. The extreme of force overwhelms; the extreme of gentleness enfeebles and enervates. Therefore, to make a handsome man, we must borrow a few tricks of grace from the female; and to make a woman who shall be more than an animated rose or primrose, we must find her infected with a certain dose of firmness and energy from the male. A mere masculine creature, composed altogether of the extreme of strength and force, is disagreeable, and often unbearable; a mere feminine creature in the extreme of delicacy, however finely tinted with the “_dolce mistura di rosa e di ligustro_,” which Ariosto lauds, if she is capable only of a gentle smile and a soft caress, very soon becomes tiresome. She is the extreme of the mere woman, and, like a cooing turtle-dove, soon satiates; and at the apparition of such an unfeathered pigeon we yawn, as from the fully-developed unmitigated male bear we shrink. But it is in the great movements of the social world--in the rise and fall of stock and commercial speculations--no less than in the slow changes and violent revolutions of Churches and States, that the operation of the Aristotelian mean is most strikingly exemplified. Moderation, indeed, both in Church and State, and on ’Change, is the one great