However this may be, Harrington’s heart was anchored on the idea, and with this faith in him, he studied his Bacon, together with Montaigne and Shakspeare, who, he thought, or seemed to think—for on this point he was mysteriously non-committal—were in the interest of the Baconian design. Possibly, he might yet come to different conclusions, for he was young; and, like Sterne’s Pilgrim, had just begun his journey, and had much to learn. Meanwhile he pursued his studies, though with the full consciousness that there was no accredited career open to him. To a man who held unpopular convictions as he did; no more a Christian of the modern sort than Christ was; no more a patriot of the modern sort than Sidney was; no more a believer in the modern order of society than Bacon and Fourier were; despising the Government as an engine of force and fraud; refusing assent to the Constitution, and allegiance to the Union, because in his view they legalized and fortified the crime and ruin of Slavery—to such a man the church, the bar, the bench, the senate, the official station of any kind were all closed. But Harrington had a solemn instinct at his heart, that the time was coming when his country would rise against slavery and social wrong and call upon her outlawed sons for their best service. Against that day he prepared himself to do his part, whatever it might prove to be. In his conception of it, the utter annihilation of slavery was first in the programme. This involved the possibility of civil war. It might come between the dark millions of the South and the Government. It might come between the Government’s pro-slavery liegemen and the freemen of the North. In either case, Harrington was pledged to serve liberty, and that his service might be efficient, he had begun the study of military science, and had the best text books, such as those of Mahan, Kinsley, Thiroux and Knowlton, together with the chief standard works relating to warfare, from the Commentaries of Cæsar to the volumes of Durat-Lasalle. To this end also went his varied practice with Bagasse in the school of arms, with rifle practice elsewhere. Hoping, too, that the period of social reconstruction would come in his own time or follow hard upon it, he was preparing to add his thought to bring it on, or shape his thought to guide it when it should come, and to this end were his scholastic labors. His shelves might have hinted as much. There were the works of the masters of law and government, and of those who have studied and schemed for society, Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Cicero, Justinian, Grotius, Burlamaqui, Vattel, Puffendorff, Henricius, Milton, Sidney, Harrington, Pothier, Montaigne, Machiavelli, Bacon, Montesquieu, Bentham, Burke, St. Simon, Fourier, Compte—legists, jurists, scholiasts, works of practice and theory, statements of codes, and books that are the seed of codes. With them works of exact science in all its branches,