modesty; a queer compound of reckless audacity and defiance of all constituted authority with abject superstition; a man, in short, who makes us wonder, as we read, whether the world has advanced or gone back; whether we have gained or lost by substituting the douce, respectable jeweller, and the vulgar blackguard of modern London, for this magnificent goldsmith bravo of the Florence of the sixteenth century. The only writer in our own literature who, at a long interval, recalls this brilliant apparition, is Lord Herbert of Cherbury. In him, too, we find the singular combination of the fire-eating duellist with the man of high intellectual power. Horace Walpole, who procured the publication of his autobiography, says that the reader will be astonished to find that the 'history of Don Quixote was the life of Plato.' Herbert, it is true, was not quite a Plato nor a Quixote. His thirst for chivalrous adventures may indeed remind us of the Don or of Cellini; yet somehow, though he wandered through Europe in true knight-errant spirit, always on the look-out for occasions of proving that courage for which, so he declares, he had as high a reputation as any man of his time, and was as irritable, punctilious, and given to dare-devil deeds as the most precise of cavaliers could desire, he seems to have had singular ill-luck. Somehow, the authorities always interpose to prevent his fighting. The vanity of Lord Herbert is of a more reflective and priggish type than that of Cellini. Instead of taking himself for granted, with the superlative audacity of his predecessor, he contemplates his own perfections complacently, and draws his own portrait for the benefit of his descendants, as an embodiment of the perfect gentleman accomplished in all knightly arts, and full to overflowing of the most becoming sentiments. He has, in fact, a rather obtrusive moral sense, whereas an entire absence of any encumbrance of that kind is one of Cellini's peculiarities; or, at least, the Italian assumes that whatever he does must be right, whereas the Englishman is simply convinced that he does whatever is right. Herbert parades himself as a model with an amazing consciousness of his own perfection, and sets forth his various natural endowments—such, for example, as the delicious odour which exudes from his body and perfumes even his clothes—as a kind of providential testimony to his merits. When a voice from heaven orders him to publish his great book 'De Veritate,' we feel that no human _imprimatur_ would be adequate to so important an occasion. And, in spite of his swelling self-satisfaction, we must admit that he has real claims upon our respect; in fact, Herbert, though not so great a poet as his brother George, at least wrote one poem which has a curious interest as anticipating, not only the metre, but, in some degree, the sentiment, of 'In Memoriam;' and, though less conspicuous as a philosopher than Bacon or Hobbes, wrote books