fault with for the flavor of a fruit slowly ripening beneath the light of His smile and the warmth of His love, but not yet fully ripe. Mr. Buckle has undertaken to write a history of civilization, or, rather, he has commenced to write an introduction to a history of civilization. His progress has not been great, and he doubtless realizes that he has undertaken a task which he can never finish. He will probably labor upon it while he lives, and then some other daring man will take up the thread where he will drop it, and go on until he in turn will be obliged to relinquish his unfinished task to a successor. When the work shall be finished, after its original design, it will doubtless be found to be antiquated. It undertook to organize a half-finished life--to reason upon forces that had only half revealed their nature and their power--to develop principles whose relations were imperfectly known. In short, it must necessarily prove to be a half-finished history of a half-finished civilization, whose every newly-opened event will throw a modifying light on all that shall have preceded it. We have, therefore, but little finished work in this world. Not a finished character lives among mankind. No nation of the world illustrates a consummate civilization. All presentations of truth, of whatever nature and relation, are necessarily incomplete. Life is too short, comprehension too limited in its grasp, and expression too feeble or too clumsy, to allow the mind fully to organize, vitalize, and fill out to roundness and just proportion, a single creature of legitimate art. It is, therefore, literally true that the criticisms of the world are the judgments of the world's half-finished men on the world's half-finished affairs. Imperfection sits in judgment on incompleteness, and the natural consequence is that criticism, in whatever field of demonstration, is little more than a record of notions which assume to array themselves against other notions, which may be better or worse than those that oppose them. It is with a depressing sense of the incompleteness of these lessons in life, that I now indite their closing paragraph. I cannot but be aware that the criticisms I have indulged in relate very largely to half-finished work, and I painfully feel that they are the product of a most imperfect judgment. If the reader has found them kind, charitable, hopeful--tending toward that which is good--and lenient toward human frailty, loyal to common sense, and faithful to virtue; if he has found in them that which leaves him a larger and a more liberal man--advanced in some degree toward that perfection which we are ever striving for, but which we never reach, then my aim has been accomplished, bid him God speed! THE END.