Coleridge, denouncing the “moral” consequences of Napoleon’s tyranny, as far more to be dreaded than the worst of those outward and calculable evils, which chiefly shock the imaginations of men, is out of all patience with such objections as, “What _good_ will the Tyrolese do themselves by their heroic resistance?” “What are the Spaniards fighting for?” etc.,—as if man were made only to eat above ground, and be eaten; as if we had no dignity to preserve, no conscience to obey, no immortality to expect. What good can it do him? demands the vulgar fine lady in “Cecil,” who hears that a certain well-to-do man of genius has written a book. A man, she argues, writes for money or distinction: what can be this man’s object? he don’t want to be made a baronet, nor does he want to increase his income. Where can be the _use_ of writing? And where, she is (by cross-questioning) answered, can be the use to the aloe of its flower, to the mine of its gold? Oldbuck of Monkbarns might have done worse than parody, as he did, the “brutal ignorance” of your _cui bono_ querists of the baser sort, in the strain of Gray’s Bard,— “Weave the warp and weave the woof, The winding-sheet of wit and sense; Dull garment of defensive proof ’Gainst all that does not gather pence.” That a new machine, a new experiment, the discovery of a salt, or of a bone, should, in England, receive a wider homage, than the most profound speculation from which no obvious results are apprehended,—this way of contemplating affairs Mr. Buckle was prompt to own as certainly productive of great good. But he also took care to declare it to be, with equal certainty, a one-sided way, satisfying a part only of the human mind—many of the noblest intellects craving for something which it cannot supply. There are mortals who, as a clerical essayist has said, cannot understand or sympathise with the gratification arising from a study of graceful and beautiful objects; who think that the supply of animal necessities is all that any man (but themselves, perhaps) can need. What more can he want? they exclaim, if the man be well-fed, and well-dressed, and well-lodged. Why, if he had been a horse or a pig, is the answer, he would have wanted nothing more; but the possession of a rational soul brings with it pressing wants which are not of a material nature, not to be supplied by material things, and not felt by pigs and horses. And the craving for surrounding objects of grace and beauty is held to be one of these. Mr. Emerson, in his far-going way, goes so far as to say, as regards the “base rate at which the highest mental and moral gifts are held” in his country,—that let a man attain the highest and broadest culture that any American has possessed, then let him die by sea-storm, railroad collision, or other accident, “and all America will acquiesce that the best thing has happened to him; that, after the education has gone far, such is the expensiveness of America, that the