The style is not more hopelessly muddled than the sentiment. The man's skull seems to be undergoing a perpetual house-cleaning. His intellectual furniture is always at sixes and sevens. It would be very strange, if so wide a rover and so indefatigable a collector should never by any chance come back with some valuable specimens for his cabinet; but the few curiosities displayed as his own property have so very awkward an air in his wilderness of common pebbles, that we have a deep inward conviction that they are stolen, though the theft may be an unconscious one. Moreover, if he ever lights on a genuine gem, he cannot keep his hands off it, but paws it over and over till it is as lustreless as its companions. He seems to have an organic inaptitude for combination. He lays a fact down and straightway forgets where he put it, what it was for, or what manner of fact it was, and goes serenely on with his argument as if no such fact existed. Some of his facts are of such a nature that the pity is not that he occasionally forgets them, but that he ever remembered them. To show that old truths are "now proved to have been lies," he quotes,-- "Doubt that the stars are fire, Doubt that the sun doth move, Doubt truth to be a liar, But never doubt I love," and adds this comment,--"Well, we know now that the sun does not move, and that the stars are not fire; that the voices of the learned, who held up these things as immutable truths, were unconsciously lying after all." Yet any astronomical horn-book would have told our philosopher, that, if one scientific theory is firmly founded on truth, it is that the sun does move; and for the matter of the stars, it is as likely to be fire as anything else. "William Penn," he says elsewhere, "is now tainted, and Washington suspected." By whom? and of what?--will this new historian inform us? "Great artists think differently, as witness wondrous Giotto, the shepherd boy, and our own clever, but mediocre Opie." A man may mistake a mediocre painter for a great artist and only err in judgment, but that he should in the same breath proclaim him to be both is a marvel of stultification. "All men are not born equal," he says, presumptuously dabbling in politics and drawing his feeble bow against the Declaration of Independence,--"all men are not equally wise, gifted, clever, strong, handsome, or tall. The brains of one nation and the brains of one man are superior in weight, form, and activity to the brains of another nation or another man." "The framers of the celebrated American Declaration knew just as well as we do that they were preaching a doctrine of romantic falsehood." A moment or two after this fine philosophical distinction and this courteous and eminently Gentle assertion,--but quite long enough for him to have forgotten both,--he makes another affirmation, that equality exists "in the grave and in the church." How, then? Are men equally wise, gifted, clever, strong,