There has likewise been a class of writers broad-cast through the nations who have sought to mend the present and make the future by holding the mirror to contemporaneous deformity, or painting the perspective of an earthly elysium with the rainbow tints of hope. Negatively or positively, directly or indirectly, these men had, in common, faith in the regeneration of humanity. Utopias are the familiar homes of such minds, either because they have a cast in their eyes, or because they are more clairvoyants than the vulgar herd. In the spring-time of our race, a Plato reflected on the poetical extravagancies of his day, and refracted the rays of golden fancy in the enchanted land of his Republic. The Hebrew seers in like manner, whilst they apply no measured castigations to the money-changers who converted the temple of God into a den of thieves, love to soar in sublimest rhapsody above the valley of dry bones and the shadow of death cast around them, and to indulge in visions of a vernal future, when earth should smile in the sunshine of infinite love, when the wolf should dwell with the lamb and the leopard lie down with the kid, and a little child should lead them. Affiliated members of this extensive and venerable company of cynics and seers have ever and anon in the current of ages lifted a frowning brow above the troubled waters round about them, and with the same breath that swept like a tempest over the wintry waste, their cradle and their home, have given utterance to strains of harmony that told of summer skies to come. Tracing the tides of the children of men in their eccentric ebbings and floodings, a little crew of rovers may be ever seen ploughing the world of waters, true to their principle of keeping aloof from the gulf-stream. Europe has been the chief nursery of these rovers, whose voices, though few and far between, have risen above the storms of evil passions howling about them, and have echoed through the ages. Thus a Rabelais could laugh the knell of monkery, and with his stentor voice, rich booming from the classic world of Nature, that had slept during the dark ages, could crack the babel of spiritual usurpation, and restore the balance of power between the seen and the unseen. A Cervantes in like manner could, in the fulness of time, inflict death-wounds with a stroke of his pen on a superannuated chivalry, and thus, by negatively giving a _coup de grâce_ to the past, pave the way for an age of prose. Later in the day a Swift appears, in the heart of a rotten age, himself infected with the leprosy, yet he smites the idols of his time, of Stuart progeny, Lust and Lucre, and converts his fables into a house of correction for a nation's vices. The Tale of a Tub contains a stream of lustral water, and Gulliver is no mean adept at the photographic art. The Dean hath taught us how the "positive" fictions of a madman's brain may indirectly be a school to the nations at all times and in all seasons.