most intense enthusiasm and the most severe self-denial to the ideal of a possible Italian republic, is as much an Epicurean as David Hume sneering at all enthusiasm, and pleasing his soul with the delicate flatteries of fair dames in a Parisian saloon. This is to confound all things, and to reduce the whole affair to a fence of words rather than to a battle of principle. Nor need we be surprised at such a result; for the whole platform of morality in {331} modern times has been so elevated through the influence of Christianity that Epicureanism to win a hearing is constrained to profess a standard which shall not fall beneath that laid down in the Sermon on the Mount or in the 13th chapter of 1st Corinthians; and to do this with nothing but the individual selfish love of pleasure to start with, requires, it may be imagined, a very considerable amount of dialectic jugglery and shifting glamoury of words. One is forced to explain--keeping Bentham’s language--how the original, individual, and personal love of pleasure, which is and must be selfishness, manages from mere external considerations, for such only are left open by the deniers of innate ideas, to take the shape of benevolence. Like theologians who are bound to stick to an unreasonable creed, and yet, to save its credit, must make it appear reasonable, the Utilitarians, in striving to accommodate the principles of the lowest theory of morals to the demands of the highest, have not escaped the awkwardness of the strategist who, while making a real retreat, plays off some movements that look like an advance. Only in this case the strategist knows that he is deceiving his soldiers, and deceiving the enemy; whereas the logician who dexterously assumes a new position while seeming to maintain his old one is the happy victim of his own fallacies. He has changed front by a manœuvre which many persons may be too stupid to observe, and he has saved himself from the disagreeableness of a formal recantation. Such dexterous shifts are the convenient refuge of all one-sided theorists who insist on taking nature to school, and trimming human souls, like trees in a fruit-garden, after their {332} own favourite pattern. Meanwhile nature goes on heaving up her strong moralities from original pure fountains, regardless alike of the intense one-eyed dogmatism of the founders of ethical schools, and the ingenious apologies of their disciples, and makes preachers, as she makes poets, by inspiration, not by induction.