too, and so feel the jury: and both parties are in a difficulty. If it were a question about an explanatory theory, as of light, an obstinate dark band or colored fringe might put the undulations out of the question, till further showing. But the court asks the jury, not for their theory, but for their verdict that verdict is guilty, and the prisoner generally confirms it, at least in capital cases, and explains the difficulty. The matter we have been discussing has two counts: the first opens the question whether, under the circumstances, the conclusion that Miss Barton lived with Halifax can be avoided; the second, on the supposition that it cannot be avoided, opens the question whether she lived with him as a mistress or as a secretly married wife. Sir D. Brewster works hard against the supposition of the marriage, and, by an ignoratio elenchi, believes himself to be forwarding his own alternative; but we strongly suspect that his reasons against the marriage, be their force what it may, will not avail against the other alternative of our second count.

We will now take the vexed question of Newton's religious opinions, a vexed question no more, for the papers so long, and, in the first instance, so unworthily suppressed, are now before the world. Sir D. Brewster, in his former Life, followed his predecessors in stoutly maintaining orthodoxy, by which, in this article, we mean a belief of at least as much as the churches of England and Scotland hold in common. But many circumstances seemed to point the other way. There was a strong and universal impression that Horsley had recommended the concealment of some of the Portsmouth papers, as heterodox and here and there was to be found, in every generation, a person who had been allowed to see them, and who called them dubious, at least. Newton was the friend of the heretics Locke and Clarke, and sent abroad, for publication, writings on the critical correction of texts on which Trinitarians relied, without a word against the conclusion which might be drawn respecting himself. Nay, he spoke of the Trinity in a

:

ted him to maintain the Deity of the second and third persons of the Trinity. He said that every spiritual being having dominion is God: Dominatio entis spiritualis Deum constituit. And he enforces his definition by so many exemplifications that it is beyond question he means that, if the Almighty were to grant some power, for only five minutes, to a disembodied spirit, that spirit would be, for that time, a God.

In the papers now produced for the first time, we have certain paradoxical questions (the word paradox then meant an unusual opinion) concerning Athanasius and his followers, in which many historical opinions of a suspicious character are maintained; but no matters of doctrine are touched upon. In A short Scheme of the True Religion, the purpose is rather to describe religion as opposed to irreligion, and all who are conversant with opinion know that a Trinitarian and a Unitarian use the same phrases against atheism and idolatry. Hence, some language which in controversy would be heterodox, may be counted orthodox. But in another manuscript, On our Religion to God, to Christ, and the Church, there is an articulate account of Newton's creed, in formal and dogmatical terms. This we shall give entire and it is to be remembered that Newton destroyed many papers before his death, which adds to those he left behind him additional meaning and force.

"Art. 1. There is one God the Father, ever living, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, and one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.

"Art. 2. The Father is the invisible God whom no eye hath seen, nor can see. All other beings are sometimes visible.

"Art. 3. The Father hath life in himself, and

hath given the Son to have life in himself.

Art. 4. The Father is omniscient, and hath all knowledge originally in his own breast, and communicates knowledge of future things to Jesus Christ; and none in heaven or earth, or under the earth, is worthy to receive knowledge of future things immediately from the Father, but the Lamb. And, therefore, the testimony of JeWord or Prophet of God. sus is the spirit of prophecy, and Jesus is the

"Art. 5. The Father is immovable, no place being capable of becoming emptier or fuller of him than it is by the eternal necessity of nature. All other beings are movable from place to place.

"Art. 6. All the worship (whether of prayer, praise, or thanksgiving), which was due to the him. Christ came not to diminish the worship of Father before the coming of Christ, is still due to his Father.

woman for whom he experienced a revival of what he once felt for Miss Storey, in such terms as the young bucks in the Spectator address rich widows. The letter reminds us much more of Addison's play, and of the puppy who was drummed away from the widow by the ghost, than of Newton.

To us it has always been matter of regret that Newton accepted office under the Crown. Sir D. Brewster thinks otherwise. "At the age of fifty, the high-priest of science found himself the inmate of a college, and, but for the generous patronage of a friend, he would have died within its walls." And where should a high-priest of science have lived and died? At the Mint? Very few sacrifices were made to science after Newton came to London. One year of his Cambridge life was worth more to his philosophical reputation and utility than all his long official career. If, after having piloted the country safely through the very difficult, and as some thought, impossible, operation on the coinage, he had returned to the University with a handsome pension, and his mind free to make up again to the "litigious lady," he would, to use his own words, have taken "another pull at the moon," and we suspect Clairaut would have had to begin at the point from which Laplace afterwards began. Newton was removed, the high-priest of science was translated to the temple of Mammon, at the time when the differential calculus was, in the hands of Leibnitz and the Bernoullis, beginning to rise into higher stories. Had Newton remained at his post, coining nothing but ideas, the mathematical sciences might have gained a century of advance.

We now approach the end of our task, and, in spite of our battle with the biographer, we cannot express the pleasure with which we have read his work. It is very much superior, new information apart, to the smaller Life which he published long ago. Homer's heroes are very dry automatons so long as they are only godlike men: but when they get into a quarrel with one another, out come the points on which we like and dislike. Newton always right, and all who would say otherwise excathedrally reproved is a case for os tracism; we are tired of hearing Aristides always called the just. But Newton of whom wrong may be admitted, Newton who must be defended like other men, and who cannot always be defended, is a man in whom to feel interest even when we are obliged to dissent from his eulogist. As we have said before, it is the defence which provokes the attack. Newton, with the weak points exposed and

unprotected, is not and cannot be an object of assault: our blow is on the shield which the biographers attempt to hold before him. A great predecessor was guilty of delinquencies before which the worst error of Newton is virtue itself: he sold justice for bribes, so committing wilful perjury-for who may dare to deny that the oath of the false judge rose before his mind when he fingered the price of his conscience-that the perjury itself is forgotten in the enormity of the mode of committing it. But how often is this remembered when we think of Bacon? The bruised reed is not broken, because even biographers admit that it is a bruised reed: let them hold it up for a sturdy oak, and the plain truth shall be spoken whenever the name is mentioned. And so, in its degree, must it be with the author of the Principia.

All Newton's faults were those of a temperament which observers of the human mind know to be incapable of alteration, though strong self-control may suppress its effects. The jealous, the suspicious nature, is a part of the man's essence, when it exists at all: it is no local sore, but a plague in the blood. Think of this morbid feeling as the constant attendant of the whole life, and then say, putting all Newton's known exhibitions of it at their very worst, how much they will amount to, as scattered through twenty years of controversy with his equals, and thirty years of kingly power over those who delighted to call themselves his inferiors. Newton's period of living fame is longer than that of Wellington: it is easy to talk of sixty years, but think of the time between 1795 and 1855, and we form a better image of the duration. In all this life, we know of some cases in which the worse nature conquered the better in how many cases did victory, that victory which itself conceals the battle, declare for the right side? Scott claims this allowance even for Napoleon; how much more may it be asked for Newton? But it can only be asked by a biographer who has done for the opponents of his hero what he desires that his readers should do for the hero himself. When once the necessary admissions are made, so soon as it can be done on a basis which compromises no truth, and affords no example, we look on the errors of great men as straws preserved in the pure amber of their services to mankind. If we could but know the real history of a flaw in a diamond, we might be made aware that it was a necessary result of the combination of circumstances which determined that the product should be a diamond, and not a bit of

Ir is our purpose to draw out, as a thread might be drawn from some woven fabric, a continuous line of advertisements from the newspaper press of this country since its establishment to the present time, and, by so doing, to show how distinctly, from its dye, the pattern of the age through which it ran is represented. If we follow up to its source, any public institution, fashion, or amusement, which has flourished during a long period of time, we can gain some idea of our national progress and development, but it strikes us that in no manner can we so well obtain at a rapid glance a view of the salient points of generations that have passed, as by consulting those small voices that have cried from age to age from the pages of the press, declaring the wants, the losses, the amusements, and the money-making eagerness of the people.

As we read in the old musty files of papers those naïve announcements, the very hum of bygone generations seems to rise to the ear. The chapman exhibits his quaint wares, the mountebank capers again upon his stage, we have the living portrait of the highwayman flying from justice, we see the old china auctions thronged with ladies of quality with their attendant negro boys, or those "by inch of candlelight" forming many a Schalkenlike picture of light and shade; or later still we have Hogarthian sketches of the young bloods swelled of old along the Pall-Mall. We trace the moving panorama of men and manners up to our own less demonstrative,

1. Scottish Newspaper Directory and Guide to Advertisers. A complete Manual of the Newspaper Press. Second Edition. Edinburgh and London.

2. The Fourth Estate: Contributions towards a

History of Newspapers, and of the Liberty of the Press. By F. Knight Hunt. 2 vols. London.

but more earnest times; and all these cabinet pictures are the very daguerreotypes cast by the age which they exhibit, not done for elfect, but faithful reflections of those insignificant items of life and things, too small, it would seem, for the generalizing eye of the historian, however necessary to clothe and fill in the dry bones of his history.

66

The English Mercurie" of 1588, which professes to have been published during those momentous days when the Spanish Armada was hovering and waiting to pounce upon our southern shores, contains among its items of news, three or four book advertisements, and these would undoubtedly have been the first put forth in England were that newspaper genuine. Mr. Watts, of the British. Museum, has however proved that the several numbers of this journal to be found in our national library are gross forgeries, and indeed the most inexperienced eye in such matters can easily see that neither their type, paper, spelling, nor composition, are much more than one, instead of upwards of two centuries and a half old. Newspapers in the strict sense of the word—that is, publications of news appearing at stated intervals and regularly paged on-did not make their appearance until the latter end of the reign of James I. The "Weekely Newes," published in London in 1622, was the first publication which answered to this description: it contained however only a few scraps of foreign intelligence, and was quite destitute of advertisements. The terrible contest of the succeeding reign was the hotbed which forced the press of this country into sudden life and extraordinary vigor. Those who have wandered in the vaults of the British Museum, and contemplated the vast collection of political pamphlets and the countless Mercuries which sprang full armed, on either side of