De Staël and Goethe and Schiller and Byron; Pitt and Nesselrode, Metternich and Hamilton; Fichte and Stewart and Brown and Cousin; Canova, Thorwaldsen and La Place, though all dying since the beginning of this century, belong essentially to a former era. They were the ripened fruits of that grand uprising of the human mind which first took form on the 4th day of July, 1776. Our era properly commences with the downfall of the first Napoleon, and none of the events connected therewith, either before or afterward, can be philosophically classed in the epoch we represent, but must be referred to a former period. Ages hence, then, the philosophic critic will thus describe the first half of the nineteenth century:
"The normal state of Christendom was peace. The age of steel that immediately went before it had passed. It was the Iron age.
"Speculative philosophy fell asleep; literature declined; Skepticism bore sway in religion, politics, and morals; Utility became the universal standard of right and wrong, and the truths of every science and the axioms of every art were ruthlessly subjected to the experimentum crucis. Everything was liable to revision. The verdicts pronounced in the olden time against Mohammed and Mesmer and Robespierre were set aside, and a new trial granted. The ghosts of Roger Bacon and Emanuel Swedenborg were summoned from the Stygian shore to plead their causes anew before the bar of public opinion. The head of Oliver Cromwell was ordered down from the gibbet, the hump was smoothed down on the back of Richard III, and the sentence pronounced by Urban VIII against the 'starry Galileo' reversed forever. Aristotle was decently interred beneath a modern monument inscribed thus: 'In pace requiescat;' whilst Francis Bacon was rescued from the sacrilegious hands of kings and peers and parliament, and canonized by the unanimous consent of Christendom. It was the age of tests. Experiment governed the world. Germany led the van, and Humboldt became the impersonation of his times."
Such unquestionably will be the verdict of the future, when the present time, with all its treasures and trash, its hopes and realizations, shall have been safely shelved and labeled amongst the musty records of bygone generations.
Let us now examine into the grounds of this verdict more minutely, and test its accuracy by exemplifications.
I. And first, who believes now in innate ideas? Locke has been completely superseded by the materialists of Germany and France, and all speculative moral philosophy exploded. The audiences of Edinburgh and Brown University interrupt Sir William Hamilton and Dr. Wayland in their discourses, and, stripping off the plumage from their theses, inquisitively demand, "Cui bono?" What is the use of all this? How can we apply it to the every-day concerns of life? We ask you for bread and you have given us a stone; and though that stone be a diamond, it is valueless, except for its glitter. No philosopher can speculate successfully or even satisfactorily to himself, when he is met at every turn by some vulgar intruder into the domains of Aristotle and Kant, who clips his wings just as he was prepared to soar into the heavens, by an offer of copartnership to "speculate," it may be, in the price of pork. Hence, no moral philosopher of our day has been enabled to erect any theory which will stand the assaults of logic for a moment. Each school rises for an instant to the surface, and sports out its little day in toss and tribulation, until the next wave rolls along, with foam on its crest and fury in its roar, and overwhelms it forever. As with its predecessor, so with itself.
"The eternal surge
Of Time and Tide rolls on and bears afar
Their bubbles: as the old burst, new emerge,
Lashed from the foam of ages."
II. But I have stated that this is an age of literary decline. It is true that more books are written and published, more newspapers and periodicals printed and circulated, more extensive libraries collected and incorporated, and more ink indiscriminately spilt, than at any former period of the world's history. In looking about us we are forcibly reminded of the sarcastic couplet of Pope, who complains—
"That those who cannot write, and those who can,
All scratch, all scrawl, and scribble to a man."
Had a modern gentleman all the eyes of Argus, all the hands of Briareus, all the wealth of Crœsus, and lived to the age of Methuselah, his eyes would all fail, his fingers all tire, his money all give out, and his years come to an end, long before he perused one tenth of the annual product of the press of Christendom at the present day. It is no figure of rhetoric to say that the press groans beneath the burden of its labors. Could the types of Leipsic and London, Paris and New York, speak out, the Litany would have to be amended, and a new article added, to which they would solemnly respond: "Spare us, good Lord!"