He becomes the Chaplain of Lord Peterborough.-His Travels. 83 bishop, that he should accompany his son, Mr. Ashe, in a tour in Europe. On this occasion, in 1715, he paid Malebranche his meditated visit. The old man was in a truly Socratic cell, suffering from inflammation of the lungs, and preparing some medicine for it. The conversation turned upon metaphysics. Malebranche had appealed to faith to reconcile his peculiar form of supernatural idealism with consciousness, and thus had flattered himself that philosophy would only affirm religion. 'La foy,' he says, 'm'apprend que Dieu a crée le ciel et la terre. Donc voila toutes mes apparences changées en réalités. Il y a des corps: 'cela est demontré en toute rigueur la foy supposée.' We can understand his indignation and astonishment at hearing a bolder thinker reject his faith as a silly compromise, as, at best, the idea of a realism he could not prove; and, with merciless logic, force a kindred idealism to destroy the absolute existence of matter. The aged philosopher stormed at his young antagonist, and in his wrath so aggravated his illness, that in a few days he was no more. He was seventy-seven years of age, and in a life of peculiar piety had become not unworthy, 'no longer in a glass darkly, but face to face,' to behold those mysteries he had dreamed on so long. Berkeley did not return to England till 1720. In his absence of five years he travelled through Italy, from Turin to Rhegium, and, for a considerable time, was in Sicily. He had written a Natural History of that island, and likewise a diary of his adventures and impressions, but they were lost at Naples; and our only record of all he felt and saw is a letter to Pope, and another to Arbuthnot. From the old Inarimè, no longer echoing the groans of the Titan, he sketches for the poet the delicious scenery of the Bay of Naples-rich in poetic and historic associations from Homer to Tacitus-and he tells Arbuthnot how, fearless of the fate of Pliny, he climbed Vesuvius, to behold its fury. But we are left to conjecture how, as he wandered from the antique Cisalpine cities-once the outposts of the empire, now the fortresses of the foreigner-to where the mouldering columns and temples of Girgenti remind us of the old Greek colonization; how, as in the picture-galleries of Florence, he gazed on the masterpieces of an art that there is now in decay: how, as from the dome of St. Peter's he looked out on the perishing magnificence of republican and imperial Rome, and contrasted it with the living images of another faith and another power rising in solemn splendour around; he may everywhere have realized to himself the philosophy, that all things of sense and time are in continual change. We may imagine him passing out from these populous cities of modern Italy, where strangers crowd to gaze at the bronzes, pictures, friezes, and sculptures of her past civilization, to the wastes of the Campagna, once the home of the Latin race, or threading his way through the half-deserted valleys of the Apennines, from whose fastnesses and hamlets-castella in tumulis, præruptis oppida saxis-issued of old the strength of the Roman legions; and reflecting sadly how the poet's boast that art was of Greece, but empire of Rome, was now a bitter satire on the poet's nation. But we may believe that when he visited the grave of Cicero, and thought on their common efforts to rescue man from materialism, he must have rejoiced that the Roman's sad doubt-harum vero sententiarum quæ vera sit Deus aliquis viderit-had been solved by a certain Revelation. And we may surmise that, as he mused over the urn of Virgil, he felt no unworthy pride at having made philosophy protest against the pantheism that stands out in his noble lines: -cœlum, et terras, camposque liquentes Immediately before Berkeley's return to England, he published at Lyons, for the French Academy of Sciences, a Latin treatise upon Motion. It is remarkable that it does not entangle the subject with his peculiar metaphysics. It refers the efficient cause of motion to the Supreme Mind or Spirit; insists that absolute motion, independent of sensible objects, like absolute space, is a mere chimera of abstraction, and defines motion as the successive existence of bodies in various places. In his metaphysics he would analyse motion into the succession of sensations suggested to us in things perceived; and as this account of it would be unintelligible without understanding his philosophy, he probably avoided it on purpose. The treatise De Motu is short, but it contains some valuable observations upon the proper limits of the different sciences; and, as far as we can judge from a hasty comparison, it has been well translated in the edition of 1843. In 1721, he was again in London society. Of the friends he had made in youth, Addison, before this, had shown how a Christian could die;' and Swift was fretting in banishment in Ireland; but Steele remained; Pope was in the zenith of his fame; and Arbuthnot was mocking science in the first book of Scriblerus. In the maturity of life, when envy begins to quail before genius, with European fame, with a taste cultivated by study and experience, with a person of singular beauty and dignity, with a charm of manner that sprang from the sweetness His Treatise on Motion.-His Tract on the South Sea Scheme. 85 of his disposition, and with the undefinable authority of a virtuous character, Berkeley was now secure of many friends and admirers. For the first time he now wrote on contemporaneous affairs. The South Sea bubble had burst; and the nation was seeking amends for its folly in a frantic cry for vengeance. A plan for converting the South Sea Company into a public creditor, by inducing certain classes of fundholders to invest in its stock, had been the occasion of one of those manias for stockjobbing which seem periodically to afflict England. It was suddenly discovered that all the wealth of South America was to flow to the fortunate holders of South Sea scrip. Eldorados of mines of gold and precious stones, of unknown cities, rich with all the elements of trade and spoil, played before deluded eyes, that perhaps could not discern Cuba from Peru. In a short time the Company's stock had risen from a hundred to a thousand pounds, and still into the huge lottery millions flowed. One speculation bred another; and projects the most frantic and illusory were certain of favour, At length, when mammon-worship had attracted to 'Change Alley many thousands of votaries; when the brokers' offices had become too narrow for the crowds; and princes, nobles, churchmen, ladies, had mingled in the throngs that truckled scrip in the streets; when the Sunflower Company, and the Human Hair Company, and the Sawdust Company, had sprung into life, and, as was estimated, three hundred millions had changed hands, the whole fabric of imposture broke down, and a loud cry of ruin, and clamour for vengeance, was everywhere heard. While this outburst was raging; while in Parliament South Sea directors were shouted at as parricides; while their estates were being confiscated, and their lives were in jeopardy; and while the whole nation was smarting with an indignation it could not fully vent, there appeared from Berkeley's pen a short essay upon the causes and the remedies of the national misfortune. It is a curious production, and reads like a chapter from The Republic upon the affairs of England. The atheistical love of private gain,' breaking out in every form of luxury and selfishness, and reducing the State to a chaos of greedy individuals, is to be neutralized by 'public spirit,' to be generated by governmental regulation of all the affairs of life. The State' is to confine the industry and energies of its subjects to noble ends; to promote virtue by direct rewards; to penetrate into families, and mould their habits; to cast into its own forms domestic life. A glance at society ought to have told Berkeley that the only possible depositaries of this tremendous power,-justifiable when governments are necessarily infinitely wiser, better, and more judicious than their subjects, but not till then,-were scarcely fitted for the trust The Aislabies, the Craggs, the Sunderlands, the Walpoles, were sorry representatives of those philosophers, to whose perfect wisdom, prudence, and virtue, Plato delegated his all-controlling omnipotence of government. Towards the close of 1721, and through the influence of Lord Burlington, who appreciated his taste in art, and remained through life his friend, Berkeley became chaplain to the Duke of Grafton. His Grace had just been appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and in his suite, after a protracted absence, Berkeley returned to his native country. Here he renewed his intimacy with Swift, who was availing himself of the wrongs of Ireland to avenge himself for neglect, and to show his powers as a partywriter. The commercial legislation of the British Parliament towards that country was a fitting and popular subject for complaint. The Irish woollen trade had been destroyed; Irish merchants were excluded from the monopolies which then formed the foreign trade of England; and Irish shipowners were excepted from the Navigation Acts, which then confined the coasting and colonial commerce of Great Britain to native vessels. Already, too, the injuries inflicted by the Penal Code were beginning to appear in a weak, insolent, and rapacious aristocracy-cut off from the people, void of real strength, and therefore despised by the English Government-and in a degraded and hopeless commonalty, unworthy of the name of a nation. The Anglo-Irish colony was in sullen discontent at repeated instances of contumely, at the restriction of its commerce, and at the distribution of all patronage, when from the Deanery of St. Patrick's issued a denunciation of its grievances in a pamphlet entitled A Proposal for the Use of Irish Manufactures. It circulated extensively, and soon attracted the indignation of Government. Chief Justice Whitshed, a convenient instrument of oppression, was directed to visit the printer with especial vengeance. The presentment of the grand jury upon his indictment for libel was published in all the papers, and a petty jury was packed to try him. But although the Irish Scroggs appealed alike to their terror and their sympathies, laid his hand on his heart, and declared the Pretender was in the book, and sent them back nine times to reconsider their verdict of not guilty, the prisoner escaped his tender mercies. Instantly an anonymous, but well-known pen, retaliated in scathing and merciless satire. The Dean of St. Patrick's was once more a power in the State. In two or three years afterwards he had convulsed a nation, shattered a government, and proclaimed the doctrine of Irish independence, in the well-known Drapier's Letters. How Berkeley at this period kept up his correspondence with the Castle's great anta He goes to Ireland.-Esther Vanhomrigh. 87 gonist does not appear, but we know they continued intimate friends. But the thread of life of these distinguished contrasts was fated to be woven in a melancholy history. Early in 1713, Swift had introduced Berkeley to Esther Vanhomrigh. She had already given her heart to that inscrutable genius, over the history of whose loves such a mystery hangs; but she proved that she never forgot his mild and pleasing friend. A year or two after Swift had settled in Ireland, she followed him there to feed a hopeless attachment. In vain he treated her with coolness and neglect; she clung to him with wild and impassioned devotion. At length Swift went through the form of marriage with Stella; and the virgin wife proved an insuperable bar to her rival. She lived at Cellbridge, tending a sick sister, brooding over a hopeless love, and, as yet, informed by rumour only, that Cadenus could never marry her. At length suspense became intolerable, and she wrote to Stella to know her exact relations with the Dean. Stella simply replied that she was the wife of Swift; and, naturally indignant at his conduct, retired from his house, and left behind her her rival's letter. The rest is well known. Swift, in a fit of frenzy, broke into the house of the unhappy girl; glared at her with ferocious eyes; and, without uttering a word, flung her letter on the table, and she saw him no more. His victim did not long survive the agony of mingled indignation, despair, and unconquerable love. The heart that was broken was not brokenly to live on;' and before many weeks there was no owner to 'Vanessa's bower.' Her will divided her fortune. between Berkeley and her cousin Judge Marshal. It would appear that, since 1713, she had not met Swift's illustrious friend. We cannot conjecture whether the bequest was owing to his reputation, to her reminiscences, or because in her mind he was associated with the thoughts of happier days; but it would be pleasing to think that, while she lay on that melancholy deathbed, and Swift was far away in an agony of remorse, the presence of Berkeley had soothed her feverish griefs, and his voice had told her of those places where the weary are at rest.' Some time before this sad event Berkeley had been meditating upon a scheme which will ever mark his name as a Christian philanthropist. The British colonies in America, from the St. Lawrence to the tropics, had already become settlements of importance. Already along the seaboard of North America had been planted many of those great cities which now rival Liverpool and Glasgow. The white man had even now made civilization secure among the wigwams of the red man and the primeval |