He becomes Bishop of Cloyne.

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through her influence, he was appointed to the vacant see of Cloyne, in Ireland. On the 19th of May following, he was consecrated in Dublin by the Archbishop of Cashel and the Bishops of Raphoe and Killaloe; and he immediately proceeded to do the duties of his diocese.

From this period, until it approached its close, the current of Berkeley's life flowed on, at Cloyne, unbroken by many incidents, and reflecting generally images of calm domestic life. The narrative of the seventeen years of his episcopate, is a specimen of that exercise of virtue, accompanied by external blessings, in which Aristotle places the happiness of man. At Cloyne, as in the rest of Ireland at this period, the elements of society were jarring and unkindly; but though he could not fuse them into. concord, he combined them into harmony with himself. He was placed among an aristocracy, which differences of race and faith, and iniquitous laws, made tyrannical towards their dependents, and which gave too faithful an image of a rapacious and ignorant squirearchy. He was a dignitary of a Church which had been perverted into an outwork of the Protestant garrison of Ireland, which was only known to the people through the tithe proctor and his bailiffs, and which had utterly been divorced from its real purpose. Around him grew up in hopelessness and penury a people who clung with eager faith to their persecuted Church, who were proscribed by law from rising in society, and who, therefore, had fallen into that indolent listlessness which ever characterises slaves. But, though exposed to influences which were calculated to cripple his usefulness, to limit the sphere of his virtues, and perhaps to fill him with disgust, Berkeley managed to make his presence felt with beneficent authority throughout the entire of his diocese. He conciliated the Protestant squirearchy by the amiability of his nature and the dignity of his manners, and by that weight of character which is the privilege of worth. He made great efforts to raise the lower orders in his diocese, by encouraging manufactures, establishing schools, and personally attending to their welfare. As, doubtless, he felt himself debarred by his position from attaining their full confidence, he applied to their despised clergy to aid him in the good work. A pamphlet which he addressed to them, under the name of A Word to the Wise, is a surviving record of his liberal feelings towards his Roman Catholic neighbours, and of his earnest desire for their amelioration. It admits the many grievances to which they are exposed, but urges on the priesthood the duty of encouraging them to industry. It closes by expressing a hope that both Protestant and Roman Catholic in Ireland might bury their animosities in love for their common

country, and in doing manfully the work of the Author of their faiths. It is not surprising that such sentiments, illustrated too in daily practice, should at last have joined the Protestant bishop and the Roman Catholic clergy in real good will. In 1749, he received the thanks of this order in his diocese for his manner of treating persons in their circumstances so very singular ;' and from this time, he was completely trusted and beloved by their flocks. At a time when, probably, no other Protestant bishop in Ireland cast a thought upon the neglected Roman Catholic peasantry, Berkeley was winning their affectionate regard, and, throughout no small sphere, spreading 'good-will among men.'

Nor, during this time, were his pen and voice altogether idle. Halley and some other mathematicians had thought fit to ridicule the evidences of Christianity, because they did not amount to mathematical demonstrations. Berkeley sought to stultify the rejectors, by asserting, with great ability and argument, that whole masses of their own science rested upon assumptions, and with this object he assailed the theory of fluxions. We will not enter into a controversy to which we could not do justice, and which, we believe, is no longer of interest. But, with this exception, all his works of this period are practical in their tendency. In 1735 he published The Querist, a treatise, in our judgment, of extraordinary merit, and to which we shall revert hereafter. In the following year the existence of a blasphemous Society in Dublin named the Blasters, called forth from him an indignant reclamation, and induced him to speak with great effect in the Irish House of Lords. About 1740, that precarious root which, even then, was the staple of the peasant's food in Ireland, suddenly failed. There was then no Imperial Parliament to shield penury from famine, no Poor Law to force property to support the poor, no possible organization to protect the starving crowds. The cruel sufferings, the deaths by hunger, the melancholy scenes which then were witnessed, are described by Berkeley and were long remembered in Ireland. After famine came disease, and it seems to have been heavy in the diocese of Cloyne. Berkeley invented a remedy, and found it so efficacious that, in 1744 he gave it to the world in his Siris, or, a Treatise on Tar Water; a work in which he details all the virtues of his specific, and with extraordinary, but somewhat misplaced, argument and learning, tracks them beyond their material and formal, to their efficient cause, the mind of God. The list of his works is closed by his Maxims concerning Patriotism, a satire upon a class then prevalent in Ireland, and perhaps even yet not unknown in that country, the tribe of noisy and pretentious place-hunters.

Practical Tendency of his later Writings.

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It would seem as if, in these his later years, the duties of his station, the care of his family, and the tendency of experience to soberise thought, had generally checked his love of speculation, and given his mind a bias to practical affairs.

Thus, happy in a family which grew around him to love him, and followed everywhere by affection and esteem, Berkeley passed onwards from manhood to old age. His correspondence gives us a picture of his life. Early in the morning he betook himself to Plato,-to whose genius he has paid many eloquent tributes, perhaps seeking in that great thinker a supporter of his own philosophy, perhaps musing on the fascinating pages of the Republic, or perhaps rejoicing that Revelation had solved the problem of the Phado. The day he spent in the duties of his episcopate, conversing with his clergy, visiting the poor, distributing alms, encouraging industry. quietly at home, teaching his children, or watching the canvass The evening saw him become animated by the painting of his wife, or listening to her voice in the harmonies of Handel or Purcell. Nor are we without his own record of his external life. Pope to visit a neighbourhood sacred to Spenser. He gives a He almost persuades passing tribute to Swift, when at length the grave had closed over his awful old age. He cannot help showing a little satisfaction at the defeat of his old thwarter, Walpole. He watches the career of Charles Edward with some interest and alarm; is very indignant with Cardinal Fleury, and betrays a warm sympathy with the cause of Maria Theresa. It would also appear from his letters, that Chesterfield was desirous to raise him to the primacy; he certainly had the refusal of the see of Clogher; but, as might have been expected, he preferred to remain where his life was so happy, and where he was so secure of many friends.

In 1752 his health began to fail. He had not learned that episcopalian savings were justifiably to be kept intact by retiring allowances, and he offered to resign his bishopric unconditionally. To the Pelhams, doubtless, this act must have seemed fanatical; but George II. was struck with the character it revealed, and insisted that Berkeley should retain his see, with a full dispensation of non-residence. The old man, accordingly, resolved to spend his last days at Oxford. If for a moment his eyes turned to London, where, forty years before, he had known early fame, and had made many friends, he must have been diverted from his purpose by the thought that now there were none to welcome him there. He was the last survivor of the great men who had shed lustre on the reign of Anne, and by so many of whom he was loved. Addison had long ago passed away, and Bolingbroke

had just died to leave him the last on the list. To Oxford, therefore, his thoughts were bent. In July, 1752, he left Cloyne, in company with his wife and eldest son, who had just been entered at Christ Church, and followed far, we are told, by mourning crowds, who had learned to love him. His last episcopal act was to make a lease of his demesne lands for the benefit of the poor.

At Oxford he was welcomed as befitted his eminence. But at this time there were few at that great University who could appreciate his intellectual height. The Oxford of 1752 was a very different place from that Oxford, which during the last twenty years has been so full of mental life, and which has had so marked an influence on English thought. The stately colleges, and the hierarchy of authority were there, but the energy of intellect was almost wanting. Oxford had become divorced from the nation, and identified more or less with the Jacobite faction; and, accordingly, in her fellows and heads of houses, she generally reared only bigoted pedants-in her students, Parson Adamses and squire Westerns. Ten years before, Adam Smith had been there, and had formed an idea of the place, that however unfavourable, was perfectly just. At this time, indeed, if we except Lowth, Warton, and Blackstone, we cannot call to mind a single Oxford M. A., in early manhood, whose future eminence was at all to be ascribed to university influences. When Berkeley came to reside at Christ Church, the only intellect at Oxford, that was at all of equal power with his own, was that of a sickly boy, who, already full of theology and history, had recently been matriculated at Magdalen, and was destined to write the Decline and Fall of the Empire of Rome.

But Berkeley's life beside the Isis was fated to be brief. On the 14th of January, 1753, he was reading from the Bible to his wife and son, when a palsy of the heart suddenly came on him. He had just strength to rise and turn his face towards the wall, when life forsook him, and he dropped down dead. Few, perhaps, were ever better prepared to meet that 'sudden death' which we seek to avert by our anxious prayers. His funeral was attended by all the dignitaries of Christ Church, but would, we think, have presented a more touching pageant, had it been followed by the simple mourners who would have flocked to it at Cloyne. And yet he rests becomingly within the University of Hooker and Butler. In that stately pile of Wolsey, which, among crowds of forgotten names, has reared for England ten generations of eminent men, a plain tablet tells the passer-by, that 'If he be a Christian and a patriot, he may be glad that Berkeley lived. Not far off, in marble life, are the keen and care-worn

He retires to Oxford, and dies there.-His Metaphysics. 97

features of his antagonist, Locke. His portrait, by his wife, taken at the prime of manhood, when youth ends,' and representing delicate Greek features, animated by dark eyes in lustrous calm, adorns the Examination Hall of the University of Dublin.

Thus Berkeley lived and died. What, as he would say himself, were his tracings of the shadowy images that flitted before his mind in the twilight of its prison-house, before it reached the upper regions of completed perception? classified as metaphysical, ethical and religious, and political; His works may be and we shall thus consider them, especially the two latter divisions.

We have already stated that, in our opinion, his Essay toward a New Theory of Vision is the ablest and most original of his metaphysical treatises. It demonstrates that the only proper objects of sight are light and colours, which experience gradually arranges into characters, from which distances and figures can be suggested to us. By the sense of feeling, or of touch, we acquire the ideas of distances and figures, and, as we observe every modification of distance and figure to furnish us with a particular visual sensation, we gradually learn what distances and figures these visual sensations indicate, and so interpret them instantly in the act of vision. Thus, on the one hand, a person endued with sight, but devoid of touch, would see, indeed, all that can be seen by any one-that is, shifting combinations of light and colour; but he could not refer them to any tangible figures, or perceive by them tangible distances; and, on the other, a person born blind, but with the sense of touch, though he had acquired a full tactual perception of distances and figures, would not be able, on obtaining suddenly the gift of sight, to adapt the visual sensations, so as to behold objects like other men. senses of sight and touch are necessary to complete the acquired Hence the perceptions of the eye, and to adjust in its proper significance the dialect of vision by which we converse with nature.

His theory of immaterialism, or, more properly, of subjective idealism, has long been famous, though, we think, less worthy of solid renown. It is not, we need scarcely say, to be silenced by a coxcomb's grin,' nor yet by Dr. Johnson's somewhat painful illustration, but we conceive that it has fairly been defeated by philosophy. It falls into the following analysis. Intelligence, argues Berkeley, exists, and has objects. But these are ideas, or things suggested to and present in the mind, but apart from and independent of it. Hence we have ideas of thought, evolved by watching the operations of the mind itself; ideas of memory and imagination; and ideas of sense or sensations-that is, things perceived immediately through the senses, present in the

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