said if his personality were not concerned.  As far as honesty goes, signature perhaps offers as many inducements to one kind of insincerity, as anonymity offers to another kind.  And on the public it might perhaps be contended that there is an effect of a rather similar sort.  They are in some cases tempted away from serious discussion of the matter, into frivolous curiosity and gossip about the man.  All this criticism of the principle of which the Fortnightly Review was the earliest English adherent, will not be taken as the result in the present writer of Chamfort’s maladie des desabuses; that would be both extremely ungrateful and without excuse or reason.  It is merely a fragment of disinterested contribution to the study of a remarkable change that is passing over a not unimportant department of literature.  One gain alone counterbalances all the drawbacks, and that is a gain that could hardly have been foreseen or expected; I mean the freedom with which the great controversies of religion and theology have been discussed in the new Reviews.  The removal of the mask has led to an outburst of plain speaking on these subjects, which to Mr. Napier’s generation would have seemed simply incredible.  The frank avowal of unpopular beliefs or non-beliefs has raised the whole level of the discussion, and perhaps has been even more advantageous to the orthodox in teaching them more humility, than to the heterodox in teaching them more courage and honesty.

Let us return to Mr. Napier’s volume.  We have said that it is impossible for a great writer to be anonymous.  No reader will need to be told who among Mr. Napier’s correspondents is the writer of the following:—­

“I have been thinking sometimes, likewise, of a paper on Napoleon, a man whom, though handled to the extreme of triteness, it will be long years before we understand.  Hitherto in the English tongue, there is next to nothing that betokens insight into him, or even sincere belief of such, on the part of the writer.  I should like to study the man with what heartiness I could, and form to myself some intelligible picture of him, both as a biographical and as a historical figure, in both of which senses he is our chief contemporary wonder, and in some sort the epitome of his age.  This, however, were a task of far more difficulty than Byron, and perhaps not so promising at present.”

And if there is any difficulty in recognising the same hand in the next proposal, it arises only from the circumstance that it is this writer above all others who has made Benthamism a term of reproach on the lips of men less wise than himself:—­