i Macmillan, August.—Mr. Charles Nisbet puts forward the pessimist targument
as advanced by Schopenhauer and Ilahnsen with groat force,
1 and offers an argument in reply, but there must be in him some latent essimism, for his answer in the main amounts to this,—that an unhappy fhaery be happier than a happy one, as a training to greater things. ( men lilfse a true, training to worse things, that most men deteriorate in the but does not answer the further objection that to most 1, battle:, that Gioldwin Smith argues, in " The Decline of Party Govern- went, that party in England is dead because the objects of party are ,attained, and fears that the corruption which arises from the new t influence of personal ambitions may conirel us to revise the Constitu- tion, substituting for a Cabinet an Executive permanent for its term of °Mee. He points to the Swiss Constitution as the one from which the most useful hints may possibly be obtained. There is a most readable, and what ib better, quite new aceount of a Sootch probationer, Thomas Davidson, a man whom the essayist describes as a " Scottish Elia," and who, under happier circumstances, might have developed into one. He was a very genuine humourist, though with a grimmer element in him than Charles Lamb had, and modified, perhaps, by his profession and his health.
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