Mr. Dickens has never done anything better of its kind
than his very clever and witty, and yet, on the whole, very wise address to the members of the Midland Institute on Monday evening,— the whole drift of which was to deprecate anything like bumptious education, and to recommend to the students Sidney Smith's excellent advice, "to have the courage to be ignorant of a great many things, in order to avoid the calamity of being ignorant of everything." Mr. Dickens, however, diverging from the main current of his very practical though very entertaining address, to defend the age against the charge of being devoted to " material " ends, interpolated a theoretically very unsatisfactory passage on that head. We say " theoretically " unsatisfactory, because we see no more reason than Mr. Dickens does to believe in any age when the great mass of mankind were less devoted to material ends than they are now. But when Mr. Dickens intimates that the only materialism that he can understand is the materialism of a sort of Chinese hatred of innovation, and that spirituality con- sists as much in opening your mind freely to chemical discovery or the laws of galvanism, as in the thirst for beauty, the love of righteousness, or the knowledge of God, he seems to us to be talking plausible confusions. He even hints that when Christ said to His disciples, "I have yet many things to say unto you, but ye cannot bear them now," He may have referred to the electric telegraph or spectrum analysis ! On the whole, we cannot advise Mr. Dickens to edit the Gospels. We fear the result would be a little like that produced by the atrocious Swiss practice of lighting up the Staubbach for gaping tourists with Bengal lights and Roman candles.
