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dependence which Chateaubriand and Shelley have alike hinted, but without any attempt at logical explanation.When the author of the Génie du Christianisme maintains that the principal cause of the decadence of taste and genius is unbelief, he perhaps unwittingly lays his finger on a principle which may be illustrated far beyond the range of Christian influences. A common creed, whether it be that of Christianity or any other system, rests, and must rest, on the belief of men in their fellow-men, on the sympathy of man with man, on the extension of man's pains and pleasures beyond the narrow circle of his personal being, within which he may be a god or a "glorious devil," but never the possessor of a creed. Moreover, since any literature deserving of the name must address itself to a community of human hopes and fears however narrow, the disbelief of man in his neighbour, which cuts away all sympathies, also paralyses the workings of imagination in its efforts to pass from the individual to a wider and greater world. Shelley, in his Defence of Poetry, has expressed this truth in words worthy of quotation, especially as coming from the pen of one whose conception of Christianity, and indeed of all creeds, was so different from that of Chateaubriand. "A man, to be greatly good," says Shelley, "must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination. Poetry and the principle of self, of which money is the visible incarnation, are respectively the God and Mammon of the world. What were virtue, love, patriotism, friendship, what were the scenery of this beautiful world which we inhabit, what were our consolations on this side of the grave and what our aspirations beyond it, if poetry did