larger distribution of landed property should shortly be brought into operation by the modification of certain protective laws. It is idle to contend against these facts, and it would be dangerous for the best interests of the peers themselves were they to fail to recognise these necessities. The cost of their institution to the community might be felt to outweigh the usefulness of their functions, and a feeling might take root of general aversion to the hereditary principle, of which we have seen symptoms in the last session of Parliament. The House of Lords, as an institution representing essentially the landowning class, has survived many dangers in past times, and preserves to the present day an immense indirect influence on our legislative industry. The time is, however, at hand when, if it is to preserve its influence in the State, it will have not only seriously to modify its own constitution, but also to divest itself of that peculiar exclusive landed character it has heretofore possessed. The hereditary character may remain, tempered by judicious selection, and supplemented by the addition of intellectual eminence from other branches of the Legislature."

It is, however, on its own merits, and on the individual character of its members, that it must be able to survive, rather than on the sentimental associations connected with an ancient monument.

Land measures will have to be brought before it, however, which many of its members will believe are destined to threaten the very existence of its constitution. The keynote of these measures was struck last year by no less a person than the late Prime Minister, in his speech on the Game Bill, when he warned the noble Lords that it was not over such small matters that they must waste their thoughts, but rather reserve themselves for that great constitutional battle he felt was coming. The battle will undoubtedly come, and we may expect to see many noble knights appear arrayed for the fray in armour of a very antiquated form, which will be of little avail for modern warfare. Fortunately there are still to be found members of the aristocracy and the landed class who are not so

The obstructive action of the House of Lords is well exemplified in the history of Irish legislation, on the four different occasions when important Land Bills came before them.

In 1829 an Arterial Drainage Bill for Ireland was sent up from the Commons and was dropped in the Lords, though that same year they passed an Arms Act.

In 1845 the Compensation to Tenants Bill of Lord Stanley, after having passed the Commons, was vigorously opposed in the Lords, and was therefore allowed to drop.

In 1854, when Mr. Napier's four Land Bills for Ireland were sent up to the Lords, they passed the first three bills, which were in every sense landlords' bills, giving relief and powers to owners of settled estates; but they carefully rejected the only bill which was of any interest to the tenant-namely, the fourth bill, which was a Tenants' Compensation Bill.'

Lastly, in 1870, the Land Bill of Mr. Gladstone was shorn of some of its most important provisions through the action of the Upper Chamber.

See Barry O'Brien's Irish Land Question, pp. 37, 75, 101.

utterly devoid of tactical skill. They will enlist on their side the great moderating element of the English nation, the large influential middle class, the employers of labour, the heads of mercantile enterprise; and thus, by timely concessions to the sound common-sense view of the influential portion of the electorate, the landowning classes will be saved from themselves and their own rashness. There are not wanting indications of how bitter the struggle will bebitterer in many ways than the battle that was fought over the great Reform Bill; but when it has been fought, and when it has been won, the institutions of this country will come out stronger from the fray. The just aspirations of the people will have been gained; the land monopoly will have been broken up; the democratic element will have been disappointed by seeing institutions which, if they and the ultra-Tory element had their way, would soon be destroyed, but which, by the moderating influence of capable statesmen, and the timely concurrence of the Liberal section of the privileged class, will have received a fresh lease of existence, preserving thus the continuity of our political life, and the true interests of the English people.

BLANDFORD.

LA ROCHEFOUCAULD.

EVERYBODY has at one time or another quoted La Rochefoucauld; some with half apology, as though the light shed by his Maxims were an evil glamour from the enemy of mankind. But no classical writer of modern times is so little known and so much the creature of hearsay. His Maxims, about which he took infinite care, have been until these latter days most shamefully treated in France and in England we have added to the falsification of the French text by a set of translations the most villanous that have ever been perpetrated. The result is that philosophers refute and rhetoricians rail at La Rohecfoucauld without knowing much about him, and certainly without knowing what were his genuine doctrines. In London one may hunt through all the second-hand book-shops for a day without being able to procure a single English copy of the Maxims, or any passable edition of them in French; and that tells a good deal of the oblivion into which the celebrated author has fallen, at least in this country, through the unfaithfulness of his editors and translators. Indeed, for the most part, when people quote La Rochefoucauld, it is not because they have taken the trouble to read his little book as he issued it, but because they have culled from other books, or have gathered in conversation, half a dozen sentences which cleave to the memory. The volume, as he put it forth, is not to be found in English at all, save in translations which are a travestie, and very often reverse the meaning in the most ludicrous manner. As for the fate of the work in France, it has been so singular, when we take into account the splendour of the author's reputation, that it cannot escape our inquiries; and in truth it is only by unravelling it that we can fairly distinguish the true La Rochefoucauld from the fictitious one of common report. That unravelling is to come; but first of all, and to give it the importance which is due to it, let us glance at the position of La Rochefoucauld, and fix a few points in his career as a writer, as a moralist, and as a man.

French literature has been summarised as follows by a master:

Critics (he says), and especially foreigners, who in these latter days have judged our two literary centuries most severely, agree in the acknowledgment that what dominated in them, what reflected them in countless ways, what gave them

their chief ornament and glory, was the spirit of conversation and society, understanding of the world and of men, quick and fine apprehension of the seemly and of the ludicrous, exquisite delicacy of feeling, the grace, the edge, the polish to be attained in speech. And virtually there indeed-with reservations which will occur to everybody, and two or three names such as Bossuet and Montesquieu which we put aside-there, up to about 1789, is the distinctive character, the feature marking out French literature from among the literatures of Europe.

These are the terms in which Sainte-Beuve begins to outline his portrait of Madame de Sévigné, who must rank with the highest in any literature pervaded by the spirit of biography, of society, and of conversation. They are of equal value to indicate the position of La Rochefoucauld in the world of letters. His way was not her way, but they are both incomparable-she in letters, he in maxims. And although her letters fill a score of large volumes, while his maxims occupy little more than a hundred small pages, he has probably packed into his short sentences as much of the life and movement of his day as the lady has in her long, rambling, and ever delightful effusions. La Rochefoucauld was himself one of the greatest personages of the most splendid period of French society. He was the most brilliant talker and the most polished gentleman of his time. No one had studied more curiously than he the arts of society, the sources of conduct, the entanglements of accident, and the meshes of conversation. His maxims are the most perfect crystallisations of the thoughts and fashions and secret influences amid which he stirred. One of his short sentences conveys the outcome of an hour's voluble talk, or distils to its drop of meaning all the worth of an intrigue and all the gaiety of a season. If it be true, as Sainte-Beuve says, that up to the Revolution, French literature is to be considered in the main as the reflex of polished society, then we may say of the mirror in La Rochefoucauld's hand, it is certainly a small one, but it reflects everything. Other consummate artists may have chosen more popular forms of expression-Madame de Sévigné in letters, Molière in plays, and La Fontaine in tales of arch wit; but no one got nearer to the heart of French society than La Rochefoucauld, and no one gives more of its life-blood than he does in his book. Nor is it only of French life that he is the exponent; he had a window into the human heart, and his Maxims contain the very bones of the first man. In a word, no one, be his manner of art what it may, can be placed above La Rochefoucauld for insight into the intricacies of human motive and for the sharpness with which he reflects the toand-fro of social life in exquisitely cut sentences. Voltaire gives him the further merit of having been the first in Europe after the revival of letters who taught people to think and to convey their thoughts in lively, precise, and delicate turns; but this is too largely expressed. It may be true of France and all the continent, but it cannot hold in the country of Francis Bacon.

To most people, however, La Rochefoucauld is repulsive, and it is· · impossible to set on high the man who is hateful, who is supposed to delight in blackening his kind, and who has ever been accused, although most unjustly, of assailing the bulwarks of morality. Spite of the critical commonplaces, that art is independent of ethics, and that it is possible to achieve greatness with a bad heart, there is something in the soul which rebels and refuses its homage to genius however bright when it is detestable. Therefore, to do justice to the intellectual eminence of La Rochefoucauld, we have to touch on his moral station and show how he came to occupy it; so that being in his day the man of highest breeding and sweetest courtesy, truest of the true, beloved by his friends in the most extraordinary manner, bewept at his death, says Madame de Sévigné, as man never was, and drawing from Mademoiselle d'Aumale the exclamation, I know nothing better than he, and I say all in that;' nevertheless, when his Maxims appeared they excited among many readers a horror of the man who could find so much wickedness in his heart. The fact is, that extreme doctrines, whether of the goodness or of the badness of human nature, are never the discovery of any one man, but rather belong to the atmosphere in which he lives. In France, of the seventeenth century, no fact is more obvious than this—we stumble on it at every footstep-that the excessive corruption of human nature was part of the religious teaching of the day, unmistakable in the oratory of such Jesuits as Bourdaloue, but most accentuated in the Jansenism with which La Rochefoucauld had the nearest and most abiding ties. The most popular religious author of the day was Francis de Salesa quaint amalgam of John Lilly, George Herbert, and Jeremy Taylor. His Introduction à la Vie dévote corresponds to Taylor's Holy Living and Dying, but has much more play of fancy, breathing of the fields and flowers amid which it was composed. Read what the gentle bishop says of himself: 'Ce bon père dit que je suis une fleur, un vase de fleurs, et un phénix: je ne suis qu'un puant homme, un corbeau, un fumier.' It was the ecclesiastical style of the period.

Since then La Rochefoucauld is not to be judged by himself alone, but by the age in which he moved, let it be noted that, though one can scarcely speak of him as a religious man, he was part and parcel of a great religious movement sweeping on from century to century. We have to think of three centuries, the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth, with a great wave of thought rolling on from one to another. In the first of these the wave was at its lowest the Church was fallen, and religion had become very cold. In the next the Church made a mighty effort to recover its strength, and France saw the religious wave cresting in two distinct points, Jesuitism and Jansenism. In the eighteenth century the moral wave sloped down again with vast intellectual force and lively spirits to uncleanness of life, to inhuman devilry, to godless liberty,