pels him to include Rogers and his poetry, let him give to them, not a third part of a page, but one line. I reckon that these reductions would shorten the last part of the primer by five pages. A little condensation in the judgments on Wordsworth, Byron, and Shelley would abridge it by another page; the omission of the first pages of the volume by two more. Our primer shortened by eight pages! no small gain in a work of this character.

The last three chapters of the book, therefore, I could wish recast, and one or two phrases in his criticism Mr. Stopford Brooke might perhaps revise at the same time. He says most truly of Addison that his Spectator "gave a better tone to manners and a gentler one to political and literary criticism." He says truly, too, of Addison's best papers: "No humour is more fine and tender; and, like Chaucer's, it is never bitter." He has a right to the conclusion, therefore, that "Addison's work was a great one, lightly done." But to say of Addison's style, that "in its varied cadence and subtle ease it has never been surpassed," seems to me to be going a little too far. One could not say more of Plato's. Whatever his services to his time, Addison is for us now a writer whose range and force of thought are not considerable enough to make him interesting; and his style cannot equal in varied cadence and subtle ease the style of a man like Plato, because without range and force of thought all the resources of style, whether in cadence or in subtlety, are not and cannot be brought out.

Is it an entirely accurate judgment, again, on the poems of Gray and Collins, to call them "exquisite examples of perfectly English work wrought in the spirit of classic art?" I confess, this language seems to me to be too strong. Much as I admire Gray, one feels, I think, in reading his poetry, never quite

secure against the false poetical style of the eighteenth century. It is always near at hand, sometimes it breaks in; and the sense of this prevents the security one enjoys with truly classic work, the fulness of pleasure, the cordial satisfaction.

"Thy joys no glittering female meets ”

or even things in the Elegy:

"He gave to misery all he had-a tear;

He gained from Heaven ('twas all he wish'd) a friend"—

And

are instances of the sort of drawback I mean. the false style, which here comes to the surface, we are never very far from in Gray. Therefore, to call his poems "exquisite examples of perfectly English work wrought in the spirit of classic art" seems to me an exaggeration.

Mr. Stopford Brooke's Cowper is excellent, but again there seems to me to be some want of sobriety in the praise given. Philanthropy, no doubt, animated Cowper's heart and shows itself in his poetry. But it is too much to say of the apparition of Cowper and of his philanthropy in English poetry: "It is a wonderful change, a change so wonderful that it is like a new world. It is, in fact, the concentration into our retired poet's work of all the new thought upon the subject of mankind which was soon to take so fierce a form in Paris." Cowper, with his morbid religion and lumbering movement, was no precursor, as Mr. Stopford Brooke would thus make him, of Byron and Shelley. His true praise is, that by his simple affections and genuine love of nature he was a precursor of Wordsworth.

Of Wordsworth's philosophy of Nature Mr. Stopford Brooke draws out, I think, a more elaborate account than we require in a primer. No one will

be much helped by Wordsworth's philosophy of Nature, as a scheme in itself and disjoined from his poems. Nor shall we be led to enjoy the poems the more by having a philosophy of Nature abstracted from them and presented to us in its nakedness. Of the page and a quarter which Mr. Stopford Brooke has given to Wordsworth's philosophy of Nature, all might with advantage, perhaps, be dropped but this:

"Nature was a person to Wordsworth, distinct from himself, and capable of being loved. He could brood on her character, her ways, her words, her life. Hence arose his minute and loving observation of her, and his passionate description of all her forms.".

There might be some condensation, too, in the criticism of Byron as the poet of Don Juan and as the poet of Nature. But some touches in the criticism of Byron are admirable. "We feel naturally great interest in this strong personality, put before us with such obstinate power; but it wearies at last. Finally it wearied himself." Or again: "It is his colossal power and the ease which comes from it, in which he resembles Dryden, that marks him specially." Nothing could be better.

On Shelley, also, Mr. Stopford Brooke has an excellent sentence. He says of his lyrics: "They form together the most sensitive, the most imaginative, and the most musical, but the least tangible lyrical poetry we possess." But in the pages on Shelley, yet more than in those on Byron, condensation is desirable. Shelley is a most interesting and attractive personage; but in a work of the dimensions of this primer, neither his Queen Mab, nor his Alastor, nor his Revolt of Islam, nor his Prometheus Unbound, deserve the space which Mr. Stopford Brooke gives

to them.

And finally, as the sentence which I have last quoted is just a sentence of the right stamp for a primer, so a passage such as the following is just of the sort which is unsuitable :

:

"Shelley wants the closeness of grasp of nature which Wordsworth and Keats had, but he had the power in a far greater degree than they of describing a vast landscape melting into indefinite distance. In this he stands first among English poets, and is in poetry what Turner was in landscape painting. Along with this special quality of vastness his colour is as true as Scott's, but truer in this that it is full of half tones, while Scott's is laid out in broad yellow, crimson, and blue, in black and white."

Very clever, but also very fantastic; and at all events quite out of place in a primer !

Mr. Stopford Brooke will forgive me for my plainspeaking. It comes from my hearty esteem and admiration for his primer, and my desire to clear it of every speck and flaw, so that it may win its way into every one's hands. I hope he will revise it, and then I shall read it again with a fresh pleasure. But indeed, whether he revises it or no, I shall read it again: δὶς ἢ τρὶς τὰ καλά.

VI.

FALKLAND.

"THE English are just, but not amiable." A wellbred Frenchman, who has recently travelled in India, and who published in the Revue des Deux Mondes an interesting account of what he saw and heard there, ends with this criticism. The criticism conveys, he says, as to the English and their rule, the real mind of the best informed and most intelligent of the natives of India with whom he conversed. They admitted the great superiority of the English rule in India to every other which had preceded it. They admitted the good intentions of the English rule: they admitted its activity, energy, incorruptibility, justice. Still, the final impression was this: something wanting in the English, something which they were not. Les Anglais sont justes, mais pas bons. "The English are just, but not kind and good."

It is proposed to raise on the field of Newbury, a monument to a famous Englishman who was amiable. A meeting was held at Newbury to launch the project, and Lord Carnarvon made there an excellent speech. I believe the subscription to the monument does not grow very rapidly. The unamiable ones amongst us, the vast majority, naturally perhaps keep their hands in their pockets. But let us take