public. Long afterwards when the appearance of the Latter-day Pamphlets' revealed how wide a gulf had secretly been forming between Carlyle's philosophy and the system to which his early friends would fain have had him attached,-when those friends seemed to him becoming hide-bound and withered in their whiggisms and politico-economical nostrums Mrs. Carlyle remained firmly at his side. In the whole world I had one complete approver; in that, as in other cases, one, and it was worth all. She was glad at my getting delivered of my black electricities and consuming fires in that way.'

'One complete approver,'-one, that is, over and above his own deliberate conviction and clearest inner conscience, against which, we may be very sure, Carlyle never spake or uttered syllable. But while we grant this intense conviction of belief in everything he wrote, must we not ask ourselves very seriously if a long course of ever-increasing seclusion and communion with his own spirit, backed by the firm affectionate echoing of his own ideas by the one complete approver,' did not tend to narrow his views of men and to darken the future of mankind in his eyes? Readily we will admit that the germ of his latest Jamaica or United States Slavery utterances is to be found in even his earliest works; even more willing are we to allow that the message he ever reiterated against the shams and wind-bags of modern Democracy was most cryingly needed by the age; but would it not have been possible, under happier circumstances, for Carlyle to have moderated his virulence against the school of Mill (much macerated, changed and fanaticized John Mill') and of Bentham ? The men had so much in common, after all, in their desire to better the universe and leave mankind better than they found it. It is almost necessary to remind a generation which has heard its possibly wisest sage expend so much energy in denouncing shallow Bethamisms' what Jeremy Bentham really did. He found the Government of England steeped in official corruption of which we can have no idea, the foul offspring of lavish war-contracts and unmerited pension grants. He found a criminal code that paralleled that of Timbuctoo, except in the heads of simplicity and freedom from expense. The sources of

of the people was cramped and subjected to a thousand humiliations, the laws of libel, of property, of commerce, all twisted into so many potent engines to oppress the people. Against such abuses he laboured all day long. In his voluminous writings were stored up the weapons with which the Reformers of the next generation effected such necessary changes as he did not live to see achieved. It is impossible to calculate the mass of actual sin, misery and poverty which he helped to dissipate, the impetus he gave to freedom of thought and discussion, to education and everything which is prized by a freeman. Surely some more cordial recognition was due to such a man from a mind like Carlyle's. But the later writer was so occupied by the undoubted fact that an improved system of popular representation had not cured every ill the political frame was heir to, that he overlooked the enormous positive good which the Reformers of Bentham's school actually effected. To us it seems as if Bentham held the place of a good Samaritan putting the cup of cold water to the lips of some traveller, dust-choked in the desert sand storm, and bidding him be of good courage. Carlyle stands by and assures the reviving man that he will surely thirst again, and that the oasis to which his saviour points him is but a mirage that deludes the eye. Both seek the good of the wearied one, but why should the dark-eyed prophet of disaster scorn the man who has at least relieved the pressing needs which, but for his timely help, would have stopped the wayfarer's labouring breath for ever.

It grieves us to note that Carlyle appears to have been unable to appreciate any of his contemporaries. We can understand his not caring for Sir Walter Scott, in spite of their being compatriots, when we look at the different way in which they were affected by King George's farcical visit to Edinburgh. The loyal baronet, in an effusion of zeal, burst into verse,

'Carl, now the King's come!' snatched the tumbler out of which the royal thirst had been assuaged, put it in his coat tail pocket and added a fit climax to these mock-heroics by sitting down on it in a moment of inadvertence! Carlyle, grimly reading the placard in which the civic authorities

coats and white duck trousers' on the occasion of His Majesty's advent, inwardly swore that he would put on white coat and black pants rather than give in to such scandalous flunkeys,' from whose threatened effervescence' of loyalty he fled for a week's country jaunt. But it is the same with authors of every stamp. Lamb and his sister are a very sorry pair of phenomena.' Yet, undoubtedly Lamb sacrificed more for his sister than Carlyle ever did for his suffering wife, and never had to pen such remorseful sentences as Carlyle does here about his own neglect. Lamb's talk is contemptibly small, indicating wondrous ignorance and shallowness,' not to say 'insuperable proclivity to gin.' His wit is diluted insanity.' The popularity of Darwin's physical discoveries was wonderful to him, as indicating the capricious stupidity of mankind.

I could never waste

the least thought on it.' Mrs. Carlyle's abilities must be exaggerated at the expense of all the Sands and Eliots and babbling cohue of "celebrated scribbling women, all of whom, boiled down, 'could not make one such woman. This is bad, but what follows is worse. Wordsworth's works he could never considerably reverence,' his melody is as of an honest rustic fiddle, good and well handled, but wanting two or more of the strings, and not capable of much !' Personally, he found Wordsworth conceited. Milton and Shakespeare had their limitations and gradually it became apparent to me that of transcendent unlimited there was, to this critic, probably but one specimen known,himself!' After this, we need not wonder that nothing came from “Coleridge" that was of use to me that day, or in fact any day.' Macaulay, De Quincey, what treatment can they expect when great genius is thus roughly labelled and pushed aside as useless and imperfect? It is with sorrow that we have written the concluding paragraph of this notice, but when so great a man as Carlyle shows so narrow a power of appreciation for the greatness of others it is a duty, no less necessary than painful, to point out the blot lest we should suffer his declared opinions to blemish the received reputations of men in every way his equals.

Ward's Selections from the English Poets. London & New York: Macmillan & Co., 1880. [FoURTH NOTICE. Vol. III. Addison to Blake.] Toronto: Copp, Clarke & Co.

No more difficult problem is presented to the critic than that which calls for the correct appreciation of the poetry of the eighteenth century. We look back with pity, not unmingled with contempt, at the overweening confidence in their own powers with which the polished writers of our so-called Augustan age complacently dubbed themselves the heirs of the beauties of their predecessors and the correctors of their faults. It was in this vein that Johnson cried Milton down, and Addison patronisingly cried him up, and it was the conviction that every alteration they made must be an improvement which spoilt the scholars of that century as editors of our older poets.

But while there is no risk now-a-days of our sharing the exaggerated views which our forefathers held about the charms of the ingenious Mr. Tickell, and his host of fellow versifiers, neither is it possib'e for us any longer to swell the chorus of depreciation beneath which the school of Wordsworth at one time drowned the few feeble voices which were yet uplifted in praise of the school whose glories culminated in Pope. Be tween these two opposing courses the critic must steer a justly distinguishing way of his own, and, as usual, it will be found that one of his greatest difficulties arises from the grouping of too many opposing elements together and the attempt to find a general formula sufficiently wide to embrace them all. So long as it was the generally received notion that from Dryden onwards English verse became more and more polished, cold and artificial, until Wordsworth and Coleridge by a dead lift raised it again to a warmer and more natural atmosphere, criticism was baffled in its attempts to conform to such an unnatural classification. The task would have been too great even for Procustes to make Addison, Pope and Johnson on the one hand, and Gray, Chatterton and Blake on the other, lie snugly in the same bed.

It is, however, a fact, and one which Mr. Ward's selections bring out clearly before us, that the natural style of poetry

simple study of Nature as opposed to the frigid study of society and morals, never did die out, but that its traditions were carried on by an unbroken chain of writers in spite of the dazzling attractions which the magnificent verse of Pope held out to every young rhymer.

It is not to be supposed that even these lovers of the country succeeded in freeing themselves entirely from the influence of the age which produced 'Windsor Forest.' Lady Winchilsed, who has been named with praise by Wordsworth himself, affords a good example of this. In the following passage from her 'Nocturnal Reverie':

"The loos'd horse now, as his pasture leads, Comes slowly grazing through the adjoining meads,

Whose stealing pace and lengthened shade we fear,

Till torn-up forage in his teeth we hear ';

we clearly see a study from rustic life, depicted in simple and appropriate language. But only a few lines before we have been inflicted with 'darkened groves' wearing softest shadows' and sun-burned hills,' concealing their 'swarthy looks,' and we remember that the fair author was a correspondent of Pope's.

6

Mr.

The same singular mixture is observable in the poetry of Parnell. Gosse, in his prefatory remarks (at p. 134) justly remarks that the 'Hermit' may be considered the apex and chef d'aurre of Augustan poetry in England.' Yet his hymn to Contentment' contains passages which breathe the love of Nature in the poet's mind and the awakening sense that inanimate objects have a word to say to us. Moon and stars, and seas, he says,

The field whose ears conceal the grain, The yellow treasure of the plain ; All of these, and all I see Should be sung and sung by me: They speak their Maker as they can, But want and ask the tongue of man.' Thomson's 'Seasons' are too well known to need more than a passing allusion. Wonderful as his description of the varied aspects of an English country-side undoubtedly are, they remain, in our opinion, pen photographs only. In Thomson, British poetry seemed to be recovering the essential faculty of looking at Nature with its own eyes instead of through the medium of

less important power of recording those impressions in honest blank verse, free from the entrapping influences of rhyme. But these tasks seemed to exhaust Thomson's powers. He could draw a religious moral from his winter landscape or overworked peasant, but he took his meanings out for a walk with him, and did not draw them out of the objects he studied. The two lines of Parnell's quoted above, which we have italicised, will serve to illustrate the difference between the attitude which these poets of the dawning revival observed towards hill and flood and the standpoint from which Wordsworth regarded the same natural phenomena. The earlier writers granted a message to the moon and the flowers, but that message was subordinated to the 'tongue of man,' which was to express it, and, in the expression, too often coloured it with his own impressions. Wordsworth would allow that man's voice is needed to formulate and publish forth as it were the viewless thoughts with which scaur and fell inspire him. But at the same time those thoughts were so clear to him and their meaning so unmistakable that the tongue of man' became the mere instrument to record them with in fitting words. To one set of poets the interpreter was everything, to the other school he occupied a subservient position to the dim natur-bilden' whose message was breathed upon his lips.

6

Dyer next claims our attention. In his poem of Grongar Hill' he plays as it were a softer, simpler prelude to the grand music which Shelley afterwards elicited from the same lyre in his ‘Lines written among the Enganean Hills.' Allowing for the difference in poetic spirit and in the grandeur of the associations awakened by the several landscapes, it is wonderful what a similarity of thought and diction is to be traced in the two

kindred poems. To Dyer's eyes

'Rushing from the woods, the spires
Seem from hence ascending fires.'

Venice, on the distant horizon of Shelley's gaze, presents him with the same idea, more nobly and more fully expressed:

'Column, tower, and dome and spires
Shine like obelisks of fire,
Pointing with inconstant motion
From the altar of dark ocean

After Dyer, Collins snatches up the lamp of natural poetry and passes it on to Gray. We can only afford space for one quotation from Collins, and that will serve to show how much wider and nobler was the view he took of Nature than was that of his contemporaries. Dyer sang from the material altitude of Grongar, but Collins lifts himself in imagination till, piercing at once the bounds of time and space, he sees all Britain lying beneath him, joined as old tradition tells us to the opposing shore and the 'silver streak of sea' effaced, while the Gaul is 'Passing with unwet feet through all our land.'

gems,

With bold imagery he calls us to behold And see, like her laughing train, The little isles on every side,' and the beauty of the description is enhanced by the proud boast which closes the antistrophe of the ode, that this 'blest divorce' is owing to Liberty, who destined England's vales to be her loved, her last abode.' This has been a fruitful thought and a favourite one among our later poets; Tennyson sings 'God bless the narrow seas that keep her off!' and Wordsworth, in one of his noble sonnets, gave expression to his feeling of surprise at beholding on a clear day,

The coast of France,-the coast of France how near!

Drawn almost into frightful neighbourhood,
I shrunk, for verily the barrier flood
Was like a lake, or river bright and fair,
A span of waters; yet what power is there!
What mightiness for evil and for good!'

To pass to Gray, we prefer to take our typical quotation from his ode 'On the Progress of Poesy,' rather than from the

Elegy,' beautiful as the descriptive passages in the latter poem undoubtedly are. But for our present purpose, and to show how a grand thought could be drawn from natural imagery and couched in simple phrase by a contemporary of Johnson, we prefer to adduce the wellknown couplet descriptive of the abandonment by the Muses of their favourite Grecian haunts,

'Where each old poetic mountain
Inspiration breathed around.'

To Gray's lofty mind Hymettus and Parnassus had imbibed the atmosphere of poesy with which Greek bards had surrounded them, until they were them

form of an inspiration purer, more intense and more refined than they had at first breathed into the souls of their earliest admirers. The poet and the mountain act and react on each other, a noble thought and one which the school of Pope was incapable of producing.

In Warton we find some occasional touches, such as the picture of the hawthorn hedge in spring

'Which, to the distant eye, displays Weakly green its budding sprays'

that plainly shows he possessed an observant eye for the more delicate and unobtrusive aspects of the seasons. But it is when we come to Chatterton that we appreciate the full tide of life that was ready to invigorate the system of English poetry. No piece of Pre-Raphaelite word-embroidery such as Tennyson's lovely picture of the clustering marish-mosses' in Mariana exceeds for truth and delicacy of execution some of Chatterton's descriptions, as the passage in one of his Eclogues in which Robert the neat-herd, wails his 'king-cup-deckèd leas.

'My garden whitened with the cumfreyplant,

My flower-Saint-Mary glinting with the light.'

In dealing with Chatterton's archaic spelling and oft-times imaginary words, Mr. W. F. Watts (who sub-edits the selections from his works) has adopted a curious and it seems to us a mistaken plan. The untouched text of Chatterton has, no doubt, a repulsive look to the modern reader, but when we consider how much harmony depends on the sound of a word or the turn of an expression, we should hesitate in substituting a modern phrase even if we could get one that bears exactly the same meaning. Mr. Watts keeps enough of Chatterton's mannerisms to necessitate the use of notes, but in the majority of cases he alters the text at his own sweet will. Nor does he exercise his discretion wisely, as will appear when we note that he retains abrodden' for 'abruptly,' and yet alters the by no means unknown word 'nesh' into 'slim,' at once thereby making a very fine line descend into the depths of common-place.

When we find Cowper in his most natural mood, he gives us charming peers into English rural scenery, as for in

felled poplar trees (p. 481). At other times, and except for a naturally stronger infusion of religious sentiment, he seems to us to follow in Thomson's footsteps too closely for us to class his country scenes in any way apart from those of his predecessor. On the whole, he appears to belong more to the past than the present. It is with an effort we put ourselves in his place. But immediately after him come Burns and a troop of minor Scotch song-writers, and we feel at once the fresh breeze of to-day stirring around our temples. We must refrain from selections, all we need say is, take down your Burns and remind yourselves, if you need reminding, how many of the master-chords of your nature are touched by him on every page. He finds the soul of goodness in things evil' from the 'wee, sleekit, cowrin', tim'rous beastie,' typical of the minor destructive powers of creation, up to 'auld nickie-ben' himself, the prince of the powers of the air, who might,-how can we tell?-have a chance yet if he would bryt tak a thought an' men'.' His loves were loved in the open air, and the songs that tell of them have the sough of the wind, the lilt of the laverock and the rush of the brook running through them all. The good and the true, he champions under whatever lowly form he may descry it; the hypocrite, the fanatic and the knave need not expect by sheltering themselves behind a national religion to escape his scorn and his derision. Long may the fearless spirit of Burns be considered as typical of the spirit of the age which he ushered in!

William Blake differed from Burns in this, that he had no audience. To what pitch of clarity he might have attained had his verses been on the lips of young and old, rich and poor, we may imagine but, alas! can never know. Starting from a wonderful simplicity which enthrals one with all the charm of holy words uttered by a childish tongue, the growing depths of meaning within him seemed gradually to exceed his power of expression. We have seen paintings by

great masters which to the untutored eye appear masses of confused colour ;you must find out the proper distant stand-point before even the subject is comprehensible to you. So it is with

the mass of Blake's works. Unfortunately in the case of his so-called prophetical works, the stand-point is irretrievably lost,-yet there can be no doubt that the mind which grasped all the majesty of the Book of Job and embodied it in the finest designs that ever lived beneath the graver of a biblical artist, must have had vast and kindred thoughts well worthy of being treated in epic form. That he was imbued with such mighty fancies we know from his poem of The Tiger, which ranks with Behemoth and Job's Warhorse as one of the grandest conceptions in our tongue : 'When the stars threw down their spears, And watered heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?' With Blake this volume closes, but with his poetry a new school sprang full-armed into being. The fact is amply recog nised now that Coleridge and Wordsworth are followers of Blake, and that they did but, as Swinburne puts it, entrench at day break the ground he had occupied over night. It will, however, we think, be apparent from what we have said, that in several important points English poets always kept alive that love of nature the credit of reviving which has been improperly fathered upon Wordsworth, and that among the frigidly correct versifiers of our Augustan age there were always a chosen few who did not bend the knee to Baal.

*

A few misprints remain to be noticed. At page 74'springes' is transformed into the monosyllable 'springs,' to the destruction of the metre of one of Pope's lines; at p. 106 'not' takes the place of 'nod' and spoils the sense; similarly at p. 181 'sate is made to read 'fate,' probably attributable to the old form of long s. in the original.