which retained the Paper Duty, by voting an excess of expenditure beyond the ways and means provided, and accepting from Mr. Gladstone a budget which did not balance the national accounts. We claim, indeed, for the House of Lords the high national function of rejecting any expenditure which they may think the Commons to have sanctioned, in the true language of Judge Story, "under the propensity of all single and numerous assemblies to yield to the impulse of sudden and violent passions, and to be seduced by factious leaders into intemperate and pernicious resolutions." The Lords may have taken a mistaken view of the proposal of the Commons; for no form of government whatever can be devised which shall not be subject to error; but the necessity and extreme importance of the function remain the same. It is the duty and the popular right of the House of Lords in all matters to appeal from the Commons to the calm and deliberate sense of the whole community. A financial despotism of the House of Commons would be as disastrous as any other.

On the other hand, it is forbidden the House of Lords, by the Constitution, not only to originate any tax, or to specify its object, but even in any way to regulate its amount; not because they do not form a part of or represent the people, or because they have acquiesced in a usage of 200 years, but for reasons far deeper and truer than these. They are incompetent, by their very nature, as much as an absolute monarch, to sympathise with the financial wants and difficulties of the mass of the population. As rich men, they are not as keen as the people themselves to perceive the various needs for which pub. lic assistance is required, still less can they estimate the severity of the pressure of taxation on the comparatively poor. They can afford the luxuries of rich men: stately public buildings, showy and expensive armies, gorgeous staffs of stateofficials, and costly wars, for the gratification of personal sentiment. Public content, as to taxation, is the strongest foundation of social order; and the surest guarantee for the depth and permanence of that content is the conviction brought home to every man's mind that he himself determines the expenditure for which he is obliged to pay.

Finally, it may be asked, was there sufficient cause for startling the country by an apparent breach of one of the most ancient securities of its freedom? We answer that the country has not been startled. It has shown no sense of an encroachment having been committed on the rights of the Commons or of the people. Nay, the very reverse is obvious. A universal satisfaction is manifest that the Constitution has found a natural

instrument in the House of Lords for encountering a dangerous crisis. The Lords have exercised a great function; the people have recognised that function, and approved its use. The deliberate judgment of public opinion condemned the repeal of the Paper Duty at the present crisis, and the general feeling of the nation ratifies its rejection. It confirms the declaration of the Lords, that the Commons have not made sufficient provision for the expenditure which they have practically voted, and that they have thereby endangered the credit and the safety of the national finances.

It would be vain for the Commons to attempt to cancel the overthrow of their policy, or Ministers to seek a new trial. The Commons can, if they please, stop public business, turn the whole financial system into annual grants, and refuse to vote any tax till the Lords have submitted to their pleasure. But in all collisions between the three estates, it is the people, the force of public opinion, which is the umpire; and the attempt to sustain error by faction might bring down signal punishment even on the House of Commons. But it can have no desire for such a contest. Declining majorities proved that the sober sense of the House, when emancipated from the spell of a bewitching voice, felt that it had been misled by excited hopes and a misplaced trust in hasty statesmanship. It has become aware how its own free agency was compromised by the skilful tactics which mixed up the Budget with the Treaty, and by a use of the royal name which the king's friends of George III. might have envied. If it smarts under the humiliation of a rebuke, let it remember that it has no one to blame but itself. The House was plainly warned, in several speeches, against the dangers of the course on which it was entering; but it was captivated by the charmer, and would neither reflect nor examine. It has paid the penalty of its thoughtlessness. Its decision has been overruled, its pretensions corrected, and its amenability to a court of error, even in finance, established. What the Commons have lost, the country has gained. It has gained an invaluable safeguard against the only formidable danger of modern times, the disproportionate growth of the power of the House of Commons and its constituents. The evil had its roots in the very heart of modern political society; it was certain to rise to the surface at one time or another; but the unimpaired vitality of the British Constitution had vigour enough to generate the antidote. It has endowed the House of Lords with the public confidence and the strength requisite to enable it to balance the expansion of the Commons. The country has recognised that the Peers

K

exist for the people, and have acted, in what they have done, for the good of the people. It refuses to enact a Bed of Justice against the House of Lords, after the fashion of Louis XIV. towards the Parliament of Paris, in order to effect the compulsory registration of a decree of finance, and, by destroying its independence, remove the sole existing barrier against the despotism of a single assembly. The Commons may protest that the act of the Lords shall not become a precedent; but as long disuse did not prevent it, neither will vehement protests, as often as similar circumstances shall call for its repetition. Writings and usages have little force in these matters. Wheresoever danger threatens, living bodies, whether men or societies, will seize weapons to repel it. Precedents have been searched for to justify the deed of the Lords; such authorities are the delight of pedantic constitutionalists, and are even appealed to by baffled innovators. It would have been more rational to have sought a precedent for the finance of the Commons. No man can desire the recurrence of such a step, because no man can wish that the Commons should again give just cause for such a reproof. But whatever may happen, it is an unspeakable comfort to every Englishman to know that the energy of the British Constitution is undiminished, and that it has still its old strength to raise up an effective barrier against irresponsible and despotical power, by whomsoever it may be claimed, or under the cover of whatever ancient form it may raise its head.

ART. VII.-WILLIAM CALDWELL ROSCOE'S POETRY.

Poems and Essays by the late William Caldwell Roscoe. With a Prefatory Memoir. London: Chapman and Hall, 1860.

AN important part of the work now before us is no subject for us to criticise. Almost all the Essays in the second volume were contributions to this Review, and we can only give utterance to the fruitless wish that the series had not found its early close,

"Tuque tuis armis, nos te poteremur, Achille!"

be

Mr. Roscoe once said in a humorous letter which we have seen, that his critical friends would never do justice to the demerits of his poetry, and that he should like to be his own reviewer; and we must be content to bear any reflections which may cast upon our impartiality in noticing his poetical works. We would rather do so than attempt to qualify the truthful expression of the hearty, though we trust not wholly undiscriminating, admiration which they excite in us.

These works consist of two Tragedies, and a small number of Minor Poems and Sonnets. Of the Tragedies, one, Eliduke, is an early work, now published for the first time. Of this tragedy we do not propose to speak in detail here. We believe that with certain retrenchments it would be a very effective acting play. It is full of life and movement and dramatic interest, and it contains a sufficient variety of persons to keep the attention of an audience from flagging. The characters, however, are not in reality particularly individual or well-marked. The principal personage, Eliduke, is intended for a man of high aspirations, but wanting in moral determination to resist a guilty passion. But the wavering complexity of such a character was perhaps not well suited to Mr. Roscoe's powers at any time, and was certainly beyond them at the early age at which the tragedy was written. Eliduke's worse and better natures speak in turn, and each of them at such length as to destroy the organic unity of the character. Eliduke too is open to an observation which has been unjustly applied to Violenzia (the other tragedy) by one of its critics,-that it is "an exercise" in the Elizabethan school. We do not believe that the forms of that school were ever perfectly adapted to Mr. Roscoe's genius. They grew up among men of redundantly fertile imagination, teeming with passion, and rooting themselves firmly in the world of outward interests. The more abrupt the alternations of vivid action, of potent passion, and of rampant humour, the

more direct the reflection of the intricate contradictions of the world, the more the ideal elements were to be furnished by the spectator of the drama, as he would furnish them if it were a real and not a feigned action, the more at ease these luxuriant minds found themselves. It is not wonderful that they were Mr. Roscoe's favourite study. His was just the mind to derive sustenance from such a mass of strong intellectual food. But according to the conception which we form of his own imagination, its natural creative instincts were of a widely different class. A fastidious pursuit of ideal grace, a tendency to unity and simplicity in all things, a pleasure rather in single images and progressive actions, than in the whirl and complication of an interlaced plot and contemporaneous incidents, marked him as belonging to what used to be called the "classical" type. Indeed, it must be noted as a limitation of his power, that he was not prolific either in invention or in illustration. His imagination was not peopled with multitudinous characters, nor had his language that richness to which the public has been lately accustomed. Moreover he was wanting in a real hold on common life, and did not let its rugged ground-work show in his art. He had (not in theory, but in practical habit) what must be now called a somewhat old-fashioned disposition to confine poetic delineation within the limits of artistic beauty, and to educe an ideal rather than to reproduce nature. If the temperament to which we refer had not been mixed with other elements, his tendency in art would have been altogether severe. It was not so, principally because the spiritual and divine side of life, and both the tender and the lofty emotions of humanity, were the highest realities to him. He united in an unusual degree depth and artistic fastidiousness. This union, combined with a strict reticence wherever thought approached the confines of dimness (as deep spiritual thought must constantly do), probably helped to restrict his creative imagination. It has certainly kept his poetry somewhat off the line of the prevailing tastes of the day. It is deficient in those qualities which produce either picturesqueness or gorgeousness of effect; nor does it ever wear any appearance of enigmatic profundity, or embody any novel doctrines, or deal with any problems especially belonging to the nineteenth century. On the other hand, it is far from realistic, and appeals rather to cultivated tastes than to strong popular instincts. It has the disadvantage of being somewhat unusual, without having any eccentricity to arrest the attention.

We should be tempted to characterise Mr. Roscoe's power as more idyllic than dramatic. We wish he had written a greater number of pieces like the ballad of " Fontanlee," or the pathetic and quaintly-beautiful " Ariadne," and had added to the