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racters, looking at them as natural objects, loving and hating them as if they were the friends and enemies of your ordinary life. This is very high art indeed, requiring much study and imagination on his part, and relieving the reader of all sense of fatigue, of all consciousness of another's fancy. Mr. Besant, in short, is a high priest of realism. We must needs go with him whithersoever he wills.

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lives henceforth the reader will find,

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thing Mr. Besant has ever done. We close the second volume in that helpless state of over-mastery which shows with what grip and tenacity the author has conquered us.

"Only for a moment is there a sigh as of nineteenth-century thankfulness-a kind of spirit-sob in the air-and we are again on the wing. The third volume transports us to the plantations ot Barbadoes. Alice is sold to slavery for sixty pounds! The picture of plantation life in Barbadoes is drawn with a realism that makes us shudder. Such horrors were possible, if they have not before been told in realistic fiction. Nothing since 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' has been half so pathetic, so grim, so real, as this bit of life in Barbadoes.

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London: CHATTO & WINDUS, Piccadilly, W.

Wordsworthiana. A Selection from Papers read to the Wordsworth Society. Edited by W. Knight. (Macmillan & Co.)

WORDSWORTHIANS will be glad to see this selection from the papers read to the Wordsworth Society-a society which not only did excellent work while it existed, but had the supreme merit of knowing when to die. It was founded in 1880, and lived seven years, during which time it never failed annually to set before its members much that was of interest. One year it was a bibliography; another a chronological table of poems, or a collection of MS. letters, or a record of a

mountain ramble from Dorothy Wordsworth's

priceless journals; and we agree with Mr. M. Arnold in saying that if Mr. Knight's work in founding it had had no other result than the production of the photographs of the various portraits of Wordsworth which appeared in the society's Transactions in 1882, that result alone would have been sufficient justification of his work. But it did much more; it permanently enriched us by the possession of such admirable papers as that read by Mr. Lowell in 1884, and

Mr. Hutton's 'On the Earlier and Later Styles of Wordsworth. Besides these, there are papers by Mr. Stopford Brooke, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, &c.; and one by Mr. Spence Watson defending Wordsworth from those (Mr. Leslie Stephen among the number) who

maintain that he hated science.

Excellent-nay, admirable as many of these papers are, the 'Reminiscences of Wordsworth among the Westmoreland Peasantry' is the paper which is, perhaps, most valuable, for Wordsworth's life work will remain and other men will arise to criticize it; but every year that passes makes it more and more difficult to gather together any new details of the ways of the man himself, and how he struck his contemporaries. No one is a prophet in his own country, least of all to the humbler portion of the community; for peasants often possess a keen sense of observation, and its edge is not blunted by being exercised on a large number of objects. The great man of their village is always before their eyes, they see his goings out and his comings in, while he is apt to be entirely off his guard before them, and to think that they take as little

notice of him as do the cows which they lead to the pasture or the sheep which they tend. Mr. Rawnsley's gleanings are decidedly interesting-the only pity is that he was not in the neighbourhood to collect them twenty or thirty years earlier. He was almost a generation too late, for Wordsworth died in 1850, Dorothy in 1855, and the poet's wife in 1859. Let us, however, be thankful that he inquired at all. Here, more or less dimmed by the lapse of time, we have the recollections of various men and women who years ago "took sarvice along wi' Mr. Wudsworth "-of men who in their youth were gardener's lads or butcher's boys, and others who, masons or builders now, were but mason's lads when Wordsworth came and overlooked the work they were doing. They thought he came because he was fond of bricks and mortar; but we who have more clue to his real mind have a shrewd guess that he was there in the interest of the

beauty which was the very breath of his life, and was carefully watching lest they should put up" " some building or make

"Mr. Wudsworth was hard on li'le Hartleyso vera hard upon him, giving him so much hard preaching about his ways."

Poor Hartley! this was when he lived at Nab Cottage, and his "ways" left much to be desired. Hartley had "habits"Wordsworth had not.

"As for his habits, he had noan-niver knew him wi' a pot i' his hand, or a pipe i' his mouth." The peasants could sympathize with a man who gave way to drinking, but it was hard to take any interest in a man who had not one redeeming vice.

"He follered nothing unless it was skating, he was never no cock-fighter, nor wrestler, no gaming man at all, and not a hunter, and as for fishing, he hedn't a bit of fish in him, hedn't Wudsworth-not a bit of fish in him."

"He was a gay good one on the ice," though, and could cut his name upon it. No better skater was known in those parts. "He was always first on Rydal, and fond of going on in danger time." If Wordsworth had been a man capable of taking pleasure in mixing familiarly with the people around him, he might, perhaps, have been a great

""He had his sāay at most o' the houses in these parts,' said one. 'He 'ud never pass folks draining, or ditching, or walling a cottage, but what he 'd stop and saay, "Eh dear, but it's a pity to move that stoan, and doan't ya think ya might leave that tree?" I 'member there was a walling chap just going to shoot a girt and he came up, and saaved it, and wrote sumstoan to bits wi' powder i' the grounds at Rydal, mat on it. He couldn't abear to see the faace of things altered,' said another."

We gather from these reminiscences that the Westmorel Vestmoreland people, though they loyally owned that Wordsworth was always

"well spoken of, and a man folks thowt a great deal of in the dale, because he was such a well-meaning, decent, quiet man,"

and

"always paid his way, and settled very reglar," did not really like him. He lacked the "natural touch" which would have endeared him to them: "he had no outgoing ways wi' folk," "he would pass you as if you were nobbut a stoan."

"Quite different Wudsworth was from li'le Hartley. Hartley always had a bit of smile, or a twinkle in his fāace, but Wudsworth was not lovable in the faace by noa means." And then again :

"Wudsworth for a' he had noa pride, nor nowt, was a man who was quite one to hissel'. He was not a man as folks could crack wi', nor not a man as could crack wi' folks. But there was another thing as kep' folks off, he had a ter'ble girt deep voice, and ya might see his faace again for long enuff. I've knoan folks, village lads, and lasses, coming over by old road above which runs from Grasmere to Rydal, flayt a'most to death there by Wishing Gaate, to hear the girt voice a groanin', and mutterin', and thunderin' of a still evening, and he had a way of standin' quite still by the rock there in t' path under Rydal, and folks could hear sounds like a wild beast coming from the rock, and children were scared fit to be dead a'most."

One of Mr. Rawnsley's great difficulties seems to have been to keep Hartley Coleridge out of the conversation. Every one called him Hartley, and when he kept a school in Ambleside the bigger scholars did the same thing.

"Wudsworth was distant, vera distant. Hartley knawed the insides of cottages for miles round, and was welcome at 'em all."

how the working folks-" ministers of day," he called them-pined for the sight of a little human weakness. Even the present writer owns to having liked Wordsworth infinitely better after hearing from an old friend of his that being on a visit to Rydal Mount during a period when he (the friend) was forbidden to eat potatoes, and rigidly abstaining in consequence, Wordsworth exclaimed, "Not eat a potato! Life without a potato is not worth having!" Hartley was the man for the villagers even his poetry was more to their taste than Wordsworth's. Being asked if people in the cot

tages around ever read any of Wordsworth's, one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants replied :

"Not likely, for Wudsworth wasn't one as wrote on separate bits (subjects) saame as li'le Hartley. Wudsworth's potry was quite different work fra li'le Hartley's. Hartley 'ud goa running along aside o't' brooks and mak' his, and goa in at t' first oppen door and write what he had got upo' paper. But Wudsworth's potry was real hard stuff, and bided a great deal o' makking, and he'd keep it in his head long enuff. There's potry wi' a li'le bit pleasant in't, and potry as a man can laugh at, or the childer understand, and some as takes a deal o' mastery to make out what's said, and a deal o' Wudsworth's was this sort. Ye could tell fra the man's faace that his potry would niver hev no laugh in it."

Wordsworth's face gave great offence to the peasants-most of them complained of it. "Ye're weel awar," said one,

"that we mun hev a few troubles; times is not. a' alike wi' the best on us; we hev our worrits, and our pets, but after yan on 'em, yan's countenance comes again, and Wudsworth's didn't, nor noan o' the family's as I ever see."

pos

Strange that, according to Matthew Arnold, as we read in his presidential address in 1883, "the most distinctive virtue" sessed by this bard of the rueful countenance is "his power of happiness and hope, his 'deep power of joy." "

He could not alter his face, but he certainly tried to make his poetry easy of understanding by any capable reader. The present writer once had long talk with Miss Southey, who dwelt much on the happy days she had enjoyed at Rydal. Many a time, she said, Wordsworth used to walk up and

a

down the room where she was sitting, repeating to her some poem he had just been composing. The admiration she expressed was never satisfactory to him unless she could answer in the affirmative the question which he invariably put: "But do you thoroughly understand it, Kate? Do you understand it without having to stop to think? It's good for nothing, and I must alter it, if you can't do that."

""He was a lonely man,' said a man who had worked in sight of Wordsworth all his life,' 'fond o' goin' out wi' his family and sayin' nowt to 'em. Many's the time I've seed him takin' his family out in a string, and niver geein' the deariest bit o' notish to 'em; standin by his sel', and stoppin' behind agaping wi' his jaws workin' the whoal time: but niver no crackin' wi' them, nor no pleasure wi' 'em-a desolateminded man, ye kna. It was potry did it.' "

Here at last we have the explanation of all that is said against Wordsworth-"it was potry did it." These good people had no conception that a man of genius dwelt among them; nor when they met him in the lanes and highways, which to him were his outdoor study, and he passed them by with such indifference as to cause them to say "he cared nowt for folk, nowt for any childer but his own-nowt for animals," had they the remotest idea how far his mind was away from them. He dwelt in meditation, and when not listening "to catch the spiritual music of the hills," or "the sallies of glad sound" sent forth by the stream, was making spiritual music of his own. He was always upon the roads, both by day and night; the mechanical movement probably stimulated the flow of composition, and the chances are that he never so much as saw half the people he met. His poetry is sufficient to prove that he loved both men and animals, and one of Mr. Rawnsley's informants bears witness that the moment Wordsworth knew any one was ill he was off to see him, and find out if there was anything that he could do for him. It is curious that Wordsworth should be reproached by the peasantry for his want of devotion to them, and by the great world, literary and otherwise, for being so fond of reproducing the ordinary country labourer's life in a too homely and natural way.

His forgetfulness when in his outdoor places of study was not greater than when he was writing indoors. There was no getting him to come to his meals :

""Ring the bell, said Mrs. Wordsworth to the old servant who narrated this; but he wouldn't stir, bless you! "Goa and see what he's doing," she'd say, and we goa up to t' study

door, hear him mumbling and bumming through it. "Dinner's ready, sir," I'd ca'

but he'd goa mumbling on like a deaf man, and sometimes Mrs. Wudsworth 'ud saay, "Goa and break a bottle or let a dish fall just outside t' door in t' passage." Eh dear, that mostly 'ud bring him out, would that. It was only that as wud, however. For ye kna, he was a vera careful mon, and he couldn't do wi' brekking the china.'" We should never have had this hint of domestic management or the following delightful glimpse of Wordsworth's jealous and all-embracing affection for the Westmoreland hills if Mr. Rawnsley had not searched the country side for stories. "Did he ever tell you which mountain he was fondest of?" he asked an old servant of

Wordsworth's. "He wasn't a man as would give a judgment again' ony mountain. I've heard great folks as came to the Mount say, 'Now, Mr. Wudsworth, we want to see t' finest mountain in t' country,' and he would say, 'Every mountain is finest." "

Mrs. Wordsworth does not seem to have made much impression on the Westmoreland folks beyond the fact that she was plain-featured, and "ter'ble partic'lar" in her accounts.

"Wudsworth niver knawed what he was wuth, or what he had in the house, he left everything to her. He was always companionable to her, and ter'ble fond of her, and not above being monstrable (demonstrative) at times in his own family, and oh, blessed barn, but he was fond o' his own childer, and fond o' Dorothy too, specially when she was faculty-strucken." Dorothy, the truest companion and sister any man ever had, was the one they had the most respect for. "Dorothy saw people."

"Dorothy was a ter'ble clever woman. She did as much of his potry as he did, and went completely off it (her head) at last, wi' studying it." When Mr. Rawnsley asked if Mrs. Wordsworth ever helped him with it, he received an emphatic denial; but we have a reminiscence as well as Mr. Rawnsley, and remember a Rydal man declaring that the Wordsworth family would suffer no pecuniary loss by the poet's death, for "Mrs. Wordsworth was a gay clever woman, and would carry on the business." This, however, seems to be a solitary opinion; one and all of those whose reminiscences are recorded in this paper say in one form or another that Dorothy had the wits of both Mr. and Mrs. Wordsworth; that "she was the cleverest mon o' the two at his job," and that "he allays went to her whenever he was puzzelt." At the risk of being too long we must quote one more reminiscence for the sake of contrasting it with Wordsworth's own words. ""Here," said a man to Mr. Rawnsley, "is the very spot where Wudsworth saw Barbara feeding her pet lamb, you'll happen have read | it i' the book. She telt me the spot wi' her own lips....... As I peered through the hedge upon the high-raised field at my right, I remembered [writes Mr. Rawnsley] that Barbara Lewthwaite's lips were for ever silent now, and recalled how I had heard from the pastor of a faraway parish that he had been asked by a very refined-looking handsome woman on her deathbed, to read over to her and to her husband the poem of 'The Pet Lamb,' and how she had said at the end, 'That was written about me. Mr. Wordsworth often spoke to me, and patted my head when I was a child,' and had added with a sigh, 'Eh, but he was such a dear, kind old man.'" Set against this dying assertion, which by dint of frequent repetition had become truth to the speaker at last, what Wordsworth

himself says:

""Barbara Lewthwaite, now living at Ambleside (1843), though much changed as to beauty,

was one of two most lovely sisters. Barbara Lewthwaite was not, in fact, the child whom I had seen and overheard as described in the poem. I chose the name for reasons implied in the above; and will here add a caution against the use of names of living persons. Within a few months after the publication of this poem, I was much surprised, and more hurt, to find it in a child's school-book which, having been compiled by Lindley Murray, had come into use in Grasmere School where Barbara was a pupil; and, alas! I had the mortification of hearing

that she was very vain of being thus distinguished; and, in after-life, she used to say

that she remembered the incident and what I had said to her upon the occasion."

To part company with Mr. Rawnsley, who has written a most amusing paper, although he might have managed the dialect better, we may give a story of our own, which has no particular connexion with the subject, but, never having been in print, may as well be given along with these other "reminiscences." We all know that Wordsworth underwent a great change of opinion, but the following anecdote shows how far this "Lost Leader" at last strayed from the path in which his youthful feet were set. Soon after the election of Mr. Bright as member for Durham, Wordsworth came to that place, and was in the Dean and Chapter Library with its distinguished librarian Mr. Raine. While they were talking-many were the subjects they had in common-in came a verger with a note from the Dean (Waddington) inviting Wordsworth to dinner. Wordsworth hastily penned a refusal, and said to Mr. Raine, "As if I would dine with a man who voted for John Bright!" Story springs from story. Some years later Mr. Bright announced a visit to the Liberal M.P. for the city, who, having some engagement which made him unable to be at home in the daytime, went to the cathedral to secure the services of the best informed verger. friend of mine is coming to-morrow to see the cathedral," said he; "I want you to show him round yourself and pay him special attention." "I'm very glad, I'm sure, sir, to show any attention to any friend of yours." "You will be sure he sees everything of interest." "He shall see everything, sir, everything." Finding the verger so well disposed, the M.P. tried to make him better disposed still, and said: "He is a very important man, very; you really must show him attention-in fact, it is Mr. John Bright." "Oh," said the verger, who was of Wordsworth's way of thinking, "I'll take good care that he doesn't steal anything away fra' the church"!

"A

Records of the English Catholics of 1715, compiled wholly from Original Documents. Edited by John Orlebar Payne. (Burns & Oates.)

SOME three years ago the late Canon Estcourt edited the summary of the register of the estates of the Roman Catholics who refused the oaths in 1715. The mere list of names had long been familiar to local historians and genealogists. In 1745-a year ominous to those who had not made terms with the new dynasty-a certain James Cosin, son of a former secretary to the Commissioners of Forfeited Estates, published a list containing the names not of Roman Catholics only, but also of the Anglican Nonjurors. It was not a religious, but a political catalogue. It gave its readers the names of those who were opposed to the Protestant succession; yet they appeared there not as adherents of the Pope, but as enemies of King George. There can be no doubt that by far the greater number were "Papists," yet it is not difficult to pick out a few High Church Nonjurors; and we believe, though we have not come on direct proof of the fact, that a few were Puritans of that extreme school who, like the Scottish Cameronians, refused to acknowledge any sovereign that they could not accept also as the supreme delegate of the Most High. Many such people existed in Cromwell's time, and we find them from time to time subject to ill treatment in the reign of Charles II. It is furthermore not improbable that Mr. Cosin's net entangled here and there a stray Quaker, who owes his place in the catalogue to his dislike not to the king, but to the legally prescribed mode of showing his loyalty.

The volume before us is free, or very nearly free, from Protestant leaven. Mr. Payne since the death of Canon Estcourt has had to carry on his work alone. He is, however, one to whom the by-paths of genealogy are familiar, and he has supplied an annotated account, arranged under counties, of the Roman Catholics who flourished at the time when "the wee, wee German lairdie" became King of Great Britain, France, and Ireland. No one can have an equally familiar acquaintance with the whole of England, and it is no censure to say that some of the counties are much more fully treated by Mr. Payne than others. Though there is not a shire in England in which there was not then to be found here and there a family of gentle blood which had clung to the old creed, yet the North was the stronghold of the unpopular mode of worship. It would take several columns to endeavour to explain why this was so. The forces which seem to have determined the faith of the men of old Northumbria owed their origin to circumstances of a time long antecedent to the religious struggles of the sixteenth century. It was not until our midland towns acquired a large population of Irish race that the Roman Catholic element there began to be an object of terror or hope.

The date of the accession of the house of Hanover makes an excellent starting-point in the investigation of English religious history. Protestantism was established by law, as events showed, so firmly that none of the disruptive forces by which the dynasty was threatened could hope to shatter it. Puritanism, which in the middle of the seventeenth century had overturned the Government and incoherently endeavoured to set up a theocracy on its ruins, survived now as an opinion only, as a method of worshipping God and of interpreting the phenomena of human life; but it had ceased to be a power which it was the duty of statesmen to take into account. The number of influential Roman Catholics who had been ready to help James II. in his subversive career had been exaggerated by popular indignation and terror. The scare of a "Popish plot" had predisposed grave and rational people to accept every wild fable that was told them. Seven-and-twenty years had elapsed, a new generation had arisen, and the ill-contrived insurrection of 1715, though it provoked anger, does not seem to have led the governing classes to fear seriously the strength of the "Popish party." They rather dreaded the Tory squires, who had inherited the absolutist opinions of the Cavaliers, but who took only a languid interest in those theological questions which separate the churches.

It would be interesting to discover what was the number of the Roman Catholic popu- |

lation in 1715. It is sometimes assumed that then the tide was at its lowest ebb. We think this is a mistake; but unless the Roman Catholic authorities of the present day should possess something in the way of a population return, of the existence of which we have never heard a hint, it would seem to be impossible that the question should ever be settled. To us it seems that about the middle of the century, or a little later-say the time of the accession of George III. - was the period when the Roman Catholic population had dwindled to its lowest point. The penal laws had ceased to be carried out with the ferocity which characterized an earlier time, but the subjects of "a foreign power were hampered at every turn, and constant irritation seemed about to achieve what the fierce legislation of a former time had failed to accomplish. As has been said before, 1715 is an excellent starting-point for the student of religious history, and it is most useful to have a list which must be nearly exhaustive of the men of wealth and position who belonged to that form of faith which is the most antagonistic to the established Protestantism. It has an historical as well as a psychological interest. Few persons realize to what a great extent religious faith is a matter of inheritance and family tradition. Wehave gone over those parts of Mr. Payne's catalogue with which we are most familiar carefully name by name, and where living representatives are known to us we have found that in most cases they are professing the same faith as that held by their forefathers upwards of one hundred and seventy years ago.

The extracts from wills which Mr. Payne gives contain a multitude of curious things on which we should have liked to enlarge. Here is one example out of many. It is commonly assumed-why we know not-that the burial of the heart in a separate spot from the body was a medieval custom, which went out with prayers for the dead and Latin services. The reason may be that popular history books tell us these things about Richard I.-whose

Herte inuyncyble to Roan he sent full mete,

though his body was interred at Fontevraud beside his father-but do not supply similar picturesque details regarding the people of later days. In 1734 Mary Stapleton, widow, "late of the city of York," but then of Bath, desired that if she died beyond sea her heart should be brought to England and buried beside her husband. She was an Errington by birth, and both she and her husband had many relatives in the religious houses of the Low Countries. We believe she died in this country, and if so her order was not carried out. The place and time of her death are, however, not certain. If she did die abroad and her injunctions were obeyed, this is one of the latest instances we know of in this country of separate heart burial.

The Carisbrooke Library. - The Tale of a Tub, and other Works by Jonathan Swift. Edited by Henry Morley, Professor of English History at University College, London. (Routledge & Sons.)

done more useful, and, in spite of some not altogether judicious abridgment, creditable work in the way of popularizing great authors. His "Universal Library," published by Messrs. Routledge, having been completed, or, at any rate, having come to an end, at the sixty-third volume, he is now engaged in editing a larger and more elaborate series under the title of the "Carisbrooke Library," which "will include books for which the volumes of the former series did not allow sufficient room." Moreover, as the volumes are to come out at intervals of two months, and will consist of 450 pages, there will be both time and space for introductions and annotations, which were excluded from the "Universal Library" by considerations of cost. So far as can be judged from the first volume, the "Carisbrooke Library" promises to hold its own among its ever-multiplying rivals. It is well printed in clear legible type by the Ballantyne Press; the paper is fair, the edges rough, and the binding modest and tasteful, though a poor gilt cut of the gateway of Carisbrooke Castle rather disfigures it.

That the opening volume should contain a selection from the works of Swift is a sign of the times. A few years ago there was hardly such a thing to be boughtSwift was not "proper"; and in 1884, when Messrs. Kegan Paul & Co. included the Dean's 'Prose Writings' in the "Parchment Library," they deemed it necessary to insist upon the excision of indelicate phrases. The "Parchment" Swift was followed by another selection in the "Camelot Classics," and now we have a third. The last two permit their author to indulge in his habit of calling a spade a spade, considering that when popular taste is not scandalized by the pruriency of modern works of fiction it is not likely to shy at Swift's coarseness.

'History of

A selection from Swift's works may be made on various principles, but so far as we can see Mr. Morley has gone upon no fixed plan at all. "Order in disorder," he says, is to be one of the characteristics of the "Library," and in the present volume the disorder, at all events, is plainly revealed. He has made a most interesting book, no doubt; but it appears to be the result more of accident than design. It consists of two parts, of which the first occupies two-thirds of the volume. This part is composed of the Tale of a Tub' of 1704, supplemented by the 'Miscellanies in Prose and Verse' of 1711, with certain omissions. The 'Tale of a Tub' is printed entire, with the 'Battle of the Books' and the Martin.' It seems a little out of place to attempt a facsimile of the title-page of the second edition of the 'Tub,' when the spelling, &c., and the half-title of the 'Battle of the Books' follow the modernized system of the eighth edition. Of the 'Miscellanies' we find the most famous-'Mrs. Harris's Petition,' 'Baucis and Philemon,' 'City Shower,' &c., in verse; and the 'Meditation on a Broomstick,' 'Argument against Abolishing Christianity, the Bickerstaff papers, Tritical Essay, and the 'Project for the Advancement of Religion' among prose essays. The last seems to have been introduced with the object of showing Swift in the light of a devout divine. Some wellEngland Man' and 'Contests in Athens and Rome,' are, it will be seen, omitted. We should ourselves have preferred the 'Miscellanies' complete, or else a more critical selection properly arranged. As it is, the various pieces come in any orderneither that of the 1711 edition nor that of

dates. The second part is chiefly biographical, and largely concerned with Stella. It includes the first seven letters of the 'Journal,' the birthday poems, the three prayers, three sermons, Cadenus and Vanessa,' and two or three other poems. It will be observed that all the political tracts and the Irish pamphlets are excluded, as well as 'Gulliver's Travels'; but a second volume is promised in which the reader is to survey the Dean from a different point of view.

The point of view from which he is to be regarded in the present selection is obvious enough from Mr. Morley's pleasantly written introductions to the two parts. Here the Dean appears as the kind - hearted gentleman, the tender lover, the devout Christian. We are far from denying that he was all these, but we were not prepared to find him only these, nor these so immaculately. That Swift has been often cruelly misunderstood and maligned is true enough, but he can hardly bear so glaring a whitewash as is here laid over him. Mr. Morley is not, we believe, specially a student of Swift, and that should make him less confident in his many assertions. For example, the episode of Varina is not pleasant to those who would see no brutal element in their hero; but it is here dismissed with "Swift courteously assented to her [Miss Waring's] view" about the insufficiency of his income, and not a word is added about the final inexcusable letter. Then the story of Vanessa is one which many warm admirers of the Dean have found a painful subject; but Mr. Morley has no such qualms. "The relation of Hester Vanhomrigh to Swift," he says,

66

was that of a poor girl who might be liable, through green sickness, to try her teeth on cinders and slate-pencil, and who not only fell ridiculously 'in love' with her elderly friend, but was unhealthy enough to tell him so. The situation was, for Swift, embarrassing in those days of formal politeness. He put his reasoning with her, and his expression of regret and astonishment, into a poem of 'Cadenus and Vanessa,' which speaks clearly enough to any one who reads it without prejudice......' Cadenus and Vanessa' was a sugar-coated pill, in which the unbiassed reader will not fail to find the pill, when to poor sickly Hester Vanhomrigh there was nothing apparent but the surface sugar. Swift, no doubt, might have dealt more wisely with his problem, but even in our days of plainer speaking a kind-hearted man would find the problem difficult."

We should be glad to believe this interpretation, but unfortunately it is incredible.

though he inserts them, seem to form an antidote alike to pill and salve. The last interview at Marley Abbey is referred to as merely "angry"; the "awful look" is not recorded. In short, the whole defence is special pleading and can convince no one.

"looking over a fringe of apricot trees and acacias, command a very extensive prospect; not beautiful or richly varied, but often attractive, with that indescribable fascination of eastern colouring, that does much to compensate for many a deficiency of form and outline "whence the eye, looking across

Danube,

the

"is carried over a richly tinted plain, dotted by a few small lakes, until it meets a solid group of bronze and violet hills, backed by the majestic outlines of a last spur of the Balkan range." The Danube is regarded as a friend, it seems, but the Pruth is considered a foe.

Mr. Morley is no less confident about the solution of the mystery which has perplexed all Swift's biographers-his relations with Stella (whose ageis, as usual, wrongly given). He asserts, without even hinting at the possibility of other views, that Swift resolved not to marry because he would not transmit the heritage of insanity to his children. This is, of course, pure assumption; and though as a hypothesis it is worth considering, and has often been considered, it should not be war, and famine, down to the burrs brought by

stated as a fact. It has been suggested that Swift could not have had children; but whichever way the matter is regarded it leaves many difficulties unexplained, and Mr. Morley should have stated his theory in less positive terms.

The introduction is full of almost childlike faith. When Stella made the famous remark about 'Cadenus and Vanessa,' that "the Dean can write beautifully on a broomstick" (it should be "finely"), the editor callsit "a reasonable way of saying 'Pooh!"" and ridicules the idea that it contained a grain of jealousy. Even "Dearly Beloved Roger" is treated seriously, devoutly: "for why should not the Scripture move the parson and the clerk?" We dread Mr. Morley's handling of 'Gulliver's Travels' in a future volume if this is the way he takes Swift, especially as he has already laid marked emphasis on the "religious purpose of Gulliver.' We do not deny that purpose, but Mr. Morley seems disposed to view the Dean of St. Patrick's solely in his cassock, and, luckily or unluckily, there are a few other elements in Swift's writings besides his piety and his affection for Stella. Per- ❘ haps in the future volume Mr. Morley may show his capacity for appreciating these.

As has been already said, the selection is necessarily interesting, and will serve to attract many more readers to the great English satirist. If we have been compelled to differ from Mr. Morley's theories, we are not the less grateful to him for having reprinted and annotated some of Swift's works which are not easily accessible in so cheap and yet readable a form.

EASTERN EUROPE AND WESTERN ASIA.

Untrodden Paths in Roumania. By Mrs.
Walker. (Chapman & Hall.)
The Kingdom of Georgia. By Oliver War-
drop. (Sampson Low & Co.)

So long as Mrs. Walker confines herself to describing what she has seen with her own eyes, her descriptions of Roumanian scenery, manners, and customs are bright and lively. When she relies upon what others have seen or written, her work loses its main charm. Fortunately, the greater part of her volume is devoted to sketches, with pen and pencil, of what actually came within the scope of her personal ken, and it is worthy of perusal by all to whom intelligent accounts of paths not generally trodden give pleasure. Very pleasant, for instance, is the account of the house in which she passed some weeks at Galatz, the

The Roumanians

"declare that all misfortunes-from cholera,

the Russians in their horses' tails-come to them from the further side of that ill-famed river."

As a specimen of Mrs. Walker's de

scriptive powers may be taken her account

of the view from the summit of the great grassy mound known to the common people as the "Capi di Bové" and to antiquaries as the "Caput Bovis"-a fortified hill supposed to have been successively held by a Milesian colony, by Romans, Goths, Genoese, and Turks:

"A splendid panoramic view is obtained of the surrounding country; you look down upon the Sereth, in many a silver winding, until it falls into the Danube, forming the boundary between Moldavia and Wallachia; the course of the mighty river can be traced (looking upwards) until it melts into the softest, tenderest tones of distant land and sky; or, following the downward current, you watch it flowing towards the delta of the Danube, that paradise of sportsmen and botanists, a wild 'No-man's land,' where pelicans, and black and white swans, cormorants, wild geese, ducks, and myriads of rare kinds of aquatic fowl, live among wonderful lilies, gigantic flowering reeds, delicate plants and glowing blossoms, rarely met with in any other spot.”

Considerable space is allotted to accounts of the numerous monasteries and churches Mrs. Walker visited. Almost everywhere she seems to have met with courteous and kindly people. Monks, nuns, and peasants appear to have vied with each other in enabling their English lady visitor to carry off agreeable impressions. Of the cottages in some parts of Wallachia Mrs. Walker speaks in the highest terms. Nothing can be prettier, she says, than they are, with their dark roofs overhanging and supported on wooden pilasters, forming a simple verandah; their tiny windows bordered with bright blue, their freshly whitewashed walls, their flowers and blossoming creepers, their shady limes and beeches, and their soft background of wooded uplands. And they are tenanted by beings of Arcadian mildness, or at least they seem to be. Only their pigs are sometimes annoying. A gentleman who was passing late one day across an open piece of land