despise the practical results of the improve ment of natural knowledge, and its beneficial influence on material civilization it must, I think, be admitted that the great ideas, some of which I have indicated, and the ethical spirit which I have endeavoured to sketch, in the few moments which remained at my disposal, constitute the real and permanent significance of natural knowledge.

1

theum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be passé. As boys love lollipops so these juvenile fops love to roll phrases ab under the tongue, as if phrases in themselve 5 had a value apart from thoughts, feeling great conceptions, or human sympathy. It Scott is just one of the poets (we may poets all the great creators in prose or in verse of whom one never wearies, just as one listen to Beethoven, or watch the sunriser the sunset day by day with new delight think I can read the Antiquary, or the Br of Lammermoor, Ivanhoe, Quentin Durvers and Old Mortality, at least once a year airest

If these ideas be destined, as I believe they 10 are, to be more and more firmly established as the world grows older; if that spirit be fated, as I believe it is, to extend itself into all departments of human thought, and to become co-extensive with the range of knowledge; if, 15 as our race approaches its maturity, it discovers, as I believe it will, that there is but one kind of knowledge and but one method of acquiring it; then we, who are still children, may justly feel it our highest duty to recognize 20 he might repeat the process of reading hir the advisableness of improving natural knowledge, and so to aid ourselves and our successors in their course towards the noble goal which lies before mankind.

Frederick Harrison

1831

WALTER SCOTT

(From The Choice of Books, 1880)

Scott is a perfect library in himself. A en stant reader of romances would find that it needed months to go through even the be pieces of the inexhaustible painter of eigi full centuries and every type of man; 30:

ten times in a lifetime without a sense a fatigue or sameness. The poetic beauty of Scott's creations is almost the least of his great qualities. It is the universality of his sym 25 pathy that is so truly great, the justice of he estimates, the insight into the spirit of each age, his intense absorption of self in the vas epic of human civilisation. What are the oit almanacs that they so often give us as his30 tories beside these living pictures of the ordered succession of ages? As in Homer himself, we see in this prose Iliad of modern history, the battle of the old and the new, the heroic de fence of ancient strongholds, the long impend

In Europe, as in England, Walter Scott re- 35 ing and inevitable doom of medieval He mains as yet the last in the series of the great creative spirits of the human race.

Strong men and proud women struggle against the destiny of modern society, unconsciously working out its ways, undauntedly defying its power. How just is our island Homer! Neither Greek nor Trojan sways him; Achies is his hero; Hector is his favorite; he loves the councils of chiefs, and the palace of Priam; but the swine-herd, the charioteer, the slave-girl the hound, the beggar, and the herds-man, all

No one of his successors, however clear be the genius and the partial success of some of them, belongs to the same grand type of mind, or has 40 now a lasting place in the roll of the immortals. It should make us sad to reflect that a generation, which already has begun to treat Scott with the indifference that is the lot of a "classic," should be ready to fill its insatiable maw 45 glow alike in the harmonious colouring of his

with the ephemeral wares of the booksellers, and the reeking garbage of the boulevard.

peopled epic. We see the dawn of our Engli-h nation, the defence of Christendom against the Koran, the grace and terror of feudalism, the rise of monarchy out of baronies, the rise of

try out of serfage, the pathetic ruin of chivalry, the splendid death-struggle of Catholicism, the sylvan tribes of the mountain (remnants of our pre-historic forefathers) beating themselves to pieces against the hard advance of

We all read Scott's romances, as we have all read Hume's History of England; but how often do we read them, how zealously, with 50 parliaments out of monarchy, the rise of indus what sympathy and understanding? I am told that the last discovery of modern culture is that Scott's prose is commonplace; that the young men at our universities are far too critical to care for his artless sentences and flowing 55 descriptions. They prefer Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the Euphuism of young Oxford, just as some people prefer a Dresden Shepherdess to the Caryatides of the Erec

1 A temple in Athens, (so named because it contained the bust of Erectheus), generally regarded as one of the finest specimens of Greek architecture. The Caryatides are six robed female figures which support the Erectheum, and are choice examples of architectural sculpture.

modern industry; we see the grim heroism of the Bible-martyrs, the catastrophe of feudalism overwhelmed by a practical age which knew little of its graces, and almost nothing of its virtues. Such is Scott, who, we may say, has done for the various phases of modern history, what Shakespeare has done for the manifold types of human character. And this glorious and most human and most historical of poets, without whom our very conception of human 10 development would have ever been imperfect, this manliest, and truest, and widest of romancers we neglect for some hothouse hybrid of psychological analysis, for the wretched imitators of Balzac, and the jackanapes phrase- 15 mongering of some Osric2 of the day, who assures us that Scott is an absolute Philistine.

ON READING

(From the same)

dreadful an abortion of a book the rare volume may be, the more desperate is the struggle of libraries to possess it. Civilisation in fact has evolved a complete apparatus, an order of 5 men, and a code of ideas, for the express purpose one may say of degrading the great books, and gives the place of honour to that which is plainly literary carrion.

Now I suppose, at the bottom of all this lies that rattle and restlessness of life which belongs to the industrial Maelstrom wherein we ever revolve. And connected therewith comes also that literary dandyism, which results from the pursuit of letters without any social purpose or any systematic faith. To read from the pricking of some cerebral itch rather than from a desire of forming judgments; to get, like an Alpine club stripling, to the top of some unscaled pinnacle of culture; to use books as a 20 sedative, as a means of exciting a mild intellectual titillation, instead of as a means of elevating the nature; to dribble on in a perpetual literary gossip, in order to avoid the effort of bracing the mind to think-such is our habit in an age of utterly chaotic education. We read, as the bereaved poet made rhymes

Collecting rare books and forgotten authors is perhaps of all the collecting manias the most foolish in our day. There is much to be said 25 for rare china and curious beetles. The china is occasionally beautiful; and the beetles at least are droll. But rare books now are, by the nature of the case, worthless books; and their rarity usually consists in this, that the 30 printer made a blunder in the text, or that they contain something exceptionally nasty or silly. To affect a profound interest in neglected authors and uncommon books, is a sign

"For the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics numbing pain."

We, to whom steam and electricity have given
almost everything excepting bigger brains and
hearts, who have a new invention ready for

for the most part-not that a man has ex- 35 every meeting of the Royal Institution,3 who

want new things to talk about faster than children want new toys to break, we cannot take up the books we have seen about us since our childhood: Milton, or Molière, or Scott.

hausted the resources of ordinary literaturebut that he has no real respect for the greatest productions of the greatest men of the world. This bibliomania seizes hold of rational beings and so perverts them, that in the sufferer's 40 It feels like donning knee-breeches and buckles,

mind the human race exists for the sake of the books, and not the books for the sake of the human race. There is one book they might read to good purpose, the doings of a great

to read what everybody has read, what everybody can read, and which our very fathers thought good entertainment scores of years ago. Hard-worked men and overwrought

book collector-who once lived in La Mancha.1 45 women crave an occupation which shall free

them from their thoughts and yet not take them from their world. And thus it comes that we need at least a thousand new books every season, whilst we have rarely a spare

To the collector, and sometimes to the scholar,
the book becomes a fetich or idol, and is worthy
of the worship of mankind, even if it be not of
the slightest use to anybody. As the book
exists, it must have the compliment paid it 50 hour left for the greatest of all. But I am get-

of being invited to the shelves. The "library
is imperfect without it," although the library
will, so to speak stink, when it is there. The
great books are of course the common books;
and these are treated by collectors and li- 55
brarians with sovereign contempt. The more

2 An affected courtier in Hamlet, noted for his high flown phrases.

1 Don Quixote in the romance of Cervantes.

ting into a vein too serious for our purpose; education is a long and thorny topic. I will cite but the words on this head of the great Bishop Butler. "The great number of books and papers of amusement which, of one kind or another, daily come in one's way, have in 2 Tennyson's In Memoriam, v. 5.

3 Founded by Count Rumford and others in 1799, for the furthering of mechanical inventions and the teaching of applied science.

part occasioned, and most perfectly fall in
with, and humour this idle way of reading and
considering things. By this means time, even
in solitude, is happily got rid of, without the
pain of attention; neither is any part of it more
put to the account of idleness, one can scarce
forbear saying is spent with less thought, than
great part of that which is spent in reading."
But this was written a century and a half ago,
in 1729; since which date, let us trust, the 10
multiplicity of print and the habits of desul-
tory reading have considerably abated..

We need to be reminded every day, how many are the books of inimitable glory, which,

The greatest men amongst them, Swift or a Johnson, have indeed a sense-perhaps a really stronger sense than Browne or Taylor-of the pettiness of our lives and the narrow limits of 5 our knowledge. No great man could ever be without it. But the awe of the infinite and the unseen does not induce them to brood over the mysterious, and find utterance for bewildered musings on the inscrutable enigma.

It is only felt in a certain habitual sadness which clouds their whole tone of thought. They turn their backs upon the infinite and abandon the effort at a solution. Their eyes are fixed upon the world around them, and they

with all our eagerness after reading, we have 15 regard as foolish and presumptuous any one

never taken in our hands. It will astonish most of us to find how much of our very industry is given to the books which leave no mark,

how often we rake in the litter of the printing

who dares to contemplate the great darkness. The expression of this sentiment in literature is a marked disposition to turn aside from pure speculation, combined with a deep in

press, whilst a crown of gold and rubies is 20 terest in social and moral laws. The absence offered us in vain.

Sir Leslie Stephen

1832-1904

SWIFT AND THE SPIRIT OF HIS TIME

(From History of English Thought in the Eight

eenth Century, 1876)

of any deeper speculative ground makes the immediate practical questions of life all the more interesting. We know not what we are, nor whither we are going, nor whence we 25 come; but we can, by the help of common sense, discover a sufficient share of moral maxims for our guidance in life; and we can analyse human passions, and discover what are the moving forces of society, without going 30 back to first principles. Knowledge of human nature, as it actually presented itself in the shifting scene before them, and a vivid appreciation of the importance of the moral law, are the staple of the best literature of the time.

philosophy, the enforcement of ethical principles is the task of those who were inclined to despise philosophy. When a creed is dying, the importance of preserving the moral law naturally becomes a pressing consideration with all strong natures.

A hatred for enthusiasm was as strongly impressed upon the whole character of contemporary thought as a hatred of scepticism. And thus the literary expression of the feeling is 35 As ethical speculation was prominent in the rather a dislike to all speculation than a dislike to a particular school of speculatists. The whole subject was dangerous, and should be avoided by reasonable men. A good common-sense religion should be taken for granted, and no ques- 40 tions asked. If the philosophy of the time was unfitted for poetry, it was, for the same reason, unfitted to stimulate the emotions, and therefore for practical life. With Shakespeare or Sir Thomas Browne, or Jeremy Taylor, 45 well as a striking contrast. They are alike in

I have coupled Swift and Johnson as the two most vigorous representatives of this tendency. Between them there is a curious analogy as

that shrewd humorous common sense which seems to be the special endowment of the English race. They are alike, too, in this; that they express the reaction against the complacent optimism of the Pope-Shaftesbury variety. They illustrate the incapacity of that system of thought to satisfy men of powerful emotional nature. The writings of each might be summed up in a phrase embodying the most

or Milton, man is contemplated in his relations to the universe; he is in presence of eternity and infinity; life is a brief dream; we are ephemeral actors in a vast drama; heaven and hell are behind the veil of phenomena; at every 50 step our friends vanish into the vast abyss of ever-present mystery. To all such thoughts the writers of the eighteenth century seemed to close their eyes as absolutely as possible. They do not, like Sir Thomas Browne, delight 55 uncompromising protest against the optimist

to lose themselves in an Oh! Altitudino!1 or to snatch a solemn joy from the giddiness which follows a steady gaze into the infinite. 1 V. p. 244, and n. 1.

philosophy. Swift says, with unrivalled intensity, that the natural man is not, as theorists would maintain, a reasonable and virtuous animal; but, for the most part, a knave and a

fool. Johnson denies, with equal emphasis,
though with inferior literary power, that the
business of life can be carried on by help of
rose-coloured sentiments and general com-
placency. The world is, at best, but a melan-
choly place, full of gloom, of misery, of wasted
purpose, and disappointed hopes. "Whatever
is, is right," say the philosophers. Make up
the heavy account of suffering, of disease, vice,
cruelty, of envy, hatred, and malice, of corrup- 10
tion in high places, of starvation and nakedness
amongst the low, of wars, and pestilences,
and famines, of selfish ambition trampling on
thousands, and wasted heroism strengthening
oppression by its failure, of petty domestic 15
tyranny, of lying, hypocrisy, and treachery,
which run through all the social organism like
a malignant ulcer, and see how far your specious
maxim will take you.

That is the melancholy burden of the teach- 20 ing of each of these great men; and it was echoed in various tones by many who felt that the grain of a sham philosophy consisted chiefly of unprofitable husks. Between Swift and Johnson, indeed, there was a wide dif- 25 ference; and the sturdy moralist had a hearty dislike for the misanthropist whose teaching was so far at one with his own. The strong sense of evil which, in Johnson's generous na

senters, deists, and papists; but it would be an insult to that fiery intellect to suppose that his official defence of the Thirty-nine Articles2 represents any very vivid belief. He could ex5 press himself in very different fashion when he was in earnest. Jove's address, in the "Day of Judgment," shows the true Swift:

Offending race of human kind,
By nature, learning, reason blind;
You who through frailty stept aside,
And you who never fell-from pride;
You who in different sects were shammed,
And come to see each other damned
(So some folks told you, but they knew
No more of Jove's designs than you-)
The world's mad business now is o'er,
And I resent these pranks no more—
I to such blockheads set my wit!

I damn such fools! Go, go, you're bit.

That is genuine feeling. The orthodox phrases are no more part of Swift than his bands and cassock.

Swift's idiosyncrasy would doubtless have made itself felt at any time. The special direction of his haughty passions and intense intellect is determined by the conditions of the time. In a time of strong beliefs he would have been a vehement partisan. . . . He felt to

ture, produced rather sadness than anger, had 30 the depths of his soul the want of any of the

principles which in trying times take concrete shape in heroic natures; and he assumed that the whole race of the courtiers of kings and mobs in all ages were such vile crawling creatures as could sell England or starve Ireland to put a few thousands in their pockets. He felt the want of some religion, and therefore scalped poor Collins, and argued with his marvellous ingenuity of irony against "the abolition of Christianity;" but the dogmas of theologians were mere matter for the Homeric laughter of the "Tale of a Tub." He had not the unselfish qualities or the indomitable belief in the potential excellence of human nature to become a reformer of manners, or the speculative power to endeavour to remould the ancient creeds. He stands in fierce isolation amongst the calmer or shallower intellects of his time, with insight enough to see the

driven Swift to moody hatred of his species. He is the most tragic figure in our literature. Beside the deep agony of his soul, all other suffering, and especially that which takes a morbid delight in contemplating itself, is pale 35 and colourless. He resembles a victim tied to the stake and slowly tortured to madness and death; whilst from his proudly compressed lips there issue no weak lamentations but the deep curses of which one syllable is more effec- 40 tive than a volume of shrieks. Through the more petty feelings of mere personal spite and disappointed ambition we feel the glow of generous passions doomed to express themselves only in the language of defiant hatred. 45 The total impression made by Swift's writings is unique and almost appalling; for even the sheer brutality suggests some strange disease, and the elaborate triflings remind us of a statesman amusing himself with spiders in a 50 hollowness of their beliefs, with moral depth

Bastille. If we ask what were the genuine creeds of this singular intellect, the answer must be a blank. The "Tale of a Tub" is the keenest of satire against all theologians; "Gulliver's Travels" expresses the concentrated 55 essence of contempt for all other classes of mankind; the sermons and tracts defend the Church of England in good set terms, and prove beyond all question his scorn of dis

enough to give such forcible utterance to his
feelings as has scarcely been rivalled in our
literature. But he had not the power or the

2i. e. the thirty-nine articles in the Prayer-book.
V. p. 295, supra.

Anthony Collins, published in 1713, a Discourse of
Freethinking, in which he ridiculed the clergy, the Mosaic
Law, and the evidences of revealed religion. Swift at-
tacked this in his tract.

An allusion to Swift's Argument Against the Abolishing of Christianity, 1708.

nobility of nature to become a true poet or philosopher, or reformer. When a shallow optimism is the most living creed, a man of strong nature becomes a scornful pessimist.

John Richard Green

1837-1883

THE DEATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH

(From History of the English People,

1877-1880)

5

ence of the people itself lessened as they fer the pressure and taxation of the war. Of okt. men had pressed to see the Queen as if it were a glimpse of heaven. "In the year 1588," a 5 Bishop tells us who was then a country by fresh come to town, "I did live at the upor end of the Strand near St. Clement's Church when suddenly there came a report to us was in December, much about five o'clock a 10 the night, very dark) that the Queen was gote to Council, "and if you would see the Queen you must come quickly. Then we all ran, whe the Court gates were set open, and no man di. hinder us from coming in. There we came,

was usually at Lenten sermons; and when w had staid there an hour and that the yard was full, there being a number of torches, the queen came out in great state. When we

your Majesty!' Then the Queen turned to us and said, 'God bless you all, my good people!' Then we cried again, 'God bless your Majesty! God bless your Majesty

well have a greater prince, but you shall never have a more loving prince.' And so looking one upon another a while, the Queen departed This wrought such an impression on us, for shows and pageantry are ever best seen by torchlight, that all the way long we did nothing but talk what an admirable Queen she was, and how we would adventure our lives to do her service." But now, as Elizabeth passed along in her progresses, the people whose applause she courted remained cold and silent. The temper of the age in fact was changing and isolating her as it changed. Her own Eng lang, the England which had grown up around

The triumph of Mountjoy1 flung its lustre 15 where there was a far greater company tha over the last days of Elizabeth, but no outer triumph could break the gloom which gathered round the dying Queen. Lonely as she had always been, her loneliness deepened as she drew towards the grave. The statesmen and 20 cried 'God save your Majesty! God save warriors of her earlier days had dropped one by one from her Council board. Leicester2 had died in the year of the Armada; two years later Walsingham3 followed him to the grave; in 1598 Burleigh' himself passed away. Their 25 Then the Queen said again to us, 'You may successors were watching her last moments, and intriguing for favour in the coming reign. Her favourite, Lord Essex, not only courted favour with James of Scotland, but brought him to suspect Robert Cecil, who had suc- 30 ceeded his father at the Queen's Councilboard, of designs against his succession. The rivalry between the two ministers hurried Essex into fatal projects which led to his failure in Ireland and to an insane outbreak of revolt 35 which brought him in 1601 to the block. But Cecil had no sooner proved the victor in this struggle at court than he himself entered into a secret correspondence with the King of Scots. His action was wise; it brought James again 40 her, serious, moral, prosaic, shrank coldly from into friendly relations with the Queen; and paved the way for a peaceful transfer of the crown. But hidden as this correspondence was from Elizabeth, the suspicion of it only added to her distrust. The troubles of the 45 She had enjoyed life as men of her day enjoyed war in Ireland brought fresh cares to the aged Queen. It drained her treasury. The old splendour of her Court waned and disappeared. Only officials remained about her, "the other of the Council and nobility estranged them- 50 selves by all occasions." The love and rever

this brilliant, fanciful, unscrupulous child of earth and the Renascence.

But if ministers and courtiers were counting on her death, Elizabeth had no mind to die.

it, and now that they were gone she clung to it with a fierce tenacity. She hunted, she danced, she jested with her young favourites, she coquetted and scolded and frolicked at sixty-seven as she had done at thirty. "The Queen," wrote a courtier a few months before her death, "was never so gallant these many years nor so set upon jollity." She persisted in spite of opposition, in her gorgeous progresses 55 from country-house to country-house. clung to business as of old, and rated in her usual fashion "one who minded not to giving up some matter of account." But death crept on. Her face became haggard, and her

She