what a horribly bad fellow he could be; to what unspeakable depths of degradation he could descend; or, again, how much a woman that he liked could do in the way of improving him. The glimpses we get of the man in Shelley's letters are very interesting: SHELLEY, AT VENICE, TO HIS WIFE. "At three o'clock I called on Lord Byron: he was delighted to see me. "He took me in his gondola across the laguna to a long sandy island, which defends Venice from the Adriatic. When we disembarked, we found his horses waiting for us, and we rode along the sand of the sea, talking. Our conversation consisted in histories of his wounded feelings, and questions as to my affairs, and great professions of friendship and regard for me. He said that if he had been in England at the time of the Chancery affair, he would have moved heaven and earth to have prevented such a decision. We talked of literary matters, his Fourth Canto, which he says is very good, and indeed repeated some stanzas of great energy to me." Again: SHELLEY, AT NAPLES, TO PEACOCK. Again: to see me. SHELLEY, AT RAVENNA, TO HIS WIFE. "Lord Byron is very well, and was delighted his health, and lives a life totally the reverse of He has in fact completely recovered that which he led at Venice. He has a perma nent sort of liaison with Contessa Guiccioli, who is now at Florence, and seems from her letters to be a very amiable woman. She is waiting there till something shall be decided as to their emigration to Switzerland or stay in Italy; which is yet undetermined on either side. She was compelled to escape from the Papal territory in great haste, as measures had already been taken to place her in a convent, where she would have been unrelentingly confined for life. "Lord Byron had almost destroyed himself at Venice: his state of debility was such that he was unable to digest any food, he was consumed by hectic fever, and would speedily have perished, but for this attachment, which has reclaimed him from the excesses into which he threw himself from carelessness and pride, rather than taste. Poor fellow! he is now quite well, and immersed in politics and literature.” SHELLEY, AT RAVENNA, TO HIS WIFE. "I told you I had written by L. B.'s desire "I entirely agree with what you say about to la Guiccioli, to dissuade her and her family 'Childe Harold.' The spirit in which it is from Switzerland. Her answer is this moment written is, if insane, the most wicked and mis- arrived, and my representation seems to have chievous insanity that ever was given forth. reconciled them to the unfitness of that step. At It is a kind of obstinate and self-willed folly, in the conclusion of a letter, full of all the fine things which he hardens himself. I remonstrated with she says she has heard of me, is this request, him in vain on the tone of mind from which which I transcribe:- Signore-la vostra bontá such a view of things alone arises. For its mi fa ardita di chiedervi unfavore me lo acreal root is very different from its apparent one. corderete voi? Non partite da Ravenna senza Nothing can be less sublime than the true source Milord.' Of course, being now, by all the laws of these expressions of contempt and desperation. of knighthood, captive to a lady's request, I The fact is, at first, the Italian women with shall only be at liberty on my parole until Lord whom he associates are perhaps the most con- Byron is settled at Pisa. I shall reply, of course, temptible of all who exist under the moon- that the boon is granted, and that if her lover is the most ignorant, the most disgusting, the reluctant to quit Ravenna, after I have made armost bigoted; an ordinary Eng-rangements for receiving him at Pisa, I am lishman cannot approach them. Well, L. B. bound to place myself in the same situation as is familiar with the lowest sort of these women, now, to assail him with importunities to rejoin the people his gondolieri pick up in the streets. her. Of this there is, fortunately, no need; and He associates with wretches who seem almost I need not tell you there is no fear that this chivto have lost the gait and physiognomy of man, and who do not scruple to avow practices which are not only not named, but I believe seldom even conceived in England. He says he disapproves, but he endures. He is heartily and deeply discontented with himself; and contemplating in the distorted mirror of his own thoughts the nature and the destiny of man, what can he behold but objects of contempt and despair? But that he is a great poet, I think the Address to Ocean proves. And he has a certain degree of candour while you talk to him, but unfortunately it does not outlast your departure. No, I do not doubt, and, for his sake, I ought to hope, that his present career must end soon in some violent circumstance." alric submission of mine to the great general laws of antique courtesy, against which I never rebel, and which is my religion, should interfere with my quick returning, and long remaining with you, dear girl. "We ride out every evening as usual, and practice pistol-shooting at a pumpkin; and I am not sorry to observe that I approach towards my noble friend's exactness of aim. The water here is villanous, and I have suffered tortures; but I now drink nothing but alcalescent water, and am much relieved. I have the greatest trouble to get away; and L. B., as a reason for my stay, has urged that, without either me or the Guiccioli, he will certainly fall into his old habits. I then talk, and he listens to reason; and I earnestly hope that he is too well aware of the terrible and degrading consequences of his former mode of life to be in danger from the short interval of temptation that will be left him. L. B. speaks with great kindness and interest of you, and seems to wish to see you." ter. husband in the familiar and very clever verses in "Don Juan ""Her favourite science was the mathematical," and so on, was in fact an able and accomplished woman; a thinker, and a good wriThere are letters of hers extant which Mr. Mill would not be ashamed of. Again, This last extract is very striking, show-the Countess of Lovelace, lately deceased, ing, as it does, not only that the Countess Guiccioli knew, but that Byron himself knew the value, in the way of social restraint, of the friendship of a pure-minded man like Shelley. There is something almost amusingly imploring about the beautiful lady's Don't leave Ravenna without taking Milord with you." 66 The interest of these extracts will, we hope, excuse their length. One or two notes as to matters of fact known in literary circles, but not to general readers, may be added. Lady Byron, ridiculed by her the Ada of " Childe Harold," was a mathematician and well versed in the sciences. The best proof of the estimation, in which she was held during her lifetime is that she was, in well-informed circles, credited for a long time with the authorship of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation." We have preferred breaking what, to large numbers of readers, will be new ground, to making general criticisms upon Byron's poetry, and can only, in conclusion, say that this "Chandos " edition is a wonder in its way. The English Bible. By a Barrister-at-Law. |ity. We cannot say that the book is very attractBartlett. THE Barrister attempts too much. His subject is the evidence relating to the history and authenticity of the Bible generally. It is impossible to compress into a volume of a hundred and eighty pages even the results of the controversies which have been raised on these questions. His title suggests a speciality to which he might have confined himself with advantage. He gives, for instance, some interesting information about the circumstances under which our own Authorised Version was drawn up; but he says next to nothing on a subject which, in one point of view, is of at least equal importance, the attempts at translation which were made before Wickliffe's time. On this he satisfies himself with a quotation from Foxe. Nor is his account of Wickliffe and his successors as full as it should be. How imperfect is his treatment of other topics may be gathered from the fact that in speaking of the external evidence to the authenticity of the New Testament, he gives no account of what must always be the principal item in it, the quotations found in the writings of the early Christian fathers. The book, nevertheless, has a certain value, and it is written in a sensible and moderate spirit. ive, but it will repay perusal. Spectator. The Rock Ahead. By Edmund Yates. 3 vols. THIS is decidedly the weakest of Mr. Yates's novels, and while aiming at being highly sensational it fails in sustained power in that direction. The author has taken, as one of the main incidents of his story, the Rugeley murder, and confers on his villain, for whom he has adopted that frightful crime, the further distinction of an attempted fratricide, and, in the end, an accomplished self-destruction. But this villain is not true to himself, for once baffled in an attempted crime, he takes no further steps to perfect it, but contents himself with an immense amount of vapouring and bluster. As to the hero, it has doubtless come within the experience of every one that an English country gentleman can, without a sigh or a struggle, alienate his ances tral estate in order to live abroad illegally married to his deceased brother's wife, and, in the author's own words, " be lost in the crowd." With his heroine, who stands forth a well drawn and thoroughly unconventional character, and with the minor personages of his story, Mr. Yates is much more successful. We do not doubt that that respectable corporation the Ancients of THIS Volume is a collection of essays on various Clement's Inn will feel highly flattered at his deethical subjects, most of them pleasantly and sen- scription of their abode; and we wonder where he sibly written, if not showing much originality or obtained his knowledge of the guiding principles power. The writer illustrates some of his posi- of College authorities. Mr. Yates's style is easy tions by instances drawn from modern biography. and flowing, and if he would avoid a certain These are, perhaps, the best part of the book. slanginess, a fondness for using foreign words He illustrates, for instance, the subject of" The when our own mother tongue would supply his Usefulness of an Invalid" by an interesting wants equally well, and a paraded admiration sketch of the labours of Dr. Andrew Combe, who, for Bohemianism in general, his writings would as he justly says, made ten years of disease and be much more agreeable and acceptable to the self-discipline worth many a life of healthy activ-reading public. Spectator. Thoughts of a Physician. Van Voorst. Spectator. From The Economist, 19 Sept. THE RUMOURS OF WAR. DURING the last fortnight there has been a fresh crop of war rumours, and a renewal of apprehensions of war. The French Emperor has been to Chalons and to Lannemezan presenting to the legions the heir of France as if preparatory to some great crisis in his fortunes, and the soldiers have been shouting in his ears "to the Rhine." Prussia and Russia again are reported to have been asking France to disarm, though a Prussian despatch reporting the fact of a partial Prussian disarmament to the French Government turns out to be a canard. The King of Prussia has also been making at Kiel one of those peaceful speeches which are held to be worse than warlike, saying in one breath that there is no cause for the peace of Europe to be disturbed, and that the listeners may be reassured by the vigour of the Fatherland as represented by its soldiers and sailors who are ready to fight to the death. Added to all this are dark hints of a Franco-Belgian Customs' Union, the disagreement between Holland and Prussia about the administration of the lower Rhine, and reports of a despatch from the Italian Government requesting the French evacuation of Rome. Partly for these reasons, and partly also independently of them, the apprehensions of immediate war have revived. Now without discussing the chronic danger to which Europe is exposed by its great military governments in the hands of irresponsible despots, and the readiness for immediate war which is now their normal condition, we should like to ask whether the frequent recurrence of war panics is altogether reasonable? It is possible to admit that the change from peace to a great war may now be swiftly made, that the circumstances are such as to keep all prudent men out of engagements at a long date, that there are even strong reasons for believing in the desire of one or more Powers for a war if they can only get a fitting opportunity, that Europe, to use the banal phrase, is a powder magazine to which the spark may at any moment be applied; all this we say may be allowed, and yet there is no reason for those feverish fits which every now and then occur. Unless new facts come to light, it would be wise to accept the situation with as much sang froid as possible. If the rulers of Europe create a permanent arrangement in which war is always on the cards it is wise to be prepared, but preparation made, commerce and industry must make the best of things, and work on quietly in their hampered state. It is not a good peace in which the effect of a coming war must be constantly discounted, but the discounting of the effect on all sides should make people proof against mere rumours. Looked at closely, we think it will be admitted there have lately been no new data. The Chalons and Lannemezan visits are nothing in themselves, and even the shouting for the Rhine only indicates an impatience for war in the French soldiery which was perfectly surmised before. So far as it goes, the Prussian disarmament, now that the despatch is proved a canard, though it was never a very probable one, is really a peace indication; the Prussian Government has really thought it safe to postpone till January the drilling of a new contingent which might have been called out in October; and the King of Prussia's speech with all its bravado gives no hint of fast approaching peril. Both the Belgian and Dutch questions again are in that early stage when their future growth is quite uncertain, so that their existence means no more than the score of questions which might be easily got up were the great Powers of Europe as desirous of immediate war as is sometimes represented. Even the Italian request for the evacuation of Rome which has perhaps more of reality in it, though that too has just been denied, is not necessarily a warlike symptom, for Italy at least is unprepared for war, and could give little speedy assistance to any great Power with whom the real struggle would lie. Other new rumours are as easily explicable. We do not deny that the atmosphere is likely to breed them, but just because they may be easily bred we should be more than usually critical towards them. It is doubtful besides whether some of the grounds on which reliance is placed for the opinion that war is immediately probable are not rather fanciful. Nothing is more common than to say, for instance, that the tension of a peace like this is almost as bad as war- that war must come to put an end to the strain and let a surer peace come by the reaction from an actual conflict. The truth we believe to be that a peace like this, full of evils and perils as it is, falls a long way short of the calamities of actual war, and that the reaction from conflict may not lead to a better peace. There is a tendency in speaking of excessive armaments to compare the expense merely with what prevailed ten or twenty or thirty years ago, and this leads to a grave error in estimating the burden on the peoples of Europe. The other side of the account is that all countries have been growing richer, and can bear greater burdens. Sometimes the expense may have grown faster than the wealth, as Mr. Gladstone held it did in this | blunt the keenness of expectation. This country between 1853 and 1860; but in being the case, the strong peace interests of general the absence of any greater percep- both Governments and peoples in Europe tible pressure in the circumstances of Euro- should weigh something in the balance. pean peoples, if indeed there has not been Russia, Austria, and Italy, are for various a small improvement, may show that arma- reasons in no fit state for fighting on a great ments are not yet absolutely ruinous, though scale, and the industrial interests of both they check material growth. Probably not France and Prussia are of such magnitude a State in Europe could have maintained a and would be so. affected by war that in century ago a standing army of a hundred spite of patriotic currents in both countries thousand men as ready for war as the hun- the leaning to peace is manifest. As M. dreds of thousands which Prussia and France Guizot has just been so forcibly pointing now have always equipped and ready, but out in the Revue des Deux Mondes, there is the armaments of the present day still bear no cause on either side for which to fight about the same relation to the resources of unless one or the other is attacked; and the nations as the armaments of former times. want of a cause so far paralyses any GovNations are now so much richer that they ernment which is backed by nothing betcan arm up to the standard of being ready ter than jealousy about position or prestige. at once for great campaigns, and are every The Prussian Government, again, as distinct way more mobile. All this does not justify from the German people, is strengthened by great armaments, but it renders doubtful peace, really makes progress by peace in any hope of a remedy in the necessity for a Prussianising Germany; and although the campaign which the supposed tension pro- French Government as distinguished from duces. And how should the reaction from the people may believe itself, and may be conflict produce disarmament? Nations believed by others, not to gain by peace, armed more than ever after the Crimea, af- the risks of such a war as must be fought are ter the Italian campaign, after Sadowa. so great that indefinite delay is not improbWhy should a new campaign have a differ- able in the hope of something turning up. ent result? One reason why reaction does not produce disarmament has been the brevity of the wars themselves, and the impatience which makes wars brief will probably be as great as ever, though of course it may be disappointed. It would be difficult in any case to conceive so exhausting a war that nations would give up the system by which, whatever number of men they have, they can take them into a campaign at a moment's notice; that secret is not likely to be lost, and this preparedness, not merely the scale of it, is the permanent cause of tension. The desire of the great Powers for war is again insufficient to justify the repeated panics. Grant that Prussia and France are both willing to engage in war as soon as a good chance offers - Prussia to extend and consolidate her hold on Germany, France to secure her preponderance in Europe and perhaps make new annexations- there is still no necessity for panic where no more chances are apparent to-day than were apparent yesterday. The greatest immediate apprehension is of the action of France, but it is the mere truth that for practical purposes French preparations have been complete for months. There is plainly no disposition to hurry into the risks and hazards of actual campaigning, and the perpetual adjournment of the "coming war" should While we deprecate war panics we admit it is not a satisfactory alternative for people to make up their minds to the indefinite prolongation of the present state of things. It is not pleasant to acknowledge as a permanent arrangement that peace should hang by a mere thread-should depend almost absolutely on the will of any one of two or three individuals, whom there is no means of checking in a necessary interval of preparation. But the fact is so whether it is liked or not, and may continue so for a good many years, while military Governments and wealthy communities render possible that high state of preparation for war which characterises our epoch. Only it does not follow that we must have more war and have wars more frequently than in former periods because of this unstable peace. The counter-currents are very strong, and perhaps the mutual paralysis of each other's preparations by several great Powers who are nearly on a level and fear the calamities and chances of actual fighting, is not really. an unfavourable condition for a season of peace. The work of peace must be restricted by the want of long credit and the abstraction of means for warlike preparations, but within these limits peace itself may practically be very safe-more safe perhaps than it has been for centuries from the disturbance of great and prolonged campaigns. From The Saturday Review, 26 Sept. ENGLAND ON DUTIES OF NEUTRALS. at once easing our consciences, and establishing a precedent most advantageous to England. On what principle the amount Ir is most satisfactory to find that Mr. to be paid should be fixed is a very curious Johnson has arrived in England not only question, and would lead the anxious inwith full power, but with every disposition, quirer into many most complicated legal to settle all outstanding disputes. As he subtleties. But, in the first place, the amount says, it cannot be difficult to do this if both will probably be fixed, as in the verdicts of nations honestly wish it. We shall soon, it juries, by a sort of hazard, and in defermay be hoped, come to the end of the long-ence to what is called substantial justice, standing Alabama dispute. England is rather than by any measure of logical fitness; ready to own herself to have been in the and, in the next place, the exact amount is wrong, but she thinks that she may claim to not a matter which gives Englishmen much have been pardonably in the wrong. We thought. We will cheerfully pay whatever did not know what could be asked from us, the representatives of both nations agree we what we ought to do, and when and how we should pay. What we really care about is ought to do it. International law was silent that the law as to cruisers from neutral terrion a point that had never before arisen. tory should be laid down so as to protect The duties of neutrals towards belligerents the just interests of a great maritime Power constituted an omitted chapter in that most like England, and also that the Americans imperfect of codes. We did not at first un- should be really and finally satisfied with derstand how much it was to our interest to what we do, and should think that, in the create and enforce these duties; but we long run and on the whole, we have behaved were brought to see how much we might suf- honourably to them. Mr. Johnson has fer if neutrals could favour belligerents with wisely paved the way for the attainment of impunity, and we rapidly gave in our adhe- a good understanding by publicly stating sion to the new doctrines as to the duties of beforehand that neither nation ought to win neutrals which the Federal Government in- a triumph over the other, and that he is as sisted should be received. Under the pres- sure England will not submit, as that his sure of circumstances, indeed, we acted on country will not submit, to be humiliated. these doctrines before we had made up our With so friendly, so temperate, and so minds to adhere to them; and a Commission courteous an antagonist, we can rely on has only this year advised that Parliament settling all our differences easily and speedshould legalize what the Government of the ily. Mr. Johnson is very fortunate in havday did several years ago without regard to ing the opportunity of beginning his diploits legality. If it was right to stop the rams, matic career so pleasantly; but he not only it would also, without question, have been has the opportunity, he uses it eagerly and right to stop the Alabama. We did wrong well, and he has already made his task much in not stopping the Alabama, and we are more easy and his success more certain, by ready to own it, and to pay for it; and if we inspiring Englishmen with a confidence in pay for it, we shall have the satisfaction of his personal friendliness and goodwill. A FRIEND of mine writing from Interlachen, and driven for amusement one wet day to the Livre des Etrangers, has sent me the following: Jungfrau looks to me like a lady And here are more extracts. This from the book at the Righi-Kulm : Pour jouir de la belle vue J'ai monté, un paquet sur le dos, Tomber en un jour autant d'eau, What a poor book am I, my only crime, In questa casa troverete Toutes les choses que vous souhaitez, Bonum vinum, coctos carnes, Neat postchaises, horses, harness, Βοὺς, ὀρνιθὲς, ἰχθους, άρνες. "Once a Week." |