freedom of the Press exists. It is by no means an old English institution. The printer of the Junius Letters (p. 336) was fined, and even as late as the nineteenth century there have been Press prosecutions. However, as everything that is good in the political life of England depends on the right of usage rather than on that of printed paper, the freedom of the Press, during the last fifty years, has slowly but irresistibly become an established custom. In England a Press prosecution on the Continental model would be an act of political folly and bad taste.

The Press in England is becoming more and more a department of public authority, by the side of Parliament, the Ministry, and the Crown. It is the Press that really unites as one nation the English and English colonists scattered over all parts of the globe; it fills up the gaps in the written law and, when excitement runs high, moulds the public conscience of the nation. The members of the Press, who are frequently members of Parliament or other distinguished bodies, enjoy a respect in England proportionate to their influence and honourable character. England is free from the scandal of a Press in the pay of the Government.

At the head of the English Press stands The Times. Its position is due to its traditional reputation as much as to the number of its readers. It was founded by John Walter in 1788, and to the present day the Englishman all over the world looks upon it as his representative newspaper.

In the mere number of its readers The Times is far surpassed by The Standard, the chief organ of the Conservative party, founded in 1827; by The Daily News, the chief Liberal paper, founded 1845, Dickens being its first editor; and by The Daily Telegraph, a Liberal organ with a very large circulation. There are, of course, many more important English newspapers, but the four mentioned are the leading ones. It was an English newspaper, The Times, which invented the "war correspondent," who has now become an ordinary institution. English newspapers have initiated enterprises which in other countries would have been organised by governmental machinery. They have equipped expeditions to the North Pole, despatched explorers to discover the sources of the Nile and penetrate the heart of Africa, and sent learned men to carry on excavations in Assyria and Palestine. And all this by the aid of the trifling sum, the cost of a single number printed on beautiful white paper. Two distinguished war correspondents deserve mention here: William Russell (born 1820) and Archibald Forbes (born 1838, died 1900).

1 The fourth German edition of the present work was published in 1897.

The illustrated papers, headed by The Graphic and Illustrated London News, have their rivals in Germany: the Leipzig Illustrirte Zeitung will compare favourably with any English illustrated paper. On the other hand, Art journals, such as The Studio and The Portfolio, are superior to most foreign newspapers of the same kind.

England produces a larger number of good weekly and monthly periodicals than any other country (Germany not excepted). There is the old Edinburgh Review (founded 1802), in which so much nonsense had been written about English literature that its reputation was at a very low ebb, until Macaulay revived its failing fortunes by his contributions. Also The Westminster Review, The Quarterly Review, The Review of Reviews, Blackwood's, Macmillan's, Cornhill, Fraser's,1 Gentleman's (the oldest), and Temple Bar Magazines, The Nineteenth Century, The Fortnightly Review, and many other monthly publications, partly literary, partly entertaining. The literary weeklies are more influential, especially The Saturday Review (founded 1855), the critical organ of the Conservative party, to which The Athenæum (founded 1828) is the Liberal, we might almost say non-party, counterpoise. The more learned Academy (founded 1867) occupies a position between the two as an indispensable contemporary source of literary and philological information.

Lastly, Punch, a weekly satirical journal, political and otherwise, which enjoys a world-wide reputation. It combines many of the good qualities of our Kladderadatsch in its better days and Fliegende Blätter. It was founded in 1841 by Henry Mayhew; its most famous contributors have been Thackeray and Thomas Hood. The Song of the Shirt by the latter and Jerrold's Curtain Lectures first appeared in it.

The most important literary societies also demand some reference. The chief is the Athenæum (founded 1824), which includes amongst its members most well-known literary men. Then come the Authors' Club (founded 1892), the Society of Authors (1893), the Savage Club (1851).

Among societies devoted to the study of special subjects may be mentioned the English Goethe Society (1886), the New Shakespeare Society (1874), the Wiclif Society (1882), the Folk Lore Society (1878), the Carlyle Society (1877), and the Elizabethan Literature Society.

1 No longer published.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The best selections from English prose are to be found in Craik's English Frost Selections.

MACAULAY.-O. Gildemeister in his Essays; Kinkel, Macaulay, Sein Leben und sein Geschichtswerk; Morrison, Macaulay (in English Men of Letters); complete Works, in 8 vols., edited by Lady Trevelyan; Works, in the Albany Edition; Dean Milman, Memoir; Rt. Hon. Sir G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay.

BUCKLE.-Huth, Life and Writings of Buckle.

DARWIN.-L. Büchner, Sechs Vorlesungen über die Darwinische Theorie; E. Hackel, Die Naturanschauung von Darwin, Göthe und Lamarck; G. T. Bettany, Life of Darwin.

MILL.-W. L. Courtney, Life of Mill; A. Bain, Mill, a Criticism; Minto, article on Mill in Encyclopædia Britannica; W. R. Browne, The Autobiography ef Mill.

THE PRESS.-C. Peabody, English Journalism and the Men who have Made It.

C

CHAPTER VI

CARLYLE AND RUSKIN

ARLYLE is a moral power of great importance. A great future lies before him and it is impossible to foresee all he will produce, or all he will achieve by his writings." This was said by Goethe of his Scottish admirer so long ago as 1827, at a period when hardly anyone in England had an idea how great a new power was growing up in THOMAS CARLYLE.

He was born on December 4th, 1795, at Ecclefechan, Dumfries, his father being a mason; he studied at Edinburgh, and lived for a considerable time, first alone, and afterwards with his distinguished wife, Jane Welsh, in a lonely country-side in Scotland. In 1834 he removed to Chelsea, London, where he died on February 5th, 1881. Although Carlyle produced much original work, remarkable for its peculiar style, its depth and its force, it was his destiny to occupy himself with German literature, to which he owed a great deal. It may be that Carlyle's works will entirely cease to be read; but even if it should be so, his personality, and his immense importance to England, as the herald of a new intellectual world, that of Germany, will always be remembered. That radiant light of Weimar, which shone into the mind of the inexperienced Scottish recluse at the age of thirty, illumined it to the end of his career. So strong was its effect, that it entirely changed his character, both as a man and as an author. Carlyle's style, until he wrote his work on Schiller (1825), was calm and simple; but after that time, chiefly in consequence of his acquaintance with the writings of Jean Paul, he almost suddenly adopted that strange, stormy, confused style, which can only be described as "Carlylean"; nay, his very handwriting altered.

Carlyle is called the founder and consolidator of the intercommunion of German and English intellect: this is his enduring merit, and it is not only Germany that owes him thanks for it. England is still more indebted to him for this enlargement of the scope of his genius, the most valuable that had been experienced for centuries, we may say

since the time of the Renaissance. About 1820 Carlyle began to learn German; he was induced to do so by Madame de Stael's book, De l'Allemagne. In 1823 appeared his essay on Schiller, which he afterwards extended to a Life of the poet. In 1827 he commenced a correspondence with Goethe, which lasted till the death of the latter (March 22nd, 1832). What attracted the Puritanical Carlyle to Goethe was not so much that he was a great poet as that he was a great man. In those early days of his enthusiasm for Goethe, Carlyle wrote thus of him: "His is the only healthy mind, of any extent, that I have discovered in Europe for long generations." And again: "The sight of such a man was to me a gospel of gospels, and did verily, I believe, save me from destruction, outward and inward." The best works of his youth were devoted to German literature, his subjects being Jean Paul, Schiller, the Nibelungenlied, Novalis, ancient German literature, etc. In addition to these he wrote several valuable essays on Goethe, the most profound of which appeared after the poet's death, when the impression made on him by his loss was still fresh. This essay is less disfigured by Carlyle's hectoring style than any other of his: it is a funeral oration, pronounced by a great man over one still greater. These essays on German poetry are also interspersed with numerous translations, some of which are excellent; there are even metrical ones among them. No foreign author ever penetrated so deeply into the inmost recesses of the German mind, in its highest utterances, as did Carlyle. Goethe thus eulogised him: "How earnest he is! And how he has studied us Germans! He is almost more at home in our literature than we ourselves are." In the evening of his days he declared his gratitude to Germany at an important moment, namely, in his letter to The Times of November 11th, 1870, against foreign intervention in the Franco-German War, and in favour of the rights of Germany. Carlyle's words, in that letter, show the nature of the

man :

"That noble, patient, deep, pious, and solid Germany should at length be welded into a nation, and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vapouring, vainglorious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and oversensitive France, seems to me the hopefullest fact that has occurred in my time."

He considered his investiture with the Prussian order "Pour le Mérite" (1874), and Bismarck's letter of congratulation on his eightieth birthday (1875), as the highest external honours that could have been bestowed upon him.

Carlyle's first great independent work, the most whimsical, and at the same time the most profound of any of his writings, Sartor Resartus (1833), is at once genuinely German and genuinely "Carlylean." It is