of course, not of his own composition, but gathered out of many lands and many ages in the course of his studies in mythology and folk-lore. Lang seemed to have all the necessary gifts of the essayist; yet, already, his essays have lost somewhat of their flavour. Only now and then, as in the lightly humorous philosophy of prefaces in the preface to The Orange Fairy Book, does Lang strike the true note firmly; and he has not enough of this quality to keep his essays in permanent remembrance. He dissipated his powers and attempted too much. Folk-lore, the occult, history, the Homeric question, literary criticism-in all he was active. Under such conditions, it was scarcely possible to be quite first-rate in any department. Specialists in each could point out his mistakes; but it remains much to his credit that he never failed to make himself interesting. The fact that, whether right or wrong, he is interesting in every page of his short sketch of English literature is not the least striking illustration of this power.

Two "rolling stones," both of whom gathered moss, as the elder hinted in the title of one of his books, were Laurence Oliphant and Lafcadio Hearn. Oliphant's books bear testimony to his wanderings. His earliest volume dealt with Khatmanda; and his next, The Russian Shores of the Black Sea, caused him to be consulted when the Crimean war broke out. In two wars, he acted as correspondent of The Times. He was in Japan while Japan was still in the medieval stage, and nearly lost his life in an attack in which the weapon of the assailant was a two-handed sword. So stirring a life afforded rich materials for various lively narratives from his pen, and for the essays which were gathered up near the close of his life in Episodes in a Life of Adventure. But the most extraordinary episode of all was Oliphant's subjection to the "prophet” Thomas Lake Harris, whom the disciple believed to be not only a prophet, but "the greatest poet of the age," and to whom he surrendered the whole of his property. One outcome of this discipleship was Sympneumata, a singular book, the joint composition of Oliphant and his wife, who both wrote, or believed that they wrote, under the dictation of a spirit. Other products were of a very different sort; for Oliphant seems to have united with this trait of enthusiasm a marked talent for business, which the prophet was shrewd enough to employ for his own benefit.

Hence, The Autobiography of a Joint-Stock Company, in which Oliphant embodied the knowledge he had gained of the methods of American financiers. In the literary sense, however, Oliphant's most valuable work was the satiric fiction Piccadilly, which shows him to have been a keen observer and a penetrating critic of the society of his time. Long afterwards, he returned to the realm of fiction in Altiora Peto, and proved that he still retained his old fineness of touch.

Lafcadio Hearn began his career as a contributor to two Cincinnati journals, but it was a subsequent residence at St. Pierre, Martinique, that gave him the materials for his first noteworthy work, Two Years in the French West Indies. In this, he showed that power to receive and faithfully to reproduce impressions, which was his special gift; and his position in literature must depend upon this gift as it was exercised in relation to Japan, whither he migrated in 1891. Probably no one can instruct the man of the west about what Japan was before the completion of the process of modernisation so well as Hearn; but that he does so on the strength of mere impression is shown by the fact that, though he married a Japanese wife, he could neither speak to her or to his children in their own language, nor, after a residence of fourteen years, so much as read a Japanese newspaper. What is valuable in his work is not his reasoned opinions, but the feeling produced in his soul by what he saw and heard; and it is important to notice, as Gould insists, that what he saw was little more than a blur of colour; for he was "probably the most myoptic literary man that has existed." Hence, the best of the Japanese books is the first, Glimpses of Unfamiliar Japan, because in it he was forced to rely almost wholly on impression. In his later volumes, he reacts on the impressions and injures them. For this reason, the latest, Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation, though the most ambitious-for it is an attempt to present in one lordly dish the cream of all he had learnt about Japan-is far from being equal to those early glimpses. Besides scenes, Hearn produced tales, both in America and in the Japanese period. He betrays in them an unhealthy love of the gruesome; but he could, on occasion, rise to a high level, as he proved by his masterpiece in this form, the story of Karma.

While Oliphant and Hearn found their literary capital in the

distant and unfamiliar, the sphere of Richard Jefferies was, as the title of one of his volumes indicates, the fields and the hedgerows around us. His task was to show that the unfamiliar lay beneath men's eyes. He belongs to the class of field naturalists like White of Selborne, and, in days more recent than even those of Jefferies, Denham Jordan, who is better known by his penname "A Son of the Marshes." But Jefferies was more ambitious than they and wider in his range. In Hodge and his Master, he deals with the human element in rural life; but he does not show that complete comprehension which he shows of beast and bird and flower. His name first became familiar through The Gamekeeper at Home; and, for the ten years of life which remained to him, he was a diligent writer. All who are qualified to judge, testify to his accuracy of observation as recorded in volume after volume, down to Field and Hedgerow, which appeared after his death; but, while the style is good, there is a marked tendency to catalogue minute facts which, doubtless, have a value as natural history, but hardly any from the point of view of literature. On the other hand, a certain vein of poetry is present in all the works of Jefferies. It is especially rich in Wood Magic, and it gives charm to the fine spiritual autobiography, The Story of My Heart.

T°

CHAPTER IV

The Growth of Journalism

O pass from the conditions recorded in the chapter entitled "The Beginnings of English Journalism" to those with which the close of the nineteenth century was familiar, is almost like being carried on the magic carpet of oriental romance from the middle of the Sahara to the bustling, electricity-lighted thoroughfares of a modern European capital. The chapter to which reference is made treats of the handwritten letter in which some, more or less professional, observer, for the benefit of a few known subscribers in the country, detailed whatever gossip he was able to pick up in the taverns and streets of London. His lineal descendants are still to be seen in the writers of the London letter which figures in the columns of nearly every daily provincial paper, and finds, latterly, a counterpart in several of the journals established in London. The information in these London letters differs, for the most part, from that which is to be obtained in the ordinary news columns, and has nothing in common with the reasoned leading article, in which is discussed the uppermost political incident of the day. The chapter above referred to took its readers from these manuscript letters through various experiments in printed news-books and sheets of intelligence, issued by, or in behalf of, groups of politicians, or news purveyors, to the establishment of The London Gazette and the few occasional journals which made their appearance towards the end of the seventeenth century. The transition from a small pamphlet containing some definite piece of news, and bearing an appropriate title, to the sheet published periodically under a distinctive and regularly repeated name, carrying not one but a great I See, ante, Vol. VII, Chap. xv.

variety of collected items of news, was, in itself, great; but, when the change was brought about, the convenience and attractiveness of it ensured permanence.

I

There was even a public ready for the news writer. Howell, in his Familiar Letters, tells that the ploughman, the cobbler and the porter would spare no effort to educate their children, and the records of the university of Cambridge show numerous instances of the sons of husbandmen being entered as students. Apart, then, from the necessity to the merchant and trader of being acquainted with current events, it is natural that the country, as a whole, should wish to be supplied with news. Dr. Johnson characterised English common folk as more educated, politically, than the people of other countries, and this because of the popularity of newspapers. The extent of the influence of the cheap newspaper in the early part of the eighteenth century is shown by the petition of publishers against the legislation described by Swift as ruining Grub street by the imposition of a tax which extinguished all halfpenny newspapers and many of the more highly priced. It was urged that halfpenny newspapers were used very largely throughout the country as a means of teaching children to read, and that, without them, there would be a failure in this respect. In these conditions, statesmen could not fail to recognise that the newspaper press might be made to serve their purposes, and they did not hesitate to employ men of marked ability and political knowledge to supplement or give finish to the work of the professional inhabitants of Grub street. For these higher services, payment was made, sometimes in coin-Swift says that he refused £50 offered to him by Harley in 1710-II-and, otherwise, by state or church preferment, or by admission to social comradeship. Publishers of newspapers, also, found it to their profit to employ writers who could mix the useful with the pleasant.

The growth of journalism in the eighteenth century was expedited by Palmer's establishment of a series of stage coaches, leaving London at stated hours and carrying parcels as well as passengers, distribution being thus much more rapid and regular than when it depended upon the older waggon. Meanwhile, newspapers had to struggle against the hand of authority. Section VIII, Letter vIII (circa 1646).