in modern days,-and by the way a very large proportion of it is domestic,-lies much deeper than imitations of Burns and Byron. And this strikes you at a glance,-that recent verse about woman's love,' granting its nauseous excess and its obvious imitativeness,—is not imitative of either Byron or Burns. The cultivation of German literature, and conquent reinvigoration (we hold the fact of such reinvigoration to be undeniable) of the Teutonic tone of feeling towards womanhood and domestic life, has had much more to do with it. If Mr. Bailey will take the trouble to trace the birth in his brain of his own 'Festus,' he will know more about the genesis of the silly love-dramas, which we owe partly to the existence of that poem, as it partly owed its existence to Faust,' than will permit him to say that Burns and Byron led the way' in this matter. In those love-dramas there is almost always present an idea which is missing in Burns and Byron,-namely, the culture and purification of the man through even mistaken loves. This is often put in the most revolting shapes, and we have heard it gravely urged that a Goethe had a perfect right to sacrifice Frederika or twenty Frederikas to his culture, if necessary; as thus :-Friend. The world could better spare a score of Frederikas than one Goethe. Ourself. Granted that that might be said from Above, what right had Goethe or A. B. to say it? Friend. What is right from above must be right from below. Ourself. But there you knock your head against the question of Free Will-and so on. It is this spirit which pervades the recent poet-love drama, and makes it, imitativeness apart, so horrible. But, on the whole, we are inclined to think the love poetry of our day a hopeful sign rather than the reverse. We, for one, are never afraid of moonshine. The facts of life are too strong for it. There is bread and butter, and, thank heaven,-to parody Rowland Hill,there are policemen! The real puzzle about many of the love poems in question is this:-that though the singer has generally an esoteric meaning, or rather an esoteric reference (so that he sings at once an actual and an ideal love), and though his machinery is purposely adopted to blind the crowd as to that reference and put them on a false track, he should yet take a pleasure in singing to an audience over and above stars and winds. As to the alleged weakness and indelicacy of publishing love confidences, the answer lies in the privilege and gift of the singer to say everything and nothing at once, by using universal symbols, and also in the fact that to speak (ostensibly) to all the world is as private a transaction as speaking to your own desk.

We cannot forbear quoting the following subtle and eloquent bit of scepticism-beyond question the finest and most pregnant part of the

book:

'AUTHOR.

I never loved, nor was loved; that is truth;
But who to woman has not sworn forsooth?

FRIEND.

Well, that's a question questionably fit;
The Court reserves the point; considers it.

AUTHOR.

You smile. "Tis true; all feeling may be feigned,
As well forestalled or mimicked as restrained;
Consider well yourself: the unwary heart
With will and wile plays but a third-rate part.

CRITIC.

To libel human nature is not fit,

You show methinks more insolence than wit.
Though truth were held a libel (wisely, too,
As dolts may deem), all libels are not true.

FRIEND.

Dissimulation, one may safely say,
Of all arts, dates from the most distant day.
The first thing Adam did, by way of task,
When he left Eden was to make a mask.
Of worldly goods he set but scanty store.
True, he'd a little baggage, Eve no more;
But in her centred every contrariety;
His friend, his foe, his wife, and his society;
She was his subject, rebel, liege and equal,
And played so various parts that in the sequel
She showed as one too many for one man,
Till Adam pitched upon the aforesaid plan,
A fact which does him honour if aught can;
Whereby he grew, though each an early riser,
Almost a match for her, and her adviser.'

We leave every heart to extract its own appropriate measure of truth from all this,-with this observation, that it is plainly the writing of a man with one eye too many.

The Satire now glides away into things in general again, and then returns to literature, to afford FRIEND an opportunity of prescribing for his auditors a somewhat wildly catholic course of reading, -in which Merrick, Byrom, and Barbauld, are not despised,' or 'duły prized! One clever thing occurs here:

He fancied, I suspect, 'twas rather odd,

That one should come between " A. Pope," and God.'

Mr. Buckle, as hinted before, comes in for a just rebuke:

But this I think is clear, that his division
Fails from a lack of logical precision.
Beside the inductive, and deductive modes
Of reasoning, much the nearest of all roads'
Is the intuitive; and that, we know,
The short cut, by their instincts, women go;
Indeed they only in perfection hold

Those faculties more fine than finest gold.
But were the Lecturer's dictum true, then they
Would be the first logicians of the day;
But fact and Nature fail him at this point,
And so the Theorist's theory's out of joint.
For mark how rarely women follow out

A train of reasoning; they've no time to doubt;
You argue with them a whole summer's day;
And they'll refute whatever you don't say.'

Ranging at large again in politics and life, Mr. Bailey gives us some striking couplets. As thus:

AUTHOR.

What is the wise man's influence in his day?
Is it the few, or many have their way?

CRITIC.

Here, to majorities the sway is given :
Rule, if you will, minorities, in heaven!'

And again :

'CRITIC.

An army is a people organized,
A senate is a nation symbolized,
A monarch is a state idealized.'

We apprehend that at bottom, and in the long run, it is the few,' and not the many,' who have their way-else, where is the standpoint from which to look out for heaven? Given, a world in which wrong rules, who is the Ruler?

There is one more long extract which we cannot omit :

'AUTHOR.

Misled by writers in whose narrow view
All high is false, all low life only true;

Who own no taste as sound, nor purpose valid,
But what concerns the vile, or paints the squalid;-
Profoundest sciolists who proclaim with gravity,
That human nature simply means depravity;
Who think the apple off Truth's head they hit,
When, with malicious and left-handed wit,
Father and brother, husband, son, maid, wife,
And mother, all estates of human life,
They have denounced, each one for other's eye,
Washing the face with white hypocrisy;
Who versed immensely in low London life
Are always twiddling their dissecting knife,
And hacking social sores with fetor rife,
Who with their gross recitals think to harrow
Our souls, and melt us to the very marrow,
With words, like boulders shot out of a barrow,
So graphic and mellifluous seems the style

Of articles contracted for "per mile:"
Philosophers, who hold all evils owing

(Themselves without one ray their pathway showing),
To what they keep perpetually "don't know "-ing;
But, granting all were systemised confusion,
For this each holds his little quack solution;
Who, deep in surfaces, delight to show
How manfully mid shallows they can go;
Who, sin ignoring, gloriously conceive

The world's vast cure were-nothing to believe;
Such earnest lieges to their empress Reason,

They look on faith as logical high treason;

But urged by want of wit, which seems immeasurable,
Secrete, by process, to us, aught but pleasurable,

Out of their souls, a torpid admiration,

Of something not unlike a Possible Negation;
Conceived, by those who boast its comprehension,
To be much flattered by that kind attention
From cognate minds, whose happiest view consists
In holding God and man both pessimists,-
You, too, with the Aristarchi of our day,
Wild to be thought judicious, in your way;
Critics, whose lucubrations feast our eyes
In journals of the most portentous size;
Who, ignorant of all but native graces,
Like leopards lick and paw each other's faces
For love, with diabolical grimaces;

Who seek to gain our sympathies in chief
For heroes whose address would gall a thief;

Send one to study nature in blind allies,

(No doubt your taste with your instruction tallies,)
"No thoroughfares," and black and filthy slums
Where Nature-bar ill-nature-never comes;
And culs-de-sac where-if you once get in-
You are stifled with the reek of rags and gin.
This is not Nature, nor dear Nature's sin;
But laws unsocial, wherein, like to graves,

Drop, tribe by tribe, the poor machine-made slaves,
Who lose all root in Nature.'

We are heartily glad at last to hear a voice raised against such painting' of life as it really is' as has become too shamefully popu lar from Mystery-of-London'-mongers and Sketchers,' and shammissionary-men in general. Such writing is sapping the foundation of goodness in a million hearts. Let no man try to sketch life,' even in a back slum, who cannot saturate his sketch' with the light of love and trust. The Deluge has been; the sweet savour of Selfsacrifice has gone up; the Bow is set in the cloud. If the rain lies deep in many a pool, let no one dare to ignore the Eternal Promise, in painting the transiencies of life as it is.'

We must draw to a close. In his last volume, Mr. Bailey permitted himself the use of a goodly number of ugly, sesquipedal, quasitechnical words. Some few of these ought to have been understood, for instance, that reviewer was not clever who sneered at the phrase 'silt up.' But the majority, we insist, were abominations, and so Mr. Bailey was told at the time. That he has not forgotten, let this attest :

FRIEND.

There's nothing rivets great and wise intents
So firmly as a few discouragements.

AUTHOR.

Remember me to that select society

Whose members form such an unique variety-
As touching their opinions-of the race
To which their ignorant ancestry they trace.

CRITIC.

We'd introduce you, but that poets ever
For mixed society are far too clever.

FRIEND.

Stop; if you publish,-don't now be absurd-
But if you wish for welcome, use no word
For which Reviewers will have cause to look
Beyond the fifth page of their spelling book,

Where halt they must o'er many a frightful syllable,
Their sluggish organs to pronounce are ill able.'

The CRITIC now gives a very pretty picture of what and who await him on the banks of the Medway, and the Satire' closes with—

" AUTHOR.

6

An easy lot, whichever light we view it in;

Nothing to do, and all one's life to do it in.'

We would fain, if we had space, quote from the few pages at the end, The Nemesis of Nations'-but our quotations have already been excessive.

We recur to our opening words. We willingly hear all Mr. Bailey has to say, and blame where we please. But, with all our hearts, we thank him for the smaller poems in this volume.

Family Unity and Responsibility.*

A HOMILY.

THE children gather wood, and the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes to the queen of heaven, and to pour out drink offerings unto other gods, that they may provoke me to anger.' In this lively picture you have the illustration of a great and momentous truth-the Organic Unity of the Family. If it be an idolatrous family, worshippers of the moon, for example, such is the organic relation of the members, that they are all involved together,

The Organic Unity of the Family.' By Horace Bushnell, D.D,, Philadelphia,