mended, may not be a measure urgently called for on grounds of expediency applicable to our own day; and the present system in Scotland, which vests many of the most important functions of academical government in the town-councils of cities and boroughs, appears to us to be an evil and an obstacle lying at the root of all effectual reform. The members of the University ought to administer its property, its patronage, and its honours. Nor is there any reason to suppose that, independently of the government of the universities, benefits of a very substantial kind, in the form of gifts and legacies, might not result from giving to the graduates of Scotch, as of English universities, an interest in these institutions which should endure through life. In so far as this can be effected by the suffrage, we look forward with confidence for its attainment to the next measure of Electoral Reform.

Finally, in presenting this subject to the consideration of our readers, we are very far from supposing that we address ourselves exclusively to those of them who are resident in, or directly connected with, Scotland. The institutions which have the training of our youth for their object, more immediately than any other, affect the whole empire; and if there is one branch of these institutions which has this character more than another, it is that which professes to deal with the highest instruction of the class devoted to the service of the country and the commonwealth. But it is not only because we know that what Scotchmen learn in Edinburgh they are very likely to practise in London, that Englishmen are interested in the Scottish universities. These universities, from their less ecclesiastical character, from their greater cheapness, from the prominence which is given to the professorial element in their teaching, and from other causes, have always been complementary to the universities of England. They have afforded in times pastand, if freed from the imperfections which at present weigh them down, will continue to afford-most valuable opportunities of academical education to a numerous class of Englishmen who would either be debarred from the higher studies altogether, or driven to seek them abroad, the latter alternative being one of which Englishmen avail themselves far less readily and willingly than Scotchmen. That this benefit need not be confined to dissenters, and to the less wealthy classes in England, will be apparent, when we remind our readers that the Scottish universities can lay claim to some of the most eminent of our living statesmen, and that Lord Lansdowne, Lord Palmerston, and Lord John Russell may be mentioned among

those who on all occasions willingly acknowledge the advantages they derived from their early residence in a school where Dugald Stuart expounded the nature of man, and Adam Smith treated of the interests of the citizen.

ART. IV.-The Angel in the House. By COVENTRY PATMORE. Second edition. 2 vols. London: 1857.

DURING the first quarter of the present century the most

popular of our poets sought their themes in distant regions and at remote periods. In this pursuit of novelty they broke through some of the earliest and most pleasing characteristics of English poetry. Chaucer, though in his youthful works he had affected classical and mythological subjects, in his last and greatest, the Canterbury Tales,' was for nothing more remarkable than for the homely vigour with which he treated English character and manners. In this respect he was the precursor of Shakspeare; and in many of his stories we find an anticipation of that genial humour, which inspired the Merry ' Wives of Windsor,' and 'Henry the Fourth.' The great Elizabethan school borrowed much from the romantic sources of Italy and Spain; but its peculiar English vein was rather thus enriched than absorbed and lost. The classic and the stately Muse of our great poets of the seventeenth century was followed by the playful grace of Herrick, and the touching elegance of Habington. The Queen Anne wits' introduced among us the French school of poetry, with its fine execution, its didactic vein, and its spurious antique, dressed up in the wigs and ruffles of Louis the Fourteenth's court. But as soon as this fashion began to wear out, our national poetry showed again its home-bred characteristics. Some of its reviving efforts were ponderous enough, from Somerville's 'Chace,' and Falconer's Shipwreck,' down to the poem on the art of making cyder; but Thomson sang of nature in no unworthy strains, and Cowper caught the ease, the humour, and the tenderness of domestic life, in happy harmony with the mind of England; while Beattie, and not a few other Scotch poets, advanced along that road which Allan Ramsay had first trod, till the series closed with the great original genius of Burns.

But the practice of painting in foreign colours, to which we have referred, was not by any means a universal characteristic of our poets in the earlier part of the present century. Rogers, like Goldsmith, his model, found his most pleasing inspiration at home, by our own firesides, or upon the village green and in the

rural dance; and the chief productions of Wordsworth were a formal protest against the taste most prevalent, and the works most popular, in his day. The cause, however, for which he pleaded was rather humble life than English life, and he might have found his themes among the peasantry in any part of Europe, rather than among the highly coloured and distorted heroes of some of his contemporaries. In his poetry the shepherd of Helvellyn takes his place with the shepherd of 'Grongar 'Hill,' and the rustic of Burns; but in conventional life, whether at home or abroad, Wordsworth saw nothing simple enough or real enough to be worthy of song. It was otherwise with Crabbe, who was contented with the workhouse, if he found there groups worthy of his dry but accurate pencil, and who, had his sense of the beautiful been but equal to his perception of the actual, and had he known how to marry the vowels with the consonants of art, might have reached some of the highest aims of poetry. The most popular writers of the time were, however, in the opposite extreme, and too often forgot that the office of the poet is not merely to set forth the beautiful, but rather to interpret truth in the forms of beauty, and to exalt the real by making it the minister of the ideal.

Without any disposition to underrate the heroic achievements of Turkish pirates and border chiefs, or to forget the manyvestured muse of Southey, the Italian grace and gaiety of Leigh Hunt and Landor, or the sublimer inspiration of Shelley and Keats, it cannot be denied that the poetry which charmed us twenty-five years ago has now lost something of its fascination even to the young, and that the fashion or the taste of the present time seems rather to favour a more calm and subdued expression of the poetic feeling. The delineation of home scenery, the reproduction of familiar emotions, the drama of domestic life, requires a more delicate sense of art, more finished execution, and more careful treatment than the poems which appeal violently to the imagination or the passions. The works to which we refer are in fact to poetry what the pictures of the Dutch masters, or of Greuze and Watteau, are to painting. They leave the sublime conceptions of the art to be dealt with by bolder hands; but they win the attention and charm the feeling by a grace and fidelity which sheds its beauty over the simplest incidents of life. Lesbia weeping for her sparrow is more fondly remembered than the finest passage of the Pharsalia; and a discriminating criticism places the rural labours of the Georgics above the most elaborate scenes in the Æneid.

Within the last few years several poems have been written on the principle of versifying the manners of the day, but with very different degrees of success; Mr. Tennyson himself set the

example, and after him we descend from the empassioned, but coarse and unrhythmical, pages of Aurora Leigh to the City 'Poems' of Mr. Alexander Smith. But the instances of failure among these recent aspirants have been more numerous than those in which they have hit the mark. Some of them have split upon the rock of politics, or rather of party spleen; for the genuine political relations are so closely connected with the deeper interests of man, human and moral, and respond so quickly beneath the fiery breath of imaginative passion, that they may possibly be included within the domain of genuine poetry. Others, instead of representing, have caricatured modern life. They seem to have forgotten that the railway whistle, and the smoke of the factory chimney, are but accidents of our age, as powder and patch were accidents of a preceding one, and that the true life of the nineteenth century must lie deeper. Still worse does the failure become when, in the desire to be familiar, the poet has substituted the slang of the day for the less offensive conventionality of a stilted diction.

6

Of these poems which attempt to describe the finer emotions of modern society, the most original and the most artistic which we have seen is Mr. Coventry Patmore's Angel in the House;' a poem, the existence of which is better than a thousand à priori arguments in favour of the school to which it belongs. Its merit is more than sufficient to account for its success, both among ourselves and in America, where, if we are rightly informed, twenty thousand copies of it are already in circulation. Mr. Patmore's hero does not hide his nineteenth century extraction in tartan or plaid, or even in 'homely russet brown;' he is a young man of good birth and gentle breeding; has won university honours, and lectured at the neighbouring institute. The lady of his love is one of the three daughters of a Dean of Salisbury. The scene lies in the cathedral close or near to it, and the incidents of the poem never rise above the familiar occurrences of English domestic life. The task Mr. Patmore has undertaken to perform is to trace, with no other colouring and no more elaborate. decorations than these, the ebb and flow of those feelings which are in every rank of life the well-head of poetry.

6

The Angel in the House' is a tale in verse, the hero of which sings the wooing and winning of his bride. The interest of the poem is studiously rendered independent of vicissitudes; the merit of it consists entirely in its careful and ingenious execution. Such a mode of treatment, while it increases the difficulty of the performance, in proportion as it foregoes the excitements derived from romantic adventure, is doubtless necessitated by the author's desire to illustrate ordinary, not ex

ceptional, modern life. This necessity has been turned, like difficulties of position or material in the hands of a real architect, to no small account. Renouncing the stimulus of curiosity, the poet has derived the interest of his work from higher sources, the philosophic analysis of the affections, and a descriptive power equally harmonious and vivid. The structure of the poem divides itself into two classes of compositions; the former entitled Preludes, and consisting of meditations on life and character, the latter of a series of descriptive Pictures.

The narrative opens with a description of the return of its hero to an abode which, in earlier times, had been occasionally his home.

'Once more I came to Sarum Close,

With joy half memory, half desire,
And breath'd the sunny air that rose
And blew the shadows o'er the spire,
And tossed the lilac's scented blooms,
And sway'd the chesnut's thousand cones,
And fill'd my nostrils with perfumes,

And shaped the clouds in waifs and zones,
And wafted down the serious strain

Of Sarum bells, when, true to time,

I reach'd the Dean's, with heart and brain
That trembled to the trembling chime.' (P. 16.)

He finds his old friend

'By widowhood more than winters bent,

But settled in a cheerful mind,'

and with him his three daughters, much changed from what they were in their childish days. The eldest has forgotten prudery, and developed into fearless grace; the second, formerly pale, sickly, and wholly absorbed in thoughts of the next world, has grown reconciled to this one; while the youngest has thrown aside her hoop to pursue graver attractions. The picture of the Deanery, with its

'Dim rich lustre of old oak

And crimson velvets glowing gloom,

is extremely dignified and clerical.
'Something that abode endued

With temple-like repose, an air
Of life's kind purposes pursued
With ordered freedom, sweet and fair.
A tent pitched in a world not right

It seem'd, whose inmates, every one,

On tranquil faces bore the light
Of duties beautifully done,