roaster, Gautama, Jesus, Mohammedthe list can be enlarged at will.

Shelley died, we have noted, only seventy years ago, and already the symbolism which he used in his attempted "criticism on life" is vapid and effete. It was, as it were, so largely journalism, so little literature; so largely mistaken and superficial subjects, so little a powerful utilization of the permanent materials of life. To put it shortly, he was passably wanting in brains, and he did not make up for it by any great force of intuition. And then he did not in his heart really care much about what are optimistically termed his "ideas." His revolutionary enthusiasm never went very deep. Of course, he thought it did. For his sensitiveness was acute, and whatever breeze blew on the wires produced music. If these ideas had been a dominant passion in him, he would have found the patience and strength requisite for something like a real apprehension of the social problem. He would have illuminated it at least partially, and he has illuminated it in no wise. Nothing he said of it is of any importance; little of any interest. His sole contribution is his fearlessness, the fearlessness of the dream drugged fanatic who believes he cannot be killed by infidel bullets. "Give us the truth, whatever it is," he exclaims once, and it is usual to call this sort of thing the passion for truth. But it is not it is the passion of the intoxication of courage. No one can deny Shelley courage. He would go anywhere, and face anything. You had only to persuade him that some of those horrible people who defiled and destroyed his dreams were in front of him, and he was ready to risk his life in trying to get at them; and nothing was easier than to persuade him. A little laudanum would do it; a little spiteful talk would do it. He was at the mercy of every fool or knave, male or female-and especially female. There was no calculating on him, and the worst feature of all in him was that he was always sincere, always in earnest. Some such character, perchance, was John, the beloved disciple, also called Boanerges; and in the hands of a Master whose wisdom and tact were consummate, John doubtless did peerless service. Shelley was unlucky enough never to meet a master. Those he took for such were men like Godwin, and, in a measure,

Byron-the one a vagabond charlatan, the other a mere superb Hau-Degen, as the Germans say, a glorified swashbuckler on the right side. Shelley was forced to stand by himself, forced to attempt all alone the feat of "scaling the Alps," in the picturesque phrase of Carlyle, who opined that the would-be climber's general existence must have been "haggard." Carlyle was mistaken. Sometimes it was, but often it was not, and sometimes it was happy beyond words. Shelley in his Italian woods, on his Italian rivers and shores, is the one revelation of pure, unconscious, lyric happiness granted us from the life of his contemporaries.

As in every case, his strength and his weakness went hand in hand. That acute sensitiveness of his made him susceptible to the whisper of "the prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming on things to come" to an extent that was remarkable for its discoveries and its errors. Wordsworth, in his heavy way, Coleridge, in his effusive way, had been excited in their youth by the "bliss" of the revolutionary dawn in France. Wordsworth was hopelessly doomed to respectability, and Coleridge was too cowardly and faithless to accept deeds of blood. Besides, their real cares lay elsewhere-Wordsworth in his "pedlar poems" and the appalling edifice of his teleological orthodoxy; Coleridge in his criticism, in his golden lyrics, in the philosophic balloons, the sending off of which diverted his last years of collapse. Keats, like Gallio, cared for none of these things. Byron, on the other hand, knew thoroughly well how badly beaten was the cause of liberty and progress. He knew what the Tory Government of England meant; what the Holy Alliance Government of Europe meant. Circumstances drove him into the opposition, and the old berseker fury came upon him. He fought for the sake of fighting, to ease his heart and mind, and he felt vaguely that in the long run the stupid and corrupt conquerors must be beaten, but that was all. It would never be in his time. Waterloo had settled all that. Shelley in his complete ignorance of the conditions of the struggle, thought that things might recommence at any moment. Therefore he sang with a divine optimism of revolts in the clouds, utterly undisturbed in his conviction of the approaching triumph of the ideas which he

found interesting and animating. "The necessity of Atheism"-the necessity of incest the necessity of a vegetable diet, everything was a "necessity" which happened at the moment to have hold of him. Then, when things did not commence nor show the slightest sign of commencing, he fell into the blackest pessimism, and only roused himself from it to indulge in versified fairy-tales, where he could manipulate everything according to his fantasy. He was right and he was wrong, we see : nearer the truth than Wordsworth and Coleridge, farther away than Byron and (on his own special side) than Keats. It was the same with his efforts after a social circle. Matthew Arnold has drawn a justly derisive picture of Shelley's associates ("What a set! what a life!" and so on), but concludes with making one of his unctuous personal appeals to Cardinal Newman as a witness in favor of better things elsewhere. This is that Cardinal Newman of whom Carlyle remarked that he had "no more brains than a rabbit; and it is unlikely that Carlyle would have contented himself with even such criticism of the members of Newman's "set." Shelley's "set" may have been this or that, and his "life" may have been that or this, but at least Shelley continually sought for a society that had in it a stream of ideas, that had an outlook on to the future, that could animate and sustain his creative and critical faculties; and he would have found nothing of the sort with the Wordsworths or the Southeys or the Coleridges, any more than years later with Newman and his followers. He found Byron, however, who, with all his dreadful limitations, was the one great man then alive in England, and he appreciated all that was best, not only in Wordsworth and Coleridge, but also in Keats. No other man of his time had a taste so catholic. He could not help feeling whatever was new and true. None of the others, except Keats, had a tithe of his receptivity, a tithe of his sincerity. Keats advised him to "curb his magnanimity and become more of an artist, " and the advice was the best he could have had. Goethe could not have diagnosed his case more infallibly, or have prescribed a more certain cure for his disease. But Shelley, like the rest of us, could only be what he was, the circumstances being unhappy. What he

might have become it is impossible to say and idle to speculate. Our sole concern is with what he was.

Toward the close he showed signs of a sounder power of estimation; but what did it amount to? He was going off on the tack of the scholarly recluse, complicated by the old wild outbursts, and who is more ignorant of life than the scholar, and especially the sensitive scholar? He was so easily drawn into adventures of a sort that was fatal to him. The Gambas and Emilia Viviani-Williams and Mrs. Williams-revolutionary skirmishes and rapt Platonics - Mediterranean yachting and his neighbor's wife; it was all of a piece. He knew no more about managing a boat than he did about managing himself or other people, and the last of his catastrophes settled the business forever. And yet he had a distinct faculty for coming back on himself, and, though his turning his experiences of all sorts to artistic use was only an unconscious instinct, still the instinct certainly existed. But he could not curb his magnanimity; he could not become more of an artist. When he had exploited his emotions it was always to find that they had also exploited him, and he turned away at once with a shudder from his expression of them as from “a part of him already dead." There lies the essential insincerity of his essential sincerity. Only an inspired amateur could have fooled himself every time in the way Shelley did, and found nothing but an empty husk for after-use.

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Byron's glory is this: that at the darkest hour which the cause of liberty and progress has known in the century, when the furtherance of that cause was utterly hopeless in the domain of action, he asserted it with irresistible power in the domain of literature. The sword was shattered: Byron seized the pen. Defeat and disaster were every where he rallied the scattered ranks, and, in a mad assault on the conquerors, checked their ruthless pursuit and saved the future. And Le did this not for one country or another, but for all Europe. What France owed and owes him she can never repay, lifted her from the dust. Italy's debt to him is, if possible, a greater one. But why should one specialize? All civilization must refuse to forget the honor due to the man who, at the crisis of life and death, imperiously declared for life, and

He

struggle, and victory. Shelley at this crisis did nothing-could do nothing.. He had no readers, no public. Byron Byron was an English lord, an English aristocrat, and the start this gave him in the race was then enormous. Europe, lying under the feet of English Toryism and the Holy Alliance, suddenly saw an English noble strike blow after blow at its oppressors. Even Wellington, the sacred peace-monger of the world, was not safe. Byron bemocked his nose! The death of an English king was celebrated by an English Laureate in abjectly fulsome style, and no one dared open lips to ridicule or reject. History will yet have to tell us what it meant at such a moment as this to see that Laureate swept away in a fiery torrent of contempt and mockery and scorn. Nothing can get over the fact that Byron, at the direst time of need, did the actual work-and a tremendous piece of work it was-which threw back the advancing tide of tyranny and kept our hope alive. Shelley's influence did not at that time count at all. He could not have lifted a straw off the ground. Later on, when the panic was over-when the process of reorganization was begun, it is possible that his purer personality began to act. But it is not as a pioneer of the Cause, as a protagonist of liberty and progress, that he can be put beside Byron, not to say in front of him.

What claim, then, can we make for Shelley? What shall we give as the last ing result of his life and labors? Firstly and chiefly-the purity of his personality. No other man of his time was so disinterested, none other so ingenuous.

He loved

the light and continually sought for it, fearing nothing, with one heart and with one face for all. His courage was peerless. His curiosity was unbounded. He had no respect for anything or for any one except such as he conceived they were

able to justify. Superstition had no place in him. Selfishness, meanness, ignobility were unknown to him. His generosity was of the sort which instantaneously forgives everything to the vanquished. The woe he would have dealt out was for the conquerors alone. Finally, his capacity for happiness, for child-like trustfulness and love, was immense. Left to himself, he was as one of the kingdom of heaven. The picture of him alone in his Italian haunts is a joy of refreshment and repose to every weary toiler after better things. Ah, truly we do well to blame him for his faults, excellently well, we commonplace people of the hour, we children of this world, wiser in our day and generation, seeing that the shapes of folly or sin which these faults took upon themselves were due to none but us. Child that he was, and child of light, we wrinkled denizens of the darkness vexed and tortured him with our unendurable egotisms, our hateful exigencies. But now we know him better. Life is life, and in the terrible struggle of our kind benefactors and malefactors must be judged-can alone be judged-by the strict rules of the game. We cannot call him great; but is it nothing to say of his spirit that it was lovely? We cannot take his larger labors seriously: they are not lasting contributions to our exiguous store of deathless achievement. But is it nothing to say that a handful of his lyrics gives us a delicate music, a subtle perfume that are too rare and too exquisite for either us or those who come after us ever to forget?

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory;

Odors, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken;
Rose-leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed:
And so thy thoughts when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

-Fortnightly Review.

men do, looking back at the time when they stood expectant on life's thresholdspeaking, I repeat-reverently he recalled those early years. It was at Tenby, "Sweet Tenby," when the world was young, where he made the acquaintance of the Aylmers. It was during their pleasant intimacy, when books and thoughts were daily interchanged, that the daughter, his especial friend Rose, lent him an Arabian story, which suggested the writing of "Gebir," his first achievement in literature ! Rapt in the glamour of the past, we listened to his rising tide of talk, till when he ceased for a space, overborne by the flood of memory, there fell upon us all "the pious silence that gives delight." The silence was broken at length by Landor breathing forth in low but distinct tones his own exquisite lines

"Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes
May weep, but never see,
A night of memories and sighs
I consecrate to thee.'

The effect of the resonant pathos of his melodious voice, together with the glow of firelight on features mobile with deepest feeling, so transfigured the old man's face, graven though it was by time and sorrow, that he looked young again, and I could fancy I had for once seen the poet in his prime!"Oh, the soul keeps its youth" How truly said by her, to whom love and youth came in middle life. There is a fine passage in Landor's "Antony and Octavius, "which formed the keynote of much of his more serious moods. He says :—

"My soul

Assures me wisdom is humanity; And they who want it, wise as they may seem, And confident in their own sight and strength, Reach not the scope they aim at.'

These pregnant lines help to an understanding of Landor's point of sympathy with Browning, expressed with critical acumen in the verses he addressed to the younger poet, at a time when none would hear his singing." He says that in "modern times"

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"No man hath walkt along our roads with step So active, so inquiring eye, or tongue So varied in discourse."

In saying this Landor anticipated by half a lifetime the verdict which a later generation has passed upon Browning's influence as a poet-an influence the chief factor of which is that same humanity which the soul assures us is wisdom.

Landor was a man who delighted to talk about his friends to his friends. Of Southey, I remember he had much to say ; things such as one loving brother might say of another. The name of Julius Hare was very frequently on his lips, while in his heart the memory of that pure-minded man was canonized. Liberal and free in speech on religion and politics, before it was the vogue to be thus free, yet might Landor's friendships have been shared by an archbishop. It is reported of him that he said: "I enjoy no society that makes too free with God or the ladies."

No one could be long with Landor without his speaking of the "large-hearted Forster." I never saw them together, but I have heard Kenyon say, that no one understood the subtle charm of Landor's genius better than Forster; and the latter averred that it was not possible to have Landor more at his best than under the hospitable roof of Kenyon.

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I met Mr. Forster occasionally in Lonif taken at his own valuation, he would be don society, and he gave me the idea, that quite the biggest person at any dinnertable. He used his wit like a flail, and then looked round as much as to say: chaff of other men's talk." I do not think See now, how the air is choked with the Crabb Robinson liked Forster, though they often met perhaps -because they often met. They had both slightly disparaging anecdotes to tell of each other. As a poor instance of Forster's wit, I remember on one occasion Crabb Robinson told the story of his butler whispering to him at the dinner-table that the soup had run short, whereupon Forster, to the astonishment of his guests, and to the dismay of his serving man, roared out the plagiarism

Then let there be more mullagatawny soup," at the same time looking round as if he had said a very good thing indeed.

On the other hand Forster had got hold of the following incident, which he took care to repeat. It must be remembered that the leading event of Crabb Robinson's life was his intimacy with Goethe

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the wisest man I ever knew," as he frequently, perhaps too frequently, reiterated.