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more European than English. He left England at an early age, and though he revisited it did not settle, but spent the rest of his life mainly in Italy. Still more was he idiosyncratic. The self-presentation and self-worship which fill his poems are unparalleled, and considering the character of the man who thus pours out upon us his lacerated feelings and sentimental woes, one finds it difficult now to read the first cantos at all events of Childe Harold" with much respect or pleasure. But the novelty of Byronism, its attractions for weak egotism, and the poetic dress which the writer's unquestionable genius gave it, helped perhaps in some measure by his rank and his personal beauty, made it the rage of the hour. As an Englishman, Byron was not a political revolutionist; in fact he always remained an aristocrat; but he was a social iconoclast. His great work, as his admirers probably say with truth, is "Don Juan", with its affected cynicism and unaffected lubricity. Macaulay sneers at British morality for its condemnation of Byron. British morality may be prudish, fitful, and sometimes hollow. But it has guarded the family and all that depends thereon, as Byron had good reason to know. Italian morality, however poetic, did not.

The connection of Shelley is rather with European history than with the history of England, though he could not shake himself free from the influences, attractive and repulsive, of his birthplace. His interest in the French Revolution is proclaimed in the opening of "The Revolt of Islam" and makes itself felt generally through the poem. A revolutionist Shelley was with a vengeance in every line, religious, political, social, moral, matrimonial, and even dietetic, wanting us to be vegetarians and marry our sisters. He was in fact an anarchist, though as far as possible from being a dynamiter; resembling the gentle Kropotkin of our day, who believes that we should all be good and happy if we would only do away with the police. It is curious to see the story of Prometheus, the great rebel against the tyrant of the universe, half written by Eschylus and finished in the same spirit, after the lapse of all those centuries, by Shelley. An Anglican college could not in those days help expelling a rampant propagator of atheism, though it has now adopted his memory and built him a strange and incongruous shrine within its courts. Nor could Eldon, as the legal guardian of the interests of Shelley's children, have left them in the hands of a father who would have brought them up to social ruin. Shelley, however, like Rousseau, was cosmopolitan. He withdrew from English citizenship to spend the rest of his days in Italy. Moreover, he was a being as intensely poetic and as little allied to earth in any way as his own. skylark. He is not the first of poets in mental power, but he is, it

seems to me, the most purely and intensely poetic. What could lead my friend Matthew Arnold to disrate Shelley's poetry and put it below his letters, I never could understand. "A beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain "; such was Arnold's description of Shelley, and true it is that so far as any practical results of his poetic preaching were concerned, the angel did beat his wings in vain; but if he was luminous and beautiful, he fulfilled the idea of a poet.

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Tom Moore clearly belongs to the history of his age. He is the bard of the Whigs in their fight with the Tory government, and of his native Ireland, then struggling for emancipation. He is a thorough Irishman with all the lightness and brilliancy of his race, with all its fun and with all its pathos. The pathos we have in Paradise and the Peri ", as well as in "Irish Melodies". The fun takes largely the form of political satire. Very good the satire is, though like almost all satire and caricature, it loses a part of its pungency by lapse of time. To enjoy it thoroughly you must have lived at least near to the days of the Regency, Eldon, Castlereagh, and Sidmouth.

On the other side we have Walter Scott. When he is named we think of the incomparable writer of fiction rather than of the poet. Yet surely the writer of "Marmion ", of the introduction to "Marmion", and of the lyrical pieces interspersed in the tales, deserves a place, and a high place, among poets. Is not "Marmion" a noble piece and the most truly epic thing in our language, besides being most interesting as a tale? Scott is claimed politically and ecclesiastically by the party of reaction. It is said that he turned the eyes of his generation back from the sceptical and revolutionary present to the reverent and chivalrous past. He has even been cited as the harbinger of Ritualism. The romance, of which he was the wizard, certainly instils love of the past. So far he did belong to the reaction. But his motive was never political or ecclesiastical. Of ecclesiasticism there was nothing about him. He delighted in ruined abbeys, but a boon companion was to him "worth all the Bernardan brood who ever wore frock or hood". A Tory, and an ardent Tory, he was. An intense patriot he was in the struggle with revolutionary France and her emperor. A worshiper of monarchy he was, devout enough to adore George IV, but he was above all things a great artist, perfectly impartial in his choice of subjects for his art. Welcome alike to him were Tory and Whig, Cavalier and Roundhead, Jacobite and Covenanter, if they could furnish him with character. Happily for his readers, he never preaches, as some novelists do; yet we learn from him historical toleration and breadth of view, while we are

always imbibing the sentiments of a genial, high-minded, and altogether noble gentleman.

We must not forget Crabbe, who though as far as possible from being revolutionary, perhaps instils a slightly democratic sentiment by cultivating our social interest in the poor. Ebenezer Elliott, the author of the "Corn-Law Rhymes " and no mean poet, is a bard of the liberal movement and especially of free trade. Unless he was greatly mistaken, there can be no doubt about the source of industrial misery in his day.

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Tennyson has been called a great teacher. The name is inappropriate, as any one who had known the man would feel. He was one of the greatest of poets, almost unrivaled in beauty of language and in melody. But he had nothing definite to teach. With fixed opinions he could not have been so perfectly as he was the mirror of intellectual society in his age. There is more faith in honest doubt than in half the creeds." There's something in this world amiss will be unriddled by and by." That was his mental attitude, and it was perfectly characteristic of a time in which old beliefs were passing away and new beliefs had not yet been formed; an age of vague spiritual hopes and yearnings, such as glimmer in “In Memoriam and wherever Tennyson touches the subjects of God and religion and the mystery of being. In this sense his poetry is a chapter in the general history of the English mind. We see at the same time in his poems the advance of science, to which with consummate art he lends a poetic form. The revolt of woman is playfully treated in "The Princess". Reaction against the prevalent commercialism and materialism finds expression in the chivalrous "Idylls of the King”. Tennyson is intensely patriotic and even militarist, though a man could not be imagined less likely to be found on a field of battle. In this also he represents an eddy in the current of national sentiment. In the well-known passage in “Maud " welcoming the Crimean War he thoroughly identified himself with English history, though he lived, like Lord Salisbury, to find that he had laid his money on the wrong horse.

The names of Aubrey de Vere and Frederick Taber on one side, those of Swinburne and Mrs. Barrett Browning on the other, show that English poetry has been lending its lyre to the expression of all the different sentiments, ecclesiastical, political, and social, of an age full of life and conflict. But the connection is rather with European than with English history. Matthew Arnold is the arch-connoisseur and general censor, appreciating all varieties and regulating them by his taste rather than connecting himself with anything national or special, unless it be the spirit of free thought which was consuming

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England in his day. His poetry is simply high art. Of Browning I fear to speak. His characteristic poems do not give me pleasure of that sort which it is supposed to be the special function of poetry to give. He is a philosopher in verse with Browning societies to interpret his philosophy. He, again, symbolizes the general tendencies of an age, rather than any special period or phase of English history.

We seem now to have come to a break in the life of poetry in England and elsewhere; let us hope not to its close. There are good writers, Mr. Watson, for example. Swinburne with his revolutionary fervor is still with us. Edwin Arnold with his singular command of luscious language has only just left us. But neither in England nor anywhere else does there appear to be a great poet. Imagination has taken refuge in the novels, of which there is a deluge, though among them, George Eliot in her peculiar line excepted, there is not the rival of Miss Austen, Walter Scott, Thackeray, or Dickens. The phenomenon appears to be common to Europe in general. Is science killing poetic feeling? Darwin owns that he had entirely lost all taste for poetry, and not only for poetry but for anything esthetic. Yet Tennyson seems to have shown that science itself has a sentiment of its own and one capable of poetic presentation. Ours is manifestly an age of transition. Of what it is the precursor an old man is not likely to see.

GOLDWIN SMITH.

THE NAMING OF AMERICA

THE Voyages of the Florentine Amerigo Vespucci belong rather to the literary than to the geographical history of the New World. An acute observer of things new and strange and a clever writer, he became, through the publication of his letters in the countries beyond the Pyrenees, the principal source of information about the western Indies. In these narratives he made himself the central personality; in not one of them did he mention the name of the commander under whom he sailed, and consequently the impression easily gained ground that he was a discoverer. His place in the history of the discoveries is the most remarkable illustration of eternal celebrity won through a happy combination of the literary gift and selfadvertisement, with the coöperation of the printing-press.

Amerigo Vespucci, generally known to the English world under a Latinized form of his name, Americus Vespucius, was born in Florence March 9, 1452, where he lived until some forty years of age. He entered business life, became connected with the mercantile house of the Medici, and in 1492 went to Seville, in Spain, as its foreign agent. He first appears in the Spanish documents as employed in carrying out the contracts of an Italian merchant, Berardi, engaged in equipping vessels for the government for the service to the Indies. He apparently continued in this business as a contractor till 1499,2 when the vicissitudes of business life finally led him to desire something more "stable and praiseworthy". He then resolved to "see . . . the world", and availed himself of the opportunity to join an expedition of four ships which was going out to discover new lands toward the west.3

It is at this point that the first puzzle in Vespucci's career or his character is met with. He says explicitly that the expedition sailed from Cadiz May 10, 1497; but there is no record, official or unofficial, outside of his letter, of such a voyage in 1497. Further, Columbus's monopoly privileges were solemnly renewed April 23 of this year, and the earlier authorization of independent voyages was officially

1 Luigi Hugues, in the Raccolta Colombiana (6 parts in 14 vols., Rome, 1892–1896), Part V, vol. 2, 115.

2 Ibid., 117.

3 Vespucci's letter to Soderini, C. R. Markham, Letters of Amerigo Vespucci (Hakluyt Society, London, 1894), 3.