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the passion gone, the further changes simply reduce the concentrated utterance of intense emotion to a conventional sentiment clothed in incongruous phrase. This illustrates the process of improving Shakespeare's diction by excluding common words" connected with sordid offices," which found favour not only with the dramatists of the Restoration, who could hardly be expected to appreciate the language of real passion, but to a certain extent with Johnson himself. At least, as we have seen, Johnson unites with critics of the same age and school in condemning the use of such terms. The great critic was indeed haunted with the notion, common to many of his immediate predecessors, of refining and fixing the language so as finally to exclude all rustic and vulgar elements from the authorized vocabulary of the lettered and polite. Dryden, as we have seen, had a vague idea of establishing an academy for this purpose, and Swift formally addressed a letter to the Earl of Oxford, suggesting that, as a member of the Government, he should take the initiative in devising some means for "ascertaining and fixing the language for ever, after such alterations are made in it as shall be thought requisite." This notion of circumscribing the language within some artificial boundary was indeed the dominant conception on the subject of the whole period, from the days of Dryden, who reigned at its commencement, to those of Johnson, who saw its close, and whose Dictionary, the partial realization of his original plan, was published about the eighteenth century.

Early in the second half of the eighteenth century the tide of conventional restriction began almost imperceptibly to turn. In the works of Collins, Goldsmith, and Thomson, the despotic influences of the town and the Court are somewhat relaxed, and there is, at least, a partial return to the simplicity of nature to the varied charm of rural sights and sounds, and the moving realities of a more homely hunian experience. The works of Percy, Crabbe, Cowper, and Burns fed the rising tide until the fountains of the great deep were once more broken up by the French Revolution following the American War. The criticism of the eighteenth century, cold and negative as it sometimes appeared, had at length done its work, and a work of unexpected magnitude it proved to be. It struck a mortal blow at theories of feudal privileges and divine right, which had become prolific sources of evil; and gradually undermined the despotic institutions that were fatal barriers to human progress, until at last they fell with a crash, and there swept over them the wild tumultuous tide of

emancipated humanity. These great events stirred the intellect and heart, not only of England but of Europe. But one of the most striking effects on our literature of this moral upheaval is the exuberance of origi nal poetic genius that marked the opening decades of the present century. The names of Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Southey, Coleridge, Campbell, Shelley, Keats, not to mention others of equal rank though of more recent fame, represent an age of original imaginative power and productiveness second only to the Elizabethan. The literary influence of the profound reaction produced by the critical movement of the eighteenth century has however been often traced, and in its general outline is tolerably well known to the majority of intelligent readers. But, as in the case of the Elizabethan period, the influence on the national speech of this great original movement of the national mind, has never yet been carefully analysed, and only noticed at all in a very partial and imperfect manner. As might, however, have been expected from the circumstances of the case, the movement had a direct and powerful influence on the vocabulary of the lan guage. The change is, moreover, well worth detailed notice, both for its own sake, and for the sake of the deeper tendencies and characteristics of the modern period of which it is a striking sign and index. Though, like all natural developments, gradual and for the most part unperceived, it nevertheless represents a revolution in the resources of literary and current English, greater than any that had taken place since the formation of the language, with the exception of the Elizabethan era. As the causes affecting the national mind in the two periods were to some extent similar, so there is a likeness in the effects. In both, the national intellect was roused by the commanding impulse of great public events, the national heart stirred to its depths by fresh interests and more generous sympathies, and the national imagination quickered by the exciting stimulus of new and glorious hopes. But in the modern period the national movement had a wider sweep, and was naturally of a more self-conscious and reflective character. Towards the close of the sixteenth century the dominant feeling was a national one, the strong desire to secure and maintain com plete independence,-scope for the free manifestation of the nation's energies, and the full development of its civil and ecclesiasti cal life. But at the end of the eighteenth century, wider thoughts and sympathies, quickened by the stirring of new life in other lands than our own, modified the isolated conception of nationality that had hitherto

ruled the English mind with undisputed | tion between nations, to express the fact that sway. Under the liberalizing stimulus of different peoples, so far from being, accordlarger vital interests, the limited notion of ing to the traditional view, rivals and antagnationality, of national welfare as an exclu- onists, are one in the higher conditions of sive end, broadened, deepened, and expanded welfare and progress, have common duties into that of humanity at large. The more and responsibilities, and, as members of the open, sensitive, and eager minds of the time, same family, ought to unite in efforts for the as well as the more far-seeing and reflective, promotion of the common good; or, to vary were stirred with a truer and more enlarged the metaphor, as soldiers fighting under the notion of liberty and justice as the indis- same banner share together the hardships pensable conditions of real progress every- and perils to be encountered in securing the where. They were kindled to righteous in- triumph of the common cause. dignation against bondage of every kind, social and political, intellectual and spiritual, and keenly sympathized with the rising struggles of long oppressed European peoples to throw off the yoke of hereditary despotic rule, and secure for themselves the national liberty and independence essential to the development of higher individual character and progressive national life.

This new conception of nations being bound together by common interests and relationships, soon enriched our own language with a new word for its expression. Coleridge justly says that any new word expressing a fact or relationship, not expressed by any other word in the language, is a new organ of thought; and this is true of the term international, a coinage of our own century, which aptly expresses one of its most characteristic and operative conceptions. We are now so familiar with the term, and the idea it expresses, that it is difficult to realize fully the extreme recentness of both. Hardly any conception is however at once more thoroughly novel, and more expressive of the modern spirit, than that represented by the term international. For though the word, it is true, does not necessarily denote friendly interests and relationships, it was originally introduced to express them, and since its introduction has been largely used for the same purpose. It was not, indeed, until the perception of common interests and connexions between nations had risen into importance, and occupied the attention of public writers and speakers, that the want of a term to express them was generally felt or adequately supplied. A more advanced phase of the same conception is expressed by another word, wholly new, and less suited, perhaps, to the genius of the language, but which, nevertheless, has already passed into reputable use, and will, probably, on account of its convenience, be ultimately adopted. This is the word solidarity, as in the phrase "solidarity of the peoples," first popularized by Kossuth during his visit to this country after the revolutionary movement of 1848. It is employed to denote essential community of interest and obliga

This expansion of social and political interests had a powerful intellectual effect, and helped directly to widen the horizon in every department of inquiry, in history and philosophy, science and literature. In pure literature the effect was perhaps most immediately seen in the opening up of fresh and living sources of interest in every department of imaginative activity. The poets, in particular, looked at nature and human life no longer through the medium of books and traditional representations, or artificial lights and conventional draperies, but face to face; and in the growing light and kindling rapture of that open vision, the whole universe of life, including its most familiar objects and experiences, was completely transfigured. The obscuring veil of custom was rent, the indurating scales of indifference fell away, and this goodly frame, the earth, o'ercanopied with this majestical roof, "fretted with golden fire," and peopled by this quintessence of breathing dust, so noble in reason and infinite in faculty, appeared once more, as it ever does to the purified and observant eye, in all the dewy freshness and beauty of a new creation. The multitude of new thoughts and feelings and experiences arising from this quickened creative activity of the intellect, imagination, and affections, demanded to some extent, at least, a new vehicle for their full and appropriate expression. The limited vocabulary of the satirical and didactic poetry of the eighteenth century was, in fact, almost ludicrously inadequate to the larger wants and requirements of the lyrical, descriptive, and dramatic poets of the nineteenth. Some of its more conventional elements were moreover unsuitable from their artificial character. Hence Wordsworth's vigorous protest against "what is usually called poetical diction," the adulterated phraseology arising from a lavish but wholly mechanical use of figures of speech and sterotyped metaphorical phrases, as simply a hindrance and a snare to the true poet of nature. Throwing aside this useless lumber, the representatives of the new and natural school of poetry sought in all directions, wherever they could

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be found, the materials of a more simple and doubt true. During the last half-century expressive, as well as of a more rich, copious, our vocabulary has been enlarged by the and varied imaginative diction. Some, like addition of a vast number of new words and Wordsworth and Southey, recalled to poet- fresh forms. In particular, the inherent viical use the homely but significant terms tality of the language has been vindicated belonging to the dialect of rustic and com- by the formation of a number of new and mon life. Others, like Coleridge and Keats, expressive compounds that have already passpassing over the uncongenial school of the ed into general use, and enriched the reprevious century, betook themselves to the sources of literary and current English. living study of the Elizabethan poets, es- But the largest additions of all have been pecially Spenser and Shakespeare, and in made from the very sources which Professor their own writings recalled to use many pic- Craik regards as least likely to furnish any,— turesque expressions belonging to that noble the nervous diction of older thinkers and school. Others, like Scott, and even Byron, pocts. We venture to say, as the result of roamed at will amongst the literary trea- a somewhat careful and prolonged study of sures of the past, visiting the byways as the materials essential to a judgment on the well as the highways of its poetic literature, question, that the words from this source— and enriching their vocabulary from various from the more archaic and obsolescent elesources, but especially from the fugitive ment of the language-added to the vocabulyrical and ballad poetry north and south of lary during the present century, must be the Tweed. The modern lyrical poets, numbered not by tens but by hundreds, if Burns and the Ettrick Shepherd, and a not by tens of hundreds. This is a sweepnumber of less distinguished bards, such as ing assertion, but it admits of detailed and Leyden, Bowles, and Clare, Beattie, Graham, rigorous proof. The details of this proof, and Wilson, fed their poetical feeling from however, it would be impossible to comprise the same living springs, and helped in the even in outline within the already exhausted same way to vitalize the vehicle of their space of the present article, and they must poetic art. From these various sources therefore be reserved for a subsequent large additions to the plastic medium of paper. poetry were gradually made; and in the first quarter of the century a stream of expressive words from the older language of feeling and imagination passed into our current speech. In the second quarter of the century, this process of enriching the language by recalling to use its neglected stores of expressive diction has been carried still further by a new generation of poets and writers of fiction. This important work of a reflective expansion is still actively going for- In welcoming this last fruit of a noble tree, ward, and as the result of it we have now in we are naturally led to look back over the use hundreds, and even thousands, of words older memorials of the author's long and that were neglected or unknown during the distinguished labours. Born early in 1791, greater part of the eighteenth century. The the son of a Court physician, who "was holate Professor Craik, for example, who was noured during his professional career," as on many grounds well entitled to speak on his son was happy to commemorate, " by the such a question, says, in discussing this very distinguished favour of" his sovereign,* Milsubject and period-the diction of the last man enjoyed the best opportunities of culture half-century that when a word has, from which England then could furnish, under whatever cause, dropped out of use, it seems Dr. Burney and at Eton and at Oxford, nearly as impossible to recall it to a really His reputation dates from a time when the living and working condition as to raise the present leaders of thought had not begun dead in any other case." And he concludes their course, and recalls or anticipates the with the broad statement that very little of age of many who have passed away before genuine revivification has ever been accomplished in human speech;" adding, "You will sooner introduce into a language a hundred or a thousand new words than you will re-establish in the general acceptance ten old ones that have been sometime thrown aside." What is here suggested with regard to the ease with which new words are introduced is no

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ART. IV.-Annals of St. Paul's Cathedral.

By HENRY HART MILMAN, D.D., late Dean of St. Paul's. London: Murray. 1868.

him full of honour. He records with some
emotion that Heber was his "early friend
(p. 488); and he contributed to Heber's
Hymnal some of its most cherished and
familiar pieces. It is nearly fifty years since

* Dedication of Milman's Bampton Lectures to George IV., 1827.

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that it would have formed the prelude, through an intermediate publication of mixed character, to a production like the History of Latin Christianity, a book of grand proportions and comprehensive scope; a book. which soars above its rivals (if indeed it has any in English) like the dome of St. Paul's above the London churches; a book which must always be counted among the few works holding the highest rank as masterpieces of the English tongue.

his longer poems were attaining the highest rare instance of that kind of growth which point of their popularity. Dr. Newman, his widens and strengthens with its stature; junior by nine or ten years, looked up to carries up breadth, as we may say, along with him in his youth as" a rising man of brilliant height, so that his end was even greater than reputation."* In the Oxford class-list his the promise of his outset. Excepting the name stands next to that of J. G. Lockhart. few hymns to which we have referred, his In the prize-list it is surrounded by such poetry has already passed away from the ear names as those of Sir J. T. Coleridge, Lord and memory of the nation. Excepting, and Derby (eight years his junior), Whately, scarcely excepting, one or two passages, his Keble, Arnold, and Hampden. His Bamp- Bampton Lectures are forgotten. His carton Lectures furnished illustrations for liest historical work was an anonymous conArchbishop Whately's Rhetoric. He held tribution to the unpretending series of the the chair of Poetry before Mr. Keble. His Family Library; and the outcry raised by Annals of St. Paul's are full of recollections the novelties of its style and mode of interwhich carry us back among scenes and per-pretation was not kept in check by any spesons now belonging to history. He was cial signs of massive strength about the confirmed at Eton by Pretyman, then workmanship. No one could have foreseen Bishop of Lincoln (p. 472). The "ineffaceable memory" of the voice of Bishop Porteus dwells on his car "after a lapse of nearly seventy years" (p. 468). He heard, or fancied that" he "heard, the low wail of the sailors" who bore the body of Nelson to his grave (p. 485). The name of Hallam is "dear to " him," from long reverential friendship" (p. 491). Yet no man ever kept up to the last a more living connexion with every passing movement of the intellect; so that all men felt him to belong to the present by sympathy and interest, as fully as in memory and reputation he belonged to the past. And whatever he did was well done, and was crowned with appropriate success. His clerical life was full and prosperous, from his Reading vicarage, through a canonry of Westminster and the rectory of St. Margaret's, to the deanery of St. Paul's. But his earlier Oxford life was equally complete and rounded. A first class, when a first class was a very high distinction, every one of the four great annual prizes, a fellowship, the Bampton Lecture, and the Poetry professorship, together form-to trace the human aspects of Church hisan outline of an Oxford career which could scarcely be surpassed. Dean Stanley calls his Newdigate the most perfect of all Oxford prize-poems;" and Dean Stanley himself wrote a Newdigate, which a third illustrious winner of that prize, Professor Wilson, called "the best prize-poem since Heber's 'Palestine.'" These four names, Heber, Wilson, Milman, and Stanley, are about the brightest in the series of the Newdigate prizemen, and Milman stands out as, upon the whole, the foremost of the four.

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But beyond all this, Dean Milman was a

*Apologia, p. 76.

Eminent as he was, alike as poet, scholar, essayist, and preacher, it is as historian that he fills the largest space in our literature, and will secure the most enduring place among great writers. It was his good fortune to find a distinct place unoccupied, and to occupy it with a completeness which has made him its master. If Gibbon first built a strong bridge between the ancient and the modern world, compacting into that stately fabric all the wrecks and fragments of information which had survived the deluge of barbarian inroads, Milman raised another structure of scarcely less imposing grandeur,

tory through the long period of its greatest splendour, as it was carried on by the strong practical energy of the Latin race from the point to which it had been advanced by the more speculative Greek intellect. A third task still awaits its architect, but Milman foreshadowed its place and its plan,-a history of Christianity as it was shaped at a later date by the peculiar characteristics of the Teutonic races, to form a platform for the history of the Church of the future.

The Annals of St. Paul's, with their narrower subject and their nearer interests, formed an appropriate work for his old age. Never did he write a more attractive vol

f Bampton Lectures, p. 269 seq.; Whateley's Rheume; but his editors are surely to blame toric, p. 451, ed. 1846. Compare History of Christianity, i. 428, note, ed. 1863.

McMillan's Magazine, Jan. 1869, p. 168; Blackwood's Magazine, Oct. 1837, p. 556.

*We observe, however, an instance of reference to them in a recent work, Dr. Roberts' Discussions on the Gospels, 1864, pp. 10, 24.

for the state in which it is published. The book is everywhere disfigured by errors of the press, to an extent which the long list of errata by no means covers.** We should gladly make excuses for broken sentences, miscopied dates, and small confusions between one name and another, rather than have wished to task the eye of the venerable author by imposing on him the tedium of revision. But surely he had relatives who should have found a pleasure in discharging so pious a duty. A young man's memory could not fail to supply the lapses into which an old man's memory, however wonderful, would sometimes fall. Here is an instance, or rather two instances together:

"The wiser defender of the Church of Eng. land, Richard Hooker (I wish that I could find the name of Hooker among the preachers at the Cross or in the Cathedral), had not yet come forward; the 'Ecclesiastical Polity' appeared in 1594. Richard Bancroft rose to London and to Canterbury; Richard Hooker died Master of the Temple" (p. 303).

To use his own phrase (p. 31), the Dean is not well up in his Walton. Within a very few he refers to "those charming pages popular biographies by Isaak Walton, which will last as long as English literature lasts" (p. 323). How could author or editor forget that curious narrative in one of those biographies, which tells how Hooker went to London "to preach at St Paul's Cross," how he stayed at "the Shunammite's house," with the unlucky sequel of his visit; how the Bishop of London was among his hearers; and how "the justifying of his doctrine did not prove of so bad consequence, as the kindness of Mrs. Churchman's curing him of his late distemper and cold"? For the other point, it is well known that Mr. Hooker left the Temple for the seclusion of a country parsonage several years before his death,--a correction which would even strengthen the argument of the passage.

Considering the grounds of Dean Milman's chief claims to distinction, it is not unnatural that his main interest turns on the more lettered of his predecessors in the deanery of St. Paul's. There were other

c. g., p. 168, for "it was overlooked" read "it overlooked;" p. 286, for "Gulls' Handbook" read "Gull's Hornbook," etc., etc. Many other errors have been already pointed out elsewhere. But for one so-called "slip" which has been charged against the book the critic who complains is himself re

sponsible. Dean Milman has been accused of calling

Deans for whom he shows much less respect. As for the Canons, a most important element in that great corporation, he tells us very little about them individually, except when he passes a strong condemnation on their behaviour towards their illustrious architect. We begin by quoting a few passages in which he gives expression to his personal predilec tions and antipathies:

"Radulph de Diceto built the Deanery of St. Paul's, inhabited after him by many men of let ters; before the Reformation by the admirable Colet, who may compensate for many names; after the Reformation, by Alexander Nowell, Donne, Sancroft, who rebuilt the mansion after the fire, Stillingfleet, Tillotson, W. Sherlock, Butler, Secker, Newton, Van Mildert, Coplestone [read Copleston]. As a lover of letters, I might perhaps without presumption add another name" (p. 39).

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According to the theory of Colet (strange that the Dean of St. Paul's in the nineteenth century should find the views which he has long held so nearly anticipated by the Dean of the sixteenth)," etc. (p. 116).

"The Dean of St. Paul's of the present day thanks God that he is spared such trials as leave a blot, at all events a dark suspicion, on the fame of his pious and learned predecessor," viz., Nowell, in his conference with Campian (p. 308).

"Donne is the only Dean of St. Paul's, till a very late successor, who was guilty of poetry" (p. 324).

"In this respect alone, I am not heartily ashamed of my clerical forefathers. With all my admiration of [Wren's] first design, I cannot regret the prolongation of the nave, or its expansion into the Latin Cross" (p. 403). For their conduct to Wren "I would willingly draw the inexorable duty of the historian forbids all a veil over the shame of my predecessors; but disguise, all reticence" (p 436). "My Etonian reverence for the good provost (Godolphin) will hardly mitigate my strong reprobation of his conduct to Sir Christopher Wren while Dean of St. Paul's (p.458).

It might console the shades of those whom he has neglected to note, that he thinks just as little of many of the Bishops of London, who pass across his page like the figures of a pageant, or like the phantoms of a dream, which "come like shadows, so depart:"

"We have a long barren list of Teutonic names of Bishops, barbarously Latinized, not one of whom has left his mark in history, or even in legend. St. Dunstan alone passes over the throne of London on his way to Canterbury.

The list of deans is even

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more

dreary, obscure, and imperfect; a few Saxonsounding names, and no more" (p. 12). "Robert [read Richard] de Belmeis," the second of that name, was bishop for ten si"During the sixty years of the thirteenth [fourteenth] century," 1304-1364, seven bishops passed over the see of London," of whom

Waller "the best of poets," p. 342. The words are a quotation from Denham's verses inserted just before, and they ought to have been distinguished by quotation marks. The irony is sufficiently obvious.lent years" (p. 28). Keble's Hooker, Life by Walton, pp 22, 23 cd., 1841. "That which I taught was at Paul's Cross." -Hooker, Answer to Travers, Works, iii, 576.

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