nothing at all; they were only part of the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When the subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious world of England Mr. Strachey says, looking down with exhilaration on the anthill beneath him, 'The questions at issue are being taken very seriously by a large number of persons. How Early 'Victorian of them!' Mr. Strachey has yet to learn that questions of this kind are taken seriously' by serious people, and that their emotion is both genuine and deep. He sees nothing but alcoholic eccentricity in the mysticism of Gordon. His cynicism sometimes carries him beyond the confines of good taste, as in the passage where he refers to the large and dirty ears of the Roman cardinals. Still worse is the query as to what became of the soul of Pope Pius IX. after his death.

These are errors in discretion. A fault in art is the want of care which the author takes in delineating his minor or subordinate figures. He gives remarkable pains, for example, to his study of General Gordon, but he is indifferent to accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came into contact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, who focus their eye on one portion of their canvas, and work that up to a high perfection, while leaving the rest of the picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait of Gordon, is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, indeed, is the least successful of the four monographs. Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey has not had the material to work upon which now exists to elucidate his other and earlier subjects. But it is difficult to account for his apparently not having read Mr. Bernard Holland's life of the Duke of Devonshire, which throws much light, evidently VOL. 228. NO. 466.

U

unknown to Mr. Strachey, on the Gordon relief expedition. Sir Evelyn Baring is here seen to have urged the expedition, while Chamberlain was one of its opponents. Mr. Strachey does not seem to have noticed how much the issue was confused by conflicting opinions as to whether the route to be taken should be by Suakin or up the Nile.

No part of his book is more vigorous or picturesque than the chapter dealing with the proclamation of Papal Infallibility. But here again one is annoyed by the glibness with which Mr. Strachey smoothly asserts what are only his conjectures.

In his account of Manning's reception in Rome-and this is of central importance in his picture of Manning's whole career-he exaggerates the personal policy of Pio Nono, whom he represents as more independent of the staff of the Curia than was possible. Rome has never acknowledged the right of the individual, even though that individual be the Pope, to an independent authority. Mr. Odo Russell was resident secretary in Rome from 1858 to 1870, and his period of office was drawing to a close when Manning arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. The author of 'Eminent Victorians' is pleased to describe 'poor Mr. Russell' as little better than a fly buzzing in Manning's' spider's web of delicate and clinging diplomacy.' It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for stating to Bismarck, without instructions from the government, that the Black Sea question was one on which Great Britain might be compelled to go to war with or without allies. Lord Morley's' Life of Gladstone (vol. ii., p. 354) is explicit on this interesting point. The information which, by special permission of the Pope, Cardinal Manning was able to give to him on all that was going on in the Council was, of course, of great value to Odo Russell, but his views on other aspects of the question were derived from quite different sources.

In this respect he had the advantage of the Cardinal, both on account of his diplomatic position and of his long and

intimate knowledge both of Vatican policy and of the forces which the Curia has at its command. On the strength of those forces, and on the small amount of effective support which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility was likely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an example of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, and with every circumstance of mystery.

Several of the characteristics which diversify Mr. Strachey's remarkable volume are exemplified in the following quotation. It deals with the funeral of Cardinal Manning :

'The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive manner, had been touched. Many who had hardly seen him declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit that moved them? Or was it his valiant disregard of common custom and those conventional reserves and poor punctilios which are wont to hem about the great? Or was it something untameable in his glances and in his gestures? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour lingering about him of the antique organization of Rome? For whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed; and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than lasting. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day. And he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten trophy, the Hat.'

Longinus tells us that 'a just judgment of style is the final 'fruit of long experience.' In the measured utterances of Mr. Asquith we recognize the speech of a man to whom all that is old and good is familiar, and in whom the art of finished expression has become a habit. No more elegantly balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is something in the equipoise of his own genius which points Mr. Asquith out as a judge peculiarly well fitted to sit in judgment upon rival

ages. In his Romanes lecture there is but one thing to be regretted the restricted space which it offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquith excels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the Victorian Age is too broad a province to be explored within one hour. He has endeavoured to lighten his task by excluding theology and politics, and indeed but for such self-denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air. He is able, however, having thrown out so much formidable ballast, to rise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian Age, as it recedes, he declares it to have been very good. The young men who despise and attack that Age receive no support in any particular from Mr. Asquith.

He dwells on the fecundity of the literature of the Victorian Age in its middle period, and especially on the publications which adorned the decade from 1850 to 1859. He calls those years, very justly, ' marvellous and almost unexampled' in their rich profusion. We may suggest that the only rival to them in our history is the period from 1590 to 1600, which saw the early plays of Shakespeare, the Faerie Queene,' the Arcadia,' the 'Ecclesiastical 'Polity,' 'Tamburlaine,' 'The Discovery of Guiana,' and Bacon's Essays.' If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do not equal these in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the ground they cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from Thackeray to Ruskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might have included ‘Lavengro, and Newman's 'Lectures,' and Herbert Spencer's Social 'Statics.' The only third decade worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is that which opens in 1705, and is illuminated by the names of Pope, Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison, and Berkeley. It is pleasant to compare these three magnificently flowering epochs, but not profitable if we attempt to weigh one against the other. They are comparable only in the splendour of their accomplishment.

It is more difficult to fit science into our scheme of the Victorian Age than to find places there for Art and Literature. Perhaps the reason of this is that the latter were national in their character, whereas scientific inquiry, throughout the nineteenth century, was carried on upon international

lines, or, at least, in a spirit unprecedentedly non-provincial. The vast achievements of science, practical and theoretical, were produced for the world, not for a race. Mr. Asquith speaks with justice and eloquence of the appearance of Darwin's Origin of Species,' which he distinguishes as being if not actually the most important, certainly the most interesting ' event of the Age,' and his remarks on the fortune of that book are excellent. No one can overestimate the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps a Frenchman might speak in almost the same terms of Claude Bernard, whose life and work ran parallel with Darwin's. If the 'Origin ' of Species' made an epoch in 1859, the Introduction à 'la médicine expérimentale' made another in 1865. Both these books, as channels by which the experimental labours of each investigator reached the prepared and instructed public, exercised at once, and have continued ever since to exercise, an enormous effect on thought as well as on knowledge. They transformed the methods by which man approaches scientific investigation, and while they instructed they stimulated a new ardour for instruction. In each case the value of the discovery lay in the value of the idea which led to the discovery, and, as some one has said in the case of Claude Bernard, they combined for the first time the operations of science and philosophy. The parallel between these two contemporaries extends, in a measure, to their disciples and successors, and seems to suggest that Mr. Asquith in his generous and difficult estimate may have exaggerated the purely Victorian element in the science of the age of Darwin. This only accentuates the difficulty, and he may perhaps retort that there is an extreme danger in suggesting what does and what does not form a part of so huge a system.

Justifiably Mr. Asquith takes it for granted that the performance of the central years of the Victorian Age was splendid. With those who deny merit to the writers and artists of the last half century it is difficult to reach a common ground for argument. What is to be the criterion of taste if all the multiform exhibitions of it which passed muster from 1840 to 1890 are now to be swept away with contumely? Perhaps indeed it is only among those extravagant romanticists who are trying to raise entirely new ideals, unrelated