SATURDAY, MARCH 6, 1875. No. 148, New Series.

THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript.

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LITERATURE. Lectures on the Early History of Institutions. By Sir Henry Maine, K.S.I. (London: John Murray, 1875.)

UNTIL lately those who appealed to natural laws or natural rights meant one of two very different things. They were thinking either of the law which they supposed to have been instituted by man in his primitive condition, issuing, as they said, from the hands of Nature; or of an ideal law in conformity with justice and discovered by reason, that is to say, of rational law. In whichever of these acceptations the term was employed, the conception of this natural law varied according to the sentiments of the particular writer who did his best to define it, because it rested on no basis of positive fact. In these days we have begun to seek for the ancient laws that really existed, by the method of comparative studies in history, which have been productive of such surprising results in the domain of comparative philology and comparative mythology. In his admirable work on Ancient Law, Sir Henry Maine furnished us with a model of this kind of investigation, so difficult and yet so interesting, which aims at the discovery of the customs, practices, and the legal ideas of ancient societies, with their corresponding institutions. In his study on the Village Communities, this distinguished writer examined the agrarian constitution of primitive societies more in detail, and in the present work he supports his previous ideas by means of a valuable array of facts taken from the ancient Irish laws known as the "Brehon Laws." The writings of Sir H. Maine are specially valuable, because he combines the elevated views of the philosopher with the practical spirit of the jurist, and unites the knowledge of the juridical traditions of India with that of the Roman, German, and Celtic laws, and he is thus enabled to point out curious and instructive parallels for every point of importance.

Until the publication of the Brehon laws, the study of Comparative Ancient Law presented an important and lamentable hiatus. As Sir H. Maine observes, "there was no set of communities which until recently supplied us with information less in amount and apparent value concerning the early history of law than those of Celtic origin." Now that the Brehon laws enable us to form a tolerably exact idea of primitive Celtic institutions, we are struck with their similarity to those of Germany, and (what is remarkable, but by no means inexplicable) with a still greater similarity to those of India. The two branches of the Aryan race

which from a geographical point of view are the most widely separated, are yet those which most resemble each other in their juridical customs and ideas, because they have most faithfully preserved the early traditions of their common stock. Nations in an oppressed condition are those which progress least, and preserve their traditions with the strictest fidelity, for these are all examples we may mention that the Servians, they have to reverence in their calamity. As enslaved by the Turks, and the Russians, who have been subjugated by the Tartars, still use the ancient modes of collective ownership.

The ancient Irish legislation furnishes us with a fresh proof of the doctrine which is now beginning to be received, namely, that the various nations have, at certain stages in their development, possessed institutions absolutely identical. We err in ascribing too much influence to race in this respect. The Russians supposed their collective communal ownership to be a peculiarity of the Slavonic race; I believe that I have demonstrated its original existence among all nations and in all climates.* The Germans often speak of the free institutions of ancient Germany, as if such had been the exclusive privilege of the German race. Yet we know that they existed in primitive times in Greece, in Italy, and not only among all the tribes of the Aryan race, but even among those of the Semitic, and among the Kabyles of Algeria. Laws are not the arbitrary product of human will, but the result of certain economical necessities, and of certain ideas of justice derived from the moral and religious sentiment. It follows, therefore, that all men, to whatever race they belong, having the same original instincts, and their economical conditions being originally the same-it necessarily follows that similar institutions must have arisen in all parts. Only, while some races have kept this primitive régime, others, by a succession of transformations, have attained a very different condition of social organisation.

Let us quote a few of the more striking resemblances existing between the ancient Irish customs and those of the other Aryan nations. In early times the laws were written in verse in India, Greece, Rome, and Judea. Similarly in the ancient Irish traditions we cannot distinguish the bard from the legislator. Part of the collection of Brehon laws entitled Senchus Mor is written in verse. Originally laws were never written, but transmitted from generation to generation by memory; hence, in order to preserve literal accuracy, it was necessary that a rhythmic form should be adopted, as at once less readily admitting of change, and being with greater facility retained in the memory. The Brehons strongly resembled the Druids as the latter are depicted by Caesar. The Druids were judges of crimes and lawsuits. All Gaul flocked to their great annual

* See my work entitled De la Propriété, et de ses Formes Primitives. Sir H. Maine says on this subject: "The collective ownership of the soil, either by groups in fact united by blood relationship, or believing that they are so united, is now entitled to take rank as an ascertained primitive phenomenon once universally characterising those communities of mankind between whose civilisation and our own there is any distinct connexion or analogy."

assizes, which were held in a sacred wood, where they settled such differences as had arisen among the tribes: they were at once priests and magistrates. The tracts lately. published show that the Brehons no less were judges in all disputes :

66

Among their writings are separate treatises on inheritance and boundary, and almost every page of the translations contains a reference to the 'eric' fine for homicide. They had schools where law and poetry-at that time so intimately associated-were taught. The chief Druid of Caesar meets us on the very threshold of the Senchus Mor, in the person of the Dubhthach Mac ua Lugair, the royal poet of Erin, the Brehon who was chosen by St. Patrick to arbitrate on a question of homicide."

The social organisation and forms of ownership among the Celts of Ireland appear to have been very similar to those of the other races at a corresponding stage of development. Among the Irish Celts as they appear to us in the Brehon tracts, the legal and political unit is the Sept, the joint-family descending from an eponymous ancestor. The sept is closely related to the Hindoo joint-family, and the Zadruga or house community of the Southern Slavonians. The joint-family of the Hindoos is really a body of kinsmen, the natural and adoptive descendants of a common ancestor. It has a legal and corporate existence, and exhibits that community of proprietary enjoyment which is observed in all the societies of archaic type.

"According to the true notion of a joint Hindoo family," said the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, "no member of the family, while it remains undivided, can predicate of the joint undivided property that he has a certain definite share. The proceeds of undivided property must be brought, according to theory, into the common chest or purse, and then dealt with according to the modes of enjoyment of an undivided family. (Per Lord Westbury, Apporier v. Rama Subba Aiyan, 11 Moore's Indian Appeals, 75.) This joint family was also found in Gaul.. Of this nature are the gentes and the cognationes hominum qui uno coierunt, of whom Caesar speaks, and among whom the magistrates made periodical distributions of the lands. We find such in all directions throughout France even in the Middle Ages, occupying one large house in common, the "cella," cultivating a common domain, and forming a perpetual society, a coterie, a fraternitas of compani, of frarescheus, who lived "au même pain et au même pot.

According to the ancient Irish law as ac cording to "the Brahminical Indian law,” what any member of the family earns. "through a special scientific knowledge of " the practice of a liberal art he does not bring: into the common fund, unless his accomplishments were obtained through a training given to him by his family or at their expense.” In the Slavonic Zadruga also, the produce of manual labour performed by women belonged exclusively to themselves.

The Celtic tribe called Fine is a corporate and self-sustaining unit. "The tribe sustains itself," say the Brehon laws. The continuity is associated with the land it occupies. "Land," says one of the unpublished tracts, "is perpetual man." But the fine is not only a corporate body owning land, it has

"live chattels and dead chattels," and some. times it follows a professional calling. The

communistic enjoyment of the land has ceased, and the best arable parts of it have been allotted to separate households of tribesmen. But the shackles of the ancient common ownership still fetter the land, which can neither be sold nor devised without the consent of the whole community. In primitive times, among the Celts as among the Germans, the phrase of Tacitus, nullum testamentum, was true, Wills, gifts, and contracts were unknown." They were borrowed from the Roman law, in order to facilitate largesses to the church; the Brehon tracts leave us in no doubt about this point.

66

At the head of the joint-family or fine was a chief who exercised patriarchal power, and was usually either the eldest son or the brother of his predecessor. He was elected by the community, which had regard to personal qualities, but did not wholly overlook the claims of primogeniture. In the Slavonic house-community or Zadruga, the chief or Gospodar was elected in the same manner, as was also the Maitre du Chanteau (chanteau signifies bread) in the fraternities of compains in France.

Sir H. Maine sums up in a few lucid lines the constitution of an Irish Tribe. At its head is one of those chieftains whom the Irish records call kings. The territory of the tribe bears his name, "O'Brien's country," "Macleod's country," and so on.

"The primary assumption is that the whole of the tribal territory belongs to the whole of the tribe, but in fact large portions of it have been permanently appropriated to minor bodies of tribesmen. A part is allotted in a special way to the chief as appurtenant to his office. All the unappropriated tribe-lands are in a more special way the property of the tribe as a whole, and no portion can theoretically be subjected to more than a temporary occupation. Much of the common tribeland is not occupied at all, but constitutes the waste of the tribe. Still this waste is constantly brought under tillage by settlements of tribesmen, and upon it cultivators of servile status are permitted to squat, particularly towards the border. It is the part of the territory over which the authority of the chief tends steadily to increase, and here it is that he settles his fruidhir or

stranger tenants, a very important class, the out

laws and broken' men from other tribes who

come to this for protection, and who are only connected with their new tribe by their dependence on its chief and through the responsibility which

he incurs for them."

Caesar makes mention of the existence in Gaul of a numerous class of men egentes et perditi, who voluntarily put themselves into the hands of a master whose clients they became in return for l.is protection. (Caesar, De B. G. iii. 17, vi. 11, 13, 19, 34; vii. 4.) At the time when the Brehon laws were drawn up private ownership of land was already established, but a portion of the soil was still subjected to periodical divisions and alternative occupation, as is proved by the Rundale which has lasted so persistently.

"It cannot be doubted," says Sir H. Maine, "that at the period of which the tracts are an index much land was held throughout Ireland under rules and customs savouring of the ancient collective enjoyments, and this I understand Dr. Sullivan to allow."

An ancient Irish MS., dated in the twelfth century, the Lebor na Huydre, preserves an account of the passage from collective

ownership of the soil to private ownership, and points out its object just as a political economist would do:-- "There was no ditch or fence or stone wall round land till came the period of the sons of Aed Slane, but only smooth fields. Because of the abundance of the households in their period, therefore it is that they introduced boundaries in Ireland."

In another still more ancient MS., the Liber Hymnorum, we find a custom precisely similar to that in vogue among the Swiss Allmenden, where every inhabitant has a right to an equal share in the pasture wood and arable land :

"Numerous were the human beings in Ireland at that time (i.e., the time of the sons of Aed Slane, A.D. 656-694), and such was their number that they used not to get but thrice nine ridges for each man in Ireland, to wit, nine of bog and nine of arable land and nine of wood."

The system of succession called Irish gavelkind is very similar to that existing among the Swiss Allmends. When a landowning member of an Irish sept died, its chief made a redistribution of all the lands of the sept. He did not divide the estate of the dead man among his children, but used it to increase the allotments of the various households of which the sept was made up. We see from this that the law of inheritance in the direct line was still far from being clearly established.

tions.

All the Aryan nations appear to have passed through a stage in which cattle served as the medium of exchange and formed their chief wealth, as is distinctly proved both by etymological considerations and epic tradiIn Homer the price of different objects is calculated at so many head of cattle. Pecunia is derived from pecus. As Sir H. Maine well remarks, "Capitale '-kine reckoned by head, cattle-has given birth to one of the most famous terms of law and of

political economy, Chattels and Capital.'' In the Brehon tracts cattle still form the standard of value and the medium of exchange. Fines, revenues, prestations, are always reckoned by head of cattle. Now I think I have shown (v. La Propriété et S.F.P., chap. ix.) that an economical régime in which cattle are used as the medium of exchange necessarily presupposes the existence of tensive common pasture-lands where the cattle received, or about to be given in exchange, may be fed. We need not, then, hesitate to affirm that at the period of the Brehon tracts collective enjoyment extended over a large part of the country.

This

had given stock was entitled to come with a
company of a certain number and feast at
the Daer-stock tenant's house at particular
periods for a fixed number of days."
is a proof "that the Irish chief was little
better housed and furnished even than his
Daer tenants, and that the primitive equality
in the fashions of living still subsisted." Sir
H. Maine quotes a passage from a very
curious volume by the Rev. H. Dugmore,
Compendium of Kafir Laws and Customs, in
which we find traces of a régime very similar
to that of ancient Ireland.

"As cattle constitute the sole wealth of the people, so they are their only medium of such transactions as involve exchange, payment, or reward; the retainers of a chief serve him for cattle, nor is it expected that he could maintain his influence, or, indeed, secure any number of followers, if unable to provide them with what constitutes at once their money, food, and clothing."

Etymology seems clearly to prove that the origin of feudal relations was the same among the Germans as in Ireland. The word fee, which in English means remuneration or reward, is evidently the same as the Dutch Vee and German Vieh (pronounced fee), signifying cattle. If the word fee means both remuneration and cattle, this is clearly because in former times ser vices were remunerated in cattle. When land was given as the remuneration instead of cattle, this land was a fe-od (od estate, fee=remuneration), in contradistinction to that held in full ownership, an all-od. The estate was given as a fee for a service, just as now in Sweden the in-delta soldiers are rewarded with the use of land, instead of payment in money. The double signification of the word fee thus enables us to trace feudalism to its source, which dates from the period when Vieh, Vee, was at once the sole wealth and the sole reward.

Want of space prevents our adducing the other curious points of resemblance be tween the primitive customs of the Irish Celts and those of the other Aryan nations, which Sir H. Maine has pointed out. But we may say, in conclusion, that Continental science owes a deep debt of gratitude to this distinguished writer, for it is by means of his book that it will be introduced to the investiex-gation of the ancient Irish law, which has just filled a large gap in the study of the com parative legislation of primitive societies. Sir H. Maine tells us that he receives on all sides most curious hints relative to the an cient constitution of property in the British Isles. We trust that he will ere long publish them, in order to complete the luminous sketches with which he has already favoured us on this important subject.

Sir H. Maine examines with his usual clearness an ancient Irish custom which appears to have been one of the sources of the feudal régime. The chief of the clan or fine had a larger portion of land than the rest, and, besides, as military chief, he obtained a larger share of the booty, which principally consisted in cattle. This cattle he gave to the free men under certain obligations, which gradually transformed the latter into Ceila or Kyle, that is to say, into vassals. There were two great classes of Irish tenantry, the Saer and the Daer tenants. The latter, having received more cattle, were in a greater state of dependence. They were subject (beside other rights) to that of refection, i.c., "that the chief who

EMILE DE LAVELEYE.

prefatory and biographical section of these volumes, Shelley says :

66 And there

Is English P with his mountain Fair
Turned into a Flamingo, that shy biru
That gleams i' the Indian air. Have you not heard
When a man marries, dies, or turns Hindoo,
His best friends hear no more of him? but you
Will see him, and will like him too, I hope,
With the milk-white Snowdonian Antelope
Matched with his camelopard; his fine wit
Makes such a wound, the knife is lost in it;
A strain too learned for a shallow age,
Too wise for selfish bigots; let his page,
Which charms the chosen spirits of the time,
Fold itself up for a serener clime

Of years to come, and find its recompense
In that just expectation."

This singulary prophetic passage occurs in
that part of the Epistle where Shelley enume-
rates the only friends" you and I know in
London." The list is not long. It includes
only Godwin, Coleridge, Leigh Hunt, Hogg,
Horace Smith, and this P, whom all the
world now knows to mean Peacock. The
opening lines of the quotation have always
been very obscure, and they are not wholly
cleared up by the publication of these
volumes. However, as the "Epistle" is
dated "Leghorn, July 1, 1820," and as we
now learn that Mr. Peacock was married on
March 20, 1820, it requires no great pene-
tration to perceive that this is Shelley's
recognition of Peacock's announcement of
his marriage. The lady is called "the
mountain Fair" and the "milk-white Snow-
donian antelope," because she lived in North
Wales, close under Snowdon, and was known
as the "Carnarvonshire beauty." The phrase
"matched with his camelopard" remains
very dark. Shelley's drollery was apt to be
more queer than funny, and one knows not
what odd fancy prompted this.
rest, it is satisfactory to have an obscure
passage of his writings fairly cleared up at
last, and this has induced us to regard Mr.
Peacock as he stood in relation to Shelley,
before proceeding to investigate his claims
to independent genius. It may, however,
be said at once that these claims are indis-
putable, and if we touch but lightly upon
them here, it is because they are not unlikely
to receive careful attention in another place,
while the peculiar touches of Shelley's por-
traiture which lie scattered about the volumes,
chiefly embodied, however, in Nightmare
Abbey and in the articles reprinted from
Fraser's Magazine, are more likely to escape

was short and " tip-tilted." So far, too, from his appearance being that of an Adonis or a Bathyllus, he had a healthy and manly appearance, and a muscular, though slight and apparently delicate frame. It must be confessed that these conflicting descriptions, together with Mr. Trelawny's accounts of his appearances and disappearances, his flashing eyes, and quivering limbs, perplex the imagination sadly; and now that the very last persons who actually "saw Shelley plain are dying out, it seems that we must finally make up our minds to regard the wondrous poet as "an invisible thing, a voice, a mystery," who must remain personally unknown to us to the end of time, a true votary of his own " Spirit of Solitude." The elaborate scholia, hopelessly-corrupt passages, doubtful readings in his works are unparalleled among modern writers; and in the dubiousness that surrounds his living individuality he resembles rather an antique poet than the contemporary of our grandfathers. About the Tanyrallt Mystery, which concerns the attack supposed to be made on the Shelleys at night by a ruffian with a the Shelleys at night by a ruffian with a pistol, Mr. Peacock has not much to say. Yet, so far as his evidence goes, it is more full than anyone else's. He himself investigated the matter on the spot a month or two after the alleged assault, and his impression was that the whole thing was a phantom of Shelley's brain. This agrees with the verdict given by Mr. Rossetti after summing up other evidence. But the additional point, that the impression of the ball on the wainscot showed that the pistol had been fired towards the window and not from it, seems conclusively to subvert Shelley's testimony. To the bulk of anecdotes which go to prove that Shelley's imagination, in certain periods of morbid excitement, amounted to vision, Mr. Peacock adds one or two very entertaining stories. Perhaps none of them is funnier than this, to the effect that Shelley fancied a fat old woman who sat opposite to him in a mail-coach to be afflicted with elephantiasis, and that he was sure he had caught it from her, convinced the disease was incurable and infectious.

Yáhmani, Yáhmani, Yáhmani," in a monotonous melody of his own making, which sounded very harsh to the world in general, but which soothed and delighted Ianthe beyond measure. The tribute Mr. Peacock pays to the beauty, purity, and unsullied excellence of Harriet Shelley is not ill-timed, being reprinted so shortly after the appearance of a work that professes to honour the poet and his friends, and which in fact insinuates against the whole circle a moral perversity wholly incredible. It seems that the passion for sailing paper-boats really originated with Mr. Peacock, but that Shelley adopted it with extravagant delight, while Mr. Hogg, who thought the employment silly, could not abominate too cordially or too loudly such a ridiculous amusement for grown gentlemen. But to the last this habit clung by Shelley, and even beneath "the dome of blue Italian weather," he found time to float paper shallops on slow marshy waters at Pisa or Leghorn.

But, perhaps, more important than the reminiscences collected at the close of his life, and nearly forty years after Shelley's death, is the portrait Mr. Peacock drew of the poet in his lifetime, as the hero of his novel of Nightmare Abbey. Lord Houghton, in his preface to this collected edition, expresses his surprise that the numerous biographers of the poet have taken no notice of this humorous portraiture, and it certainly is a singular neglect. But when he goes on to say

"that if Shelley had had more of the companionship of such men as Peacock, and less of the narrow and conceited society in which both chance and choice had placed him, he would soon have thrown off the paradoxical spirit that the ungenial atmosphere of his youth had generated, and reconciled his genius to the conditions of his time." This last remark shows Lord Houghton to be deeply discontented with the results of the unreconciled genius of Shelley. Many of us find ourselves more easily satisfied. But since Lord Houghton, from the study of Nightmare Abbey, has come to the conclusion that Peacock was the man who understood Shelley so well that he could have lifted him into a more congenial atmosphere of the imagination, it is well to examine the portrait of the poet as we there have it. In the first place, Nightmare Abbey is irresistibly amusing, full of quaint, witty, sarcastic, and even brilliantly satirical writ

|

and is, in its essence, a piece of invective against the influence of "blue devils" in literature, and specially against the poetry of Byron and Southey, and the philosophy of Coleridge. Nightmare Abbey is a mansion in a lonely part of the Lincolnshire coast, which is inhabited by Mr. Glowry and his son Scythrop, i.e., Shelley. These two combine to keep one another in the most complete and unbroken melancholy, but Scythrop is also very anxious about a scheme for the regeneration of society, a scheme entirely founded, of course, upon Shelley's socialistic dreams. There is one biographical touch that is true to the life: Scythrop first falls in love with a lady who answers to the mysterious F. G.; then with Marionetta, a girl of great personal attractions, and possessing the qualities of Harriet Grove; and lastly, on meeting with a mys

terious lady who was intimately conversant with the German literature and philosophy, "Scythrop found that his soul had a greater capacity of love than the image of Marionetta had filled." That is drawn from the life, and so are various affectations, such as Scythrop's fondness for mystery, for graveyards, for skulls, but beyond all this there is remarkably little appreciation of the finer qualities of Shelley's brain and heart. At Nightmare Abbey are joined these visitors, among others, the "transcendental Mr. Flosky," that is Coleridge; Mr. Toobad, who is very funny in his persistence in seeing the immediate agency of the Devil in any untoward event; Mr. Larynx, a supple and ready-witted clergyman; Mr. and Mrs. Hilary, Miss Marionetta O'Carroll, who falls in love with Scythrop; and the Hon. Mr. Listless, a fop. There is no plot whatever, but these persons converse in a very amusing way, joined soon by Mr. Cypress (Lord Byron), who talks "Childe Harold" to them, and the interest clusters around Scythrop's eccentricities. That worthy, who has the very un-Shelleyan trick of consuming large quantities of Madeira, lives in a tower of the Abbey, where he constructs secret chambers, and where he is visited by the mysterious lady who becomes his third love. Scythrop is not represented as writing poetry, or as having any love for or interest in it, but as caring for nothing but lukewarm amativeness and a weak kind of philanthropy. He is too shadowy to be comtemptible, but he is neither heroic nor beautiful, and one wonders at Shelley's good nature at receiving the portrait with amusement and praise, till one recollects how easy it is to approve of a caricature of oneself that does not resemble one in any salient feature. Had the likeness been closer, Shelley might have liked it less. Once, when Scythrop is caught by Mr. Toobad, and saved from a bad fall down stairs, he launches out into a very Shelley-like catalogue of probable sorrows ensuing :

"Evil, and mischief, and misery, and confusion, and vanity, and vexation of spirit, and death, and disease, and assassination, and war, and poverty, and pestilence, and famine, and avarice, and selfishness, and rancour, and jealousy, and spleen, and malevolence, and the disappointments of philanthropy, and the faithlessness of friendship, and the crosses of love-all prove the accuracy of your views and the truth of your system; and it is not impossible that the infernal interruption of this fall down stairs may throw a colour of evil over the whole of my future existence.' "My dear boy,' said Mr. Toobad, 'you have a fine eye for consequences.'

in detail with the various works of Peacock. They consist, beside poetry and miscellanea, of seven novels, published, with one exception, between 1815 and 1831. The one exception is Gryll Grange, which he wrote when he was a very old man, and which was not published till thirty years after its immediate predecessor, Crotchet Castle. With the exception of Melincourt, where the sparkling stream of wit and satire spreads itself out into something of the lake-like fulness and flatness of the ordinary fivevolume novel, these romances are very short, and some of them mere novelettes. Headlong Hall, which began the series, is perhaps more conventional and less characteristic than some of the others, but it was the most popular. Maid Marian and The Misfortunes of Elphin are historical, the first being a charming realisation of the merry life under the greenshaw in the days when Robin Hood ruled Sherwood Forest, and the other a very curious and learned effort to revive the early days of Welsh history, and introduce us to the epoch of Taliesin and the Triads. This is an especially able book, the verse plentifully scattered through it being in Mr. Peacock's happiest manner, and the adventures being humorously, as well as graphically described. Nightmare Abbey, which we have already mentioned, is perhaps the most amusing, and Crotchet Castle the cleverest of the series. In Gryll Grange the veteran author strove to discuss the new questions of social science and politics which had arisen since the days of his youth. It is a kind of sequel to Crotchet Castle, but far less interesting. The style of these novels throughout is epigrammatic, clear, and paradoxical there is little plot, no evolution of character, but plenty of Socratic dialogue and merry analysis of what the Elizabethans called "humours." As a poet Mr. Peacock lacked the divine fire, but his humorous ballads were full of spirit; and such stanzas as this from Melincourt

"Why did not Love the amaranth choose,

That bears no thorn, and cannot perish?
Alas! no sweets its flowers diffuse,
And only sweets Love's life can cherish.
But be the rose and amaranth twined,

And Love, their mingled powers assuming,
Shall round his brows a chaplet bind,

For ever sweet, for ever blooming."show him to have been a proficient in the art of composing elegant verses of sentiment. His critical essays are learned and laborious, but not brilliant: it is his witty and original novels that will support his reputation. EDMUND W. Gosse.

perceive these extravagances did not by

any means render him capable of lifting Shelley into higher spheres. He himself was destroyed by the canker of want of enthusiasm, and his own "Rhododaphne " contains nothing that suggests that by good advice he could have bettered "Adonais," although he is known to have been of opinion that he could. He was a most charming and original writer, but in a vein diametrically opposite to Shelley's.

We have left ourselves no space to deal

A

CHARLES I.

History of England under the Duke of Buckingham and Charles I., 1624-1628. By Samuel Rawson Gardiner. In Two Volumes. (London: Longmans & Co., 1875.)

THESE volumes take up the history of England at the point where Mr. Gardiner had left it in the preceding work of his important series: viz., at the return of Prince Charles and Buckingham from Madrid. From that point Mr. Gardiner dates the real ascendency of Buckingham in the poli

per

tics of England; and the volumes are, in fact, a history of that Buckingham ascen dency to its close in August 1628, when the life of the splendid Duke was cut short by Felton's knife at Portsmouth. Of the four years and a half so traversed, a portion still belongs nominally to the reign of James I. We have the old King's last Parliament, the dissolution of the Spanish Treaties, the plexity of the old King in the prospect of the wars into which the impetuous favourite and the sombre young prince were dragging him, the French Marriage Treaty, and the old King's last days and death. Then, from March 1625, the narrative carries us through those beginnings of the fatal reign of Charles I., in which the Vizier far outblazed the King, and yet Charles himself is to be seen, sometimes in the background, sometimes in the foreground, the very man he was to be found to the last, the same in principle, the same in temper, the same in style of speech and action. We have his marriage with Henrietta Maria and the domestic difficulties that followed, his diplomacy with and against Spain, his diplomacy with and against France, and the planning and execution of the various continental enterprises which were the first disasters of his reign, includ ing Wimbledon's expedition to Cadiz and Buckingham's to the Isle of Rhé. Intertwined with these foreign relations of Charles, we have his proceedings with his first three Parliaments. They take their start in a rooted difference between King and People both on the question of supplies and on the religious question; and they pass on, through such intermediate forms of conflict as that over the impeachment of Buckingham, into the announcement at last of a direct struggle between Parliament and Prerogative in the Petition of Right. At the close of the book, Charles is left, at the age of twenty-seven, no longer with Buckingham by his side, but facing for himself a very ominous future. Laud, who has been heard of more and more since the beginning of the reign, has just been made Bishop of London.

To say that the present work is based on varied, original, and most conscientious research, and that, consequently, it does not leave the history of the period as it found that history, but contains new facts and sets forth old facts in new and more authentic lights, is only to say that it is Mr. Gardiner's. For the diplomatic transactions of the period Mr. Gardiner has explored so many new sources of information, whether in collections of the contemporary despatches of foreign agents or in the foreign series of our own State Papers, that he may be said to have made those transactions his own property, and to have unravelled them intelligibly for the first time. But not for the story of the foreign transactions alone researches for the proceedings of the first has he sought and found new material. His three Parliaments of Charles have enabled him to correct and modify at various points the hitherto received accounts-most notably, perhaps, for the great Parliamentary Session of 1628. In short, so far as matter is concerned, one may congratulate Mr. Gardiner on having now added to the list of works bearing his name, and already known and honoured, one which will certainly take

its place as a standard authority for the history of England, or at least for the history of the government of England, from 1624 to 1628.

The manner is worthy of the matter. If the art of historical narration consists in so handling one's materials that the reader shall see things happening in their proper sequence, and shall understand how they came to happen, Mr. Gardiner possesses this art in no common degree. Having a strong grasp of all the facts himself, he tells the complex story firmly, clearly, and coherently, dropping one thread for a time without forgetting it, and always bringing it in again at the right moment. From first to last the reader finds himself really interested, and can yet note that the interest is of that satisfactory and full-bodied kind which is produced, not by brilliant devices of style or eccentric methods, but by genuine and orderly information as to men and events, communicated by one who has made himself at home among them through the records. The style is deliberate, grave, and manly, with no sentence dull or purposeless, and every now and then a passage of energy and heightened tone. Mr. Gardiner does not deal much in dissertation, nor even in formal sketching of characters. He has touches of both; but he trusts mainly to direct narration. As might be expected from one who knows so well what 66 record means, his text abounds with quotations of phrases and sentences from the documents used. He does not, indeed, resort to the plan of difference of type, so often found useful when records have to be condensed or digested; but he inweaves abundantly into his paragraphs, whenever there is occasion, the very words of contemporary despatches or speeches in Parliament. This is as it should be. That method of writing history which tries to fuse all that it is necessary to tell into the single flowing stream of the historian's own language ought to have been in disrepute long ago for anything beyond the merest abstract; and whoever opens a professed historical work referring to recent ages, and does not find the text studded more or less with quotation-marks, may pretty safely at once throw the book aside as likely to be

worthless.

A marked characteristic of the work is its temperateness. The author bespeaks attention in his Preface to his regard for this quality:

"We have had historians [of the period] in plenty," he says, "but they have been Whig historians or Tory historians. The one class has thought it unnecessary to take trouble to understand how matters looked in the eyes of the King and his friends; the other class has thought it unnecessary to take trouble to understand how matters looked in the eyes of the leaders of the House of Commons. I am not so vain as to suppose that I have always succeeded in doing justice to both parties, but I have, at least, done my best not to misrepresent either."

Every reader of the book will see that Mr. Gardiner has been true to his intention. Perhaps the passage in which the studied temperateness of his judgment appears most expressly with reference to the facts of the period throughout, we may even call it the studied two-sidedness of his judgment-is that in which, describing the excitement of

Charles's first Parliament over the appearance of an Arminian or semi-Romish tendency in the Church of England in certain writings by Richard Montague, Rector of Stamford Rivers, he explains the position which he himself takes up between the two great religions parties, called vaguely the Puritans and the Laudians, then begining to polarise the society and the politics of England. In this passage, which is perhaps the longest and most characteristic passage of disquisition in the book (vol. i. pp. 210-216), Mr. Gardiner tries, most anxiously, to do justice to Calvinism, both as a system of belief for the individual spirit, and also as a force of great momentum in the modern history of Europe; but he is as careful to note the necessity of some such reaction as that which was represented in Laud and Montague, and to specify the points he thinks of real worth in the particular Anti-Calvinistic reaction in England with which Laud's name is now principally associated. Accordingly, throughout the book, so far as it overtakes the incipient struggle between Puritanism and Laudism, Mr. Gardiner retains this balanced calmness, never disguising, on the one hand, the vein of intolerance that ran through the energetic and popular English Calvinism of the time, with all its passion for political liberty, nor forgetting, on the other hand, that English Arminianism or Landism, with all its punctilious care for uniformity of ceremonial, and all its abject sycophancy to the doctrine of passive obedience by the subject, did really allow, in a corner of its heart, some speculative laxity, some right of inquisitiveness, to the thoughtful and learned. The same candour appears in Mr. Gardiner's treatment of persons. Whoever expects to find in his pages a repetition of Lord Macaulay's method of the excessively black brush for one character or set of characters, and the excessively white brush for an opposite character or set of characters, will be disappointed. Besides Laud, Montague, and Manwaring, who are introduced in the ecclesiastical connexion, and King James, who is seen in his last days, the chief characters in the narrative are Buckingham, Charles himself, Henrietta Maria, Abbot, Williams, Pembroke, Bristol, Carlisle, Arundel, Wentworth, Sir Edward Coke, Secretary Coke, Phelips, Digges, Sir John Eliot, Selden, Pennington, Count Mansfeld, Gustavus Adolphus, and Richelien; and none of these, unless it be Count Mansfeld, does Mr. Gardiner throw absolutely into the limbo of those of whom nothing creditable Gustavus Adolphus, and Richelieu, have evican be reported. While men like Eliot, dently either his strongest sympathies, or his highest admiration on the whole, he is careful to suggest anything that occurs to him in favour or in excuse of those who are "down" in our popular versions of English history, and are therefore generally maligned. To Charles himself he is as lenient as he can well be; any trait of generosity or personal bravery to be found in the rash and gorgeous Buckingham is dwelt on even kindly; and especial pains is taken to correct that estimate of Wentworth which, comparing his later career with his leadership on the popular side in certain passages of Charles's

carly Parliaments, condemns him off-hand as a mere political apostate. Wentworth, Mr. Gardiner thinks, was no mere political apostate, but a man in whom there may be detected from the first that faith in authority, or the beneficence of legislative enactments by any central wisdom, together with that desire of power in his own hands, which flashed out afterwards, in changed conditions, in the acts and the fate of Strafford.

If any serious objection is to be made to Mr. Gardiner's work, it will found itself perhaps on this perception of its peculiar temperateness, taking the form, as we have said it necessarily must in that period of English history, of a continual and scrupulous two-sidedness. Most readers like a

roaring partisanship in history; and a writer whose principles, whose temper, or whose conscientious adherence to records, will not permit him to gratify this taste, may please less widely in consequence. To such a consequence, as regards the readers with whom resolute partisanship is the one thing needful for flavour, Mr. Gardiner will be properly indifferent; and the only question is whether, even in a higher view of the rights and duties of an historian, his impartiality does not pass too much into the guise of unnecessary coolness. In the English past of two hundred and fifty years ago, if not at dates much farther back, may not the strictest mo

dern historian discern the tendencies that had

most of the right in them, most of potential virtue and nobleness for the future; and, while acknowledging anything of merit in other tendencies, may he not attach himself preferably to those? So with persons. In the very circle of one's own living acquaintances one finds varieties of character, from the sheerly silly and mean, through rising grades of ability and respectability, up to the one or two that deserve reverence and supreme trust; and one's language of appreciation may be elastic to correspond. Why should it be otherwise with any group of

characters of a past period that paint themselves to our vision through their registered acts and words? To the highest, when we are quite sure they are such, may we not yield our hearts complete; in speaking of the lowest, when the mood of sternness and contempt seems too harsh, have we not a natural refuge in humour and pity? Whether Mr. Gardiner has in the present volumes allowed himself the legitimate range of historical liking and disliking, and graduated it sufficiently, is a question the answer to which will depend on the reader's own estimates of the persons and tendencies conmyself that, if I were to find fault, it would cerned in the story; and I will only say for probably be here and there, in one form or another, on this account. Having hinted so much, however, I am bound to add two remarks. One is, that it would be a mistake to suppose that Mr. Gardiner's temperateness, even should we define it as an unnecessary limitation of the historian's range of estimate and epithet, can fairly be called coolness or neutrality. There are passages, as we have said, of energy and heightened tone in the book, passages of subdued and yet manifest glow of feeling; and, so far as we remember, the chief of these are where the patriotic Eliot is the object of contem