SATURDAY, JANUARY 23, 1875. No. 142, New Series.

THE EDITOR cannot undertake to return, or

to correspond with the writers of, rejected manuscript.

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LITERATURE.

A Letter addressed to His Grace the Duke of Norfolk on occasion of Mr. Gladstone's Recent Expostulation. By John Henry Newman, D.D., of the Oratory. (London: B. M. Pickering, 1875.)

In the noble poem which Wordsworth dedicated to the last of the popular risings on behalf of the old faith, he does not find the fundamental tragedy of the situation in the hopelessness of the effort, or in the wholesale calculating ruthless cynicism with which its failure was punished, a cynicism far more revolting to the historic conscience than the short-sighted rigour with which Mary, merciful to her own enemies, punished the ten or twelve score of preachers, and yeomen, and craftsmen, and women, who persisted in repeating the stupid blasphemies in which they had been trained. He finds it in the forced abstention of a spirit doomed to

cleave

To fortitude without reprieve,"

authorities on the practical supremacy of even an erroneous conscience. And then comes a most splendid and solemn panegyric on conscience in its strength and in its weakness; conscience which has been attacked by one set of the Pope's enemies, and abused against him by another :—

"The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expediency, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted selfishness, nor a desire to be consistent with oneself; but it is a messenger from him, who, both in nature and in grace, speaks to us behind a veil, and teaches and rules us by his representatives. Conscience is the aboriginal Vicar of Christ, a prophet

"A great Council has been called; and as England has for so long a time ignored Rome, Rome, I suppose it must be said, has in turn ignored England. I do not mean of set purpose ignored, but as the natural consequence of our act. Bishops brought from the corners of the earth in 1870 what could they know of English bluebooks and parliamentary debates in the years 1826 and 1829? It was an extraordinary gather-in ing, and its possibility, its purposes, and its issue, were alike marvellous, as depending on a coincidence of strange conditions, which, as might be said beforehand, never could take place."

its informations, a monarch in its peremptoriness, a priest in its blessings and anathemas, and even though the eternal priesthood throughout the church could cease to be, in it the sacerdotal principle would remain and would have a sway."

As to the essence of the subject, Dr. Newman begins by reminding us that the Catho- "All sciences except the science of religion lic hierarchy has always been liable to come have their certainty in themselves; as far as they into collision with the State, and insists that are sciences they consist of necessary conclusions from undeniable premisses, or of phenomena manithe chance of such collisions has rather been diminished than increased by the centralisa-pulated into general truths by an irresistible induction. But the sense of right and wrong, which tion of the largest and soundest portion of is the first element in religion, is so delicate, so that hierarchy under the successors of St. fitful, so easily puzzled, obscured, perverted, so Peter; while those portions of the hierarchy subtle in its argumentative method, so impressible which escaped, or refused that centralisa- by education, so biassed by pride and passion, so tion, certainly give the State no trouble, unsteady in its flight, that, in the struggle for because they have lost their independence. It existence amid various exercises and triumphs of the human intellect, this sense is at once the may be so, and yet one thinks there is a difference. We sympathise with St. Ambrose shutting the church to Theodosius with a moral enthusiasm; we sympathise with St. Basil in his contest with Constantius with a moral or a theological enthusiasm, accord

Farewell all wishes, all debate,

All prayer for this cause or for that." And this tragedy is reproduced by the events of our own time, not in a young maiden whose helplessness, however pitiful, is only natural, but in learned and venerable men used to make themselves felt in the world by their authority and their arguments, who could speak their whole minds and be listened to, and now are left in mournful isolation, as if they hardly knew what to say or even what to wish. Dr. Newman on one side, and Dr. Döllinger on the other, stand apart between the hosts who are fighting over the Vatican decrees, divided from the combatants and from one another. Dr. Newman, at any rate, still keeps his faith and courage. eye is not dim, nor his natural force abated; ' in his latest work, which he expects to be his last, he pushes back the exaggerations and

"His

excesses of Mr. Gladstone's parliamentary rhetoric with the old mastery of slow irresistible strength, and with an air of grave dignified regret of reproachful compassionate surprise, that makes one ashamed of having found his opponent simply ridiculous, and the echo of his accusations a reproach to our national good sense. And yet the clouds return after the rain, and yet the last echo of his voice in our ears is the echo of a dirge:

“ αἵλινον αἵλινον εἶπε, τὸ δ' εὖ νικάτω.” Perhaps we are wrong to pity him; all his own pity is for others; he has pity to spare even for the people to whom it is still a

possible to sympathise with Pius VII. excommunicating Napoleon I. for confiscating his States; but it will be with a purely political enthusiasm. The independence of the hierarchy is so indispensable a means to since the days of St. Gregory VII. it should so much good, that it is intelligible that times it may be at the expense of higher have been pursued as an end in itself, someends, and this is certainly a danger which the centralisation of ecclesiastical action has tended to increase.

allegiance, Dr. Newman brings the matter In dealing with the question of divided in a delicate dignified way to the point to which it had been brought already by the bluff masculine sense of a right honourable member for Philistia. The occasions on which in England (or any other civilised State) a the law and obeying the Pope are happily man will have to choose between obeying very rare, and it is a criminal folly wantonly to speculate upon them in advance. William Vernon Harcourt could have done, He even carries the matter farther than Sir for he lays down two imaginable cases in which a pope might bid English Roman Catholics to break the law, and yet it would be duty to obey it. The cases are those of soldiers and sailors already engaged in a war not disapproved by their own consciences and condemned by the Pope, and that of a Roman Catholic Privy Councillor, if he takes, as Dr. Newman believes, an oath not to recognise the succession of a Roman Catholic Prince of Wales. This is justified by quotations from unquestionable Roman Catholic |

highest of all teachers, yet the least luminous; and the Church, the Pope, the hierarchy are, in the Divine purpose, the supply of an urgent demand. Natural religion, certain as are its grounds and its doctrines as addressed to thoughtful, serious minds, needs in order that it may speak to mankind with effect, and subdue the world, to be sustained and completed by Revelation." Consequently "the Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature." It is possible that his censures may be unjust, at any rate they are fallible. There is much to be said on this. In the first placeas would soon be clear if all Protestants as Mr. Fitzjames Stephen-the real wrote as accurately as Dr. Newman or even gravamen is not that the Pope's authority will make Roman Catholics break the law, but that it will make them dislike and disparage it rather a grievance of politicians and journaland hinder legislation-and this, no doubt, is ists than of the public at large. In most things people are better subjects for practising an old and admirable religion strictly; but precisely the things in which a strict Roman Catholic is likely to be troublesome cians and journalists are nowadays most are the things about which Liberal politi

eager.

In the second place, the principle of

authority, which is largely and happily illusamong Protestants as Dr. Newman repretrated, is hardly quite so absolutely extinct sents it: there are institutions and principles which all serious thinkers deliberately refuse to call in question. People still look up for guidance, with not unsubmissive trustfulness, to those who fill great positions with dignity. And it hardly seems as if Dr. Newman's distinction-that any act of life may be made the subject of Papal regulation, but that nothing like every act will or can be quite meets the feeling which underlies Mr. Gladstone's heated rhetoric about the mental and moral slavery of converts.

early struggles and subsequent success, enthusiastic panegyric on his music, and a somewhat systematic enumeration of his compositions. But no life of Bach-not even a brief memoir of thirty pages-can be considered satisfactory that presents no indication of the state of the musical world at the time he arose "a prophet in Israel," no account of the nature of the instruments for which he wrote, and how their imperfect or peculiar mechanism influenced both the form and style of his compositions. To talk of Bach's piety is pleasant, but to point out the especial character which the Lutheran mode of worship gave to the composer's sacred works, would have been more to the point. Moreover, beyond one mention of Wilhelm Friedemann, there is no account of the remarkable circle of musical sons and descendants who were the first-fruits of the great master's teaching. Such shortcomings as these beset the companion biographies. Without some information about instruments as well as players, a great deal of inflated language over this and that composition or performance goes for nothing. Moreover, is it not a mistake in so popular a book as this to use technical expressions and the names of musical forms without indication of their meaning? Terms such as "thick and heavy orchestration,' "little inventions and deviations which Schumann has made so completely his own," "superb and masterly scoring," "thin pianoforte music," and so on, savour too much of that use of easily-acquired technicalities which besets a holder of the proverbially dangerous "little knowledge," and are Hindostanee to the ordinary reader. Of what avail again, I would venture to ask Mr. Crowest, is the oft-repeated statement that each composer was opposed for innovations and novelties-a fact true and pregnant with significance-unless accompanied by explanation in what the novelty consisted. Haydn, we are told, "unfettered by the rules and trammels of any school or master, followed the bent of his own inclinations . . . . and to a great extent revolutionised instrumental music." Mozart made "surprising and successful innovations, and rid himself of the accepted trammels and formalities to which opera till then had been subjected;""notable is Beethoven's.. total disregard of the rules of writing." This mode of generalisation is most misleading, even when it is not absolutely false. The simple-minded reader, uninformed by his author what was the nature of Haydn's revolution, Mozart's innovations, and Beethoven's evident rank rebellion, would gather the notion that the great giants of music distinguished themselves by their destructiveness, that each in turn threw down the work of his predecessor to raise his own edifice on the ruins; that, in short, genius was made manifest by revolution. An honest writer as Mr. Crowest appears to be, would do well to avoid helping this popular fallacy by general statements such as those quoted. He must know that music, the latest born of the arts, has grown in the hands of the great masters by development, not by accident-by addition, not by subtraction.

To do Mr. Crowest full justice, he does not often err on the side of over-learned and

technical writing; his criticism may be considered emotional, descriptive, fanciful, only not profound; it is, moreover, couched in very singular English.

Despite commissions and omissions these biographies have one virtue-they are not dull. The strong individuality, or what Mr. Crowest would call the "unique originality of character, in the great musicians, gives emphasis to the interest of their lives, the tale of their struggles and successes abounds in dramatic points. Little Sebastian Bach copying by moonlight the stolen book of elavichord pieces which his elder brother will not lend him; Hadyn acting valet to old Porpora in return for lessons; Rossini in bed writing over again the score of part of L'Italiana in Algeri, because he is too lazy to get out and pick up the fallen sheets, or shrugging his Italian shoulders at the audience that storms disapproval of his Barbiere; Mozart singing his own Requiem on his death-bed; grand, deaf Beethoven turned round by friendly hands at the conductor's desk that he may see the audience he cannot hear, clapping and screaming their delight in his Ninth Symphony; Schubert scribbling divine melodies out of a sad soul on scraps of paper at a Vienna beer-house amid clatter of glasses and tongues-incidents like these give charm to the biography, and bring out into picturesque relief the character of musicians. From the available resources of anecdote Mr. Crowest has gathered many good stories, taken direct from the foreign text, it may be surmised, as they often read like translations.

a

So little effort has been made hitherto by English writers to bring music intelligibly home to the general public, that it behoves us to be thankful for small mercies, and to welcome Mr. Crowest's well-meant effort. Should The Great Tone Poets reach second edition, perhaps the author may remember the apothegm of Bacon that "diseretion in speech is more than eloquence." Grouped against a sound historic background, denuded of frothy and chaotic panegyric, and written in clear English, these memoirs might yet fulfil a useful and worthy mission.

A. D. ATKINSON.

The Paston Letters. Edited by James Gairdner. Vol. II. (London: Edward Arber, 1874.)

IT is fortunately no longer necessary to introduce either the Paston Letters or their editor to the world. When the controversy stirred up by the late Mr. Herman Merivale ended not only in the production of conclusive proof of the authenticity of that celebrated collection, but in the discovery of a large number of unprinted letters and documents properly belonging to it, it was felt that the time had come for a new and complete edition of the whole correspondence, while it was not so certain that a really competent editor would be found for letters competent editor would be found for letters written in a period which is probably less attractive to the student than any other in our annals. The announcement of Mr. Gairdner's name, however, set at rest any doubts that may have been felt on this score, and his unique knowledge, alike of the details and of the general bearing of the events

of the epoch, has been thus for the first time utilised for the benefit of his readers.

Taking therefore for granted at this stage of his work, that we have to deal with a good book well edited, it may be worth while to ask what lessons we learn from this second volume, which reaches from the seizure of the crown by Edward IV. in 1461, to his recovery of it in 1471, after the battle of Barnet. In its pictures of domestic life, indeed, we have nothing to equal the naïveté of Margaret Paston's thoughts of her husband when he was lying sick in London, as we find them expressed in the earlier volume: "If I might have had my will, I should have seen you ere this time. I would ye were at home, if it were for your ease, now liever than a gown, though it were of scarlet." Nor do we here get so close a peep into the miseries attending the education of the young, as when we hear of a young lady that "she had since Easter the most part been beaten once in the week or twice, and sometimes twice in one day, and her head broken in two or three places." No wonder Elizabeth Paston sighed for liberation from domestic thraldom, even by marriage with an elderly suitor. She had learned too to have an eye to the main chance. never so willing to none as she is to him, if it be so that his land stand clear."

66

She was

The second volume, however, reminds us that a way to escape from such thraldom was then open to young ladies which is now closed to them. Margery Paston fell in love with Richard Calle, her brother's bailiff. The whole family was up in arms against the girl who proposed to disgrace it by so disparaging a match. Another brother expressed the opinion of the domestic circle when he said: "That an my father (whom God assoil) were alive, and had consented thereto, and my mother and ye both, he should never have my good-will for to make my sister to sell candle and mustard in Framlingham." In our days such a barrier would probably, except in the case of a very strong-minded woman indeed, have proved insuperable. In the fifteenth century the difficulty could be surmounted with the least possible effort. The bishop had merely to be informed that Margery and her lover had mutually promised marriage to one another. When the bishop had convinced himself that this was the case, the marriage ceremony had to follow as a matter of course.

From these lighter matters we may turn to those domestic difficulties which lay at the root of the political changes with which the atmosphere was full in the years in which the royal authority began to establish itself after the long anarchy of civil war. If we want to understand how Edward secured his throne, and even to understand how there came to be a Tudor despotism with a reinforced Court of Star Chamber and other apparatus of authority, we cannot do better than study the history, as it is here revealed, of the inheritance of Sir John Fastolf.

He was

Fastolf's heir was John Paston, the husband of the notable lady who loved him even better than a scarlet gown. bound by the will to establish in Caister Castle, Fastolf's own mansion, a college of religious men to pray for his benefactor's soul. soul. But in those days might was right,

and the Duke of Norfolk, fancying that he should like the house for himself, quietly took possession of it. At that time Edward was just seated on the throne, and Edward had just been reported to Paston to have said in reference to another suit, that

"he would be your good lord therein as he would to the poorest man in England. He would hold with you in your right; and as for favour, he will not be understood that he shall show favour more to one man to another, not to one in England."

Mr. Gairdner and no one is better qualified to judge thinks that this was a true expression of the King's intentions. But either he was changeable in his moods, or during these early years he was hardly settled enough on the throne always to be able to carry out his wishes. This time, however, in some way or another, the great Duke was reduced to submission, and Caister was restored to Paston.

In 1465 a new claimant appeared; and claimants, though as troublesome in the fifteenth as the nineteenth century, proceeded in a different fashion. This time it was the Duke of Suffolk who asserted a right to the manor of Drayton in his own name, and who had bought up the assumed rights of another person to the manor of Hellesdon. John Paston was away, and his wife had to bear the brunt. An attempt to levy rent at Drayton was followed by a threat from the Duke's men that, if her servants" ventured to take any further distresses at Drayton, even if it were but of the value of a pin, they would take the

value of an ox in Hellesdon.'

Paston and the Duke alike professed to be under the law. But each was anxious to retain that possession which in those days seems really to have been nine points of the law. The Duke got hold of Drayton, whilst Hellesdon was held for Paston. One day Paston's men made a raid upon Drayton, and carried off seventy-seven head of cattle. Another day the Duke's bailiff came to Hellesdon with 300 men to see if the place were assailable. Two servants of Paston, attempting to keep a court at Drayton in their master's name, were carried off by force. At last the Duke mustered his retainers and marched against Hellesdon. The garrison, too weak to resist, at once surrendered.

"The Duke's men took possession, and set John Paston's own tenants to work, very much against their wills, to destroy the mansion and break down the walls of the lodge, while they themselves ransacked the church, turned out the parson, and spoiled the images. They also pillaged very completely every house in the village. As for John Paston's own place, they stripped it completely

bare;

and whatever there was of lead, brass, pewter, iron, doors or gates, or other things that they could not conveniently carry off, they hacked and hewed them to pieces. The Duke rode through Hellesdon to Drayton the following day, while his men were still busy completing the wreck of destruction by the demolition of the lodge. The wreck of the building, with the rents they made in its walls, is visible even now." (Introd. xxxv.) The meaning of all this is evident. We have before us a state of society in which the anarchical element is predominant. But it is not pure anarchy. Men have a sense

of the duty of submission to the law. We dition pointed (and no doubt correctly) as hear of long pleadings in Westminster Hall, the chief source of the wealth which flowed of sheriffs issuing replevins, and of decisions into the treasury of Montezuma. Altogether given by judges and bishops. But this legal the resources of this region seem sufficient machinery, though powerful in small matters, machinery, though powerful in small matters, to supply almost any number of intelligent is powerless in things of greater importance. observers with subject-matter of unusual It can save a cow or deliver a bailiff. It interest. cannot prevent a manor house from being wrecked. Again and again we perceive how the eyes of those who are wronged turn towards the King. Once the owners of a ruined house contrive that Edward in his passage near shall turn aside to view the mischief, in order that he may be moved to redress the wrong. Plainly, there is a notion abroad that a strong and powerful king who will make evil. How this wish was satisfied, the annals laws respected is the real remedy for the of the Tudor reigns testify.

indeed been so much visited and so much

written about of late, that we are better acquainted with it than with some of the wilder and more remote districts of Ireland or of Scotland. Nothing but the great extent of the country, and the extraordinary richness and variety of the materials which it furnishes for description, has saved the subject from becoming altogether stale and wearisome from too frequent repetition. It possesses vast prairies, the magnificent ranges of the Rocky Mountains, the Cascades, and the Sierra Nevada, with peaks loftier than the Alps, glaciers and mighty cañons, countless lakes and lovely valleys, geysers, and volcanoes. Arizona, Sonora, and New Mexico contain, moreover, numerous archaeological treasures of extraordinary interest, visited many years ago by Mr. Stephens, and more recently by the author of The Marvellous Country; extensive districts, once densely populated and highly cultivated, which have now become barren wastes, studded with the ruins of great cities which bear internal evidence of the handiwork of a civilised race of men who have died out, and whose history is lost in obscurity. And then the old glamour of romance still lingers about Western America; it embraces within its vast limits the homes of the fiercest and most untameable of the Red Indian tribes, the Blackfeet, the Modocs, and the Apaches; and that El Dorado, so persistently and vainly sought by the Spanish conquerors of Mexico, to which native tra

The author of Western Wanderings has not broken much fresh ground. He tells us little that has not been told already by others who have gone before him. Yet he describes what he has seen in a pleasant easy way, and the illustrations by Mr. Whymper are unusually well executed. This makes us regret the more that the author should not have been able to supply sketches of fresh scenes, such as the Mystic Lake or the Lava Beds, in place of the wellknown views of the Falls of Niagara.

The earlier portions of the book, which are occupied by an account of the journey by the Pacific Railway to San Francisco, and a visit to Salt Lake City, are less attractive than the subsequent pages which

deal with the wilder life and less known scenery of California and Oregon.

From San Francisco Mr. Boddam-Whetham made the inevitable pilgrimage to the groves of great trees, and the celebrated Yosemite valley. The giant trees of California, the Sequoia gigantea, are well known in England under the name of Wellingtonias, and in America as Washingtonias. Enormous numbers have been raised from seed, and are found to grow freely and to thrive almost anywhere. It is an extremely curious fact, that this tree, which produces a profusion of seed, and can be propagated artiin its natural condition be limited to one or ficially with such ease and success, should two secluded valleys on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada. It has not spread beyond a few isolated spots of a few acres in extent during all the hundreds, nay thousands of years it must have flourished there. There is nothing in the world, perhaps, which strikes one as so strange, so utterly beyond all previous experience as these enormous trees when seen for the first time. The banyan and the baobab of the tropics attain a wide-spreading growth which covers a large area. But the effect upon the mind is as nothing compared with that produced by the gigantic trunks of the Sequoia-vast columns of a girth two to three times that of the Monument on Fish Street Hill, and half as high again; while one fallen monarch must have towered up to a height of 440 feet, i.e. twenty or thirty feet higher than the summit of the cross which crowns the dome of St. Paul's.

Still further south along the valley of the San Joaquin, on the Merced River, lies the Yosemite valley. The special features which render this loveliest of all valleys so pre-eminently beautiful, are the grandeur of the lofty cliffs by which it is shut in, which rise vertically to a height of from 3,000 to 4,000 feet, and the magnificence of the numerous waterfalls which stream over these great precipices sheer down into the valley below. There bloom an endless variety of brilliant flowers, amid verdant grasses, clustering oaks and maples, and scattered rocks rich in ferns and mosses.

Returning to San Francisco, Mr. Boddam