6 with turning his bonhomie to bad purpose | all classes there is certainly not an equal in some country fair, by acting bonnet' to amount of crime. Every one knows how the local dicer ? much fewer middle class criminals there are than pauper criminals, and how extremely rare the prosecution of any peer for positive crime is in our generation. Of course, that shows that prosperous circumstances, - of which education is perhaps the most important of all, - make the difference between crime and no crime. The Marquis of Salisbury should consider his words better before he imperils his well-deserved reputation for ability and statesmanship, by talking as if nothing could affect the amount of crime in a country which does not go direct to the conscience. The civilization which widens and tames men by no means universally makes them morally better. Still, it is none the less a great object to widen and tame them, if it does not make them morally worse. · Remote as these superficial analogies may seem to anything really in the characters of these illustrious men, we feel no doubt in the world that they themselves, if they judge themselves honestly, would admit that they are conscious of tendencies which, if they had not been checked by the high dispersive influence of wide intellectual attainments, and had been stimulated by the goad of extreme want and misery, might well have led them into such breaches with society as we call crimes. We are sure, at least, that we scarcely ever yet met any man born with a nature so saintly, that under conceivable unfavourable circumstances the evil in him might not have been developed into crime; and we are quite sure that there are thousands of criminals far less guilty in the sight of God than numbers of respectable and even eminent men of the world, to whom we all owe, and feel that we owe, a great debt of gratitude. When the Marquis of Salisbury talked in this rash and narrow way of education as having no influence on crime and moral depravity,' he either meant what is utterly false, that the mere widening of the tastes or opening up of new employments and of hosts of pure and healthy interests, has no effect in diverting men's minds from the morbid and dangerous veins of disposition that may be in them, or he only meant what is something very different from what he said, that it is no credit to men to be kept out of sin or crime by happy circumstance, - that the respectability which is born of situation and the moral atmosphere around us, though it may be a fortunate thing for society, is no merit in the sight of God. That, of course, we admit. The ticket-of-leave man who resists a strong temptation to thieve may be infinitely better than the most popular millionaire who yields to a strong temptation to adultery. But though what we hope from education is not, in any considerable degree, the purification of the will, it is, undoubtedly, the opening of a thousand wholesome safety-valves for human energy and hope, which will divert men from the wish for criminal pursuits. That in all classes there is about an equal amount of moral goodness and moral evil, using these terms in the strict sense of resistance to temptation and yielding to it, we firmly believe; in this respect we doubt if the House or Peer or Commons has much advantage over any equal number of men taken from the Union work-houses. But in From The Spectator. SIR J. T. COLERIDGE'S MEMOIR OF KEBLE. THIS is a fascinating book, because it is a book written from the heart, and concerning one whose great qualities, and they were very great, were in the main qualities of the heart. We say this without forgetting Keble's claims as a poet, indeed, with special reference to them. No doubt the poetic eye, the love and grasp of beauty in detail, is not precisely, certainly not exclusively, a characteristic of the affections. But the charm and inspiration of all Keble's poetry is unquestionably a sort of intensely loving, intensely refined, and decidedly despondent religious domesticity,· the farthest removed in the world from that truly Roman spirit of Catholicism with which his high sacerdotal and eucharistic views were generally supposed to bring him into close sympathy. We can imagine almost anything more possible, after reading this remarkable memoir, than that Keble could have followed his friend Newman into the fold of the great mediaval Church. Even his imagination was never caught by the grandeur, or power, or the political and social triumphs of the Roman Church. The sentence of St. Augustine, which made such an impression on Dr. Newman's imag ination, and rang a peal in it, to use his own illustration, like the celebrated “ Turn again, Whittington," securus judicat orbis terrarum, - would never have made the A Memoir of the Rev. John Keble, M. A., late eridge, D. C. L. London: James Parker and Co. Vicar of Hursley. By the Right Hon. Sir J. T. Col cans. 99 for .. 66 faintest impression on Keble. His imagi- they lead, as we contemplate them, in spite nation was one which pursued the track of of ourselves, to anticipations of violence "the particular affections," as Butler calls borne with composure; they seem to bid them, and which was attracted to the high us hope that our Lord will still have a Anglican system partly for its temperate Church here, yet to warn us that its exisspiritual beauty, and quiet, home-like hu- tence must be purchased by no slight primility of sentiment, partly for its tender vation and suffering." That is the view of conservatism; for conservative it was in the Church which Keble has embodied in the minds of very many of the true Angli- the poetry of the Christian Year, and which Dr. Newman has told us that Dr. expresses the very essence of his long corPusey very early vaunted the "stationari- respondence with his friend Sir J. T. Colness "of the Anglican appeal to antiquity eridge, an intensely conservative view, and the Primitive Church, and did so in a dignified indeed but dejected view, a perfect good faith. Keble seems through- thoroughly resigned view, a profoundly calm out life not only to have felt no necessity view, and let us add a view keenly alive to developing the doctrines which the beauty of patient and humble melanProtestants held Romanizing in his faith, choly. If there is a single stanza in the but to have adopted them rather from love whole Christian Year which concentrates in of the subduing and majestic features of the it the fullness of Keble's poetic nature, it is past than from any sense that they con- the following stanza in the exquisite poem tained the_germs of a great power in the for the Wednesday before Easter: future. The theory to which he clung "Lord my God, do thou Thy holy Will; throughout life with a certain pathetic resI will lie still ignation was very characteristic of him. It was, that the Church is, and has long been, in a state of decay." He not only had no objection to be a priest in such a Church, and could see nothing in it at all inconsistent with his profound faith in its Divine Founder, but the dejected, humble, and obedient attitude of mind becoming a priest in such a Church rather strikingly suited him, fitted closely, at all events, the musing and melancholy receptiveness of his nature. In the most lovely of all his poems he declared that he had learnt from the sweet messenger of calm decay," "rather in all to be resigned than blest;" and that most sweet and characteristic line seems stamped, not only on every page of this volume, but on almost all his ecclesiastical and theological writings as well. For instance, in an essay on the relations between Church and State, which Keble published in the British Critic in October, 1839, and which Mr. Liddon has just republished, Mr. Keble asserts that the uniform failure of the Church Conservatives, combined with the almost equally uniform and still more unexpected impediments and hindrances put in the way of the Church Liberals when they were contemplating any peculiarly heinous offence, produces an impression of the Anglican Church " analogous to that which has been stated to result from a certain cast of features, majestic yet melan-tory, so miserably poor and meagre, so choly, such as those of King Charles I.; unlike the glorious vision which they have 66 Many a devout and loving heart, I well know, will rise up against this view of our To be on this conditional footing case. will strike them as something so unsatisfac been used to gaze on, of the one Catholic Apostolic Church. And poor indeed and disappointing it undoubtedly is, but not otherwise than as the aspect of Christianity itself in the world is poor and disappointing -- ↑ The State in its Relations with the Church. A Paper reprinted from the British Critic, October, 1839. By the late Rev. John Keble, M. A., Vicar of Hursley. With a preface by the Rev. H. P. Liddon. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co. 1869. I will not stir, lest I forsake thine arm, Which lulls me, clinging to my Father's breast And the poem ends as it began, with perhaps a still more perfect reflection of Keble's nature: 66 66 O Father! not my will, but thine be done! Be this our charm mellowing Earth's ruder Of griefs and joys: That we may cling for ever to thy breast To our mind Sir J. T. Coleridge's memoir is a mere expansion of this inner heart of Keble's nature into the prose detail and circumstance of daily life. Thus when he concludes his treatise on the worship of Christ in the Eucharist in the following words, quoted by his biographer (p. 427), it will be seen that his mind is dominated by the very same conception of religion which we have just adduced from his essay on Church and State, and which runs through every page of the Christian Year. compared with what we read of it in the Gospel. Men will not escape from this state of decay by going elsewhere, though they may shut their eyes to the reality of it. Rather, whatever be our position in the Church, since God Almighty has assigned it to us for our trial, shall we not accept it, and make the best of it, in humble confidence that, according to our faith, it will be to us?" vanity, some betrayal, at all events, of a chronic consciousness of being an object of interest to others and of taking some delight in that interest. But Keble seems to us utterly without any share of this quality, though we are not sure that he was quite without it as regards what we may call his moral saintliness. We say we are not sure, because on that subject he was a shade morbid, though he showed it in the usual fashion of intense and excessive self-depreciation. But on his merits as a poet he never seems to have cast a thought. His only self-consciousness as regarded the Christian Year was in relation to the saintly ideal it contained, which, as he held it to be far above his own practice, caused him many pangs of disgust, as though he had been a sort of hypocrite to write it. He says in one place in the memoir, and in one place in the Christian Year, that he was keenly sensible to the enjoyment of tender moral flattery, for which, however, he evidently hated himself. The two passages show so naturally and unconsciously the identity of the man and the poet, that it will be worth while to place them side by side. Most of our readers probably recollect the second stanza in the poem for the Wednes : Such is Keble's tone for his Church, and such also is his tone for himself. Even in the earliest of his letters here published, written at the age of twenty-two, the tone is always alike, whether most cheerful or most suffering, rather patient than anything else. The happiness of his letters never rises above a gentle smile; their pain never rises above a soft but serene melancholy. His whole correspondence and his whole poetry are steeped in "a light nor dark nor clear," to use his own phrase; the light never stronger than what he calls "the softest moonlight of the soul," the shadow never deeper than "the gathering twilight" in which he wraps the true "watchman" of the Church. In his letter to Sir J. T. Coleridge on his first family trouble, the death of his sister Sarah, when he was twenty-two years of age, he says very day before Easter: characteristically, "Not that I have been so much overwhelmed by what I have lately" 99 seen and heard, as to be unable to write or to enter into common subjects. Indeed, when I look back, I wonder at my own hard-heartedness. I do not believe there has been one day since my dear sister was given over, that I have not been able to go on with my reading as usual. Yet I do not think it is insensibility. The farthest possible from that. Tenderness breathes through every page of his letters. No sensibility could be finer than Keble's, but there was nothing passionate about him, and the line, rather in all to be resigned than blest," expressed as much the inclination of a constitutional temperament, as the ideal of a spiritual desire. Compare this with Keble's reply to Sir J. T. Coleridge's letter of sympathy on his mother's death (a letter which seems to have contained kind expressions as to the tenderness and goodness of Keble as a son). He calls his friend's letter, "Kind in all respects, except some partial expressions which I would beg of you as a kindness to forbear; they please me so well at first, that I am quite sure they are best not thrown in my way; and when I come to look at them or think of them afterwards, they seem, as it were, to spoil the rest of the letter; if you please, therefore, do not send me any more of them." And he repeated the same thing almost in the same words to One thing that strikes us perhaps more in this memoir than anything else, is the total and entire absence of any touch, however slight, of the ordinary vanity of the poet. Most poets are constitutionally vain by the very necessity of their natures. Without the desire for appreciation and his friend Dyson at the same time. There sympathy, not to say praise, the poet is not a single expression of pleasure would scarcely have enough impulse to utter throughout the memoir at the popularity of his thoughts in poetry; and consequently the Christian Year. On the contrary, we rarely meet with any man of the true there is the frequent expression of a sort of artistic temperament, whether poetry or any disgust for it, as for a book which painted a other of the fine arts be his special province, very much holier mind than that of the without some more or less simple kind of author really was. Sir J. T. Coleridge Wild Fancy, peace! Thou must not me be- Be silent, Praise, Blind guide with siren voice, and blinding all very close of life he should shrink from reading Mr. Robertson's biography, or Ecce Homo. They were books with which he was certain not to agree, and at his age and in his health one does not wonder that he disliked the mere jar that a fair consideration of them would give to his nerves. Still, we doubt if any memoir of any equally able man ever could give the conception of a more contracted range of interests. There is no trace of the Reform Bill, no trace of the Corn Laws, no trace of interest in the Crimean war and its political issues, no trace of interest in the great events going on in France in 1832, or 1848, or 1852, or in Italy in 1860, or in Ireland in 1847, in the whole memoir. On the Poor Law, indeed, he wrote with knowledge, acumen, and apparently wisdom, for it affected the actual condition of his parish. But beyond this there is no instance in the memoir of any political interest not included in ecclesiastical and University legislation. More than this, there is no trace of any living interest in the development of English literature. There is not a criticism or allusion to Tennyson, or Browning, or Macaulay, or Froude, much less, of course, Dickens or Thackeray, There is not, moreover, a metaphysical speculation, or a philosophical note, in the whole volume. Religion, ecclesiastical polity, University administration, and the poetical criticism of natural scenery, apparently absorbed the whole man. thinks that Keble scarcely ever read it, and 66 Next to the sweetness and tenderness of the man, and his excessive moral and singular intellectual humility, the chief point which strikes us in the memoir is the very narrow range of his interests, both intellect- And naturally enough, a nature so limited, ual and moral. As a politician his timid in spite of its wonderful purity and sincerity, conservatism is almost ludicrous. No re- became not only at times shockingly bigoted, form is ever suggested on University mat- but on points excessively finikin. Can anyters, for instance, or on Church matters thing be more ludicrously petty than the either, which does not strike him with dread, advice which his biographer prints on pp. -except, indeed, Mr. Gladstone's suggested 357-8? It appears that some clergyman disestablishment of the Irish Church, on in the Judge's parish, a pious and amiable which, owing partly to his dislike of the man," with whom Sir J. T. Coleridge had Erastian principle, partly to a true feeling lived in a good deal of social intimacy," of equity towards the people of Ireland, he had gone over to Rome. For some reason seems to have looked with approval. The or other, we do not know what, this very simple measure for simplifying the secession created a difficulty in the Judge's oaths and declarations of the clergy which mind as to the amount of intimacy to be was recommended by a Commission, and kept up. Keble advised him, in reply, to passed by Parliament a few years ago, filled keep up as much intercourse as he could, him with melancholy forebodings. The" in the way of morning visits with the rest Oxford Reform Act of 1854 filled him with of the family," but "not to.have him to dine." forebodings. Every decision of the Privy I should consider it scandalous, in respect Council on theological questions filled him of the servants, to say no other; they know with forebodings. The Divorce Act of 1856 that he is a clergyman who has renounced filled him with horror. This correspond- his orders; and it cannot be but certain ence is one long melancholy twitter on all thoughts must enter into their minds, if they questions of this kind, and, then, his think of such things at all." To such sympathies pass so little beyond questions wonderful pettiness could Keble descend! of this and, if we may judge by this me- Probably we scarcely apprehend what he moir. Perhaps it was natural that in the alludes to. Even if it were so terrible to 66 suggest to a footman that Anglican orders | benevolence which in its own parochial field might not be indelible, why such an idea was without limit. Sir J. T. Coleridge says should be borne in upon him more strongly that Keble and his wife regarded themselves on sceing the ex-clergyman cat, than on simply as the servants of the parish of Hurany other occasion, does not seem clear. sley, and acted through life as if they were so. Keble went there not "to be ministered unto, but to minister;" and in the most trying of all senses, to a scholar and a poet, laid down his life for his people. We may fairly say of him that a man in many respects so near Christ was never before so churchy as Keble: that one so churchy, in a sense in which we feel instinctively that our Lord and St. Paul and St. John could not have been churchy, was never before so near the saintly love of the divine world. ――― The Dean of Westminster has shown us, in his fine tribute to Keble in this month's Macmillan's Magazine, that Keble's poetry often betrayed him into a larger and truer theology than his own. That is perfectly true, but it is equally true that the habitually low flight of his intellectual sympathies often injured his poetry. The poet who in treating of the Eucharist could be generous and bold because he was announcing a faith, in treating of eternal torments became narrow because he felt it his duty to define a creed. He defended, "O come to our Communion Feast, Not in the hands, the eternal priest From The Examiner. SACK OF THE CITY OF ASUNCION. THE condition of the La Plata States, more especially of Paraguay, is again attracting public attention amongst us; but unfortunately, the intelligence hitherto received by the readers of newspapers has been so unfaithful that, nothwithstanding the important commercial interests at stake, there was a general indisposition to look into the facts as they really transpired, or the policy and aims of the different States engaged in the sanguinary war, which is not even yet closed. Our information has since the proclamation of hostilities been derived from Brazilian sources mainly; sometimes directly from Buenos Ayres, for the Brazilian and Argentine Governments were interested in misrepresenting the progress of the struggle, so as to keep up the prices of stock in the markets of Europe. Brazilian, Buenos Ayres, and Argentine It appears that the La Plata, Parana, and Paraguay are all open now to Asuncion, the capital of the Paraguayan Republic, and correct news can at last be obtained, not by the roundabout way of Bolivia, but direct. The Brazilians can have no pretence further for closing the navigation, as their enemy is driven off the waters everywhere between Asuncion and the ocean. The present condition of affairs ought to be understood in the interests of commerce, of the holders of Brazilian bonds, and of humanity. It is necessary, therefore, to remark that the war arose from the interference of the Brazilian Government in the Banda Oriental. Paraguay remonstrated with diplomatic courte But we cannot close with any carping sentence. Sir J. T. Coleridge has protrayed here a rare mind, narrow, indeed, in its sympathies and interests, but of wonderful beauty, of a domestic tenderness passing the love of woman, of purity that is incapable of a blot, of a sweet self-forgetfulness, humility, and resignation almost us-sy, and at last proclaimed that any attempt paralleled in the history of poets, of a love to force a Dictator upon Paraguay, would for Christ and God that was as intense as it be considered a casus belli. Flores (since was shy, reserved, and refined, and of a assassinated), who had been expelled from in spite of his belief that He was present in course, is so, waste, |