Morley has left behind him the old revolutionary Liberalism of his masters, and has advanced to what may be called evolutionary Liberalism. Mr Morley's philosophy of life must be gathered from a study of his writings, of which that On Compromise (1874) is one of the most characteristic. In his Voltaire (1872) we have his attitude towards religion, particularly to that form of it which in his view has been the main obstruction to individual and social progress. In his Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1878) we have his insistence upon the paramount importance of knowledge and freedom as the two vital factors in progress; and a generous tribute is paid to the advanced thinkers of the Revolution period, who fought so valiantly for the liberation of humanity. In Rousseau (1873), along with appreciation of Rousseau's influence as supplementary to the hard, dry, critical influence of Voltaire, we have a protest against the dangers of importing into political life sentimentalism and intuitionalism. In Burke (1879) Mr Morley presents us with a sketch of the ideal politician, in whom the desire for progress is held in check by a profound regard for the principles of order and continuity. In his Life of Cobden (1881) he does justice to those great politico-economic principles which, in his opinion, tend to internationalise commerce and industry, thereby promoting the brotherhood of man. Two series of Critical Miscellanies (1871 and 1877) and a volume of Studies in Literature (1891) are an integral part of Mr Morley's literary work; and the Oliver Cromwell (1900) showed how fairly Mr Morley could deal with a man and a revolution dominated by religious conceptions he does not share. His Life of Gladstone (3 vols. 1903) was sure to be not merely a permanent addition to the political history of the time, but a literary masterpiece. Yet as Gladstone's career was so bound up with the public life of his time, there was an obvious danger that the historian would encroach on the biographer; that against the massive historic background the figure of Gladstone would shrink into something quite indistinct and shadowy. But in this greatest of our political biographies, Mr Morley's intuitive sense of literary proportion stood him in good stead; the history of the time is depicted with superb and attractive lucidity, while Gladstone all through remains the central figure. The Political Spirit. It is at least well, and more than that, it is an indispensable condition of social well-being, that the divorce between political responsibility and intellectual responsibility, between respect for what is instantly practicable and search after what is only important in thought, should not be too complete and universal. Even if there were no other objection, the undisputed prominence of the political spirit has a plain tendency to limit the subjects in which the men animated by it can take a real interest. All matters fall out of sight, or at least fall into a secondary place, which do not bear more or less directly and patently upon the material and structural welfare of the community. In this way the members of the community miss the most bracing, widening, and elevated of the whole range of influences that create great characters. First, they lose sincere concern about the larger questions which the human mind has raised up for itself. Second, they lose a fearless desire to reach the true answers to them, or if no certain answers should prove to be within reach, then at any rate to be satisfied on good grounds that this is so. Such questions are not immediately discerned by commonplace minds to be of social import. Consequently they, and all else that is not obviously connected with the machinery of society, give way in the public consideration to what is so connected with it, in a manner that cannot be mistaken. . . . How momentous a disadvantage this is we can best know by contemplating the characters which have sometimes lighted up the old times. Men were then devoutly persuaded that their eternal salvation depended on their having true beliefs. Any slackness in finding out which beliefs are the true ones would have to be answered for before the throne of Almighty God, at the sure risk and peril of everlasting damnation. To what quarter in the large historic firmament can we turn our eyes with such certainty of being stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human life and the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated by its seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits whom the Protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal responsibility brought to the front in Germany in the sixteenth century, and in England and Scotland in the seventeenth? It is not their fanaticism, still less is it their theology, which makes the great Puritan chiefs of England and the stern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our sight. It is the fact that they sought truth and ensued it, not thinking of the practical nor cautiously counting majorities and minorities, but each man pondering and searching so as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.' (From On Compromise.) HECTOR MACPHERSON. James Bryce, son of Dr James Bryce, geologist and schoolmaster, was born at Belfast, 10th May 1838, and educated at Glasgow High School and University, and Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1862 as double first. Elected a Fellow of Oriel, and called to the Bar in 1867, he was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford from 1870 to 1893, and entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1880. In 1886 he was made Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and in 1892 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; and he is a member of the Privy Council. His literary works give him a place among the most accomplished scholars of the day. His first book of note, The Holy Roman Empire, which appeared in 1884, was an elaboration of a university prize essay, and contains a luminous sketch of the central political institutions of the Middle Ages; his Transcaucasia and Ararat (1877) is the record of a visit to the East, in which he climbed the historic mountain. The monumental work on The American Commonwealth (1888) marked him as the successor of De Tocqueville, and won him the honour of a corresponding membership of the Institute of France. His later works are Impres sions of South Africa (1897), Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1902), and an interesting volume of Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903). Sir George Otto Trevelyan, son of Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, Governor of Madras and Baronet, and Hannah, the sister of Lord Macaulay, was born in 1838 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, the birthplace of his illustrious uncle. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he graduated as second classic in 1861, and gave high promise of distinction in literature by his Aristophanic skits of Horace at the University of Athens (1861) and The Ladies in Parliament (1869). In 1865 he entered Parliament as a Liberal, and sat, mainly for Scotch constituencies, until 1897, filling at different times the Cabinet offices of Chief Secretary for Ireland and Secretary for Scotland. His earlier prose works were the Letters of a Competition Wallah (1864) and the brilliant but rather too emphatic narrative of the defence and fall of Cawnpore (1864). In 1876 he enriched English biography with his admirable Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, which ranks next to the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart, and in 1880 he followed it up with a vivid picture of later eighteenth-century politics in The Early History of Charles James Fox. The American Revolution (parts i. and ii., 3 vols. 1899-1903) was in a sense a continuation of the Fox.-His youngest son, George Macaulay Trevelyan, born in 1876, has also applied himself to historical studies, and published a volume on England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899). Mandell Creighton (1843-1901), born at Carlisle, from Durham School passed to Merton College, Oxford, where he was elected a Fellow in 1866. Successively vicar of Embleton, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, Bishop of Peterborough (1891) and of London (1896), he became one of the most authoritative of English historians, amongst his works being a book on Simon de Montfort (1876), his great History of the Papacy during the Reformation Period (1882-94; new ed. 6 vols. 1901), and the sumptuous Queen Elizabeth (1897). His Memoir of Sir George Grey, privately printed in 1884, was published after his death; as were his Thoughts on Education and his Essays and Reviews (1902). William Hale White was born at Bedford about 1830, the son of a bookseller who was from 1850 to 1880 doorkeeper to the House of Commons. In 1848-51 Mr Hale White qualified at Cheshunt and New College for the Congregational ministry, but was expelled for his views on inspiration, whereupon he became a journalist and miscellaneous writer. His translation of Spinoza's Ethic (1883; revised by Miss Hutchison Stirling; new ed. 1894) was published under his own name; but he owes his literary eminence to the powerful studies of domestic, social, moral, and theological problems contained in the remarkable trilogy of novels, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1885), and The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887), 'edited by Reuben Shapcott.' 'Mark Rutherford's' later novels, Miriam's Schooling, Catherine Furze, and Clara Hopgood (1896) attracted less notice. He collected and edited in 1897, as The Inner Life of the House of Commons, a series of articles contributed by his father to a weekly paper. In a book on The Apostasy of Wordsworth (1898) he vindicated the poet's consistency; in 1900 he gave us Pages from a Journal. William Robertson Smith (1846-94), the son of the Free Church minister at Keig in Aberdeenshire, was educated at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Bonn, and Göttingen, and in 1870 became Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in the Free Church College at Aberdeen. For his article on the Bible' in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica he was prosecuted before the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland on a charge of heresy, but acquitted, in 1880. Another article on 'Hebrew Language and Literature' cost him his chair, from which he was dismissed in 1881. Subsequently he delivered in Edinburgh and Glasgow the lectures republished as The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882), and after assisting and succeeding Professor Spencer Baynes in the editorship of the Encyclopædia Britannica, he was made Professor of Arabic in Cambridge University in 1883 and university librarian. Ere his death he had gained the reputation of one of the foremost Semitic scholars in Europe; The Religion of the Semites (1889) containing some of his most pregnant work. Edward Dowden, born at Cork in 1843, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where in 1867 he became Professor of English Literature. To him we owe Shakspere, his Mind and Art (1875), a work which gave a decided impulse to Shakespearean study and gave him high standing as a Shakespearean scholar; the invaluable Shakspere Primer; the Introduction to Shakspere (1893); the standard Life of Shelley (1886); and an excellent small book on Southey; besides poems, several volumes of studies in literature, a History of French Literature (1897), and Puritan and Anglican (1900). He has also edited Shelley, Wordsworth, selections from Southey, critical editions of Hamlet, of Romeo and Juliet, and of the Sonnets, the correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor, and that of Southey with Caroline Bowles. Professor Dowden contributed the article on Matthew Arnold to the present work. John Pentland Mahaffy was born near Vevay, Switzerland, in 1839, studied in Germany and at Trinity College, Dublin, and from 1871 to 1899 was Professor there of Ancient History. He has written on Kant, on primitive civilisation, on Greek antiquities, on papyri, and on the art of conversation, but is best known for a series of fresh and interesting works on Greek history, such as Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander, Alexander's Empire, Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest, and The Empire of the Ptolemies. Henry Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth on the 18th of January 1840, and at the age of eight went with his parents to Holyhead in Wales. Educated at Beaumaris and Coventry, and afterwards at the gymnase of Strasburg, he returned to England in 1856, intending to follow his father's profession of civil engineer; but it was fated that he should enter the Civil Service as a clerk in the Board of Trade, where-for the last seventeen years as principal of his departmenthe served until his retirement in 1901. His officework did not debar him from favourite studies in art, or from practising in prose and verse. His first poetical contribution to a magazine was to Temple Bar in December 1864. But his literary career practically began in March 1868, when he became a contributor of verse to St Paul's Magazine, then under the editorship of Anthony Trollope; and to the editor his first volume of poems, Vignettes in Rhyme and Vers de Société, was dedicated at its publication in October 1873. Proverbs in Porcelain followed in 1877, Old-World Idylls in 1883, and At the Sign of the Lyre in 1885. Whether in the artificial forms of old French verse-rondel, rondeau, ballade, triolet, chant royal, and villanelle (which he was among the earliest to write systematically) or in more familiar and less elaborate rhythms, his poems are remarkable for perfection of technique, for freshness, spontaneity, and sprightly humour, while many are instinct with true pathos or genuine satire. Activity in prose composition and editorial work soon followed. 1879 Mr Dobson began his literary studies of the eighteenth century with the Life of Hogarth (expanded in the subsequent editions of 1891, 1898, and 1902), and continued them in the monograph on Fielding in the 'English Men of Letters' (1883; new American ed. 1900), since followed in the same series by Richardson (1902) and Fanny Burney (1903); in Thomas Bewick and his Pupils (1884 ; new ed. 1889); in Steele (1886) and Goldsmith (1888); in Horace Walpole (1890), in EighteenthCentury Vignettes (1892-96), A Paladin of Philanthropy (1897), and Side-Walk Studies (1902). By these he has approved himself an accurate and sympathetic biographer and an exquisite critic, having at command the rare gift of combining the results of conscientious and laborious research with lightness and brightness of presentment. Through his various works in prose and verse, and through his editing of a selection of EighteenthCentury Essays (1882), and the Fables of Gay In (1882), the poems of Prior (1889), and the plays, poems, and novel of Goldsmith, as well as by his contributions to Ward's English Poets, Craik's English Prose, and to most of the principal magazines and reviews, Mr Dobson has attained critical rank as the supreme authority on the lighter literary aspects of the ages of Pope and Johnson; and his intimate knowledge of French literature is seen in his Four Frenchwomen (1890). His prose has the same pleasant ease and daintiness of style as distinguishes his poems, which, with some new additions, were collected in 1897. The fifth edition (1902) contained selections from Carmina Votiva, poems first privately published in 1901. In 1902 Edinburgh conferred on him its honorary degree of LL.D. He contributed important articles to the Dictionary of National Biography, to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and to Chambers's Encyclopædia; and the value of his contributions to the present work (see Vol. II., pages 1-13, 294-300, 339-348, 478-494) cannot fail to be recognised by every reader. Angel-Court. In Angel-Court the sunless air Grows faint and sick; to left and right The cowering houses shrink from sight, Huddled and hopeless, eyeless, bare. Misnamed, you say? For surely rare Nay! the Eternities are there. And Love has climbed that crumbling stair On a Fan. Chicken-skin, delicate, white, Roses and vaporous blue; Hark to the dainty frou-frou! Picture above, if you can, Eyes that could melt as the dew,— This was the Pompadour's fan! See how they rise at the sight, Thronging the Eil de Bauf through, Courtiers as butterflies bright, Beauties that Fragonard drew, Talon-rouge, falbala, queue, Cardinal, Duke,—to a man, Eager to sigh or to sue,This was the Pompadour's fan ! Ah, but things more than polite Hung on this toy, voyez-vous ! Matters of state and of might, Things that great ministers do; Things that, maybe, overthrew Those in whose brains they began ; Here was the sign and the cue,This was the Pompadour's fan! Envoy. Where are the secrets it knew? Weavings of plot and of plan? -But where is the Pompadour, too? This was the Pompadour's Fan! A Garden Song. Here, in this sequestered close, Bloom the hyacinth and rose; Here beside the modest stock Flaunts the flaring hollyhock; Here, without a pang, one sees Ranks, conditions, and degrees. All the seasons run their race Here, in alleys cool and green, Sounds of toil and turmoil are. Here be shadows large and long; Here be spaces meet for song; Grant, O garden-god, that I, Now that none profane is nigh,— Now that mood and moment please,Find the fair Pierides! In After Days. In after days when grasses high Though ill or well the world adjust I shall not question or reply. I shall not see the morning sky; I shall not hear the night-wind sigh; But yet, now living, fain were I Saying- He held his pen in trust To Art, not serving shame or lust.' Will none? Then let my memory die In after days! The Letter. 'Dear John (the letter ran), it can't, can't be, For Father's gone to Chorley Fair with Sam, And Mother's storing Apples,-Prue and Me Up to our Elbows making Damson Jam : But we shall meet before a Week is gone,""Tis a long Lane that has no turning," John! 'Only till Sunday next, and then you'll wait Behind the White-Thorn, by the broken StileWe can go round and catch them at the Gate, All to Ourselves, for nearly one long Mile; Dear Prue won't look, and Father he'll go on, 'My Dear, I don't think that I thought of much daughter, She first Thackeray,' is Thackeray's eldest Anne Isabella, and was born in 1837. appeared as an author in vol. i. of the Cornhill (1860) with 'Little Scholars.' To this sketch succeeded a dozen or more volumes of novels, tales. biographical essays, and other varied work, of which may be mentioned The Story of Elizabeth (1863); The Village on the Cliff (1867); Old Kensington (1873); Miss Angel (1875; its heroine Angelica Kauffmann); Mrs Dymond (1885); Records of Tennyson, Ruskin, and Browning (1892); Lord Tennyson and his Friends (1893); Chapters from some Memoirs (1895); and her dainty modern recasts of such old-world stories as 'Bluebeard' and 'Cinderella.' Tender, delicate, harmonious, her books are feminine as are very few women's books. In 1877 she married her cousin, Mr Richmond Thackeray Ritchie. Mary Elizabeth Braddon was born in Soho Square, London, in 1837, the daughter of a London solicitor; and her brother has been Prime Minister of Tasmania, and first representative of Tasmania in the Commonwealth Parliament. She early showed a turn for literature, which she indulged by sending verses and miscellaneous contributions to a Brighton newspaper. Neither a comedietta brought out at the Strand in 1860, a volume of verse, nor one or two novels had had much success, when, in 1862, Lady Audley's Secret, the story of a golden-haired murderess, attained an enormous popularity, in three months reaching its eighth three-volume edition. Aurora Floyd (1863) was little less popular. Of some sixty novels by her -almost all of them sensational, melodramatic, ingenious in plot, and carefully constructed so as to lead up to an unforeseen dénouement-one of the best is Ishmael (1884), a tale of the Second Empire, which depends not so much on sensation as on character. But her men and women are conventional. She has no deep insight into life, and though her fertility of invention is marvellous, her style has no literary charm. His Darling Sin (1899), The Infidel (1900), The Conflict (1903), well illustrated the author's unabated command of her powers. Her dramas (Griselda, The Missing Witness) have the same merits and defects as her novels. Several of her works appeared in Temple Bar, St James's Magazine, and Belgravia, of which last magazine she was for some years editor. In 1874 she married the publisher, Mr John Maxwell (1825-95), but to her wide circle of readers always remained 'Miss Braddon.' Augusta Webster (1837-94), the daughter of Vice-Admiral Davies, was born at Poole, and in 1863 married Mr Thomas Webster, solicitor and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. She wrote reviews marked by intellectual power, sympathetic insight, and literary finish for the Examiner, and a novel, Lesley's Guardians. Her translations of Prometheus Vinctus and Medea (1866) were models in their kind. Her original poetic work, which showed from the first exceptional accomplishment, began with Blanche Lisle (under a pseudonym), and included Dramatic Studies (1866), Portraits (1870), A Book of Rhyme (1881), and the dramas The Auspicious Day (1874) and The Sentence (1887). Rhoda Broughton, the daughter of a clergyman and born in North Wales in 1840, secured notice in 1867 by two novels in a vein then unusual-Cometh up as a Flower and Not Wisely but Too Well-lively in action, brisk in description, piquant, and skilfully piloting her characters through risky situations. Red as a Rose is She (1870) was equally popular; and when Foes in Law and Lavinia appeared in the first years of the twentieth century, Miss Broughton had amused a large circle of readers by a succession of nearly a score of novels, some of which were less effective than her first efforts. Ouida, her own childish mispronunciation of 'Louisa,' is the pseudonym under which Mdlle. de la Ramée has made herself conspicuous as the author of more than forty novels, not to speak of dramatic sketches, critical studies, and contributions to magazines. Spite of her French name, she comes on her father's side of Suffolk farming stock, though her mother was French; she was born about 1840 at Bury St Edmunds, lived long in London, and from 1874 made her home in Italy, first at Florence, then at Lucca. She was writing for Colburn's New Monthly and Bentley's Magazine as early as 1860; and among the most successful and characteristic of her novels are Strathmore (1865), Idalia (1867), Under Two Flags (1868; generally accounted her best), Puck (1869), Folle From a Photograph by Elliott & Fry. Farine (1871), Pascarel (1873), Ariadne (1877), Moths (1880), Guilderoy (1889), The Silver Christ (1891), and The Massarenes (1897). In Bimbi: Stories for Children (1882), she essayed a very different kind of work. Ouida has always pleased the crowd better than the critics. Her stories have verve and go; she envelops her handsome rakes and women with a past in a certain glamour, and treats several sides of life with a frankness till her time rare amongst English women writers; she often attains to the picturesque, is not seldom truly tender, is sometimes powerful, and has created one or two attractive characters. But she has no profound insight into the human heart; she is hardly less amazingly inaccurate in matters of ordinary observation than of literary allusion; her characters are often conventional and her stories unreal; her ideals are always tawdry or unwholesome, and her style is wholly without beauty or distinction. She feels keenly to the point of extravagance on vivisection and the grievances of the Italian peasantry under the new régime, and has expounded her views largely both in her novels and in magazine articles. |