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captured in the columns of a newspaper. They do not go very deep down into the human heart, and we can understand easily how it was that Meredith, having expressed them with all his eloquence, thought it hardly worth while to carry them from the pit of speech inte the "wider sphere of action." Moreover, the motive of the book-the opposition of the so-called Celt to the so-called Saxon-has been the excuse for a larger mass of loose, indistinguishable talk since Meredith made his sketch, than any other topic under heaven. Thousands of restless persons have tackled this dark, unsolved problem of race without any other qualification for the task than an unreasoning pride. Their enormous assumption that there dwells side by side in the British Isles two distinct and opposite races, is wholly unjustified. The mixture of our blood has been so subtly made as to defy analysis, and no generalisation has ever been advanced by the fanatics of race that cannot be instantly refuted. In every country there may be observed the same conflict of opposite temperaments. Everywhere the joyous, the reckless, the extravagant confronts the narrow, the practical, the penurious. But elsewhere it is not thought necessary to invent an imaginary Celt, with no warrant to history, to be thwarted perpetually in his journey towards salvation by a heavy-witted, portly knave of a Saxon.

It is not fanciful, perhaps, to discern in the extravagant

treatment of his theme the reason why George Meredith put his sketch aside. It was not for him to follow the common, uninstructed scribe into a labyrinth of prejudice, to base upon a problematic Celt who has lost every mark of his race, and a visionary Saxon who never existed, the interesting clash of two contrary tempers. The contrary tempers exist, and will exist always, apart from all superstitions of Celt and Saxon. It is thus, indeed, that Meredith most moderately poses his own problem : "Common-sense,' says he, "is necessarily critical in collision with vapours. There is the heart of the matter, and when we have reached it there will be no more conflict of Irish and English, of Gascon and Norman, of South German and Prussian. Fancy is at feud with fact all the world over, and we may admit this without becoming the victims of a far-fetched ethnology.

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Mr Meredith, however, was the true child of his age, and he saw when he made this sketch-was it in the 'Sixties ?

the hideous frame of John Bull pervading all things. Now John Bull, as Meredith conceived him, never existed, and the mere conception of him, with his side - whiskers and his enormous pearl buttons, was long ago relegated to the obscurer theatres of Paris. But here he is, large as life, as memory has preserved him, and sketched by the hand of a master. "Ideal of his country, Bull has none-he hates the word; it smells of heresy, op

position to his image. It is an exercise of the imagination to accept an ideal, and his digestive organs reject it, after the manner of the most beautiful likeness to him conjurable to the mind-that flowering stomach, the sea-anemone, which opens to anything and speedily casts out what it cannot consume. He is a positive sham, a practical corporation, and the best he can see is the mirror held up to him by his bards of the press and his jester Frank Guffaw. There, begirt by laughing ocean-waves, manifestly blest, he glorifies his handsome roundness, like that other Foam-Born, which the decorative Graces robed in vestments not so wonderful as printed sheets." There is much more to the same purpose, which gives Meredith's style an admirable exercise, and carries us no nearer to the portraiture of England or Ireland or Wales.

the pack-saddle ass of vanities and susceptibilities which were never national, which were never more than parochial. In truth, it is always dangerous to symbolise in a single figure the complex amalgam of races, characters, and temperaments which go to the making of a nation. John Bull, as Meredith imagines him, will not stand for England until Ireland and Tammany Hall are indistinguishable.

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Is it too much to believe, then, that Meredith put aside his sketch because the passing years proved to him the insecurity of its basis? We think not, and if Celt and Saxon' gave way to Rhoda Fleming' and 'Sandra Belloni,' we cannot regret that it comes to us in its unfinished state. The qualities for which we prize it-its vivid style, in which every phrase is a picture, the fine supremacy of the verb over the adjective, the noble And when, at last, Meredith choice of strong and living adjures England to be loved words-are there in their and to banish Bull, it is hard maturity; and what matters to follow him. For the Bull it if he has left the battle of his imagining was never of Ireland and England still adopted by England. He is undecided?

KING JAMES AND THE ENGLISH PURITANS: AN UNPUBLISHED DOCUMENT.

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THAT "the right High and mightie Prince, JAMES by the grace of God King of great Britannie, France, and Irelande, Defender of the faith, &c.,' was the son of Mary Queen of Scots and the father of Charles I., is one of those facts which lend from time to time an air of strangeness and paradox to the study of history. The glamour of romance has invested the personality of his mother with an interest that grows rather than diminishes with the lapse of years, and the note of high tragedy no less than the magnitude of the issues involved in his death has made the character of the Martyr-king" a subject upon which the sympathies and, we must add, the prejudices of men are still sharply divided. But neither legend nor cult has ever been associated with the name of King James. To the historian, it is true, he is a factor of considerable importance, at least in the ecclesiastical affairs both of England and of Scotland; by the ordinary reader he is regarded with a mixture of indifference and contempt, from which not even the eulogy of the translators of the Authorized Version has availed to rescue him. that eulogy was not wholly unmerited, and while occasional references in State papers may suggest that his personal character was open to graver censures than any which have

Yet

usually been passed upon it, they do not render the study of the motives of his public actions less instructive or less necessary.

One historical document of some considerable value for this purpose has lately been discovered in the Archbishop's Library at Lambeth. It is a small quarto pamphlet of 48 pages, entitled 'An humble Supplication for Toleration and libertie to enioy and observe the ordinances of Christ IESUS in th' administration of his Churches in lieu of humane constitutions.' For reasons which will readily suggest themselves from what follows, it bears the name neither of authors, publisher, nor printer, but we learn that it was addressed to the king

in 1609 by "Your Ma. most loyall, faithfull and obedient Subiects, some of the late silenced and deprived Ministers and people consenting in iudgement with them." The seventeenth century has left us a rich store of historical pamphlets of very various degrees of interest, and in itself this "humble supplication might not seem to call for more particular notice than a number of others, but for one fact: the silenced ministers contrived by some means that it should reach the King, and its wide margins are enriched with copious annotations by James himself. How the copy

came subsequently to find a place upon the shelves at Lambeth it is perhaps impossible to determine with certainty; but it is, no doubt, either one of the collection of books formerly belonging to Prince Henry which the Library possesses, or a gift to Archbishop Bancroft for his guidance in dealing, if not with its unknown authors, at any rate with the "people consenting in iudgement with them."

They were less easily dealt with than discovered, as Laud found, thirty years later, in regard to the Scottish Covenanters and their "most cunning sly and dangerous pamphlet." Deprived the ministers might be, but (apart from public ministrations) silenced they certainly were not. And, the fate of the Millenary Petition notwithstanding, they seem still to have been hoping that an appeal to the King in person might relieve them of the burden of subscription which was being enforced upon them by his authority. It must be confessed that the terms of their address to him were ill adapted to secure the end which they desired. They wished to be conciliatory: had they not adorned the titlepage with a Latin motto from Tertullian, "We reverence the Emperor as a man second to God, and to God alone inferior," a sentiment which should have been grateful to Stuart ears. But in the first fifty lines of the treatise they manage to offend twice 8 singularly inauspicious open

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to sigh at home in the case of publike and private grievances, but (so farre as it may be done with all dew regarde and reverence) to crye also by way of Supplication in the eare of his Prince." Now, whatever may be the truth as to the friendliness of James to Rome at different periods of his reign-and from the Chisholm letter onwards the subject is involved in difficulty-the treatment of the Recusants before and after Guy Fawkes' plot in 1605 made such an allusion at least impolitic, and the King's note in the margin "A presumptuouse lye, witnesse both the yrishe popish & the englishe puritaines petitions," shows his irritation at being supposed to be ready to inaugurate an era of general toleration. It would, of course, be unreasonable to expect that men smarting under a sense of injustice and inspired with a fanatical belief in the sole validity of their own principles should always choose their words with diplomatic nicety; but if the ministers believed, as we must suppose, that there had been a weakening in policy in one direction, and appealed for a similar concession to themselves on that ground, a sense of fitness (if

not the worldly wisdom which they doubtless despised) might have induced them to refrain from adding a hope that "th' Almightie hath reserved [the King's] sacred persone to be the proper meane and instrument ... of a final ruine to that Dagon of Rome, and to all the appendants & pompe thereof."

The second cause of offence betrays perhaps an undue sensitiveness on the King's part, but as he glosses the reference to their own "conscience of the integritie and dutiefulnes of our hearts" with "in youre owin conceate," there can be no doubt as to its effect. After declaring that "wee acknowledge you are the Lords Lieutenent," and eulogising his conduct of secular affairs, the petitioners continue: "And therefore we can not otherwise apprehend but that you will performe the like in the cause of the Lords spirituall Kingdome: wherein if you shall answereably to the addresse and instructions you have from him sway your royal Scepter ... your Ma: shall greatly honour your selfe in the eye of your people, and establish the throne you sit on." Upon this James notes: "This distrustefull 'if' is maliciouse, since my care for the lordis spirituall kingdome is so well knowin both at hoame & abroade as well by my daylie actions as by my printed bookes." We have here the first of several allusions made by the King to his published works which he regarded with a vanity not not after all confined to authors of exalted station. It will, how

ever, be admitted, we think, that it receives some amusing illustrations. Thus when the ministers maintain that they do not find "either in the doctrine propounded in the Gospel, or in the practise observed by the Apostles in the churches planted by them, any warrant for Provinciall or Diocesan Bishops," James, who was about to restore the Episcopate to Scotland, notes that "my laste booke sayeth the contraire." One can only regret that the vexed problem of the early government of the Church did not receive its final solution in the judgement of the English Solomon. But then, as he says later in another connection, "Your Skottishe brethren are endewid with a contraire light."

After this it is not surprising to find the lengthy discussion of "paritie" and subordination which occurs in the middle of the appeal described as "a villanouse skorne of my basilicon doron," while the complaint that the Prelates have paid no heed to the writers' "most equall Offer of Disputation" on the points at issue is answered, "Ye have bene marrid in getting too muche hearing & leave to dispute, as I saye in my basilicon doron." The comment derives additional interest from the fact that the Basilicon Doron was written for Prince Henry's benefit at least ten years earlier and four years before James added England to Scotland. But the ministers were seriously mistaken if they imagined that the Sovereign to whom they addressed them

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