of their colleagues and rivals. Let us turn to letters. I have just read through a new book of rare erudition by an acknowledged master of a vast field of learning. It is Professor George Saintsbury's History of the French Novel. What a helluo librorum! He begins with the eleventh century, and, as yet, closes with the end of the eighteenth. Thoughtless young ladies, do not hope to hear about Dumas, Zola, and Anatole France from our Professor-not yet-wait and see! But read him about Saint Eulalia, Chrestien de Troyes, Partenopeus of Blois, Aucassin, and the Fabliaux, Princesse de Cleves, Lesage, Voltaire, Rousseau. All this is luminous and authoritative. The French novel of the eighteenth century is known to thoughtful readers--but how few know the delightful French romances of earlier times.

Do not, ladies, attempt to follow the Professor in reading through Astrée and the 12,000 pages of the Grand Cyrus, but do let him guide you to some of the delicious old romances. Read them in the original verse if you care to learn old French, such as

or

Bel i vinrent et bel s'en vont

Et moi anrés cascune nuit.

But, in any case, do try to get to the heart of these old French. romances. They are worth a ton of Zola any day. There is an entire literature in the Fabliaux-romantic, lyric, fantastic, tragic, ribald, and comic. Let me say it to my shame, Professor, I read them in the modern French prose version-say, of Le Grand d'Aussy. Many of the old verses are uncouth jargon, for all the charm of the thought. And I am too old and too idle to learn this cacographic doggerel. But I bow my head in reverence to the Professor's learned accounts of so many βιβλία ἀβιβλία. May I live to see his next volume!

And I have just read the Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke. Every page recalls to me the rich nature of a friend whom I have known so long, so much valued, with whom I and mine spent happy times both in country houses and in London gatherings. In the 'sixties I used to hear him preach in St. James's Chapel, as in the 'fifties I used to hear Robertson preach at Brighton. I was staying with Brooke at Naworth in 1880 when he showed. me in draft his letter of resignation to the Archbishop. He seemed to think it might be a bar to his career. I advised him. to go on, that it would make no difference to his position in the wiser world and would strengthen his influence. I used again to hear him preach in the Bedford Chapel, both before and after

his quitting Orders. I have read with interest and sympathy most of his books. He was a fine teacher of spiritual truth, a fine judge of art, an unerring critic of poetry. He and I were real friends and colleagues in many a public cause. I admired and I honoured him.

The two volumes of 700 pages recall the alertness, versatility, pluck, and brilliancy of my friend, but they add nothing to me about his personality and his work. Indeed, his achievement as a religious force, as brave reformer, as social teacher, as thinker, as poet, is rather overlaid with the torrents of family gossip, of the banalities of society, of the cooings of a most loving and lovable home circle, which filial piety has poured out to the world. The nemesis of all biographies by near relations is, that they cannot stint the measure of all their home memories. Every incident they can recall seems typical, memorable, glorious; every letter they have treasured seems literature; every casual utterance a maxim or an epigram. And this is specially a danger when the lost one is so recently mourned. The son-in-law has given us more than was needed. Yes! the composite personality is there -the compound life of Priest, Poet, Friend, and Critic. But we get too much about the popular preacher, the pet of drawingrooms, the camaraderie of the Press, the love of flowers, of nice people, of objets d'art, of children, cousins, and aunts.

Dr. Jacks has done his work well; but it would have been better had he not been so near. For private circulation, all this would be right. But the outside world wants to know in definite statements what Brooke achieved in the evolution of Christian faith; what the Church, and which Church, gained or lost in him; what were his services to the public; what was his place in literature. And all this is rather overlaid by Irish exuberance and all this beautiful family canonisation. I wish the Life of Brooke had been more like Brooke's own Life of Robertson. There was not in that so much enfantillage and "chatter about" the house of Brooke. Dr. Jacks, who is an eminent theologian and philosopher, need not have printed after forty-eight years the mendacious gossip retailed by a young clergyman about Comte, which is both spiteful and false, and wrong in its date by more than two years (I., 112). The idle jest has often been fully refuted. As to the religion of Humanity, Brooke would discuss it with me. with candour and knowledge. Even in the 'sixties he told me that he was a believer in Humanity, but he preferred to call it Christ. He and I had many objects of faith in common.

This vast war-this stirring of the deeps in man's soul-calls out much love of poetry, not a little new poetry, as is ever the case. The Revolution of 1789 and Napoleon's wars gave us Scott, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Campbell, Southey, Shelley, Keats. We have no Shelley, no Keats, no Wordsworth-yet. Indeed, amidst the flood of third-rate poems that pours on day by day, there are so very few which reach even to a second standard. And criticism of poets, theories of poetry are incessant. Notable and interesting are new books, new pieces, of Keats. and of Swinburne. Surely, we already know all we shall know, all we need know of both; and the place of both is assured and settled. Keats ranks with Byron, Shelley, and Wordsworth; but, being almost nothing but a glorious promise cut short, cannot be counted as above these three. And Swinburne, for all his exquisite music, cannot by intellect be placed on a par with Tennyson and Browning. He certainly comes next to them, and has none who come near him.

For my part, I find Brooke's judgments, so admirably expressed in many Letters, to be quite conclusive. All he says of Byron, Scott, Shelley, Keats, Campbell, Coleridge, is excellent. And I follow him for Tennyson, Browning, and Swinburne, whose monotonous beauty at last becomes, as he says, quite wearisome. How true, how quaint is his saying that, much as he had written about poets, perhaps we have had too much "talk about" poets, and would do better to read them. For myself, to use the current slang, I am "fed up" with all this "chatter about" Fanny Brawne, about Watts-Dunton's mystic fane, and Orestes and Pylades. The private life of poets is not so really important as is that of politicians, whose characters we need to know before we judge their acts. Let us read the poets and leave them in peace at home. Happily no man can unearth the domestic privacy of Homer.

No doubt many of the new verses are really good-even if they just miss being poetry that may be more than fugitive. There never was in England a time when more readable verse without any bad quality was produced-not even in the time of the Tudors or the Stuarts. I read and enjoy not a few. Nor, as a citizen of Bath, can I fail to note The Day and other verses by our Bath Railwayman, Henry Chappell, which Sir Herbert Warren introduces with just praise. And I am myself responsible for a Foreword to the graceful lyrics about memorable haunts of pilgrimage by Mrs. Richard Strachey, of Ashwick Grove. Our

of men have flung off a mighty, autocracy, have sunk into a new social, industrial, morat chaos, have put in motion a civic earthquake on a scale. such. as never before was seen amongst men, this sends a thrill through the masses which the world has never yet known

How far, in what way, will it work? The Italian people is .får more ignorant, more passionate, more predatory than the French. The Italian Kingdom is a recent, artificial, somewhat shallow edifice under the ancient shadow of Saint Peter. Parliamentary government struggles on in defiance of all the traditions and instincts of France; and now is a mere battle-ground for Socialistic combats, rivalries, and plots. The United Kingdom has been heaving with change for at least one generation, and its spasms were not unconnected with this war. Our royal, loyal, indefatigable George, alas! is not all that a George was to a Chatham and a Pitt-however much he surpasses his ancestors in every public and private gift.

In the crash of Tsardom and the rumblings everywhere of social order, Monarchy, with all its undoubted good, has the undeserved weakness of being the symbol of what is antique and established. And yet the whole horizon blazes with new, unexpected, mysterious lights and clouds. France and America have no cleavage of kingdoms, have no kingdom at all. For generations each Frenchman, each American, has felt in his bones that he and his fellow-citizens are France, are America. They have no double sense of a compound loyalty to the State and another loyalty to the Throne.

*

Now-what is the moral to be drawn from all this? It is, that behind this enormous war, there is coming over civilisation a change even more enormous, and much more lasting in time. When fighting has ceased-and I cannot feel sure that it will cease either soon, or in any complete, definitive, mutually agreed way-there will be a wholly new Social Order, as different perhaps from ours, as when the Catholic and Feudal Order superseded that of Polytheism, slavery, art, and luxury. Many things will be reconstructed. There will be no special ruling class, no select educated class, no idle class. If Upper House, Magnates, Honours, and the stately Homes associated by history with Honours continue to live-these will be more akin to the obsolete noblesse of the Louis and their dilapidated châteaux than the mansions and parks which make England so rich in romance and charm. It

1

will be folly, almost criminal, to hold on obstinately to old Parties, worn-out Principles, ingrained habits, to the arrogance of Wealth, to the pride of Culture.

In politics dogged consistency was ever a doubtful virtue. When the hour of New Things has struck, these Catos, de Broglies, Eldons, bring the old Cause to ruin and injure the new. Rigid conservatism is the bane of all revolutions. For my part, I shall go out of the world with a clean slate in things political and economic. Free Trade, Home Rule, the Suffrage, Party, Socialism, Capitalism, Reform of Parliament, even the sovereignty of the Commons, will all have to be recast in a new atmosphere and altered relations to each other.

This seismic and cosmic upheaval seems in the fourth year of war to be affecting in opposite ways two orders of politicians amongst us so that somehow they converge to the same point, which in practice would be craven surrender to the foe. Some of our Elder Statesmen seem to have lost their nerves over the continuance of horrors and the social débâcle that travels after them as fire succeeds an earthquake. We are told that stouthearted men can stand an earthquake for a time, but their nerves begin to shake if it continues long. On the other hand, Commercialism, Cobdenism, Socialism, with all its hundred heads and its hundred voices, Internationalism, red, grey, and blackall are agog with a vision of Industrial expansion, or else of Social Liquidation, cosmopolitan Brotherhood, utopian Peace-if only these dreadful Governments would cease to fight. If these Elder Statesmen really represent their order, it will be the last act of a Ruling Class in Britain. If tradesmen and Internationalists. really impede our victory, they will both end in Bolshevic chaos.

I turn from the crisis of the hour to that which is a permanent monument in English literature. All who follow politics or letters must study from beginning to end Lord Morley's two stout volumes of Recollections, wherein almost every incident and person of note over the last two generations is touched with the hand of a master. It forms an encyclopædic survey of State affairs, judgments, and books of our time. Turn over the eighty pages of a very careful analytic Index, and you will find a reference to almost every public man and to every leading writer of the day. This gives a truly unique interest to this book. It is the political testament of a statesman who has held great offices in critical times and has been at the helm in many a storm. Again, it is the life-long