all. He was not used, as we have seen, with this resolve clear before his mind he to admiration in that quarter. Despite was able, with more semblance of equathose attributes of his which might, under nimity, to await the slow but all-decisive ordinary circumstances, have been sup- course of events. posed to give rise to some such feeling, a That he was honestly, intensely, irresort of good-humored indulgence, deepen- coverably in love with Katherine Holland ing at times into something like pitying as man need be, he had not a shadow of contempt, was their most familiar attitude doubt. It is true that he had had no towards him, and of this he himself was previous experience of the sensation, but perfectly well aware. Dull as he was, his then neither, on the other hand, had he dulness, as we have also seen, was not ever had any experience of a glow which that truly enviable variety which enwraps had lost its first intensity. He loved her its possessor in a triple-lined coat of mail, for herself; for her grave, slightly, perthrough which no dart, however potent, haps, austere beauty, for her brightness can ever penetrate. On the contrary, it- and clear eyed intelligence, for the unfailhad always been pricked through and ing gentleness with which she met the, through with a certain irritated conscious often, as it seemed to him, unreasonable ness of itself; he hated it; he chafed calls upon her time and patience; finally against it; he longed to get away from it, and chiefly he loved her for that best of to find himself in the freer air, amid the all reasons-because he loved her, belarger surroundings of those to whose cause everything about her filled him with intelligence what to him was opaque apa joy, a rapture, a sense of exhilaration, peared clear and apprehensible. When of which his previous intercourse with his therefore, for the first time in his life, he fellow-beings had given him no faintest perceived a direction in which his facul- inkling. ties, instead of standing still in torpid ineptitude, seemed to leap, flow, and move of their own accord, it was not very likely that any pressure from without would hinder him from following the invitation.

One thing, and one alone, filled him as the days went on with disquietude, and that was the footing upon which he stood with regard to Katherine Holland. It seemed to him that he made no way at all. He was not, it is true, repulsed, but then neither was he encouraged. He could not even flatter himself that he had made clear his sentiments to her at all. When he called and he called I may say extremely often she was always friendly, always ready to discuss his latest zoological perplexity, to eke out, so far as her capacity enabled her, his, at present, very limited amount of knowledge in that direction; but whenever the conversation threatened to take a more personal and therefore interesting turn, it seemed to him that she always contrived quietly but determinedly to lead it away to safer and less exciting topics, a manœuvre which, helpless as ever in conversational mat ters, he found himself powerless to avert, though it inwardly filled him with rage and wild gnashings of teeth at his own stupidity.

If he was helpless, however, he was also very tenacious, a family trait which here as elsewhere stood him in good stead. He swore to himself that he was not going to be balked; that come what would she must, would, should hear him yet; and

One not a little amusing transformation resulted from all this. Borroughdale, to whom the portals of what is called the great world stood as naturally open as his own hall door, and who had hitherto shown such remarkably slight anxiety to get inside them, now, on the contrary, exhibited a willingness to present himself at reunions to which that great world in its ignorance and impertinence would in all probability have turned up its distinguished nose.

Mrs. Holland dearly loved such mild dissipations as came within her sphere, and, more to please her than for any great joy which they afforded her personally, Miss Holland allowed herself to be conducted to them, and, for the sake of see. ing, and occasionally, when he summoned courage, of talking to her, Borroughdale too began to frequent them. The diffi culty of procuring invitations was not, as will be imagined, insurmountable. The society which the Hollands moved in was largely made up of the professional element-the medical, as incorporating a greater infusion of science than any other, perhaps preponderating. Science, however, pure and simple, was also to be found, those occasions on which the greater scientific bodies throw wide their doors to the wives, sisters, cousins, and remotest connections of their members constituting perhaps the highest, or at any rate the most striking, points in Mrs. Holland's social horizon. All, or a con siderable portion, of these entertainments,

Lord Borroughdale now took to attending. His mantelpiece, long destitute of those natural adornments of a young man about town, began about this time to bristle with shining announcements that the conversazione of the Microscopical Society would take place upon such a day, or that Professor and Madame van Ovibos would hope for the pleasure of the Marquis of Borroughdale's society at their soirée upon the 22nd. Calling from time to time upon his son, Mr. Vansittart would turn over a dozen, perhaps, or more, similar intimations, lifting them one by one between his finger and thumb, and dropping them again upon the mantelpiece, with a slight elevation of his brows and a perceptible start of astonishment as each fresh, and to his mind, more utterly incongruous announcement met his gaze.

fairly be called its most attractive form, embellished by a thousand possibilities which fired his brain with vague but therefore all the more dazzling notions of what might not yet be in store for a world where all those exciting suggestions would sooner or later become sober and universally accepted matters of fact. If these gatherings had no other merit, moreover, they at least had that of causing Katherine Holland's beauty and bearing to stand out before him in new and more commanding lustre; indeed she seemed to him to be immeasurably more out of keeping with what was ordinary in her surroundings than he was himself. Comparing her, for instance, with the four Miss Macmanuses, daughters of Professor Macmanus, how could he fail to be struck with the difference?

Borroughdale himself was quite uncon- Professor Macmanus was an entomoloscious, however, of any incongruity. The gist, a term which probably sounds quite society suited him quite well enough sufficiently explicit to the outer world, but quite as well, at any rate, as any society which the initiated know to be far too was likely to suit him. That sense of coarse and too generalized for anything being at odds with his world which had like accurate definition, entomology, like hitherto been such a familiar experience, knowledge itself, having long since passed did not obtrude itself here, at any rate not out of the grasp of any one pair of hands, nearly as much. If he were something of no matter how strong or how wide-ema fish out of water still, it was, at least, in bracing they may be. Professor Maca different and a much more endurable manus, however, embraced two or three way. To Mrs. Holland or Madame van of its divisions, the one in which he had Ovibos he was not an anomaly at all, but first won his spurs, and made for himself simply an amiable young nobleman, whose a European reputation, being known as presence in their drawing-rooms diffused the Heteroptera - - a term which sounds over their souls a mild sense of beatitude, better perhaps in Latin than its equivalent and whose appearance, way of life, and does in English. He was a widower, and deportment it did not even enter into their he and his house with all that it contained heads to criticise. He might have been with the exception only of his entomoon his way to Marlborough House, or re-logical boxes and cabinets were wholly turning home from the House of Lords ruled over and subjugated by his four that natural abiding-place of the young daughters. hereditary legislator - for anything either of them could tell to the contrary. Now I hope no one will too hastily accredit Borroughdale with any ignoble love of being first in his company, if I say that in this sort of unhesitating acceptance there was no little balm and solace for him. He was so tired, you see, poor fellow, of being criticised, of knowing that every one in and out of his own circle of acquaintance had an eye for his vagaries, and was mentally conning over those points in which he differed from the received type, always of course exclusively to his disadvantage. Amongst the younger scientific portion of these gatherings he made friends, too, as (Farquart excepted) he had never as yet done elsewhere. His leanings had always been to the workaday side of things, and here that side was to be seen in what may |

The poor professor himself was like wax in those redoubtable young ladies' hands. If they had only been entomological specimens, no matter how rare or how unique, he would have known in a moment how to deal with them, but being as they were sufficiently average specimens of the genus youthful Englishwoman of the nineteenth century, he simply yielded himself an easy prey, intrenching himself behind his collections, and leaving the whole weight and direction of social ob servations to be determined as they in their united wisdom and experience might see fit.

It so happened that it was at an enter tainment given by this enterprising fam. ily that Borroughdale for the first time found courage to break down that bar which her discretion and his own diffi

could only faintly and intermittently dis- THE LIBERAL MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH

the eighteenth century is the poetry of society and manners.

So long as a powerful necessity compelled men to think and act for them. selves, their work was marked by a vital originality of matter and form, and hence in literature almost everything of imagi native value belonging to what may be broadly called the eighteenth-century movement came into existence between the Restoration and the accession of George III. Dryden, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Johnson, among the poets; Swift, Steele, Addison, Fielding, and Smollett, among the essayists and novelists, had written their all or their best before 1760. "The Deserted Village," "The Traveller," "The Vicar of Wakefield," and Miss

IN a recent endeavor to estimate the imaginative genius of the eighteenth century, I said that one of its most marked features was its limitation. When the range of thought and feeling in the "Canterbury Tales," "The Faery Queen," Shakespeare's plays, and "Paradise Lost," is compared with the subject matter of Dryden and Pope's satires, of "The Vanity of Human Wishes," the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," "The Bard," and "The Progress of Poesy," the odes on "Liberty " and "The Passions," "The Deserted Village," and "The Traveller," every one must perceive within how narrow a tract the imagination of the later period is circumscribed, and that the mines of poetry which the region contains, though precious, are not inexhaust- Burney's novels, are nearly all the works ible. of genius or talent, peculiarly characterThe causes of this limitation are readistic of the eighteenth century, produced ily discoverable by the light of history. after this date and before the French Chaucer had at his disposal all the re- Revolution. When the liberties of the sources of a social system highly stimu. nation were finally secured, and the prinlative to the imagination, which was not ciples of taste and manners advocated in peculiar to one country, but prevailed over the "Tatler" and "Spectator" had met the whole of Europe. His successors, with general acceptance, the creative imafter the period of the Reformation, drew pulse of the age seems to have ceased. inspiration from still deeper wells. With Faction reigns supreme in politics: the minds dramatically excited by the spirit Church sinks into slumber: artifice in of religious liberty and ardent patriotism, poetry prevails over thought. We see a they employed the materials afforded by Junius succeeding a Swift as a controverthe still vivid traditions of romantic chiv sialist: a Warburton following a Butler alry, together with the wealth of ideas in theology: for Pope as a satirist we and the beauty of form discovered in the have to put up with Churchill: and the revival of classical letters. All these op- pure Horatian style of the "Epistle to posite veins of thought may easily be de- Arbuthnot" is exchanged for the sonotected in the wonderfully compounded rous emptiness of "The Botanic Garden." work of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Mil- I endeavored to illustrate the decay of ton. But after the civil war, religious, medievalism in the seventeenth century political, and social influences turned the by citing two poems of Cowley and Craimagination of the English people exclu-shaw; a comparison of a passage from sively upon their own manners. The old Thomson's "Seasons" with one from modes of mediæval thought had lost their Darwin's poem mentioned just above, power over the mind: the spirit of reli- will be equally suggestive of the exhaus gious fanaticism which rose up in opposition of the inspiring impulse of the eightion to them, seemed hostile to every form teenth century. The following extract of creative imagination. In the sphere from "Winter" shows the creative spirit of politics the ancient traditions of mo- of the age still in its vigor: narchical government were subverted first What art thou, Frost? and whence are thy by the Rebellion and afterwards by the Revolution. Everywhere men were asking themselves wherein consisted the foundations of society, what were the limitations of liberty, and how they were to recognize the first principles of art. And, these being the questions which agitated the mind of the nation above all others, it was these for which a natural, an irresistible instinct drove men of genius to provide an answer, either in a philosophic or in an imaginative shape. The poetry of

keen stores

Derived, thou secret all-invading power
Whom even the illusive fluid cannot fly?
Is not thy potent energy, unseen,
Myriads of little salts, or hooked, or shaped
Like double wedges, and diffused immense
Through water, earth, and ether? hence at eve,
With the fierce rage of Winter, deep suffused,
Steamed eager from the red horizon round,
An icy gale, oft shifting, o'er the pool
Breathes a blue film, and in its mid career
Arrests the bickering stream. The loosened

ice

Let down the flood, and half-dissolved by day
Rustles no more; but to the sedgy bank
Fast grows, or gathers round the pointed stone,
A crystal pavement by the breath of heaven
Cemented firm; till, seized from shore to
shore,

The whole imprisoned river growls below.
Loud rings the frozen earth, and hard reflects
A double noise; while at his evening watch
The village dog deters the nightly thief;
The heifer lows; the distant waterfall
Swells in the breeze; and with the hasty tread
Of traveller, the hollow-sounding plain
Shakes from afar. The full ethereal round,
Infinite worlds disclosing to the view,
Shines out intensely keen, and, all one cope
Of starry glitter, glows from pole to pole.

In the following from "The Botanic Garden" the same spirit is seen in its decay:

|

blow his wreathed horn." Darwin feigns, without a blush, that the operations of nature are performed by a whole army of nymphs, sylphs, and gnomes, yet in the very same breath describes with scientific coldness the mechanical forces to which they owe their origin.

Poetry of this kind is as sure a symp tom as the lethargy of the Church or the prevalence of petty faction in politics that the vigorous and constructive conservatism of the eighteenth century, the nature of which I attempted to describe in the September number of this review,* has become crystallized in lifeless forms and conventions. Side by side, however, with these indications of exhaustion in the established order of society there are many signs of the activity and progress of the democratic spirit. Wilkes in the field of

Nymphs, your fine forms with steps impassive politics, Wesley in the sphere of religion,

mock

Earth's vaulted roofs of adamantine rock;
Round her still centre tread the burning soil,
And watch the billowy lavas as they boil:
Where in basaltic waves imprisoned deep
Reluctant fires in dread suspension sleep;
Or sphere on sphere in widening waves ex-
pand,

And glad with genial warmth the incumbent
land.

So when the Mother-bird selects their food
With curious bill, and feeds her callow brood,
Warmth from her tender heart eternal springs,
And pleased she clasps them with extended
wings.

You from deep cauldrons and unmeasured

and Burns in the realms of poetry, all,
though with very different intentions,
strike the same note: -

The rank is but the guinea stamp,
The man's a man for a' that.

At the same time, the centrifugal movement of the individual away from society, which appears to be a natural accompaniment of democracy, and which manifests itself in France in the philosophy of Rousseau, is seen in the blended Methodism and love of nature in Cowper's poetry. Many influences thus combined to prepare the way for that strife between the spirit of aristocracy and the spirit of democracy both in politics and art, the outbreak of which was hastened by the incidents of the French Revolution.

In literature the battle began with the controversy excited by the publication of Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads." Το prevent the historical accuracy of this assertion being questioned, let me quote what Coleridge, who had every means of knowing, says, in his "Biographia Literaria," about the origin of the volume, and the influence it exerted on the taste of the times:

There is evidently something in common between these two passages. In both (though only in the first few lines of Thomson) the description is, to some extent, scientific, and, as far as it is so would find a more fitting expression in prose; in both the frequent use of Latin words and the Latin method of linking epithets to substantives is observable; The thought suggested itself (to which of us but while Thomson has evidently con- I do not recollect) that a series of poems might ceived his subject with enthusiasm, and be composed of two sorts. imparts his enthusiasm to the reader, cidents and agents were to be, in part at least, Darwin thinks throughout in a matter-of-supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections fact spirit, and uses metre merely for dec: by the dramatic truth of such emotions as orative purposes; so small is his sense of would naturally accompany such situations, sublimity that he does not perceive any supposing them real. thing ridiculous in imagining one volcano class, subjects were to be chosen from ordihallooing to another. Wordsworth lamented that he could not "hear old Triton

In the one, the in

For the second

• LIVING AGE, No. 2102.