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ter of his work, as the very titles of his books imply ("In Russet and Silver," "An Autumn Garden") has changed with the passing of the years; and as his friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, says-in the letter written from Vailima only two days before his death which acknowledges "Tusitala"-takes on an autumnal sobriety as it goes, growing, not indeed less "rich in adornment," but more "natural, personal, sincere and articulate in substance." This is partly expressed in the poet's own epigraph:

Life, that, when youth was hot and bold,

Leaped up in scarlet and in gold,
Now walks, by graver hopes possessed,
In russet and in silver dressed;

and finds larger utterance in the impressive verses that close the opening poem:

Thank God, that, while the nerves decay

And muscles dessicate away,

The brain's the hardiest part of men, And thrives till three-score years and ten;

That, tho' the crescent flesh be wound
In soft, unseemly folds around,
The heart may, all the days we live,
Grow more alert and sensitive.

Then, thews and prickly nerves, adieu!
Thanks for the years I spent with you;
Gently and cheerfully we part:
Now I must live for brain and heart.

Fourteen years later, in "The Autumn Garden," the same thought dominates "A Song for the New Year":

Why, then, my New Year's wish shall be

For love and love alone;
More hands to hold out joy to me,
More hearts for me to own;

And if the gain

In part be pain,—

Since time but gives to take again,Yet more than gold a thousandfold Is love that's neither bought nor sold.

How should one speak of a volume such as this, the hiving of well-nigh forty years! To Mr. Gosse's contemporaries to those who have walked with him through good and evil hap-the way is strewn with memories, thickcoming memories of the Past. Criticism may set aside her considering cap. It is no time for the weighing of values, where all has been valued already. One listens to the bygone voices, renews the old sensations. One reads again the old favorites, "The Whitethroat," "Wind of Provence," "The Mænad's Grave," "The Charcoalburner." Here is "Firdausi in Exile," which one recalls as an introduction to "The Epic of Kings"; here is the spirited "Cruise of the Rover," which belongs to the "Magazine of Art" in Henley's reign, when it was illustrated by Seymour Lucas; here are the clever Popsque couplets addressed to Oliver Wendell Holmes on his seventy-fifth birthday; here are a score more which bring back a vanished time. The beautiful early sonnet "On a Lute found in Sarcophagus," and the dexterous "Alcyone," serve to show how skilful is this craftsman in an exacting form; the "Memorial Verses," with how light a hand, and yet how sure a touch, he can paint the people he has known and loved. The "R.B." of this will be easily recognized:

a

His soul went singing like a mountaineer

Who climbs the hills, and carols as he climbs;

Above the snow he heard the fairy chimes

Of God's faint bells, and felt no shade of fear.

He leaped in faith from year to glimmering year;

Nothing to him seemed poor or vile or vain,

Since all the fibres of his heart and brain

Were braced by hope's high Alpine atmosphere.

I have known no goodlier spirit! Where he walked, Love masqueraded in rough skins and claws,

Feigning to be some monster of the woods;

Loud was the voice wherewith he rhymed and talked,

But warmer heart, or moved in kindlier cause,

Was never stirred by man's vicissi tudes.

One of the most interesting of these "Memorial Verses" is a ballado on the death of that "Prince-jeweller" of rhyme, Théodore de Banville, which serves further to bring to mind Mr. Gosse's connection with the revival, circa 1875-85, of the old French forms of Villon and Clement Marot and Charles of Orleans. We say "revival," to be accurate, because some of them had been written by Chaucer; and they had also been essayed fitfully and timidly by Surrey and Patrick Carey, and even by writers of the eighteenth century. And when, at last, they were marshalled in force, they had long been, so to speak, in the air. Swinburne was thinking of them in the "Ballad of Burdens"; and the stanza of his admirable "Match" is a modification of the Dante triolet. Rossetti paraphrased Villon's "Ballad of Dead Ladies" in a way that, had he played the game as he did in Villon's "Rondel to Death," would have made all later versions needless. Mr. Gosse himself, in his "On Viol and Flute," of 1873, wrote The Bookman.

early rondels, which, he would admit, were rondels only in name. But not until later do people seem to have become aware, through Banville's "Odes Funambulesques" and his "Petit Traité de Poésie Française," that there were fixed rules for all these forms-rules as definite and inexorable as those for the Petrarchan sonnet. An article by Mr Gosse in the Cornhill Magazine for July, 1877, first called attention to what was then being done; and he was fortunate enough to illustrate his "Plea for certain Exotic Forms of Verse" by an excellent and unexcelled "Chant Royal," one of the most intricate of the exercises which "the bigots of that iron time" regarded as a futile dancing in fetters. As though there were no fetters in the sonnet of Milton and Wordsworth! There are examples of most of the French forms in the "Collected Poems" (especially a "Ballade of Dead Cities"), which may serve as models to the student. It is a far cry to 1877, but the imported measures are still being written as assiduously as ever, both in England and America; and it is encouraging to those who, like Mr. Gosse, first attempted them seriously in English, to note, that, in most cases, they are being written by versifiers who, still blissfully ignorant of Banville and the "Petit Traité"-to say nothing of Marot and François Villonfollow sedulously in the footsteps of the makers of the 'Seventies.

Austin Dobson.

THE COMING DELUGE.

Money is perhaps the mightiest engine to which man can lend an intelligent guidance. Unheard, unfelt, unseen, it has the power to so distribute the burdens, gratifications, and opportunities of life, that each individual shall enjoy that share of them to which his merits or good fortune may fairly entitle him;

or, contrariwise, to disperse them with so partial a hand as to violate every principle of justice, and perpetuate a succession of social slaveries to the end of time.-Alexander Del Mar.

In no period of British history has the national conscience been more

keenly alive to the disabilities under which great masses of our population labor, or more genuinely anxious to alleviate those disabilities by the introduction of practical measures of reform, than at the present day. And nobody who visits the great mining and manufacturing centres of British industry, or inspects the poorer quarters of our largest and most famous cities, can doubt for a moment that there is much scope for the reformer's activities. At the same time, while there are many ready and able hands working at the amelioration of the social, industrial and political conditions amidst which we are living, there is one factor in our national life-perhaps of greater importance than many others put together—to which the bulk of our people give little or no attention, yet which is at the present moment undergoing a change calculated to vitiate much of the good reforming work being done in other directions. I refer to the purchasing and measuring function of the nation's money.

To appreciate clearly the vital importance of maintaining as far as possible the stability of our great purchasing and measuring instrument and standard of deferred payments, it is necessary to recall the fact that practically every transaction of our daily life private, public, personal, corporate, national, imperial-is carried through directly or indirectly by the aid of money, and that any fluctuation in the value (i.e. purchasing-power) of money must therefore affect each and every individual in the State more or less seriously. The sudden arbitrary changing of the pint measure to threequarters of its ordinary capacity, or the extension of the standard yard to forty-six, or fifty-six, or sixty-six inches would inflict far fewer and less serious

injustices upon the community at large than the shrinkage of the sovereign from a purchasing-power of

twenty shillings to, say, that of only fifteen shillings. Nevertheless, it is a fact that a sovereign nowadays only goes as far as fifteen shillings did a little while ago. Our pound sterling has in reality during the last fifteen years lost more than a quarter of its purchasing-power! Moreover, there are good reasons for believing that this shrinkage will continue. It is quite possible that the distortion of our monetary measure now in progress is but the beginning of a movement that may conceivably prove more revolutionary than anything that the most extreme Socialists have yet imagined. Indeed, if the movement be rapid and continued in a marked degree, many forms of accumulated wealth must of necessity disappear, and in a way more complete than could be effected by the most drastic of class legislation. At the same time, if such a shrinkage in monetary values should come to pass, the rewards of labor would also slip through the fingers of the poorer classes. prices always rise before wages in such circumstances, and the laboring man would therefore find himself the victim of a cruel delusion-the seeming prosperity of increased earnings being invariably discounted by a still more rapidly advancing cost of living. What was gained in one direction would be lost in another. And with the result that great masses of our population, notwithstanding every effort to assist and raise them, would perforce, for want of means, remain in the same condition of poverty, degradation and arrested development as that in which we see them to-day.

For

But, it will be asked, why has our good British sovereign shrunk in value? And what grounds are there for conjuring up this nightmare of a further shrinkage? The answer is simple. Like every other commodity in this world, although in a different way and to a different degree, gold is subject to

the laws of supply and demand-an increased demand tending, all other things being equal, to raise its value, and an increased supply to diminish its value. During the last half-century there has been a vastly increased demand for gold, practically every great nation in the world abandoning silver as a chief monetary instrument and adopting in its stead the more precious yellow metal. Per contra, in England, and in certain other Western countries, very great economies in the use of gold have been effected by the continued development of banking, of cheques and bills of exchange, and of credit facilities of all kinds. At the present moment, with mints open to free coinage of gold, the value of every ounce of new gold unearthed is determined by the purchasing-power of the gold coins already in use. At the same time the purchasing-power of the gold moneys in use obviously bears some relation (though a relation difficult to define mathematically) to the amount of gold, coined and uncoined, in the possession of mankind and actively employed. Exactly what this amount is nobody can say with any degree of certainty; nor is there any need for us to attempt an estimate at the moment. Suffice to say the output of new gold from the mines of the world during the last few years has altogether eclipsed anything known in history. Moreover, there seems every probability of the output increasing. With an immense flood of the precious metal of unprecedented magnitude pouring into the centies of civilization, commerce and government, can we feel surprised that, notwithstanding the additional demand for gold, its value all the world over is steadily diminishing?-that its purchasing-power is shrinking?-in other words, that prices generally, measured in gold, are everywhere advancing?

The same thing has happened before, and with precisely the same results.

The middle of the sixteenth century was marked by extraordinary discoveries of silver in South America and Mexico. The precious metal was shipped across the Atlantic, and slowly found its level in the currencies of Europe, with the result that the purchasing-power of money dwindled in an extraordinary way. Sir George Evelyn, in his paper contributed to the Royal Society in 1798, attempted to prove that between 1550 and 1795 the level of prices rose 400 to 500 per cent. Although his conclusions have been severely criticized by Hallam and others, there is no doubt whatever that prices at least doubled (in other words, that our monetary measure shrank by at least one-half) during the period referred to, the greater part of the change occurring within a hundred years of the discovery of Potosi.1

During the first half of the last century, when the effects of a greatly reduced output of gold and silver from the mines of the world were emphasized by the rejection by Great Britain of silver as a chief monetary instrument, prices dwindled very seriouslyover 45 per cent. according to Mr. Sauerbeck, and nearly 60 per cent. according to Jevons. Then came the marvellous discoveries of gold in California and Australia. The effects were at once apparent. Prices quickly swung round, and an upward movement set in, traces of which can be discerned til nearly the middle of the seventies. The distortion in our monetary measure was very marked at first, the sovereign losing some 25 per cent. of its value between 1849 and 1857. Subsequently a partial recovery took place; but there is no question that the increased output from the mines materially affected for a number of years the value of all the gold and gold money then existing, seriously dis

1 Vide Professor L. L. Price's "Money and its Relation to Prices."

torting its purchasing and measuring functions, and inflicting corresponding injustices upon all those dependent upon fixed wages, incomes, pensions and the like.

Astounding as the flood of gold from the mines of California and Australia seemed to our fathers, it was, as a matter of fact, quite a small matter in comparison with the great deluge of precious metal that is now steadily spreading over the surface of the civilized world. The average annual production of gold for the first half of the nineteenth century was only about 3,150,000l. Then came the most wonderful discoveries ever known up to that time. The world's output for the next ten years was approximately as under:

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Nearly eight hundred millions sterling of new gold added to the world's stock in the last ten years, as compared with the 267 millions added in 1851-1860! Where will it end? And where will it land us all?

The relation between money and price levels has been the subject of innumerable disquisitions during the last hundred years. It is only necessary to mention such names as Jacob, Tooke, Newmarch, Cairnes, Macculloch, Ricardo, Chevalier, Bagehot, Jevons, Giffen; such Professors as Lexis, Rogers, Walker, Nicholson, Foxwell, Marshall, Price; such index-number specialists as Dr. Soetbeer and Mr. Sauerbeck, to recall the wealth of expert knowledge that has been brought to bear on this question. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century the relation was no doubt a comparatively intimate one (as it is to this day in India and other parts of the East, where but little advance has been made by the people at large beyond the stage when metallic money forms the chief instrument of purchase); but with the growth of banking and the multiplication of credit-spinning devices such as those with which we are familiar at the present day, the connection between price levels and the volume of metallic money in use has become greatly obscured. So much so, that there are not wanting advocates of the theory that credit, and not metallic money, is now the determining factor in the problem. Whilst in highly-developed States the relation between the instrument of purchase and the commodity purchased is admittedly most difficult to define, there can be no doubt that the relation is there. The connecting link, as has been proved by Bagehot, Giffen and others, is to be found in the banks' reserves. In its issue of the 21st of January 1911, the Statist published a table showing that the gold holdings of the chief central banks of

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