in Hamlet's allusion to the 'heavy-headed revel' of the Danes. As a whole, Bruno's ethics, while not systematised, rank as high, clear, and prophetic, though he has no understanding of the Christian virtues.

In spite of this difference of spirit we still seem to find an echo of Bruno in Spenser's verse. The broken cantos On Constancy' recall some of the 'Spaccio' in their machinery, and other words of Bruno in their ruling idea. They play with large conceptions of change and recurrence. Here also is a conclave of gods led by Jove and discomfited by the feeling of decay. Mutability is a 'Titaness' who makes a struggle to revive her dynasty. She pleads before the gods her right of conquest. So far the scenery nearly recalls that of the 'Spaccio,' but the sequel differs. Nature sits in judgment, and before her, in proof of the endlessness of Change, passes the pomp of the Seasons, Months, and Hours.

'For who sees not that Time on all doth prey?
But times do change and move continually,
And nothing here long standeth in one stay.'

But Nature pronounces that if all things change, they change in a fixed cycle (so that change and order imply each other).

And turning to themselves at length again

Do work their own perfection so by fate.

Then over them Change doth not rule and reign,

But they rule over Change, and do their states maintain."

6

The notion, which appears elsewhere in the Faerie Queene' (III, vi, 37, 38), is an old one, but had been phrased most recently in the Eroici Furori,' though of course without the Christian application given by Spenser.

'Death and dissolution do not befit this entire mass, of which the star that is our globe consists. Nature as a whole cannot suffer annihilation; and thus, at due times, in fixed order, she comes to renew herself, changing and altering all her parts; and this it is fitting should come about with fixity of succession, every part taking the place of all the other parts. . . . Thus all things in their kind have the vicissitudes of lordship and slavery, felicity and infelicity, of the state that is called life, and the state that is called death; of light

and darkness, and of good and evil. And there is nothing which by natural fitness is eternal but the substance which is matter.'

The references in English to Bruno during the next century and a half are usually to the 'Spaccio'; those made by Bacon to his name are cursory and show no sign of study. But the 'Spaccio' is unexpectedly to be traced in an English masque played at Whitehall by Charles I, and set to music by Milton's friend Henry Lawes. It is unknown how Thomas Carew came to use a work so rare and discredited for the fabric of his 'Coelum Britannicum' (1634). He had been in Venice, where the tale of Bruno and copies of his books may still have lingered. He does not own his source, which we believe was first noted by his biographer in the Encyclopædia Britannica,' nor does he use it with any notion of its scope or grandeur. But he has certainly taken its setting and dipped into its episodes. Momus, the satiric god, a kind of Shakespearian fool in Bruno's Olympus, plays, like Mercury, a part in the masque. Carew makes Mercury promote Charles and his queen into the room of the usurping stars, which are plucked down as in the 'Spaccio.' In one speech a dozen of the signs are saddled with the same vices as Bruno allots to them; while Riches, Poverty, and Fortune, as in the original, though not in the same language, make harangue. The rest is different; but it is curious that this show should have appeared in the same year as 'Comus.'

For long we hear no more of Bruno in English literature, except a few casual words in the Anatomy of 'Melancholy.' Burton alludes to his physical theories, and calls him an atheist, which he was not. But the stigma helped to obliterate his work in England. Hobbes and Locke both worked in a different direction; and if Spinoza, who may have studied the Italian, was a misunderstood name of terror, Bruno was apparently quite forgotten. The deistical movement at the beginning of the eighteenth century produced a curious little current of interest in his work. Copies of the 'Spaccio' rose in price at the book-sales to thirty or fifty pounds; and 'nothing,' began Eustace Budgell in the 'Spectator' (No. 389, 27th May, 1712), 'has more surprised the learned in England.' The work, he says, might be thought formidable, as it was written by one Jordanus Brunus, a

professed atheist, with a design to depreciate religion.' Budgell, however, read it, and found it so little dangerous that he ventured' to give a cursory and bewildering summary of its contents. Meagre as his relation is, it tells more of the work than Bayle's article in his 'Dictionary' published fourteen years before. So Mandeville, in his Remarks' on his Fable of the Bees,' refers to the book as 'that silly piece of blasphemy.'

In 1713 enough interest was excited for a transla tion to appear, which is thus far the only one in English. Few copies-it is said a hundred-were printed, and the execution is so creditable that it might well be revised and re-issued, though the preface to Sidney is not rendered in the copy we have seen. The translator seems to have been Morehead. But he was probably inspired by John Toland, whose reading was wider than that of the other deists, and to whom we owe the only notices of real interest for many a decade. Toland had been attracted already to Bruno. He had summarised the 'Spaccio' in a letter, though he did not dare to name the author. Leibnitz, with whom he corresponded, had, as we have noted, misunderstood the title. Toland then explains further, but 'the matter is not to be communicated to every one.' However, he ventured further. In another pamphlet he quotes and corrects the letter of Scioppius, mentions the 'De la Causa,' gives a fuller notice of the more harmless 'De l'Infinito,' and translates its preface. How much he understood may be judged from the remark that Bruno considered spirit 'only a more movable and subtle portion of matter.' But Toland was the first Englishman, and one of the few men of his day, who showed any inkling at all of Bruno's significance. Allusions to him doubtless exist in the later eighteenth century, but it is only in the nineteenth that the revival of interest in his thought has been great. Still it remains for the twentieth to produce a complete and adequate study of his whole life and thought. His own country and Germany have done much, and England has done something. He should be pictured by some one who is equally versed in the history of philosophy and of Italian letters. Is there no young Scotchman, who understands the temper both of Burns and of Spinoza, who will rise to the task?

Art. VII. THE EARLY HANOVERIANS.

1. A Foreign View of England in the Reigns of George I and George II. The Letters of Monsieur César de Saussure to his Family. Translated and edited by Madame Van Muyden. London: John Murray, 1902. 2. Caroline the Illustrious, Queen Consort of George II and sometime Queen Regent. A Study of her Life and Times. By W. H. Wilkins. Two vols. London: Longmans, 1901. 3. Bolingbroke and his Times. By Walter Sichel. Two vols. London: Nisbet, 1901-2.

4. Undercurrents of Church Life in the Eighteenth Century. Edited by Canon Carter. London: Longmans, 1899. 5. Reports of the Historical MSS. Commission. Carlisle Papers, 1897; Portland Papers, 1899; Harley Papers, 1899; Stuart Papers, 1902.

EVERY century supplies its own special contribution to the stream of history. In England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that contribution took the shape of great religious and constitutional movements. In the nineteenth, combined with these, we have to note more especially the progress of industry, the emancipation of labour, the growth of scientific discovery, 'the steamship and the railway and the thoughts that shake mankind.' The eighteenth century was comparatively a stranger to all these things, and lies rather like an interval of repose between two periods of tumultuous activity. Yet it had its salient characteristics. Between the beginning and the end of the eighteenth century we see a much greater change in the manners and customs of society than we see between the beginning and the end of either the seventeenth or the nineteenth. In reading Boswell's 'Life of Johnson' we are perfectly at home: we can drink tea with Mrs Thrale, dine with Mr Dilly, and sit down at Mrs Abington's supper-table without any effort of the imagination. But most of the works whose titles are given above depict a state of society to which we are complete strangers. We can no more fancy ourselves the guests of Lord Sparkish than the guests of William the Conqueror. The eighteenth century came in with lace and swords and full-bottomed wigs and brocaded coats,

with hoops, paint, and powder; it went out with the shepherdess costume for ladies, and coats and breeches for the male sex, such as may be seen on the statue of Mr Pitt at Westminster, and men still living can remember to have seen in their childhood.

Here was a gulf indeed; but it was only in externals. Our remarks apply exclusively to manners. In morals there was little change. There was some, indeed. In George III's reign the Court, at all events, set a better example, whereas under George I the Court played high, and the King drank deep-an example which his loyal subjects were not slow to follow. In the 'Carlisle Papers' we find a letter from Sir Thomas Robinson to Lord Carlisle at the beginning of George II's reign, in which he says that on the King's birthday the gentlemen all got so drunk at dinner that they were unable to go to the ball afterwards, and the ladies were at a loss for partners. He himself was one of the defaulters. He was engaged to a lady, but was obliged to go home instead, being, as he says, 'quite demolished.' Lady Cowper records in her diary that in 1716 a young man came drunk to the Drawing-room and pulled a gentleman's nose in the presence of royalty.

Ladies in general played for high stakes all through the early Hanoverian era. According to Lord Shelburne, the fashion was only introduced in the reign of Queen Anne by Lady Shrewsbury, who gave card-parties in a small house which afterwards belonged to General Conway.' If so, her ladyship had much to answer for in the shape of ruined fortunes, shameful compliances, and domestic misery in general. All the memoirs and biographies of the period teem with gambling anecdotes; and the papers published by the Historical MSS. Commission abundantly confirm all that we find elsewhere. In the confidential correspondence between friends, as in Sir Thomas Robinson's letters to Lord Carlisle just quoted, we get at particulars not always to be found in other quarters. Here it is sufficient to say that the most recent of the Historical MSS. publications only confirm what is told by the earlier ones, and fully justify the description given by Lady Cowper (Lord Carlisle's sister) of London in her day. London,' she says, 'is like a kept mistress, dissolute in principle, loose in practice, and extravagant in