find that it falls at times below the higher level of poetic inspiration towards that which is appropriate to a public meeting. And yet a poem which has been accepted by a nation as the worthy utterance of its patriotic feelings has better credentials than any that can be given by the literary authority. We must humbly confess, at any rate, to be unable to read it without admitting its singular power, to whatever particular class of literature it may be assignable. The loftier passages, such as that in which he speaks of the martyrs to the cause, seem to us to be genuine poetry, and of a very high order. Anyhow, it has the fervour and glow of deep feeling which makes technical objections appear irrelevant and unworthy.

The intense patriotic feeling which animated the ode was destined to a serious shock. In a letter written a few years later, Lowell says that 'love of country is' in his ' very blood and bones.' 'If I am not an American, who ever was?' He was defending himself for some lines called The World's Fair,' in which he had spoken indignantly of certain familiar abuses. He suggested that Americans should exhibit, as specimens of their own invention, their civil service, their State legislatures and 'Rings,' with high officials sharing the plunder. Revelations of corrupt practices had startled him during Grant's second administration, and he had been taunted with the failure of democracy during a visit to Europe. In early days he had attributed such symptoms, not to democracy, but to that subservience to the slave-owning interest which had weakened the moral sense of American statesmen. That evil abolished, the true American was to reveal himself, and be independent in spirit as in politics.

We need not here discuss the true significance of the case. To Lowell it seemed due, partly at least, to the submergence of the New Englander by the importation of foreign pauperism. His early impressions, he says, had been received in a community the most virtuous, he believed, that ever existed.' His democratic instinct was a natural outcome of the old Puritanism and the social conditions. Jefferson, as he incidentally remarks, had superimposed upon this native product the abstract doctrines of the Declaration of Independence. The New Englander, like his English ancestors, was a practical man, holding to precedent and tradition, and objecting to

being taxed, on the obvious ground that he liked to know what was to be done with his money. The homespun democrat accepted for the time the doctrine of the 'rights of man,' as it led to the same conclusion for the moment; and Lowell could speak of the Declaration (Bentham's 'hodge-podge of absurdities') as proposing for the first time to embody Christianity in human laws.' Yet his inborn Yankee shrewdness led him to condemn a priori theories, and to admit that even democracy was an experiment to be judged by its results. He had a strong conservative sentiment, and the contempt of a humorist for the fine phrases which flattered the meaner selfcomplacency of his countrymen. To himself, indeed, he always remained a convinced democrat. In the address which he delivered at Birmingham in 1884, he showed admirable tact in discussing the point under the eyes of Englishmen on one side, and Americans, rather suspicious of his patriotism, on the other. He spoke, however, with obvious sincerity. He was too buoyant in temperament to be a pessimist, and, while admitting certain weaknesses of the American system, held that the sound common-sense of his countrymen would enable them to 'worry through' in good time. The American constitution would endure, as he told Guizot, so long as 'the ideas of its founders remained dominant.' The 'ideas,' he added, included the traditions of their race in government and morals'; and the traditions, no doubt, were pretty fully represented by Parson Willow and Hosea Biglow.

Lowell's denunciation of scandals and his interest in civil service reform led incidentally to his being appointed a presidential elector, and to his receiving the mission to Spain and afterwards to this country. The United States have done us the honour of sending us representatives qualified by literary as well as by political eminence; and Lowell was certainly among the most acceptable. Enough is given in the 'Life' to show that the position had its difficulties. Gentlemen who claimed to be both Irish patriots and American citizens gave him a good deal of trouble; and when he could not take their view of the question, he was accused of 'sickening sycophancy' to a wily aristocracy. To the English ministry, at least, he did not appear to err in the sycophantic direction. His American susceptibilities were easily aroused; and in

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society he was ready to take up the cudgels for America even upon questions where he was sensible of a weak side in his case. Lowell, in fact, was often irritated by what he called 'a certain condescension in foreigners.' The amusing essay with that title and certain other passages even in his serious poetry show the feeling rather too strongly for English tastes. We may forgive him on the ground that it was partly due to his affection for the old race. In his youth he had told his countrymen that they had a mental and physical stoop of their shoulders.' They accepted a position of inferiority. But, when they had fairly claimed equality, it was the more annoying that Englishmen should still take them to be in the old provincial position. He wished for a friendly feeling founded on mutual respect; and few men have done more to cultivate the desired sentiment. An admirable public speaker and a charming conversationalist, he was a living proof that the descendants of the old Puritans could preserve their homely sagacity and yet take the highest social and literary polish. He was not less the Hosea Biglow that he could be thoroughly at home in the most cultivated European circles. Franklin had shown the charms of republican simplicity to the courtiers of Louis XVI; and Lowell played a somewhat similar part among modern Englishmen. His strong personal affections and his hearty appreciation of many charms of the old home almost naturalised him in spirit, though he was not sufficiently naturalised in law to be admitted to the Rectorship of St Andrew's.

Lowell's personal career was saddened during these years by the illness of his wife, which led to her death just before his mission ended in 1885. He returned to America, where his daughter and grandchildren were still living, and whither he was called by other ties stronger than those which drew him to England. He came in succeeding summers to visit favourite English scenes, especially Whitby, and to keep up the warm friendships which he had formed. A fatal illness began to show itself in the spring of 1890, and after much suffering, borne with undaunted cheerfulness, and solaced by his old literary enthusiasms, he died on 12th August, 1891. The strongest impression made by reading the letters will perhaps be due to the personal characteristics-to the admirable sim

plicity, warmth of heart, and courageous buoyancy of a wholesome and vigorous nature. Lowell had, as became a humorist, quaint crotchets, such as a passion for discovering that every remarkable person had an infusion of Jewish blood in his veins. That theory, and his skill in showing that every so-called 'Americanism' was sanctioned by early English authorities, afforded him opportunities for exerting all his knowledge and ingenuity. Such little oddities only gave zest to his talk and occasional play to a certain amusing pugnacity. Nobody could have been a warmer or more steadfast friend, or have borne the sorrows of life more simply and gallantly.

Of Lowell's services to letters thus much may be said. He did not achieve one of those masterpieces which become permanent monuments of a national literature. He did not rival Emerson as the revealer of a new philosophical aspect to his countrymen. But he did something towards solving the problem from which he started-to show how his countrymen might cease to be 'provincial' in the narrower sense, and yet retain the qualities which had been associated with the old provincial peculiarities. In the vast evolution of a new society which has taken place in America since Lowell's birth, the New England element has become relatively less important by the introduction of so many races which do not share its traditions. Still it has had an immense influence upon the whole mass, and must always be reckoned as one of its main constituents. What Lowell more or less did in all his activities, was to extricate the finer creed of his forefathers from its coarser and more obsolete surroundings, and to apply the sturdy sagacity and strong moral sense, the shrewd humour and deep, if limited, feeling of the old Puritan to the problems of his day. These qualities, he held, would enable them to guide the inevitable democratic tendencies into the paths of downright honesty and sound common-sense, and encounter the dangers of political and social materialism that threaten the faith in plain living and high thinking. We must hope that his trust in the substantial soundness of his people will be justified. At any rate he did his best in his time to support the cause of upright and elevated aspiration.

By

Art. V.-THE GOLDEN AGE OF ENGLISH PROSE. 1. Puritan and Anglican: Studies in Literature. Edward Dowden. London: Kegan Paul, 1900. 2. English Prose Selections. Edited by Sir Henry Craik. Five volumes. London: Macmillan, 1893-96.

AFTER the later prose of the eighteenth century had developed and exhausted, in the genius of Burke, all the possibilities of rhetorical grandeur, it lost life and sharpness, declining into a false eloquence of a mechanical and circumlocutory cast. Excessive balance and verbal contrast, idle epithets and withered flowers of speech, came to be the art of prose, as it was generally practised. For ordinary purposes it, perhaps, remained an adequate and even dignified manner of expression. If it was less winning than direct natural speech, it possessed, at least for those who cared to listen, more authority. For the purpose of art, however, the later prose of the eighteenth century became almost as much worn out as the eighteenth century couplet. Consequently, just as the leaders of the new movement in poetry returned to the plays of the earlier dramatists, so the essayists began to study the works of the then neglected prose-writers of the seventeenth century; and in these works they found such beauty of phrase and freshness of rhythm, such idiomatic force and magnificence of diction, that the pre-Restoration period was proclaimed the age of classic prose. But from many causes the return to earlier models in prose has been neither so general nor so lasting as the corresponding movement in poetry. The undoubted grandeur of the earlier writers is not without a kind of ruggedness in the minutiae of composition; and, as a whole, the matter of their writings is not of a nature to engage the interest of an ordinary reader. Besides, those who continued the traditions of Junius and Gibbon had subjects more attractive, and a larger audience, than those who versified in the manner of Pope; so that at the present day the magisterial statement of commonplace thought is still employed in the daily affairs of men, from the leading article and the Blue-book to the circular of the world of commerce.

De Quincey, Hazlitt, Lamb, Shelley, and Landor,