But not seldom the qualities which give a book immortality are the qualities that for a time guard it from the crowdtill its bloom of fame has grown to a safe maturity, beyond injury or doubt. MANY English readers have hardly heard the name of Mr. E. L. Godkin, who for many years has had the reputation of being one of the strongest and most brilliant journalists in the United States. As editor of the New MR. E. L. GODKIN York Evening Post and the Nation, the second paper being practically a weekly edition of the first, Mr. Godkin has given and taken hard blows since 1882. He has just retired from the editorship of these papers in consequence of ill-health, said to have been contracted while he was in London last summer. Mr. Godkin's early journalistic training was English, for it was as correspondent of the Daily News in the Crimean War that he started work. It is now Mr. Godkin's privilege to sit in his arm-chair and read divergent opinions on himself and his career. For instance, these: The "Critic" (New York). During the period of reconstruction after the Civil War, and in the long - continued struggles for tariff reform, the purification of the ballot. the elevation of the civil service, the establishment of the finances of the country on a sound basis, the separation of municipal affairs from state and national politics, and, finally, the curbing of the present lust for expansion by force of arms, he has been an aggressive and persistent fighter. No one identified with journalism in New York rivals him in the length and brilliancy of his service; and on the occasion of his receiving the degree of D.C.L. from Oxford in 1897, a leading English writer declared him to be perhaps the most distinguished of living journalists. The "Mirror" (St. Louis). was He was a jaundiced, exclusive, hypercritical, unsympathetic publicist. He always against whatever appealed most to the common people. He saw little but the deficiencies of popular government, rarely its great merits. He had high ideals, but they were frosty. He was so pertinaciously critical of things American as to be almost entitled to the epithet of unAmerican. He had brains, but his character as a publicist was repellent. His brilliancy was practically nullified by bis acerbity. . . . Bile overbalanced his brain. His intellectualism took little account of toleration for human frailty. He was a polite and graceful Thersites, stupendously wrongheaded in his leanings toward the exclusive's views. It is not often, by the way, that a critic flatters more than a mirror. WHEN we enumerated some weeks ago Dr. Conan Doyle's many qualifications for making himself valuable in South Africa, we ended by remarking that he was a good surgeon. It is as a surgeon, we find, that Dr. Doyle is to go out. He will be attached to the Langman Field Hospital. An epigrammatist contributes the following to Books of To-day and Books of To-morrow: MAJOR CONAN DOYLE, V.C. Said Dr. Robertson Nikola concerning Sherlock Holmes Who's volunteered for Africa as a change from writing tomes): "He canna weel ignore the least of meeleetary cues, For the modern soldier learns to fight by Multiple Reviews." THE statistics of book-production for 1899 just issued by the Publishers' Circular present some unusually interesting features. To begin with, in spite of the war and the disturbed conditions that preceded it, the number of new books and new editions in 1899 exceeded by fifty those of 1898. Other things to note are these: In fiction the number of new editions is 88 greater than in 1898. That is a healthy sign. In belles-lettres, essays, monographs, &c., there is an increase of 102 books over 1898. In poetry an increase of 23 volumes. Oddly enough, political and kindred books have fallen by 70 from the total of 1898, and by 177 from the total of 1897. THERE is always room for solid, well-printed and bound reprints of the classics, and we have no hesitation in commending the new "Library of English Classics" just begun to be issued by Messrs. Macmillan. The books in this library are in a rather large octavo size, and are bound in dull red canvas. Each book has a bibliographical note, otherwise it is left to shine in its own. light, and by the aid of the best typography. The series has started with The Plays of Sheridan and Bacon's Essays and Advancement of Learning. Complete and accurate texts may be looked for in this series, which will speedily include Malory's Morte d'Arthur (2 vols.), Shelton's Don Quixote (3 vols.), Boswell's Life of Johnson (3 vols.), Lockhart's Life of Scott (5 vols.), a collection from De Quincey, and many other standard works. The price is 3s. 6d. net per volume. FROM The Philistine, of East Aurora, N.Y.: NOTICE. Systematic attempts having been made by the tribe of Romeike to secure the gifted author of the Rubaiyat as a subscriber for clippings, this is to notify all parties that Col. Khayyam doesn't care a dam what the newspapers say about him, one way or the other. MR. WALTER RALEIGH, whose treatise on Style won him some honour two years ago, has recently delivered an address on "The Study of Arts in a Modern University" to the students of the University College at Liverpool. The address is the first of a series of annual addresses to be delivered to the students in the Faculty of Arts. Mr. Raleigh's address sparkles, as his book did, with neat thoughts expressed in rather lapidary diction, as witness these sentences: The poetry of Catullus has survived the passing of a religion and an empire; the diary of Mr. Samuel Pepys will be as fresh as at the day of its birth when the Forth Bridge is oxide of iron and London a geological pancake of brickdust. It is not likely that man will ever be dangerously reluctant to form moral judgments, and to act upon them. But that, he cannot and will not understand-that is his daily disease; so that his morality becomes a kind of wandering ague, shaking him with hot and cold fits. "Rousseau, Sir," said Dr. Johnson, "is a very bad man. . . I should like to have him work in the plantations." There is then no more to be said. But if you study Rousseau in his own world and his own country, how engrossing and difficult a study it is, and what gleams of lofty thought flash through the clouds of sentimentality and mania that veil his head! Charles Darwin sauntered into the garden of Literature, one day in his later years, and remarked, with rare and admirable candour, that the plays of Shakespeare made him sick. The remark is weightier, and more interesting, than the majority of literary criticisms. It will be understood that without their contexts these extracts indicate, rather than convey, Prof. Raleigh's thoughts. IN a "Thing Seen" published in our last issue, called "The Lower Criticism," the troubled Beadle of a Public Garden, opening his heart to a sympathetic friend, remarks that "the new Bible Dictionary plays havoc-great havoc, sir--with the Bible." Messrs. T. & T. Clark ask us to state that the remark did not apply to their publication called The Dictionary of the Bible, edited by Dr. Hastings. A Beadle is a Beadle, but his words should not be liable to misconstruction. Acting on his behalf we gladly make the correction. Bibliographical. AFTER what I have already said in this column on the subject of "introductions" to literary classics, I need hardly say how delighted I am that in Messrs. Macmillan's new series of such things "introductions are to be conspicuous by their absence. That is why I am able to congratulate the said firm for once more putting before us Mandeville's Travels, Malory's Morte d'Arthur, Shelton's Don Quixote, Walton's Lives and Angler, White's Selborne, and so forth. To judge from the frequent reproductions of the same works, one would imagine English literary classics to be singularly few! The edition of Sheridan's Plays I rather welcome because, though it has had several predecessors, cheap and otherwise, it was always possible to improve upon them. A very attractive book in many ways was Sheridan's Comedies, as published in England fifteen years ago, with "introductory" matter by Mr. Brander Matthews, and pictorial illustrations by E. A. Abbey, C. S. Reinhardt, Fred. Barnard, &c. In this volume "The Rivals" and "The School for Scandal" were reprinted from the edition of 1821, which was prefaced by Moore. Unfortunately "The Critic" and "The Duenna were omitted from this volume; the rest (such as "St. Patrick's Day" and "Pizarro ") one can very well do without. One is inclined to be very well pleased that the bibliographical part of Messrs. Macmillan's new series should be undertaken by Mr. A. W. Pollard, who is also to choose the editions to be reproduced. Mr. Pollard, as all know, has already done good work in the direction of illustrating by his pen the history of English literature. There is, for example, his little book on English Miracle Plays, now nearly ten years old. Then there are his Chaucer Primer and his Early Illustrated Books, both belonging to 1893. Add to these his Odes from the Greek Drama, and it will be seen that Mr. Pollard is a scholar in whose hands literary classics may safely be left. Talking of classics, there are those which the Scottish Text Society proposes to give us in a new shape by and by. For instance, Archdeacon Bellenden's translation of five books of Livy's Annals; secondly, the works of Robert Henrysoun, of which, I fancy, there is not at present a complete edition, though some of them were reprinted by the Bannatyne and Maitland Clubs; thirdly, the Hymns or Sacred Songs of Alexander Hume (1599), which have long awaited reproduction; and the Scots works of James I. of England, whose prose writings were collected in 1616, and some of whose work was reprinted by Mr. Arber. For all of these promised new editions something is to be said. I take it that Mrs. Meynell's monograph on Mr. Ruskin will be rather critical than biographical, or even expository, in form. The biography of the sage has often been written, and its details are familiar to the public. One of the first to deal with it was Mr. J. M. Mather, in a book published in 1883-4. Then there were Mr. W. G. Collingwood's two volumes in 1893, preceded by Mrs. Ritchie's essay in 1892. A good deal of light on Mr. Ruskin's relations with the Pre-Raphaelites has been thrown by a recent volume of Mr. W. M. Rossetti's. On Mr. Ruskin's autobiographical work I need not dwell. The books devoted to criticism of his writings and teachings are fairly numerous. He was dealt with, anonymously, as an Economist in 1884. Mr. E. T. Cook's Studies in Ruskin date from 1890; Mr. Collingwood's analysis of his Art-Teaching came out in 1891. Mr. C. Waldstein's discussions of his Work in general and his relation to Modern Thought belong to 1893 and 1894 respectively. It will be remembered that one of the earliest and most enthusiastic critics of Mr. Ruskin was Charlotte Brontë. A collection of Mr. George Meredith's epigrams! That should be at once easy and difficult to make-easy because of the wealth to choose from, difficult because of the universal brilliancy. Theoretically, one objects to these gatherings together of disconnected sentences; practically, one rather enjoys them, and even finds them useful. That they are popular may be assumed from their increasing number. I do not refer to the more solid books of extracts, such as those of the Selections from Mr. Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and the like. I refer to the small anthologies, usually in the form of birthday books, and so forth. There is, for instance, a little book of sentences from Disraeli's writings which I keep habitually at my bedside, together with similar selections from favourite writers. An epigram or a maxim may suggest a whole train of thought; it may even conduce to somnolency! What is certain is, that this sort of book should really be a booklet; one does not want a volume full of maxims or epigrams. I read the other day, somewhere, a very favourable notice of a new book of verse called The Foremost Trail, and written (to quote the title-page) by C. Fox Smith. The reviewer assumed throughout that the author was a man, and, if I remember rightly, made some encouraging remarks about his future career. Now, a reviewer should always be suspicious of initials on a title-page. They are sexless, and may lead one wrong. Sometimes, I believe, they are deliberately placed as traps for the unlucky commentator. However that may be, it is certain that C. Fox Smith is no man, the "C." standing for the word Cecily a name which adorned the title-page of the young lady's first book of verse, published some little time ago. Miss Fox Smith, I am told, is still in her teens, a remarkable testimony to the extent to which the spirit of an English girl can be informed with the most enthusiastic patriotism. I wrote the other day concerning the difficulty of recording and describing the prose and verse printed in connexion with private clubs and societies-opuscula which must needs be lost to the world if not reproduced some day in volume form. A somewhat similar difficulty meets the bibliographer in the case of the publications issued by theatrical managers in connexion with their various productions. These sometimes have a literary interest, especially when they have reference to Shakespeare's plays. They are usually the work of experts, and occasionally are something more than compilations. There are those who make collections of such fugitive issues; but it is virtually impossible to catalogue them. They have their day and cease to be. THE BOOKWORM. Reviews. Sober and Substantial. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill, and other Literary Estimates. By Frederic Harrison. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d. net.) MR. FREDERIC HARRISON is a man of versatile gift, as we are aware. For years his pen has touched, in the principal reviews, various themes of the day; and his scope has not been limited, while he has always shown himself an accomplished gladiator. But it is as an intellectual gladiator that we chiefly think of him, and as the gladiator of a special cause. He stands to us for the high priest and protagonist of Positivism. Instinctively, at the sound of his name, there leaps to our memory that deft pasquinade-do the younger generation know it?-of Mortimer Collins: Churches and creeds are all lost in the mists, With such a squadron of Positivists ? The squadron, alas! is scattered; viscerunt. No longer, in compact ranks, do they ride the fields of literature, and bear down all before them, as (Comte excepted) they did in the earlier times of the century. Mr. John Morley and Mr. Frederic Harrison alone survive to witness a reaction against the principles they valiantly championed, and which they still unfaintingly maintain. But it is not Mr. Harrison the gladiator who now, in this volume, confronts us. He enters the silken lists of pure literature, controversy (save incidentally) laid aside. Unarmed and pacific, he casts a backward eye upon some of the principal writers who have been his contemporaries, whom he has known in the campaigns of literature. These essays, consequently, cover no small part of the great figures in Victorian letters; and such, he tells us, was the deliberate plan of his book. Mr. Harrison has very considerable equipment for such a task. His style is always cultivated, equable, lucid, and graceful; though it cannot claim the distinct and individualising stamp which is the token of genius. He has a tolerant appreciation of multifarious excellence; and his taste only falls short of the last and keenest edge with regard to verse. But it does so fall a little short; and also (which is well-nigh an inevitable limitation) his appreciation is confined mainly to the writers of his own youth and prime. Beyond these there is a level line of silencenot the less felt for being mostly inexplicit, merely indicated by reticence. In a book which covers (through successive essays) Tennyson, Ruskin, Arnold, Symonds, Lamb, Keats, Gibbon, Froude, Freeman, and John Stuart Mill, the writer can scarce narrow himself entirely to pure literary criticism. The man must show at intervals through the critic; not only his idiosyncracy, but his general views, his prejudices, his personal attitude towards life and life's problems. Therefore, as we have hinted, the veteran of Positivism emerges now and again: we are not suffered to forget under what banner Mr. Harrison fights; and the reader, after his several kind, must allow for the critic's peculiar views. For the most part, however, these are expressed with courtesy, if also at times with energy; they are offensive only in the martial sense. It is exceptional to encounter (in the fine essay on "Ruskin as Prophet") a fleer at "tender mothers adoring the divine judgment which consigns their children to hell-fire"-exceptional, and we note it with regret. Such an utterance is in hopelessly bad taste, not merely because it is crass, perverse, and unfair- —a hit below the belt-but because it is calculated wantonly to wound the deepest feelings of multitudes among Mr. Harrison's fellow-citizens; and especially of the tenderest class. It is as if he had buffeted a woman. So cheap a sneer might be left to the scurrilous rank of controversialists; it is not worthy of Mr. Harrison-let us trust he will see fit to suppress or modify it. But because of its rarity we note it: Mr. Harrison is not given to hit below the belt. Not in vain has he studied his favourite master in criticism, Matthew Arnold, whose balance and sanity he conscientiously strives to imitate. Dealing with so various a range of writers, he holds a level balance in regard to all; no easy feat, requiring a judiciality combined with catholicism of taste, not in these hasty days too common. In detail we may, and do, freely dissent from him; but there is seldom much fault to be found with the broad scope and trend of his judgment. This is high praise of essays which compass so large a field. Yet with all their merits they do not rank Mr. Harrison among the illuminative critics; there are neither flashes nor broad lights of insight, bringing to sudden view unsuspected aspects, dark recesses in the great authors analysed. We do not feel as we rise from our reading that we know substantially more of them than we did. The best which is held in solution by the better criticism of our day has been precipitated and presented to us in crystalline form; our most truthful previous impressions are pleasantly confirmed and interpreted to us; but beyond sifting and discrimination these polished essays hardly go. The best of them is perhaps the elaborate study of Ruskin, which runs through three successive essays: it is eloquent, it is enthusiasticas in these reactionary days a study of Ruskin ought to be; it analyses his prose with understanding love; it defends his greatness as teacher with selective sense of his limits, weaknesses, perfervid extravagances, and appreciation of his power more generous than could be surmised from a rival apostle, professedly out of touch with many of Ruskin's most basic beliefs. But there is like fairminded justice, if (on account of the subject-matter) less eloquently set forth, in the studies of those two most opposite and antagonistic historians, Froude and Freeman, in the perhaps too genially balanced notice of Addington Symonds. Perhaps, however, we may study Mr. Harrison's defects and qualities in representative equipoise by considering the essay on Arnold. After some remarks on Arnold's admitted felicity as a phraseur, he proceeds to discuss his poetry, with the disputable opinion that in poetry he reached his finest vein, and by it will be longest remembered. To this succeeds the assertion that no poet in our literature, unless it be Milton, "has been so essentially saturated to the very bone with the classical genius." Much depends on the interpretation of this sentence, and one must confine it to the poets of Mr. Harrison's own prime. His remarks on the sense in which Arnold is classical" the serene self command, the harmony of tone, the measured fitness, the sweet reasonableness of his verse"-would need for their due discussion an essay on what is permanent, essential, universal in Greek poetry, apart from what is local, external, and externally imitable. Mr. Harrison thinks that the full acceptance of Arnold's poetry has yet to come-which we may seriously doubt, calculated as its appeal was for his special time. That Arnold's equableness is attained at the expense of height and passion Mr. Harrison perceives. Arnold is, he says, peculiarly a gnomic poet, a moralist on life and conduct. He credits him with seeing into the intellectual world of our age more deeply and more surely than any contemporary poet." If this somewhat inexplicit sentence means that Arnold reproduced the tone of thought common to the cultured circles of his day, it is true. That is just what he did. But we cannot extend it further. "A resolute and pensive insight into the mystery of life and of things" we cannot discern in him, but rather a resigned pausing at the gates of the mystery. The ethical lesson of nature preoccupies him when he is not dealing directly with human conduct Mr. Harrison recognises. It is no loss to Mr. Harrison-though it is to us-that Arnold, unlike his beloved preceptor, Wordsworth, halts at the ethical lesson of nature, is insensitive to the spirit within and behind nature which was the solemnly convinced burthen of Wordsworth's song. To this "concentration of poetry on ethics, and even metaphysics," Mr. Harrison attributes Arnold's limitations and loss of charm." Yet, at the same time, he says that Arnold, unlike Wordsworth, is "never prosaic." Here it is that we find that falling short of the keenest poetic sense which we have attributed to Mr. Harrison. Arnold, unfortunately, is too often prosaic-for line after line, passage after passage. Perhaps, as a subsequent portion of the essay would suggest, Mr. Harrison is not insensible to this; and we should take him to mean that Arnold is never prosy. That is the exact truth; he is too much an artificer to prose like Wordsworth, but prosaic he is frequently, to a level extent that is to say, his language is the language of very fine and distinguished prose. Even when he rises higher, he too often hovers on the doubtful border where we hesitate to pronounce it poetry, are loath to pronounce it prose. And though it is true that the greatest poets are seldom directly didactic, it is not this which depresses Arnold; it is the lack of inspiration to give wings to his thought. The greater the burthen of intellectuality, the more of sheer inspiration is necessary. "Dramatic passion,' "" tumultuous passion "-not these, as Mr. Harrison regretfully supposes, does Arnold need. Wordsworth had them not, and yet soared into regions of which Arnold but desirously dreams. It is inspiring emotion, the solemn passion, intense in its still ardour, appropriate to intellectual poetry, which Arnold needs. It is really passion of the intensest order, deceptively calm through its equipoise with the weight of thought. The calm which results from the careful husbanding of effort may imitate it with the multitude, but can never deceive the elect. In the main, Arnold reaches only this latter calm; and that Mr. Harrison should identify it with that inspired tranquillity and impassioned peace of Wordsworth (at his highest), the supreme Greek poets, and Dante, shows that Mr. Harrison-as we say-has not the keenest edge of poetic sensitiveness. That is why Mr. Harrison feels that Arnold, though faultless, is "not of the highest rank." It is a misnomer, in fact, to call such poets "faultless," whether it be Racine or Arnold, when in line after line there is the blot of absent inspiration, when there is not the only possible word in the only possible place. The greatest of all faults in a poet is to lack poetry, and that is theirs. At the same time Mr. Harrison does not, perhaps, lay sufficient stress upon Arnold's occasional success in touching the mark at which he aimed. The austere and noble sonnet on Shakespeare, with other brief achievements of the kind, are worth more than long poems full of fine thought, but only now and again inevitable in expression. For they are integral; and it is that quality which makes for permanence. Mr. Harrison (in this influenced by Arnold himself) is too apt to set store by detached lines and passages, which poets of no high power can often forge in tolerable quantity, to the great comfort of reviewers who pant for quotes." He ignores too much the supreme value of relation and organism. Thus he depreciates, justly enough, the quality of Arnold's metre; but the reason he alleges is quite unconvincing and inadequatenamely, that Arnold has lines containing harsh collocations of consonants. The same could be alleged against Shakespeare, could be-and has been-alleged against Milton. Lowell rightly replies that metre may aim either at melody or harmony; that while the former demands smoothness, the larger music of harmony not only admits but makes use of occasional roughnesses, as discords have their function in the harmonies of music proper. To cite these individual lines of Arnold's, disjoined from their relation, proves nothing. Yet Mr. Harrison is right in his judgment, though defective in his reason: Arnold was lacking 66 in metrical power, though he could strike out fine imitative music in occasional passages. When we leave details, and attend to Mr. Harrison's summing-up, we find, indeed, that he is mainly right, and that our objections have caught largely on side-issues. By temperament and by training he, who at birth" was breathed on by the rural Pan,' was deprived of that fountain of delight that is essential to the highest poetry, the dithyrambic glow-the ἀνήριθμον γέλασμα— The countless dimples of the laughing seas of perennial poetry. This, perhaps, more than his want of passion, of dramatic power, of rapidity of action, limits the audience of Arnold as a poet. But those who thirst for the pure Castalian spring, inspired by restrained and lofty thoughts, who care for that high seriousness of which he spoke so much as the very essence of the best poetry, have long known that they find it in Matthew Arnold more than in any of his even greater contemporaries. That is a good specimen of Mr. Frederic Harrison's style, and it states the case for Arnold as a poet with a discrimination which leaves little to desire. Partly, indeed, it agrees with our own criticism of Mr. Harrison's criticism, or so nearly that the difference seems to become inconspicuous. And this excellently exemplifies the studiousness of balance which characterises Mr. Harrison's appreciations. Not once nor twice does he thus in his summary disarm the reviewer, and leave him halfapologetic for differences which are finally made so small. What may in the body of the essay have erred by overemphasis or omission is here usually rectified and supplied. His picture of Arnold altogether (though he gives less space than we could desire to the prose) is urbane, sympathetic, and observant of poise. If we doubt his forecast of an extended future for Arnold, it is because we think his aloofness from the many is due to more than his mere distinction and those other fastidious causes set forth by Mr. Harrison. Arnold as a teacher was pre-eminently undecided (to use an adjective thrown out by Mr. Harrison himself). A teacher of delicate incertitude, a watchman who has no word of the night, a prophet who disclaims prophecy, and Whose only message is that he sees nought, is never likely to have acceptance with the many who still, as of old, ask for a sign. And even among the few his cultivated stoicism and half-complaisant, half-melancholy indecision is scarce likely to be the fashion of the future. Even the cultured and sovereign few now begin to cry for a gospel and a hand from the cloud. But that constant reference to conduct, which Mr. Harrison rightly adjudges his dominant note, will doubtless secure to him long his measure of influence with the practical Saxon mind. His spirit has done a worthy posthumous work in prompting the eminent sanity of Mr. Harrison's extremely able, though not strongly original, book. A Man of Fashion-and More. George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life. Edited by E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue. (Unwin.) ALTHOUGH it is natural to regard this book as merely supplementary to the late Mr. Jesse's George Selwyn and His Contemporaries, it is nearer the truth to say that it supersedes that work. That is to say, there is more of Selwyn in this one volume than in the four volumes of Jesse. The biographical sketch of Selwyn here given is as good as Jesse's-in some respects it is more discerningwhile the body of the work is composed of Selwyn's own letters; not, as in Jesse's volumes, of letters that Selwyn received. How Mr. Jesse missed these letters, or whether he was denied access to them, we do not happen to know. He must have suspected the existence of Selwyn's letters to the fifth Earl of Carlisle, seeing that he printed the letters of that peer to Selwyn. Fifty-five years after Jesse's volumes were published, these lost letters stole from their obvious hiding at Castle Howard, and ranged themselves in the Fifteenth Report of the Historical Manuscripts Commission. There they attracted little attention save from Mr. E. S. Roscoe and Miss Helen Clergue, who are to be thanked for bringing them to our arm-chairs escorted by a discerning memoir and many notes. Critics are grateful and captious in a breath, and we must point out a few trifling faults of editing before we go further. Selwyn's English is slovenly in grammar and unessential details, but it was a pity to sprinkle sic's over his text. Far better have announced George's weakness, and then left him to placate the reader by his good qualities, which he would have done before he had written three letters. As it is the sic's are for ever tripping "There has [sic] been no events this week that I one up. know of," is the sort of thing, and one soon wearies of seeing so good a fellow as Selwyn checked for writing like a gentleman instead of like a scholar. And the editors have contrived to double the infliction by making it uncertain. So that the absence of a sic when Selwyn writes "You was," on page 41, is as trying as its presence when he writes "There has [sic] been no events," on page 43. If "terrible [sic] long appears on one page, why should "your extreme kind letter" go unscathed on another? This is not quite all; the footnotes are pointed and informing, but they are hardly numerous enough. On page 73 two notes are required. We read of Charles James Fox: "Vernon said yesterday, after dinner, that he and some others-Bully, I think, among the rest-had been driven by the rain up into Charles's room; and when they had lugged him out of bed, they attacked him so violently upon what he did at Bath, that he was obliged to have recourse, as he did last year, to an absolute denial of the fact." What was this affair at Bath? Maybe no one knows; but a query at the foot of the page would have been rather better than nothing. Again: "Lady Albemarle, who is not a wise woman, certainly, was at Lady Gower's the other evening, and was regretting only that Charles had not been consumed in the Fire, instead of the linnets." The reader soon understands that the fire was at Holland House, but he would like to know more about the linnets which suffered vicariously for Charles "I had rather have heard Walter play upon his hump for nothing," comments Selwyn on an expensive evening at Vauxhall; but without a note it is difficult to gauge his regret. We come to the Letters. Their value is twofold. They are full of matter; they bring back the habits, tones, and follies of high life in the most interesting part of the eighteenth century. Reading them, we catch the manners as they flew when George III. was king and America was rebellious. In 1781 Selwyn writes to his friendyoung the Carlisle of these Letters: "I have . a perpetual source of intelligence, for although je ne fais rien qui vaille, I am always doing or hearing something, as much as those who are employed about more important matters, and if among these a circumstance happens to interest or amuse you, je ne serai pas fáché de vous l'avoir mandée." Fortunate young Earl! Though often out of London, now abroad, now in Ireland, now ensconced in his seat at Castle Howard, he had in Selwyn a friend, older than himself, who was a kind of lay confessor to the choicest people of the age, who united a love of gossip with a sound judgment, and was never happier than when transmitting smart news and shrewd comment to those whom he loved. Hence these Letters take us into fine company and yield us many secrets. We are constantly at Almack's, at White's, at Holland House. We go to the House of Commons to hear Fox, and leave it to escape Burke. We whisper dark things about duchesses, and calculate the losses of young bloods at faro. We intrigue for sinecures and punt for fortunes. And always we watch the squalid comedy of Charles James Fox-noblest, weakest of mengiving his eloquence to his country and his furniture to the bailiffs. Let us dwell for a moment on the gambling scenes in which Fox rose and fell, was hated and worshipped. On May 29, 1781, Selwyn writes to his friend: You must know that for these two days past all passengers in St. James'-street have been amused with seeing two carts at Charles's door filling, by the Jews, with his goods, clothes, books, and pictures. He was waked by Basilico yesterday, and Hare afterwards by his valet-de-chambre, they being told at the same time that the execution was begun, and the carts were drawn up against the door. Such furniture I never saw. Betty aud Jack Manners are perpetually in a survey of this operation, and Charles, with all Brooks's on his behalf, in the highest spirits. . What business is going on I know not, for all the discourse at which I am present turns upon this bank. Offley sat up till past four, and I believe has lost a good part of his last legacy. Two days later Selwyn reports: "Never was a room so crowded or so hot as this was last night," and then he names the punters. A little later: The Pharo Bank is held in a manner which, being exposed to public view, bids defiance to all decency and police. The whole town as it passes views the dealer and the punters by means of the candles and the windows being levelled with the ground. The Opposition, who have Charles for their ablest advocate, is quite ashamed of the proceeding, and hates to hear it mentioned. Gambling pervades many pages, but never to the exclusion of deaths, marriages, divorces, dinners, balls, and levées. Sometimes Selwyn goes down to Gloucester to cajole his electors, and spend some weeks of boredom at his lovely seat, Matson. He makes speeches which he is glad no one hears but the Corporation, and is delighted when Horry Walpole turns up in those benighted parts"someone to converse with who speaks my own language." If his constituency is tiresome, not less so is Parliament. Between these two boredoms Selwyn is never happy unless poised in the beatific regions of St. James's-street. Of literature we do not hear much. Topham Beauclerk seems to be the one link between Selwyn and the Johnsonian circle. Once or twice Selwyn dines with Gibbon. He is not a great reader. One day he buys Mme. Du Barri's Anecdotes, and they amuse him; he buys also Dart's Antiquities of Westminster Abbey, but seems to think more of the price, £6, than of the book. We are alert when we find him buying Dr. Johnson's Lives of the Poets. But it leaves him cold: I have bought Johnson's Lives of the Poets, and repent of it already; but I have read but one, which is Prior's. There are few anecdotes, and those not well authenticated; his criticism on the poems, false and absurd, and the prettiest things which he wrote passed over in silence. I told Lord Loughborough what I thought of it, and he had made the same remarks. But he says that I had begun with the life the worst wrote of them all. He In truth Johnson was not an author to lure Selwyn from his wines and his hazards and his own triumphs of wit. Every post brought him letters, every scandal and every posture of affairs in Parliament brought him suppliants for advice. He was liked and pestered by all. gave sympathy so freely that he came to need it, and the little note of tragedy in Selwyn's life, which was single to the end, is accentuated in this confession to the friend he trusted most: To find a person who really interests themselves about you, and is able and willing to give you such advice as applies immediately to your case, is of all things in the world most difficult to meet with, but the most comfort |