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boundaries and limits. Take an example, his picture of what we may call the bourgeois nature in difficulties; in the utmost difficulty, in contact with magic and the supernatural. He has made of it something homely, comic, true; reminding us of what bourgeois nature really is. By showing us the type under abnormal conditions, he reminds us of the type under its best and most satisfactory conditions:

By famous Hanover city;

there are comfortable benefices-there is ☛ money, and it is pleasant to spend it. Accept the creed of your age and you get these, reject that creed and you lose them. And for what do you lose them? For a fancy creed of your own, which no one else will accept, which hardly any one will call a creed,' which most people will consider a sort of unbelief." Again, Mr. Browning evidently loves what we may call the realism, the gro-"Hamelin Town's in Brunswick, tesque realism, of orthodox Christianity. Many parts of it in which great divines have felt keen difficulties are quite pleasant to him. He must see his religion, he must have an "object-lesson" in believing. He must have a creed that will take, which wins and holds the miscellaneous world, which stout men will heed, which nice women will adore. The spare moments of solitary religion-the "obdurate questionings," the high "instincts," the "first affections," the "shadowy recollections,"

Which, do they what they may, Are yet the fountain-light of all our day— Are yet a master-light of all our seeing; the great but vague faith-the unutterable tenets-seem to him worthless, visionary; they are not enough immersed in matter; they move about "in worlds not realized." We wish he could be tried like the prophet once; he would have found God in the earthquake and the storm; he could have deciphered from them a bracing and a rough religion: he would have known that crude men and ignorant women felt them too, and he would accordingly have trusted them; but he would have distrusted and disregarded the "still small voice;" he would have said it was "fancy"-a thing you thought you heard to-day, but were not sure you had heard to-morrow: he would call it a nice illusion, an immaterial pret tiness; he would ask triumphantly "How are you to get the mass of men to heed this little thing?" he would have persevered and insisted "My wife does not hear it."

But although a suspicion of beauty, and a taste for ugly reality, have led Mr. Browning to exaggerate the functions and to caricature the nature of grotesque art, we own or rather we maintain that he has given many excellent specimens of that art within its proper

The river Weser, deep and wide,
Washes its walls on the southern side;
A pleasanter spot you never spied;
But, when begins my ditty,
Almost five hundred years ago,
To see the townsfolk suffer so
From vermin, was a pity.

"Rats!

They fought the dogs, and killed the cats, And bit the babies in the cradles,

And ate the cheeses out of the vats, And licked the soup from the cook's own tables;

Split open the kegs of salted sprats,
Made nests inside men's Sunday hats,
And even spoiled the women's chats,
By drowning their speaking
With shrieking and squeaking
In fifty different sharps and flats.
"At last the people in a body

To the town-hall came flocking.
"Tis clear,' cried they, our mayor's a
noddy;

And as for corporation-shocking
To think we buy gowns lined with ermine
For dolts that can't or won't determine
What's best to rid us of our vermin!
You hope, because you're old and obese,
To find in the furry civic robe ease?
Rouse up, Sirs! Give your brains a racking
To find the remedy we're lacking,
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing!'
At this the mayor and corporation
Quaked with a mighty consternation."

to extricate the civic dignitaries from the
A person of musical abilities proposes
difficulty, and they promise him a thou-
sand guilders if he does.

"Into the street the Piper stept,

Smiling first a little smile,
As if he knew what magic slept
In his quiet pipe the while;
Then, like a musical adept,
To blow the pipe his lips he wrinkled,
And green and blue his sharp eye twinkled
Like a candle-flame when salt is sprinkled
And ere three shrill notes the pipe uttered
You heard as if an army muttered;

And the muttering grew to a grumbling; And the grumbling grew to a mighty rumbling:

And out of the houses the rats came tumbling.

Great rats, small rats, lean rats, brawny rats, Brown rats, black rats, gray rats, tawny rats, Grave old plodders, gay young friskers,

Fathers, mothers, uncles, cousins, Cocking tails and pricking whiskers, Families by tens and dozens, Brothers, sisters, husbands, wivesFollowed the Piper for their lives. From street to street he piped advancing, And step for step he followed dancing, Until they came to the river Weser Wherein all plunged and perished! -Save one who, stout as Julius Cæsar, Swam across and lived to carry (As he, the manuscript he cherished) To Rat-land home his commentary: Which was, 'At the first shrill notes of the

pipe,

I heard a sound as of scraping tripe,
And putting apples, wondrous ripe,
Into a cider-press's gripe:

And a moving away of pickle-tub boards,
And a leaving ajar of conserve-cupboards,
And a drawing the corks of train-oil flasks,
And a breaking the hoops of butter-casks;
And it seemed as if a voice

(Sweeter far than by harp or by psaltery Is breathed) called out, Oh rats, rejoice! The world is grown to one vast drysaltery! So, munch on, crunch on, take your nuncheon,

Breakfast, supper, dinner, luncheon!
And just as a bulky sugar-puncheon,
All ready staved, like a great sun shone
Glorious scarce an inch before me,
Just as methought it said, Come, bore me!
-I found the Weser rolling o'er me.'
You should have heard the Hamelin people
Ringing the bells till they rocked the steeple.
'Go,' cried the mayor, and get long poles,
Poke out the nests and block up the holes!
Consult with carpenters and builders,
And leave in our town not even a trace
Of rats!'-when suddenly, up the face
Of the Piper perked in the market-place,
With a, First, if you please, my thousand
guilders!'

"A thousand guilders! The mayor looked blue;

So did the corporation too.

For council dinners made rare havoc
With claret, moselle, vin-de-grave, hock;
And half the money would replenish
Their cellar's biggest butt with Rhenish.
To pay this sum to a wandering fellow
With a gipsy coat of red and yellow!
Beside,' quoth the mayor with a knowing
wink,

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'Our business was done at the river's brink; We saw with our eyes the vermin sink,

And what's dead can't come to life, I think.
So, friend, we're not the folks to shrink
From the duty of giving you something for
drink,

And a matter of money to put in your poke;
But as for the guilders, what we spoke
Of them, as you very well know, was in
joke.

Beside, our losses have made us thrifty.
A thousand guilders! Come, take fifty!'

"The piper's face fell, and he cried,
'No trifling! I can't wait, beside!
I've promised to visit by dinner time
Bagdat, and accept the prime

Of the head-cook's pottage, all he's rich in,
For having left, in the caliph's kitchen,
Of a nest of scorpions no survivor—
With him I proved no bargain-driver,
With you, don't think I'll bate a stiver!
And folks who put me in a passion
May find me pipe to another fashion.'
"How?' cried the mayor, 'd'ye think I'll
brook

Being worse treated than a cook?
Insulted by a lazy ribald

With idle pipe and vesture piebald?
You threaten us, fellow? Do your worst,
Blow your pipe there till you burst!'

"Once more he stept into the street;
And to his lips again

Laid his long pipe of smooth straight cane;
And ere he blew three notes (such sweet
Soft notes as yet musician's cunning
Never gave the enraptured air)
There was a rustling, that seemed like a
bustling

Of merry crowds justling at pitching and hustling,

Small feet were pattering, wooden shoes clattering,

Little hands clapping and little tongues chattering,

And, like fowls in a farm-yard when barley is scattering,

Out came the children running.
All the little boys and girls,

With rosy cheeks and flaxen curls,

And sparkling eyes and teeth like pearls, Tripping and skipping, ran merrily after The wonderful music with shouting and laughter

And I must not omit to say

That in Transylvania there's a tribe
Of alien people that ascribe

The outlandish ways and dress

On which their neighbors lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
Out of some subterraneous prison
Into which they were trepanned
Long time ago in a mighty band
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why, they don't understand.”

| Had wasted thoughts, and hopes, and fears,
Rude laughter and unmeaning tears,
Ere England Shakspeare saw, or Rome
Others I doubt not, if not we,
The pure perfection of her dome.
The issue of our toils shall see;
And (they forgotten and unknown)
Young children gather as their own
The harvest that the dead had sown.”

The Cornhill Magazine.

W. B.

THE RISE OF ROMAN IMPERIALISM. THERE are some coincidences of history that entertain better than a novel, and moralize more persuasively than a sermon. The foot-prints of the Deity, in human action, seem there more visible than in the more isolated results we owe to his government of the universe. The Master-Hand which coerces, to a few given limits, the extravagance of human action, shows in more palpable evidence; the thing we call human greatness resolves itself more into the theatrical pretensions in which it so often consists; and we are tempted, as we marvel over the humiliating study, to think that the loftiest of our fellows, with the best of their works, form but so many instruments of a nursery game in the hands of a superior intelligence.

Something more we had to say of Mr. Browning, but we must stop. It is singularly characteristic of this age that the poems which rise to the surface should be examples of ornate art, and grotesque art, not of pure art. We live in the realm of the half educated. The number of readers grows daily, but the quality of readers does not improve rapidly. The middle class is scattered, headless; it is well-meaning but aimless; wishing to be wise, but ignorant how to be wise. The aristocracy of England never was a literary aristocracy, never even in the days of its full power, of its unquestioned predominance, did it guide-did it even seriously try to guide -the taste of England. Without guidance, young men and tired men are thrown amongst a mass of books; they have to choose which they like; many of them would much like to improve their culture, to chasten their taste, if they knew how. But left to themselves they take, not pure art, but showy art; not that which permanently relieves the eye and makes it happy whenever it looks, and as long as it looks, but glaring art which catches and arrests the eye for a moment, but which in the end fatigues it. But before the wholesome remedy of nature the fatigue-arrives, the hasty reader has passed on to some new excitement, which in its turn stimulates for an What, for example, is the career of instant, and then is passed by for ever. Louis Napoleon but a providential plaThese conditions are not favorable to giarism on that of Octavius Cæsar? The the due appreciation of pure art-of that most cursory recollection of our Merivale art which must be known before it is will bring up the coincidences, that both admired-which must have fastened ir- emperors rose to eminence from private revocably on the brain before you ap- stations, under the shadows of great preciate it which you must love ere it names, not their own; that, though both will seem worthy of your love. Women were essentially civilians, both reached too, whose voice in literature counts as the successions of military uncles and well as that of men-and in a light liter- the chieftainhoods of great military naature counts for more than that of mentions, by much the same arts and agenwomen, such as we know them, such as cies, after long intrigues and by very they are likely to be, ever prefer a deli- similar tenures of power, at kindred cate unreality to a true or firm art. A epochs as to faith and morals, over kindressy literature, an exaggerated litera- dred nations as to legal and social charture, seem to be fated to us. These are acteristics, and amid similar sources of our curses, as other times had theirs. strength and weakness. As we detect so extraordinary a reproduction of character and events in lives severed by thousands of years as to time, and thousands of miles as to place, with a whole Christian civilization between the two, how are our conceptions of the world's gov ernment altered, and how mean seem the

"And yet
Think not the living times forget.
Ages of heroes fought and fell,
That Homer in the end might tell;
O'er grovelling generations past
Upstood the Gothic fane at last;
And countless hearts in countless years

parts played by the most successful of the world's actors, compared with that mysterious law of event-the immediate guard of Providence-which seems to force great national movements into a few given grooves, and reduces all human flesh into the almost passive instrument of ends, shaped as little as possible like those which had been so painfully roughhewed by itself.

The young Augustus, when taking the first step in his extraordinary career, was brought in contact with a commonwealth already entered into the rapids of a new revolution, as enigmatic then as it became legible in characters of blood later. An aristocratic conspiracy had just laid low "the foremost man of all the world," and for an instant his friends "bent down, while bloody treason flourished over them." But if that "godlike stroke," as it has been called, avenged the traditional majesty of Roman right, it by no means restored it. In the utter darkness that came over the future, consternation took possession of every party and every leader of party. Antony disguised himself as a slave, and fled when no man pursued him. Brutus and his friends fortified themselves in the Capitol; and the senators and burgesses, even when not immediately concerned, did not dare to appear in public, to question each other on the next act in the drama. Like the mangled body itself, smuggled home by servants, in the night, supported on a broken litter, the State lay helpless and exanimate, shrouded in darkness, and under improvised carriage, at the hands of slaves, scared, more than pleased, at the death of a master.

The first surprise over, the mutual concessions, which a present or a proximate anarchy tends to extort, allowed the machinery of constitutional rule to get again into play, but the main power falling into the hands of the surviving consul, the debauched lieutenant of the dictator, it was soon made apparent that Antony meant to reserve the vacant succession for himself. Scarcely, on the one hand, had he directed the brands which had consumed Cæsar's body to the houses of the assassins, before he seized Amatius, a relative of the Cæsars and ardent supporter of their policy, and strangled him, with his principal followers, as traitors to the State. As the sickly youth of

eighteen heard, in his school at the other side of the Adriatic, of this betrayal of the Cæsarian policy by his uncle's best friend, and acquired the certainty that the statesman who wielded the executive power of the republic by that uncle's own appointment was using it against his nephew, he might well recall the great man's touching apostrophe to Brutus, and forecast, with an anxious heart, the journey he now decided on making to the capital. His friends expounded to him the uncertainties of popular favor, and the tragic contingencies of factious times, of which his own family had just furnished two memorable instances: they dilated on the reckless ambition of Antony, on the power of the senate, and the influence of the republican party, and he was made to feel that, in aspiring to so gigantic an inheritance, he was inviting against his own bosom every sword, and against his own peace every treachery which had been turned against his uncle's.

But, were these counsels as wise as they were specious, it was fated that the individual who was to be distinguished for his prudence above all other statesmen should pay them no heed now, in taking the most important step in his career. Influenced by principle, as the new chief of the great Marian party, influenced still more by feeling, as the heir of Cæsar's wrongs, he opposed to their reason the impulse and ascendancy of a fixed determination; and we are told. that his mother, charmed as well as amazed at a daring that seemed to her little less than inspired, allowed even her timidity to give way, and delivered him up to the career from which dated the imperial house of the Caesars, with these memorable words: "Go, my son; may the gods conduct thee whither thy high destiny calls thee: may they grant that I may soon see thee victorious over thy enemies!"

Could the veil of the future at that hour have been withdrawn, how would she have recoiled from the drama her words prolonged! How little she surmised that the time was near when the last matron that was to survive of her illustrious progeny, should be anxiously like her questioning a dark future on the destiny of its last offshoot, and that when told the terrible truth that her son, Nero, was to reign, but to reign her murderer,

should pronounce the response which like Horace-another friend of Augustus epitomizes the history of the Cæsars: the son of an enfranchised slave; and "Let him murder, but let him reign! "his uprise to the first offices in a State Yes, Attia, as thy son shall attain the essentially patrician, indicates that the destiny to which thou yieldest him, but revolution, in social relations, was even the republic that gave him birth be no greater than that which in the world of more, so Nero, the last of thy blood, shall politics, perhaps, only typified it. He ascend to empire, but Agrippina, his was, in the highest sense of the term, a mother, perish! The parricide that in- man of business, possessing with force augurates the rise of thy family shall fol- of character and natural courage that low them into their palaces, till it sing ready tact and intuitive good sense which the requiem of their fall! seems more like instinct than genius, but But though a calamity for the youth which, if less brilliant, is nearly always to be drawn into the furnace of faction, more successful. His straightforward he was in circumstances that made it the abilities were exactly of that class requirlaw of his existence, and left no substan-ed to complete the far-reaching policies tial imprudence in the determination. but over-subtle appliances of his young His high birth and higher adoption com- companion. pelled a career of greatness. He might have exclaimed with one to whom Shakspeare has given many like traits of character:

"The time is out of joint: O cursed spite,

That ever I was born to set it right”. for it was the fatality of the man and the hour, that he could not live for himself. The Cæsarian party, as if animated by the heroic genius of its founder, was nu merous, powerful, and, above all things, in earnest; and from every extremity of the empire its myriad voices were hourly inviting the orphaned nephew to take the place of honor at their head. Even as a paltry question of personal security, there was as much hope in a vigorous campaign as under the most secluded life of privacy. The heir of the tyrant could only know safety in the strong arms of the devoted partisans who were crowding around him their services. He had inherited, with the name, its eminence of glory or catastrophe; and dangerous as was the position of dictator, for him it was still more dangerous to be without it.

Brundisium, the first Italian station in their progress to Rome, stood to Epirus, where Agustus had been sojourning, as Boulogne to the coast of England; but instead of staking his fortunes on the chance of winning an enthusiastic reception from his uncle's legions, he cautiously landed with a few attendants at a neighboring village, and sent thence some agents to test the feelings of the inhabitants. The soldiery and people at once flocked to his encounter, and placed themselves and city at his disposition. The offer was tempting, but the young man moderated the enthusiasm of their zeal, by the assurance that, for the present, the safety of his person and of the common cause required that he should be considered a private person. He showed no anxiety to precipitate his arrival in Rome.* As a boy-statesman he had time which he could profitably lose in letting his birthright take further rootin habituating men to the idea that they had among them the heir of Cæsar-in feeling at his leisure the pulse of Romein mastering the state of its parties—in throwing out silently the filaments of that web which should inclose the scattered partisans of his house into an efficient

The responsibility, solemn for any man, was terrible for one so young; and ably as, for the most part, he discharged it, we must not so far lend ourselves to the ex-faction-and, most important of all, in aggerations of history, as to believe that he owed all to his own inspirations. By the appointment of his prescient uncle, he had near him at school the counsels of an able friend destined to aid him with rare fidelity through the vicissitudes of his future fortunes.

Marcus Agrippa, subsequently celebrated both as general and minister was

letting rival parties demonstrate their reckless impracticability in forcing the current of opinion to the chieftain whose hereditary title alone typified unity, order, conciliation, and authority. A few

* Cæsar's murder took place on the 15th of March; young Octavius reached there on the 27th of April.

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