Orleans, and either by stress of circumstances or a happy instinct entered on the oddly diversified career that in his novels he turned to such good account. Successively storekeeper and negrooverseer, schoolmaster and play-actor, hunter and sharpshooter in the Indian wars, he from time to time plunged into journalism; but in 1847 he took service in the United States army, and as lieutenant distinguished himself in the Mexican warespecially at the storming of Chapultepec, where he was so severely wounded that his life was despaired of, and he never completely recovered from his injuries. When convalescent he began his first novel, The Rifle Rangers (published 1850). But in 1849, a United States captain, he came to Europe to offer his sword to the Hungarian revolutionists. Finding that the revolutionary movement had already been crushed, he established himself in or near London and embarked on the business of novelwriting; and this was henceforward the work of his life, varied only by unlucky building speculations and three years' journalistic enterprise in New York.

Ebenezer Jones (1820-60) was born at Islington, of a Welsh family, and was bred a Calvinist. In 1837 he was forced by his father's long illness to turn clerk in a City warehouse; his hours were from eight to eight six days a week. But long ere this he had been writing verses, and now he was powerfully stimulated by influences so various as those of Shelley, Carlyle, and Robert Owen. In 1843 he published his Studies of Sensation and Event, poems amazingly unequal, crude, eccentric,

and faulty, or even at times 'excruciatingly bad,' yet full of the very essence of poetry,' as was ultimately recognised by Browning and Rossetti. But at the time-spite of kindly encouragement from Bryan Waller and Hengist HorneJones saw his work was rejected by the world, and he published no more, save

a pamphlet on the Land Monopoly (1849), which anticipated Henry George by thirty years in proposing to nationalise the land; and three powerful poems, 'To the Snow,' 'To Death,' and 'When the world is burning,' not long before his death. He lived by professional work as an accountant. In 1844 he had married a niece of Edwin Atherstone (see page 146), but the marriage brought only misery and a separation. See three articles by Mr Watts-Dunton in the Athenæum (1878), and two notices by Sumner Jones (Ebenezer's elder brother, himself a poet) and W. J. Linton prefixed to a reprint of the Studies (1879).

His last years he spent at Ross in Herefordshire. In a long succession of novels-well over thirty in number-he utilised to the full the strangely varied adventures of his own early career. His vigorous style and the profusion of daring feats, perils, hairbreadth escapes, and romantic episodes riveted the attention of two or three generations of young readers. His romances are lacking in artistic form, but at times he attained to high excellence in narrative style and in description of scenery and character. Among the best known of his stories (in which he sometimes at least took Fenimore Cooper as model) are The Scalp Hunters (1851), The Boy Hunters (1852), The Young Voyageurs (1853), The War Trail (1857), The Maroon (1862), The Headless Horseman (1866), The Castaways (1870), and The Free Lances (1881). Many of these tales were translated into French and German.

Mayne Reid found time to write also books on natural history for boys and on croquet. The Memoir published by his widow in 1890 was in 1900 expanded into a full record of his life and adventures.

John Tulloch (1823-86), born at Bridge of Earn, studied at St Andrews and Edinburgh, and after holding charges in Dundee and elsewhere, was in 1854 appointed Principal and Professor of Divinity in St Mary's College, St Andrews. In 1879-80 he was the editor of Fraser. He wrote on theism, on the Reformation and its leaders (1859 and 1861), on Pascal, on sin, and on modern religious thought (1884-85). But his principal work was Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century (1872; new ed. 1886), a standard authority. Mrs Oliphant wrote his Life (1888).

Philip James Bailey.

Philip James Bailey (1816-1902), poet, was born at Nottingham on 22nd April 1816. His father, Thomas Bailey, owned and edited the Nottingham Mercury from 1845 to 1852. Educated at various schools in his native town, in 1831 he matriculated at Glasgow University, which in 1901 conferred on him the degree of LL.D. In 1836 he settled at Basford, just out of Nottingham, and devoted himself to the production of his masterpiece, Festus, which was published anonymously by William Pickering in 1839. In 1840 he was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, but he never practised. In 1856 he received a Civil List pension of £100. From 1864 to 1876 he lived in Jersey, travelling from time to time in Switzerland, France, and Italy. Returning to England, he resided near Ilfracombe till 1885, when he moved to Blackheath. In his later years he lived in retirement with his wife, whose death in 1896, after a union of thirty-three years, tried him sorely. On 6th September 1902, at the age of eighty-six, he died at his house in the Ropewalk, Nottingham. He was never in close touch with literary circles, though about 1870 he was sometimes present at Westland Marston's symposia, where Rossetti, Swinburne, 'Orion' Horne, and other celebrities were wont to meet. He was sweet, gentle, and rather timid in nature. Superbly handsome in physique and countenance, he rivalled Tennyson in the art of looking like a poet.

No poem like Festus has ever been written by a boy of twenty. It is a miracle of mature immaturity. Its vogue was almost Byronic. Twelve editions have been issued in England, and over thirty in America. The poem was praised by Tennyson, Thackeray, Bulwer Lytton, and other eminent men. 'I can scarcely trust myself,' wrote Tennyson, 'to say how much I admire it, for fear of falling into extravagance.' The success of Festus stereotyped Bailey's poetic impulse, which was wasted in vain attempts to imitate himself. The Angel World (1850), The Mystic (1855), The Age (1858; a weak satire), and The Universal Hymn (1867) failed. The poet rashly tried to propitiate oblivion by incorporating 'The Angel World' and portions of the other poems in later editions of Festus. The result was disastrous. A new generation recoiled in dismay from a philosophical poem of over forty thousand lines, and Festus joined the limbo of books that are revered unread. If the poem is to recapture its first fame, its earlier and better form must be restored.

Festus is a variant of that Faust legend which has haunted literature since its birth in the Book of Job. It owes little to Goethe or to Marlowe ; their Fausts are incarnations of pessimism, Festus is an incarnation of optimism. It has been called an epic drama, but although it is divided into fifty-two scenes, the action is epic rather than dramatic. The sublimity of its action equals, and

its moral altitude surpasses, other epics. Modern thought sees far beyond the spiritual horizon of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Milton. Their poetry is imperishable; much of their morality is outworn. Festus presents a loftier view of God and Man than any other world-poem. In it deity is more humane and humanity more divine. It adumbrates a prophetic ideal of a divine humanity which will ultimately transmute all evil into all good. Doomsman of time, Festus impersonates the destiny of humanity, moving through cycles of sin and suffering towards that harmony with itself which is harmony with the Infinite. Lucifer,

who guides him through the universe of sensation, is not the more conventional fiend of Marlowe or of Goethe, but a subtle symbol of the evil that is half good and the good that is half evil. The action sweeps through celestial, terrestrial, and infernal space towards its stupendous culmination, the apotheosis of Festus, the last man, whose attainment of spiritual sovereignty is the signal for the end of all things. Magnificent is the passage in which Festus describes the withering of the world:

The earth is breaking up, all things are thawing,
River and mountain melt into their atoms;

A little time and atoms will be all.
The sea boils, and the mountains rise and sink
Like marble bubbles bursting into death.

O thou Hereafter, on whose shore I stand,
Waiting each toppling moment to engulf me,
What am I? Say, thou Present; say, thou Past,
Ye three wise children of Eternity!
A life, a death, and an immortal? all?
Is this the threefold mystery of man?
The lower darker Trinity of earth?

'Tis vain to ask. Nought answers me, not God.
The air grows thick and dark. The sky comes down.
The sun draws round him streaky clouds, like God
Gleaning up wrath. Hope hath leapt off my heart,
Like a false sibyl, fear-smote, from her seat,
And overturned it. I am bound to die. . . .
God, why wilt thou not save? The great round world
Hath wasted to a column 'neath my feet.
I'll hurl me off it, then, and search the depth
Of space in this one infinite plunge. Farewell

To earth and heaven and God. Doom, spread thy lap,
I come, I come. But no, may God forbear
To judge the tempted purpose of my heart.
Me hath he stablished here, and he will save,
And I can smile destruction in the face.
Let his strong hand compress the marble world,
And wring the starry fire-blood from its heart,
Still on this earth-core I rejoice in God,
I know him and believe in him as Love,
And this divinest truth he hath inspired,
Mercy to man is justice to himself. . . .
Open thine arms, O death, thou fine of woe
And warranty of bliss. I feel the last

Red mountainous remnant of the earth give way.
The stars are rushing upwards to the light,

My limbs are light and liberty is mine.

The spirit's infinite purity consumes
The sullied soul. Eternal destiny
Opens its bright abyss. I am God's.

Judged solely and separately by the moral and spiritual grandeur of its imaginative conception, Festus is not inferior to any other epic. Issuing with volcanic intensity out of the fiery heart of youth, it moves majestically amid the stars. The poet, unlike Antæus, falters only when he touches earth. It is in the more familiar scenes that his genius flags. Youth is not ripely humorous or nobly patient, and in the frantic haste of his feverish toil, Bailey failed to fuse all the episodes and incidents, characters and conceptions, into a lucid and harmonious whole. In architectonic symmetry Festus is as far below the great epics as it is above them in imaginative conception. Bailey knew better than he built. His soul outran his hand; his imagination outsoared his technique. The poem lacks not only the vaster rhythms and deeper harmonies, but it is full of minor technical flaws. Metrical irregularities abound ; the lyrical interludes are feeble; many of the characters are shadowy. The amorous ratiocinations of Festus, Angela, Clara, Helen, and Elissa mar the austerity of the theme. Doubtless they are meant to show the regenerative nobility of womanhood, but this platonic parliament of platonic loves brings a breath of incongruity into the severe heroism of the action. Nevertheless, in spite of its manifold defects, Festus stands unchallengeably among the great spiritual epics of the world. Its profound significance will be gradually perceived as religion emerges from the mists and morasses of mechanical theologies, for it foreshadows the only Christian philosophy which can endure. Bailey, indeed, was far in advance of

his time and of our time. His mystical optimism is equally repugnant to scientific and to religious materialism; but as science and religion abandon their unreal antagonisms for common and coordinated research in the unexplored field of spiritual experience, his imaginative solution of the problem of life will find a juster evaluation. Like all possible solutions, it is and must always be a splendid hypothesis; but until a still more magnificent hypothesis be evolved, it will be supreme.

In the realm of absolute poetry Festus has never been adequately appraised. It occupies a lonely pinnacle whose altitude has not yet been measured by a comparative criticism which is apt to overvalue purely literary skill and purely technical virtuosity. What is Bailey's place in Victorian literature? In our judgment, not far below Tennyson and Browning. At its best, his blank verse is as fine as any since Marlowe or since Milton. His imaginative energy is of the first order. He sees in flashing symbols; he thinks in thunder and lightning. His passionate mind pours out mighty torrents of majestic imagery. An artificer of terse phrase and gnomic epigram, his incandescent style is shaped by the powerfully wielded hammer of his imagination on the iron anvil of his thought. In his work there are faint vestiges of Miltonic and Shakespearian influence, his lyrics are debased by Byronisms, but of other poets there is barely an echo. On the other hand, many poets, both contemporary and posterior, dead and living, great and small, have borrowed from Bailey. Festus is a vast quarry of poetry out of which many a block has been and will be hewn; and although its author is not yet numbered by literary pundits among the great poets of the nineteenth century, it is certain that a critic will arise, or soon or late, to do for him what Addison did for Milton. In the meantime, this brief estimate may help to broaden the basis of a reputation hitherto perilously poised on the sliding sands of religious whim.

The best passages in Festus are too long to be quoted here, and too fine to be mutilated; but the quality of its poetry may be shown by a few characteristic lines:

The visionary landscapes of the skies,
The golden capes far stretching into heaven.
It was the rush of God's world-winnowing wing.
Earth heaves with tomblets as the sea with waves.
Love's heart turns sometimes faint, like a sick pearl
Why, deathling, wilt thou long for heaven?
Lips like rosebuds peeping out of snow.
Nought happens but what happens to oneself.
A wreck
Whose board scarce floats flush with the face of death.
The dreamy struggles of the stars with light.

To most man's life but showed A bridge of groans across a stream of tears.

God's hand hath scooped the hollow of the world.
I feel death blowing hard at the lamp of life.
Art is man's nature, nature is God's art.

Like autumn's leaves distained with dusky gold.
To live like light or die in light like dew.
Drowned lands and verdurous meadows submarine.
And age but presses with a halo's weight.

It is the sun,

God's crest upon his azure shield, the heavens.
Loaded with golden rain of annual stars.
The heavens grow darker as they purer grow.
Time's sun, declining down the eternal skies,
Leaves his last shining shadow upon the sea.

Bailey's blank verse often reaches a serene spontaneity of verbal beauty. In such passages as Lucifer's address to Night, the large rhythm moves on the surface of the thought as the waves move on the surface of the sea:

Night comes, world-jewelled, as my bride should be.
Start forth the stars in myriads at the sign
Of light, divine usurper, as to wage
War with the lines of darkness; and the moon,
Pale ghost of light, comes haunting the cold earth
After the sun's red sea-death, quietless.
Immortal Night, I love thee. Thou and I
Are of one strain, the eldest blood of God.

He makes, we mar, together, all things, all
But our own selves.

The poem marches with spacious strides through a dazzling pageant of symbol and simile, massively epic in its grandeur :

As when by sunset hues
Invited, some fair falcon, whose broad eye
Mirrors the welkin, through air's shadowy blue
Wheeling with wing unwavering, every plume
Stretched tense, 'mid sky serenely balanced, calls
Forth from his eyrie, crown of sea-faced crag,
Her mightier mate; these twain each other now
In unconceived ellipse, curve following curve,
Redoubled rainbow-like, outsweep; thrice o'er
Snatch from ambition's touch the zenith: mock
With playful fall the expectant earth; now, thwart,
In arbitrary and intercircling flights,
Their mutual orbits emulous; this below
Echoing the other's cry on high, till heaven
Closes, by hint of stars, the rapt contest.

The whole range of poetic vision is found in Festus. The audacity of the theme would be ridiculous were it not made sublime by the most solemn, the most sombre, and the most tremendous images, swift, simple, concrete, concentrated, direct. The dream of Festus is an impassioned Up we flew

and piercing fantasy:

Sheer through the shining air, far past the sun's
Broad blazing disk;-past where the great, great snake
Binds in his bright coil half the host of heaven ;-
Past that great sickle saved for one day's work
When he who sowed shall reap creation's field ;-
Past those bright diademed orbs which show to man

His crown to come; up through the starry strings
Of that high harp close by the feet of God,
Which he, methought, took up and struck, till heaven
In love's immortal madness rang and reeled;
The stars fell on their faces, and far off

The wild world halted, shook his burning mane,
Then, like a fresh-blown trumpet-blast, went on,
Or like a god gone mad. On, on we flew,

I and the spirit, far beyond all things

Of measure, motion, time, and aught create,

Where the stars stood on the edge of the first nothing,
And looked each other in the face and fled ;—
Past even the last long starless void, to God;
Whom straight I heard, methought, commanding thus:
Immortal, I am God. Hie back to earth
And say to all that God doth say-love God !

Lucifer. God visits men a-dreaming : I, awake. Festus. And my dream changed to one of general doom.

Wilt hear it?

Lucifer. Ay, say on. 'Tis but a dream. Festus. God made all mind and motion cease, and lo! The whole was death and peace. An endless time Obtained in which the power of all made failed. God bade the worlds to judgment and they came, Pale, trembling, corpse-like. To the souls therein Then spake the Maker: deathless spirits, rise! And straight they thronged around the throne. His arm The Almighty then uplift, and smote the worlds Once, and they fell in fragments like to spray And vanished in their native void. He shook The stars from heaven like raindrops from a bough, Like tears they poured adown creation's face. Spirit and space were all things. Matter, death, And time left nought, not even a wake, to tell Where once their track o'er being.

Magnificent, too, is the pæan which Festus chants to the sun :

Shepherd of worlds and harmonist of heaven,
The music of whose golden lyre is light.

The holiest mystery of poetic magic trembles in such lines as these:

Jewels are baubles only, whether pearls

From the sea's lightless depths, or diamonds
Culled from the mountain's crown, or chrysolith,
Cat's-eye, or moonstone, or hot carbuncle,
That, from the bed of Eden's sunniest stream
Extracted, lamped the ark, what time the roar
Of lions pining for their free sands smote
The hungry darkness.

Not even Shakespeare confronted the irony of existence with a more august regard :

Long we live thinking nothing of our fate,
For in the morn of life we mark it not,
It falls behind: but as our day goes down
We catch it lengthening with a giant's stride,
And ushering us unto the feet of night.

Not even Milton carved sterner thoughts in more adamantine phrase than the inspired singer who sang of

Men who walk up to fame as to a friend,

Or their own house, which from the wrongful heir They have wrested, from the world's hard hand and

gripe,

Men who, like death, all bone and all unarmed,
Have ta'en the giant world by the throat and thrown
him,

And made him swear to maintain their name and fame
At peril of his life; who shed great thoughts
As easily as an oak looseneth its golden leaves
In a kindly largesse to the soil it grew on;

Whose names are ever on the world's broad tongue,
Like sound upon the falling of a force;
Whose words, if winged, are with angel's wings;
Who play upon the heart as on a harp,

And make our eyes bright as we speak of them;
Whose hearts have a look southwards, and are open
To the whole noon of nature; these I have waked
And wept o'er night by night, oft pondering thus :
Homer is gone; and where is Jove? and where
The rival cities seven? His song outlives
Time, tower, and god-all that then was, save heaven.
Not even Wordsworth has surpassed the heavy
beauty of the four glamour-laden words into which
Bailey pours the cosmic romance of the soul:

The rich star-travelled stranger.

Not even Dante forged imaginative utterance more fierily poignant than the simple words in which Festus, with sword-like pathos, addresses the spirit of his Beatrice :

Immortal, from thine eye

Wipe out the tear of time.

And where in all poetry can we find a more tremulously ecstatic sob of love than this?—

Come to the light, love. Let me look on thee.
Let me make sure I have thee. Is it thou?
Is this thy hand? Are these thy velvet lips,
Thy lips so lovable? Nay, speak not yet,
For oft, as I have dreamed of thee, it was
Thy speaking woke me. I will dream no more.
Am I alive? And do I really look
Upon these soft and sea-blue eyes of thine,
Wherein I half believe I can espy

The riches of the sea? Nay, heavenly hued,

As though they had gained from gazing on the skies Their high and starry beauty. These dark rolled locks!

Oh God, art thou not glad, too, he is here? Shimmering with romantic innuendo, these lines are the very voice of love, uttering an ecstasy of sobbing joy and trembling rapture that suddenly flames into a glory of divine invocation transcendently daring in its triumphant egoism. The angels in Festus are mystically incorporeal :

Light as a leaf they step, or the arrowy
Footing of breeze upon a waveless pool,
Sudden and soft, too, like a waft of light,
The beautiful immortals come to me.

Often the poet chisels out of verbal marble a subtle beauty that rivals the rhythmic curves of plastic art. Here is a statue of death which a Michelangelo could hardly better:

Behold there Death! Throned on his tomb, entombed in his throne, Just as he ceased he rests for aye; his scythe

Still wet out of his bloody swath, one hand
Tottering sustains, the other strikes the cold
Drops from his bony brow; his mouldy breath
Tainteth all air.

Another nuance of visionary glamour glimmers in this ravishing nightscape:

Eve came, the dewy night stole forth dim-veiled,
Arcturus, heavenly oxherd, bowed his knee
Star-cusped, upon the hill, as though with all
His worlds he worshipped God, his conquering head
Bowed 'neath the orb-gemmed crown, hollow with
heaven,

God o'er him holds as one who had striven with God,
And gained the day o'er deity.

And yet another in this magical symphony of gloom :

Wave

On wave of darkness, like the shadowy tides
Of that tenebrous sea which billowing breaks
Soundless on lunar promontories.

The poet brandishes the bright sword of optimism in the procession of mortality:

Life's more than breath and the quick round of blood, 'Tis a great spirit and a busy heart;

The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.
One generous feeling, one great thought, one deed
Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem
Than if each year might number a thousand days,
Spent as is this by nations of mankind.

We live in deeds, not years, in thought, not breaths,
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most, feels the noblest, acts the best.
Life's but a means unto an end, that end,
To those who dwell in Him, He most in them,
Beginning, mean, and end of all things, God.
The dead have all the glory of the world.
Why will we live and not be glorious?
We never can be deathless till we die.

It is the dead win battles, and the breath
Of those who through the world drive like a wedge,
Tearing earth's empires up, nears death so close
It dims his well-worn scythe. But no, the brave
Die never. Being deathless, they but change
Their country's arms, for more, their country's heart.
Give then the dead their due: 'tis they who saved us,
Saved us from woe and want and servitude.
The rapid and the deep, the fall, the gulph,
Have likenesses in feeling and in life,
And life so varied hath more loveliness
In one day, than a creeping century
Of sameness.

The heroically youthful optimism of Festus falls like a snowflake on the feverish lips of the modern pessimist. It rejects the superstitious creeds of cynicism and the blind dogmas of materialism, affirming that life is lifeworthy, being an endless pursuit of an eternal ideal by everlasting runners:

Star on star the heavens fulfil Their issue, and truth quickens here the soul Dipped in substantial lighting of the sun Spiritual, and with the eternal saving saved.

JAMES DOUGLAS.