to building a missionary college in New Zealand. Miss Yonge published several historical works (including eight volumes of Cameos from English History); books on military commanders, good women, and golden deeds; a work on Christian Names (1863); a Life of Bishop Patteson (1873); and a monograph on Hannah More (1888), with whom she had so much in common. An illustrated edition of her more popular novels was issued in 1888-89 in thirty-five volumes. There is a Life of her by Miss Christabel Coleridge (1903).

Mrs Craik (1826-87) was better known by her maiden name of Dinah Maria Mulock, and better still as 'the author of John Halifax, Gentleman! The daughter of a Nonconformist minister of Irish extraction, she was born at Stoke-upon-Trent ;

MRS CRAIK.

From the Portrait by Hubert Herkomer, R.A., by permission of Mr G. L. Craik.

but, settling in London at twenty, she published in succession a series of stories for the young, of which Cola Monti was the best known, and then The Ogilvies (1849), Olive (1850), The Head of the Family (1851), and Agatha's Husband (1853). She never surpassed or even equalled her John Halifax, Gentleman (1857), a story of middle-class English life; her ideal, a generous, high-minded man, carried about with him an old Greek Testament, in which, after an ancestor's name, was the epitheton 'gentleman'-to John a motto, a talisman, a charter, imposing on him truth, honour, fidelity, and purity. The story was eminently popular at home, and was erelong translated into French, German, Italian, Greek, and Russian. A pension (1864) of £60 she set aside for authors less fortunate than herself; in 1864 she married Mr George Lillie Craik, a partner in the publishing house of Macmillan, and spent the rest of her

life in quiet happiness and literary industry at Corner House, Shortlands, Kent. Much of Mrs Craik's verse is collected in Thirty Years Poems (1881). Avillion, and other Tales, contained some of her most imaginative work. She produced in all nearly fifty works-more than a score of novels, including A Life for a Life, Mistress and Maid, and Christian's Mistake; and several volumes of prose essays, such as A Woman's Thoughts about Women (1858) and Concerning Men, and other Papers (1888).

Eliza Lynn Linton (1822-98) was born at Keswick, a daughter of the Rev. James Lynn, vicar of Crosthwaite. She did not get on with her family, and at the age of twenty-three left home and settled in London as a woman of letters, publishing her first novel, Azeth the Egyptian, in 1846. In 1858 she married william James Linton (1812-98), an eminent wood-engraver and zealous Chartist, and also something of a poet and man of letters, who edited Republican papers and wrote (besides many pamphlets and occasional verses) The Plaint of Freedom (a remarkable poem; 1852), Claribel, and other Poems (1865), an important work on The Masters of WoodEngraving (1890), and Lives of Tom Paine and J. G. Whittier. He prepared the illustrations for the volume on The Lake Country which she wrote, and published in 1864; but in 1867 they separated, Linton going to America and settling at New Haven in Connecticut, while his wife remained in England and made literature her career. She produced about a score of novels, of which the most notable are The True History of Joshua Davidson (1872), a daring and striking adaptation of the gospel story to modern conditions; Patricia Kemball (1874); Christopher Kirkland (1885); and The One Too Many (1894). She wrote much for the magazines and reviews, and her Girl of the Period' articles in the Saturday were collected in 1883. In her latter years she showed herself an equally caustic critic of the 'new woman.' A rather masculine temper, a strong confidence of opinion, and a faculty of vigorous utterance were among her characteristics.

See her autobiography, My Literary Life (1899), and George Somes Layard's Elisa Lynn Linton: her Life, Letters, and Opinions (1901). Her husband wrote a volume of autobiographical Memories (1895).

Frances Power Cobbe was born at Newbridge' near Dublin on the 4th December 1822, the daughter of a county gentleman and magistrate, and went to school at Brighton. Her interest being early aroused in theological questions, she found spiritual guidance in Theodore Parker's works and lost her faith in the Trinity, but said nothing of her heresies to vex her invalid mother. When after her mother's death she revealed her change of view to her father, he banished her from home for a time, and never till his death quite forgave her, even though she was allowed to keep house for him. Her first published work, in

1855, was an Essay on the Intuitive Theory of Morals, published anonymously, which created a good deal of controversy; but none of her critics suspected the author to be a woman. After her father's death in 1857 she travelled in Italy and the East, wrote Cities of the Past (1864) and Italics (1864), and engaged in philanthropic and reformatory work with Miss Carpenter at Bristol. She began to write for the magazines, and ere long was a busy journalist, being from 1868 to 1875 leader-writer for the Echo. A strong Theist, a supporter of women's rights, a strong social reformer in all directions, and a prominent antivivisectionist, she published more than thirty works, among them Friendless Girls (1861); Criminals, Idiots, Women, and Minors (1869); Darwinism in Morals (1872); The Hopes of the Human Race Hereafter and Here (1874); Re-echoes (1876); The Peak in Darien (1882); The Scientific Spirit of the Age (1888); and an Autobiography (1894). In spite of her many controversies, she had a happy life, being at all times optimist in her views of life and buoyant in temperament. She knew most of the people best worth knowing in her time, was on kindly terms with people of the most various faiths and political views, and was only irreconcilably bitter against vivisectionists of all shades of opinion. She bestowed more care on the substance of her arguments than on polishing her style, and thought more of the effect she could produce in abating social evils than in securing fame as an authoress. But she had the pen of a ready, copious, earnest, and effective writer.

Mrs Oliphant (1828-97), till her marriage in 1852 Margaret Oliphant Wilson, was born at Wallyford near Musselburgh in Midlothian. Her father's business took him to Glasgow and ultimately to Liverpool, where he held a post in the Customs; and her education was in nowise specially adapted to a life of letters. But she early cherished literary ambitions and made literary experiments. In 1849 she published her first work, Passages in the Life of Mrs Margaret Maitland, which instantly won attention and approval by the tender humour and insight of its presentation of Scottish life and character on both their higher and lower levels. This work was followed by Caleb Field (1850), Merkland (1850), Adam Graeme (1852), Harry Muir (1853), Magdalen Hepburn (1854), Lilliesleaf, and Katie Stewart, which, like three others, appeared in succession in Blackwood's Magazine, with which the authoress had formed a life-long connection. These stories are of varying merit, but are all rich in the minute detail dear to the womanly mind, show nice and subtle apprehension of character, and have a flavour of quiet fun; they often display a charming delicacy in the treatment of the gentler emotions.

Meanwhile she had for a while been in London looking after a brother, and in 1852 she married a cousin, Francis Wilson Oliphant, a designer of

stained glass windows. His health was feeble; in 1859 he was far gone in consumption, and he died at Rome before the end of that year, leaving her not merely unprovided for but deep in debt. She addressed herself bravely to her life-workthenceforward a continuous embarrassed struggle, complicated by her generosity to an unfortunate brother and his children, and her amazing and reckless determination to give her sons the best (and most expensive) education Eton and Oxford could provide. She also considered it her duty or her privilege to live in something like luxury and to dispense an almost lavish hospitality; and

it was only on the posthumous publication of her autobiography that her friends and the public knew what anxious, monotonous toil was daily demanded from the gracious mistress of what seemed an affluent household. Her daughter died in 1864; her two sons, who lived on her labours, both predeceased her; but her last years still found her hard at work as ever, writing with almost undiminished vivacity and energy.

Her early novels had been well received, and had secured a market for all she wrote. But it was by the Chronicles of Carlingford (published in Blackwood's, 1861-65) that her reputation as a novelist was established; the most notable of the series, Salem Chapel, perhaps indicates a wider and more vigorous grasp than is to be found in any other of her works. Certain of the unlovelier

features of English dissent, as exhibited in a small provincial community, are here graphically sketched, and adapted with admirable skill to the purposes of fiction. The Carlingford' series comprised The Perpetual Curate and Miss Marjoribanks; Phœbe Junior, in 1876, was a continuation. The long series of her novels included Madonna Mary (1866), The Primrose Path, He that Will Not when he May, The Ladies Lindores, The Wizard's Son, Hester, and Kirsteen (1890), and, if we consider the circumstances under which they were produced, maintained a surprisingly high and equal level.

In some respects she touched a deeper note in A Beleaguered City (1880), based on a legend of a city besieged by the dead, and A Little Pilgrim : in the Unseen (1882), both of which revealed a mystical element in an otherwise rather matterof-fact temper, little disturbed by philosophising or speculative profundity. Her lives of Edward Irving, of her cousin Laurence Oliphant, and of Principal Tulloch were sympathetic studies, though not great biographies; her sketch of Sheridan in the 'Men of Letters' series was unsympathetic and an obvious failure. Other contributions to general literature, marred by want of thoroughness though often containing interesting suggestions, were Historical Sketches of the Reign of George II. (1869); St Francis of Assisi (1871); Memoir of the Comte de Montalembert (1872); The Makers of Florence (1876); Dress (1878); The Literary History of England, from 1790 to 1825 (1882); The Makers of Venice (1888); Dante and Cervantes in 'Foreign Classics for English Readers,' and Chalmers in another series; Royal Edinburgh (1890); The Reign of Queen Anne (1894); The Makers of Modern Rome (1895); Jeanne d'Arc (1896); The Two Brontës (1897); besides a child's history of Scotland (1896), and a history of the publishing house of Blackwood (2 vols. 1897-the third completing volume being by another hand).

She wrote too rapidly and she wrote too much. Having a strong natural gift of story-telling, she wrote easily, with a running pen, in a simple, plain, conversational style, not without a certain vigour of her own and frequent felicities of phrase. But she took no pains with her style, did not pause to amend her clumsiest sentences, and evidently did not realise the beauty and power of well-ordered, compact, rhythmical clauses, sentences, and paragraphs. Taking novels and other works together, she is computed to have produced upwards of a hundred and twenty separate publications in some two hundred and fifty volumes; and she has paid the inevitable penalty. Salem Chapel and the Beleaguered City are still current literature; Magdalen Hepburn, The Perpetual Curate, and Miss Marjoribanks and one or two others of her stories, are not yet forgotten; on much of her work oblivion already scatters its poppy. She had little joy in her work, no love for her own inventions; and accordingly she took up with equal willingness

tasks in miscellaneous literature for which she was all too slenderly equipped. She as readily undertook books on Sheridan as on Dante, on Jerusalem as on Florence. And the result shows that she had neither historical grasp nor critical insight; lacking original familiarity with the subjects, she could not atone for the defect by patient study, acuteness, and vivacity of presentation. But her inexhaustible fertility, her command of humour and pathos, her mastery of multitudinous details, are illustrated in all her novels, which, spite of defects, have often an indisputable interest and charm.

The Convert's Wife.

'Oh, Frank, I am so glad you are come!' said Louisa through her tears. 'I felt sure you would come when you got my letter. Your father thinks I make a fuss about nothing, and Cuthbert and Guy do nothing but laugh at me, as if they could possibly know; but you always understand me, Frank. I knew it was just as good as sending for a brother of my own; indeed better,' said Mrs Wentworth, wiping her eyes; 'for though Gerald is using me so badly, I would not expose him out of his own family, or have people making remarks-oh, not for the world!'

'Expose him!' said the Curate, with unutterable astonishment. You don't mean to say you have any complaint to make about Gerald?' The idea was so preposterous that Frank Wentworth laughed; but it was not a laugh pleasant to hear.

'Oh, Frank, if you but knew all,' said Louisa: 'what I have had to put up with for months-all my best feelings outraged, and so many things to endure that were dreadful to think of. And I that was always brought up so differently; but now,' cried the poor little woman, bursting into renewed tears, 'it's come to such a pass that it can't be concealed any longer. I think it will break my heart; people will be sure to say I have been to blame; and how I am ever to hold up my head in society, and what is to be my name, and whether I am to be considered a widow'—

'A widow' cried the Perpetual Curate, in utter consternation.

dis

'Or worse,' sobbed Gerald's poor little wife: 'it feels like being divorced-as if one had done something wrong; and I am sure I never did anything to deserve it; but when your husband is a Romish priest,' cried the afflicted woman, pressing her handkerchief to her eyes, I would just ask anybody what are you? You can't be his wife, because he is not allowed to have any wife; and you can't go back to your maiden name, because of the children; and how can you have any place in society? Oh, Frank, I think I shall go tracted,' said poor Louisa; 'it will feel as if one had done something wicked, and been put out of the pale. How can I be called Mrs Wentworth any more when my husband has left me? and even if he is a priest, and can't have any wife, still he will be alive, and I shall not have the satisfaction of being a widow even. I am sure I don't know what I say,' she concluded, with a fresh outburst; for to be a widow would be a poor satisfaction, and I don't know how I could ever, ever live without Gerald; but to feel as if you were an improper person, and all the children's prospects in life!—Oh, Frank!' cried the weeping Louisa, burying

her face in her handkerchief, I think I shall go distracted, and my heart will break.'

To all this strange and unexpected revelation the startled Curate listened like a man in a dream. Possibly his sister-in-law's representation of this danger, as seen entirely from her own point of view, had a more alarming effect upon him than any other statement of the case. He could have gone into Gerald's difficulties with so much sympathy and fellow-feeling that the shock would have been trifling in comparison; and between Rome and the highest level of Anglicanism there was no such difference as to frighten the accustomed mind of the Curate of St Roque's. But, seen from Louisa's side, matters appeared very different: here the foundations of the earth were shaking, and life itself going to pieces; even the absurdity of her distress made the whole business more real; and the poor little woman, whose trouble was that she herself would neither be a wife nor a widow, had enough of truth on her side to unfold a miserable picture to the eyes of the anxious spectator. He did not know what answer to make to her; and perhaps it was a greater consolation to poor Louisa to be permitted to run on

And you know it never needed to have come to this

to me? I can't call myself Miss Leighton again, after being married so long; and if I am not his wife, what shall I be?' Her crying became hysterical as she came back to this point; and Mr Wentworth sat by her trying to soothe her, as wretched as herself.

(From The Perpetual Curate.)

Mrs Oliphant's Autobiography and Letters was published in 1899.

Frederick Tennyson (1807-98) was eldest of the nest of singing-birds in the Lincolnshire rectory of Somersby, and from Eton passed to Trinity College, Cambridge. He travelled much on the Continent, spent nearly twenty years of his life at Florence, found a wife in the daughter of the chief magistrate at Siena, and from 1859 till within two years of his death lived in Jersey. With his brothers Charles and Alfred he was one of the authors of the so-called Poems by Two Brothers; but he shrank from authorship and from criticism, and did not till 1854 publish anything in his own name. Days and Hours, a collection of lyrics, was praised by Charles Kingsley for its luxuriant fancy, terseness, scholar

her tears, and with a tone of remonstrance.

'Of course it is a family living, and it is not likely his own father would have made any disturbance; and there is no other family in the parish but the Skipwiths, and they are great friends, and never would have said a word. He might have preached in six surplices if he had liked,' cried poor Louisa-' who would have minded? And as for confession, and all that, I don't believe there is anybody in the world who had done any wrong that could have helped confessing to Gerald; he is so good -oh, Frank, you know he is so good!' said the exasperated little wife, overcome with fondness and admiration and impatience, and there is nobody in the parish that I ever heard of that does not worship him; but when I tell him so, he never pays the least attention. And then Edward Plumstead and he go on talking about subscription, and signing articles, and nonsense, till they make my head swim. Nobody, I am sure, wants Gerald to subscribe or sign articles. I am sure I would subscribe any amount,' cried the poor little woman, once more falling into tears-‘a thousand pounds if I had it, Frank-only to make him hear reason; for why should he leave Wentworth, where he can do what he likes, and nobody will interfere with him? The Bishop is an old friend of my father's, and I am sure he never would say anything; and as for candles and crosses and-anything he pleases, Frank'

Here poor Louisa paused, and put her hand on his arm, and looked up wistfully into his face. She wanted to convince herself that she was right, and that the faltering dread she had behind all this, of something more mysterious than candles or crosses-something which she did not attempt to understand-was no real spectre after all. Oh, Frank, I am sure I never would oppose him, nor your father, nor anybody; and why should he go and take some dreadful step, and upset everything?' said Mrs Wentworth. Oh, Frank! we will not even have enough to live upon; and as for me, if Gerald leaves me, how shall I ever hold up my head again, or how will anybody know how to behave

were somewhat freely criticised as diffuse. The too sensitive or irritable poet-overshadowed, like Charles, by Alfred's fame-now kept silence till 1890, when he published The Isles of Greece, an epic dealing with Sappho. Daphne (1891) contained 'tender and beautiful idyls;' and Poems of the Day and Night (1895) reproduced some pieces from the earlier Days and Hours. Frederick has no little share of his greater brother's imagination and power, as many splendid passages in his Greek Legends and in his shorter poems show. But he lacked that power to concentrate and construct which goes to the making of a consummate artist. A temporary adhesion to Swedenborgianism and spiritualism is reflected in some of his poems.

Charles Tennyson Turner (1808-79), second son of the Tennyson house, went to school at Louth, graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1832, and became vicar of Grasby in Lincolnshire. He took the name of Turner under the will of a relation, and married a sister of the lady who was to be his brother Alfred's wife. Besides his share in the Poems by Two Brothers (1827) he wrote upwards of three hundred and forty sonnets, published in volumes in 1830, 1864, 1868, and 1873, and collected, with a Life by the second Lord Tennyson and an essay by Spedding, in 1880. Though Charles's genius was not so robust as that of his brothers, Coleridge had greeted the first sonnet series with warm commendation; the sonneteer's more famous brother, Lord Tennyson, unhesitatingly pronounced some of his sonnets as amongst the finest in the language. And Professor Palgrave described them as idyllic, sincere, pathetic, and subtle, as sometimes verging on quaintness, and as 'covering in their pensive range a vast number of motives from English country ways.'

Lord Tennyson.

Alfred Tennyson was born on the 6th of August 1809, at Somersby, Lincolnshire, in the rectory of his father, Dr Tennyson. He was one of a numerous house, being the fourth-born of twelve sons and daughters, the eldest of whom died in infancy. His two elder brothers, Frederick and Charles, were poets of a high order, though never widely recognised (see above); but the poetic work of each of the three brothers was not merely quite original, but was absolutely distinct, bearing not the faintest family likeness to that of the others in manner or method. Alfred Tennyson gives his Own account of his beginning to write : 'According to the best of my recollection, when I was about eight years old I covered two sides of a slate with Thomsonian blank verse in praise of flowers for my brother Charles, who was a year older than I was-Thomson then being the only poet I knew. Before I could read I was in the habit on a stormy day of spreading my arms to the wind, and crying out, "I hear a voice that's

mountain scenery-with Scott's regularity of octosyllables and his occasional varieties. Though the performance was very likely worth nothing, I never felt myself more truly inspired. I wrote as much as seventy lines at one time, and used to go shouting them about the fields in the dark. All these early efforts have been destroyed; only my brother-in-law, Edmund Lushington, begged for a page or two of the Scott poem. Somewhat later (at fourteen) I wrote a drama in blank verse,

speaking in the wind;" and the words "far, far away" had always a strange charm for me. About ten or eleven Pope's Homer's Iliad became a favourite of mine, and I wrote hundreds and hundreds of lines in the regular Popeian metre -nay, even could improvise them; so could my two elder brothers, for my father was a poet, and could write regular metre very skilfully. My father once said to me, "Don't write so rhythmically; break your lines occasionally for the sake of variety." "Artist first, then poet," some writer said of me. I should answer, " Poeta nascitur, non fit;" indeed, "Poeta nascitur et fit." I suppose I was nearer thirty than twenty before I was anything of an artist. At about twelve and onward I wrote an epic of six thousand lines à la Walter Scott-full of battles, dealing too with sea and

which I have still, and other things. It seems to me I wrote them all in perfect metre.' These poems made his father say, with pardonable pride, 'If Alfred dies, one of our greatest poets will have gone;' and suggest at another time, 'I should not wonder if Alfred were to revive the greatness of his relative, William Pitt.' But it was not Thomson and Pope and Scott who were to be really permanent influences. Part of The Bridal, one of the most remarkable of the boypoems, is quoted below.

Alfred was educated by his father, and at the Louth Grammar School. In 1827 Charles and Alfred, with some help from Frederick, published anonymously Poems by Two Brothers, showing amid immaturities wide range of subject and command of varied metres. In 1827 Frederick had gone to Trinity College, Cambridge, and there next year Charles and Alfred joined him, becoming associates of the brilliant group that included Trench. Monckton Milnes, Merivale, Alford, Lushington, and Arthur Hallam. Here Alfred wrote The Lover's Tale (first published in 1879) and (1829) the university prize poem Timbuctoo.

The earliest volume of Alfred Tennyson's poems (Poems, chiefly Lyrical, 1830) did not take the world by storm. Critics were then too conventional and too conservative; they looked askance at a new departure; they disapproved of the young poet's style and his modes of expression. Some affecta