are everywhere evident. It is clear that a nobleman is not called upon to consult me before he sells what is as much his own as his stud. If anything were needed to reconcile me to this state of affairs, it is the fact that the greatest of private libraries, long practically outside my ken, will now be brought within it so soon as the formalities of the circumlocution office will permit. I will urge, however, that this collection stands on a different footing from the British Museum, and that access to it should, as I before suggested, be confined to serious students and men of guaranteed reputation. Books of value, at the British Museum even, are not at the mercy of all comers, and with all precautions the record of destruction and loss is sufficiently dismal. In club libraries I have known a member, to save hin.self a trifle, cut a tract from a bound volume in the library. From ravage of this kind our new acquisition must be protected. So soon as these treasures are on view, I shall seek for an opportunity of inspecting them, and shall hope then to say something more to my readers concerning them.

MR. HENLEY'S POEMS.

ONCERNING the value of Mr. Henley's poems, to which also

Co

I drew attention in the August number of the Gentleman's Magazine, I have received gratifying, if unneeded, support. As to the merits of those productions, I would hold my own opinion in opposition, were such a thing possible, to the assembled and united voices of criticism. In the Fortnightly Review for the same month, however, my opinion was fortified by that of a most competent judge, in Mr. Arthur Symons. A space I could not claim was at the disposal of Mr. Symons, who has dedicated to Mr. Henley's literary accomplishment an entire essay. The verdict is in each case, however, the same, and the poems and even the passages chosen for quotation are in some cases identical. "London Voluntaries," which I mentioned with highest praise, is obviously a favourite with Mr. Symons, and the refrain beginning

What have I done for you,
England, my England?

is also quoted with admiration. On the revolutionary aspects of Mr. Henley his critic dwells, and the latest volume of poems is regarded as "a vigorous challenge, a notable manifesto," on behalf of "the art of modernity in poetry." I cannot follow further Mr. Symons, but am pleased to find that our opinions are in so plenary accord.

A

"TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES." I

MONG the novels of the past season Mr. Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles: a Pure Woman," has been the most discussed and the most commended. It is, indeed, a powerful and harrowing, if not wholly satisfying, story. There is much boldness in selecting as a pure heroine a woman whose honour is twice sacrificed-once to her ignorance, and a second time to her poverty. The old charm of Mr. Hardy's descriptions of rural life is preserved, and the pictures are as vivid as they can be. Some influence upon a vigorous English mind of the latest form of French realism however appears, and Tess's murder of her villainous lover may be compared with the slaughter of her husband by Pauline Blanchard, as exhibited recently by Mme. Sarah Bernhardt. I would rather Mr. Hardy would stick to his old English style, and keep his heroine from the gallows; and his final picture of the hero hand-in-hand with his future wife, the sister of the woman who has died for him, fails either to win sympathy or carry conviction.

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ON "SELECTIONS."

BIBLIOPHILE acharné, as the French say, and a genuine lover also of the contents of books, I am not disposed to look with too much approval upon selections from the works of great authors. A florilegium or an anthology, except when it preserves to us poems elsewhere inaccessible, scarcely appeals to me. I admit that there are men so busy that they cannot afford time to read much poetry even if they had the taste, which they rarely have. I am not of these. The admirable selections from the old dramatists of Lamb and Leigh Hunt have not weaned me from the originals whenever I can obtain access to them; and though there are authors of mark concerning whom I know discreditably little, I do not want other people to taste them for me, and I mean to read them when I have leisure, that leisure to which we all look with a sort of pensive halfhope, and awaiting which Death finds us and leads us away. Books of criticism, such as Leigh Hunt's "Imagination and Fancy" and "Wit and Humour," Hazlitt's "Essays," and Warton's enchanting "History of Poetry," sent me in search of the writers from whom they gave appetising extracts. In saying these things I am not seeking to force on my readers unsolicited and unwanted fragments of autobiography, I am only preparing them to attach full value to a Osgood, McIlvaine, & Co.

1

species of recantation I am preparing. When in a pretty and readable form one obtains a masterpiece of a man whose whole works rest in comfort upon the shelves, with some dust upon their tops awaiting their turn to be read in the leisure that cometh not, one is lured into reading it out of turn, and one is occasionally thankful for having been so tempted. It must be a work complete in itself, however, and not a volume of "beauties."

SWIFT'S "POLITE CONVERSATION.”

O a temptation of the kind I have just yielded with very

An edition, Mr.

bury, of Swift's "Polite Conversation," in three dialogues, has been added to the "Chiswick Press" editions of Messrs. Whittingham. More years than I care to count have elapsed since I first read this masterpiece, and I had but a faint recollection of its brilliancy. Nothing can, of course, surpass in satire "Gulliver" and "The Battle of the Books." The "Polite Conversation" is, however, worthy to stand side by side with these immortal works; and it has a tolerance for human error not common with Swift-with something positively approaching good nature. As Mr. Saintsbury says of the characters by whom the dialogue is maintained: they "are scarcely satirised; they are hardly caricatured. Not one of them is made disagreeable; not one of them offensively ridiculous." How brilliantly painted are they, moreover; and their dialogue is good enough almost for Congreve or Sheridan. It is difficult to resist the conviction that Swift had the making of a brilliant comedy-writer. He seems, indeed, to have felt this, and in the exquisitely humorous Introduction he says: "My most ingenious Friend already mentioned, Mr. Colley Cibber, who does too much honour to the Laurel Crown he deservedly wears (as he hath often done to many Imperial Diadems placed on his Head), was pleased to tell me that, if my Treatise were formed into a Comedy, the Representation, performed to advantage on one Theatre, might very much contribute to the Spreading of polite Conversation among all Persons of Distinction through the whole Kingdom." This is mere banter, but Colley Cibber was too good a judge of wit not to have been capable of feeling and uttering the opinion assigned him. Another whim of the author, meanwhile, that schools for the study of his book should be established, has been practically carried out, since a very large percentage of his jokes are still retailed in conversation.

THE "MIGHty Dead.”

HOW

is

mighty dead Genuine enough is

a disciple is apt Many of us are

OW much of our enthusiasm for the genuine, and how much counterfeit ? the delight which we take in their works, and enough to let his religion run away with him. labelled Wordsworthites, Shelleyites, Browningites, and even, to include a living man, Ibsenites. When an occasion comes, however, for doing ostensible honour to a great man, we hold aloof. In the case of the greatest even, when an attempt was made to celebrate the tercentenary of Shakespeare, what was the result? A great deal of unseemly squabbling, the planting of a tree on Primrose Hill, and the collection of a few hundred pounds, which have never, I believe, been refunded, and are now lying until somebody has the courage to appropriate them-if, indeed, they are not already appropriated. A movement to do honour to Marlowe was scarcely more successful. A monument was, indeed, erected in Canterbury, the city of Marlowe's birth, but remains incomplete for want of funds. After Marlowe comes Shelley, the hundredth anniversary of whose birth a few wellmeaning, amiable, and distinguished gentlemen have just commemorated. In no case was the general public touched; no national or patriotic feeling was aroused, and the entire proceedings were regarded, if not with contempt, at least with indifference. The attitude is not, as might be supposed, the outcome of a conviction that our public statues are failures: it is a genuine apathy. The people who hunt royalty as though it were a wild animal, who stood for hours on the chance of seeing Garibaldi, are moved by no sentiment beyond the feeling of the day, and would not cross the street to do homage to a dead poet.

VERY

THE SHELLEY MEMORIAL.

Still, a more striking of Time brings about Here are dignitaries

ERY little seems likely to come out of the Shelley celebration. One is none the less glad that it has been held. Shelley now needs no vindication. There is, indeed, more cause to fear that he will be the subject of too blind a cult. example of the way in which "The whirligig his revenges" can scarcely be conceived. ecclesiastical and temporal, and conservatives of the deepest dye, doing homage to a man whose name once stank in the public nostril, who was compelled to leave the country, who was deprived of the possession and control of his children, and whose writings were declared by the highest legal authority of the time to be debarred from

I should like, however, the testimonial form of a statue. If ever there were a stimulate the ambition of the sculptor, A task of some difficulty would, howFor an emblematical design, however,

the protection of the law.
to take in this instance the
face and figure calculated to
they were those of Shelley.
ever, attend the aspirant.
Shelley himself gives the outlines in "Adonais ":

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His head was bound with pansies over-blown,
And faded violets, white, and pied, and blue;
And a light spear topped with a cypress cone,
Round whose rude shaft dark ivy-tresses grew,
Yet dripping with the forest's noonday dew,
Vibrated, as the ever-beating heart

Shook the weak hand that grasped it; of that crew
He came the last, neglected and apart :

A herd-abandoned deer, struck by the hunter's dart.

A CONCORDANCE TO SHELLEY.

EANWHILE, if public recognition is withheld, private zeal runs in advance. In his "Concordance to Shelley," 1 Mr. F. S. Ellis has given the world a monument really more enduring than brass and marble. One stands aghast at the zeal and piety that have been necessary to furnish this noble and exemplary index to every word in every line of Shelley's works. The labour, Mr. Ellis says, has been of love, and his assertion may be accepted, since under such conditions only could it have been accomplished. Mr. Ellis's concordance is, indeed, in its class a model. Besides enabling a student to find instanter any passage of which he is in search, it classifies the words used by the poet in groups, giving thus the various senses in which an individual word is used. This style of concordance-making has been condemned as augmenting the difficulties of reference. To me the objection seems hypercritical. With the expenditure of a very little trouble in mastering a method, the task of consultation is simplified and abridged. Mr. Ellis speaks of the work of compilation as pleasurable, as, indeed, an antidote against cares. I hope the comforting assurance will encourage some one to give us the much-needed concordance to Wordsworth. When a line from the Sonnets comes to the mind, the task of verifying the quotation becomes inexpressibly difficult. Though the most appropriate and valuable tribute to Shelley yet given, the fact that the concordance came out in the centenary year of the poet's birth is, we are told, an undesigned coincidence.

1 London : Quaritch.

SYLVANUS URBAN.