Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live in dreams?"

This he calls "the higher pantheism." It is a pantheism which asks, "Is He not all but thou?" It therefore leaves to each

spirit its own personality, looking upon in dividual minds perhaps as shuttles in God's great loom, wherein He weaves the veil through which men see Him. But we do not look for severe logic in dreams. A pantheism where all that is individual and finite mind is not God at all, and all that is material is a vision which seems and is not, which is not God but only represents Him, and stands for Him, is not in any true sense Pantheism at all, lower or higher. Among the poems published with these idylls is one called "Wages," which embodies the first of Arthur's principles that action is the first duty, and dreaming, if a duty at all, only secondary. Virtue has no wages; if she aim at glory she is not virtue at all:

"She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,

To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky!

Give her the wages of going on, and not to die."

This confession cuts away all supposition that Mr. Tennyson attributes any real goodness to the quietude which from "The Lotos-Eaters" to his last poem, "Lucretius," he attributes to the highest beati

tude:

"the great life which all our greatest fain
Would follow, centered in eternal calm.
The gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm! and such,
Not all so fine, nor so divine a calm,
Not such, nor all unlike it, man may gain
Letting his own life go."

It is a characteristic conclusion that Mr. Tennyson should at last put the most finished utterance of his own youthful creed into the mouth of Lucretius, and should have corrected, not to say contradicted it, by the mouth of Arthur, his ideal knight,

"Who reverenced his conscience as his king." The "Northern Farmer, New Style," is not so successful as the first of the se

of the first consisted in the old man's frank contradiction to the most elementary principles of morals, and his justification of his breach of the minor virtues by his asserted observance of the greater

ones.

After so successful an effort, Mr. Tennyson was not able to resist the temptation of making his northern farmer not exactly an apostle of his evangel, that no young man or young woman is to be thwarted in love or forced to resist the impulse to marry-not exactly an apostle, but a Helot, warning others from the vice by his own hard and remorseless doctrine that a man should marry, not for love, but for "proputty." In showing up a maxim so partially acknowleged and capable of such foolish applications, no humorist could achieve the same success as when the unquestioned rule of right and wrong, or some equally unquestioned article of good manners, is the subject of his ironical raillery.

It is clear that "The Window," Mr. Tennyson's last publication, though not his last work, was not intended to weigh for much in the estimate of his poetry. It was written for music, and consists of a cyclus of a dozen lyrics, expressing the templates his mistress's window, through of a lover's feelings, as he conprogress the course of a successful suit. It is a of "Maud" and the old baliad with its cross between the lyric of the middle part pictorial or interjectional burden, like "Heigh-ho to the green holly," or "Green grow the rashes, O." On similar orthodox principles does Mr. Tennyson construct his "When the winds are up in the morning," "Vine, vine, and eglantine,"

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Bite, frost, bite," and the rest of the present series. Perhaps the old burdens sounded as affected to those who first heard them as these new burdens may to the present generation. By the nature of the case, such interjectional phrases are more cherished for the associations with which familiarity surrounds them than for what they directly denote. There is no reason why Time may not dress up these songs with similar feelings, and carry them down to posterity in the good company to which they evidently aspire.

Of all the characteristics of Mr. Tennyson's poems, perhaps the most general and most comprehensive is its youthfulIt is not merely the poetry which

ness.

the mature guardian would judge to be harmless for youths and maidens, but it is the poetry which is calculated to go most directly to the heart of such unsophisticated readers. It is youthful in its metaphysics, in its religious views, in its views of nature, in its politics, in its social theories, and in its pathos. As for the metaphysics, there can be no philosophy more naturally grateful to the young mind than the notion that matter is a dream; that it is only by some inexplicable necessity, which it is our happiness to represent as a duty, that we are bound to matter, and made dependent on food and raiment and air and shelter; but that, our mere duty once accomplished, we are free as air to question the reality of all that we have been doing, and to advance the supreme reality of our visions by denying the reality of our sensations. Then again, the union of a general Christianity with an imaginary and merely sentimental pantheism is a youthful phase of religiosity; this too stands in close connection with the superstitious reliance on presentiments, on the fatal significance of random words, on chance omens and their mystical sense. Even the religious difficulties which the poet encounters and controverts are those which specially strike the youthful imagination, but hardly live in the reason of the grown man. They are imaginary difficulties. He is quite right in implying that there is no arguing against the argument: "The solar system is one in an inconceivable multitude of similar systems; therefore Christianity, which makes man the moral centre of the universe, is false." Such fancies can only be evicted by the same door by which they gained possession, that of the feelings. There is no reasoning a man or boy out of an opinion he was never reasoned into. The poetry too is youthful in its appreciation of time. The boy has all life before him, and he has no idea how little is that all. He is ready, with the Greek scholasticus, to accept the custody of a raven in order to see whether it really lives a hundred years. He can therefore put up with the slow motion, molecular and not mechanical, which Mr Tennyson assigns to the passions and development of men. "Had we but world enough, and time," says the old poet,

"My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow."

However contradictory this tardy action may be to the hot blood of youth, it falls in with the workings of the youth's brain, and with the metaphysics appropriate to his age. He can muse upon the idea, however impatient he might be of having to act upon it. Then the very monotony and narrowness of range in Mr Tennyson's poems have their strict analogues in the youthful intelligence. The young intellect is the home of formal logic-of that logic which carries out the few principles it knows into all their deduced results, without check from the exceptional facts and modifying conditions which only a mature experience can supply. To such an intelligence the very perfection, however monotonous, with which Mr. Tennyson has carried out his ideal, and shed the phosphorescence of dreamland round the images of fact, must be a source of keen pleasure. If it is not logical, it is at least the dreamy substitute for logic, and therefore hyperlogical. For the poet may claim as fairly to be above logic as the Emperor above grammar. Again, Mr. Tennyson's politics have all the graceful characteristics of the youth. Indeed, with a poet's tact, he very often puts his political utterances into the mouths of young university men. There is in these utterances, not the union, but the mixture of three qualities-the refinement which keeps a man apart from violent action in the present, the dreamy faith in the past, and the unborn movement within which whispers of a better future; all these are found fermenting in the young heart and brain, as well as in Mr. Tennyson's poetry. Then his politics have in them the sympathetic enthusiasm of youth, and all its admiration, not for the hidden great, whom the want of research disables the young from comprehending, but for the main actors on the world's stage, for the acknowledged great, especially when they are in temporary disfavor. He has also, to the full, the patriotic confidence which might be so graceful and becoming in the young midshipman; and, with all his overflowing disgust at the sordid knaveries of a life given up to trade, he grows dithyrambic over the greedy gripes who becomes a determined patriot when his country is in danger, and over the dissolute drawler who in the battle can face his enemy like. a hero. Such sudden resurrections of his

countrymen out of the mud into the clear firmament seem to give the poet a new confidence in the surpassing excellence of the clay out of which English nature is moulded; and he has more joy over such repentances than over any amount of steady excellence, wearisome in its sameness. In all this there is a youthfulness of sentiment, which must carry with it all the youthful sympathies left even in mature readers. Such readers will also recognize a wealth of imagination and illustration which could only be looked for from the mind of the grown man, and a versatility and familiarity with the tech

nical resources of his art which are incompatible with an artist literally youthful. But the satisfaction of the mature reader with Mr. Tennyson will hardly stand the test of too much repetition, and, still less, of comparison with profounder poets. His characters come out not as real men, but as boys and girls acting the parts of men and women in their Christmas games. The words he puts into their mouths are full of beauty and refinement; but they illustrate only a narrow segment of that humanity which is the privilege of poetry, at its highest power, to exhibit in myriad-sided completeness.

THE great grandfather of all Murrays is surely the author of the Introduction of Knowledge, "the whych dothe teache a man to speake all manner of languages, and to know the usage and fashion of all manner of countreys. And for to know the moste parte of all manner of coynes of money the whych is currant in every region. Made by Andrew Borde, of Physycke Doctor." Here in thirty-nine chapters are the Doctor's notes on "Barbari and the black Mores and their speche;' on "Jeene (Genoa) and the Jeneneys; "of the kingdom of Poll, and of the disposicion of the people;" "of Gulik and Lewke" (Juliers and Liege), and base and high Almayne, and so forth. The said notes were from personal observation, for Boorde "had trauayled thorow and round about all the regions of Christynte ;" and were put together at Montpellier in 1542.

Who was Boorde? Mr. Furnivall has published his book of travels, his Dyetary of Health, and Barnes's answer to his lost Treatyse upon Berdes, along with his own learned "Forewords" and "Hindwords' in the last extra volume of the Early English Text Society. Boorde was born at Borde's (now Board's) hill in Holmdale not far from the Hayward's Heath station, in Sussex. The family makes a figure in Lower's Worthies of Sussex: by the time the

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Armada came it had split into two branches, the heads of which, occupying Board's Hill and Paxhill, gave 30l. a-piece towards the defence of the country. In 1570 one of them, an Andrew, was a nativus or "villein regardant," of Lord Abergavenny's manor of Ditchling, near Cuckfield; and him, Georgius Nevile Dnus de Bergevenny," manumits, so that he no longer has to "regard," i.e. to be on the watch, what service may be required of him. But this cannot be our Doctor; for he had been got hold of by the Charterhouse monks while he was under age, according to their practice of "drawing boys into religion with hooks of apples, whom having professed, they do not instruct in doctrines, but maintain them to go upon beggarly excursions." So Boorde became a monk; but he was "dispensyd with relygyon," first by the Pope's bull that he might be suffragan to the Bishop of Chichester—a man of mark in the county he must have beenand afterwards three times over by his Carthusian superior, that he might go abroad and study medicine. After this he reckons himself (as well he might) clearly discharged from religion, and able to settle quietly at Montpellier, then the chief transalpine school of physic.

There was nothing of the martyr about Andreas Parforatus, as he calls himself. If he writes a book of Sermons in 1532,he takes the oaths to Henry VIII. in 1534. The Prior Houghton and several of his monks were put into the Tower, and afterwards hanged, for refusing to take these same oaths. But Boorde was already

something of a courtier; when he was "a young doctor" (of full forty years old) he, just home from his travels, was sent for by the Duke of Norfolk. He did not like to prescribe without consulting the Duke's old physician, Dr. Butte. But Butte did not come; so Boorde prescribed, made a cure, and was "allowed to wait on" the King. He was, too, not at all the man to make a good Carthusian. He, the original "Merry Andrew," must have been horrified by their silence, their solitariness, their no meat, no fun, all stay at home life. It made him ill; and his distaste for it doubtless strengthened his inclination for travel. When he got free from the Charterhouse, Cromwell took him up, had him to stay with him at Bishop's Waltham, and got him appointed to an office which Tudor statecraft taught necessary-of observing, viz., and reporting on the state of feel ing abroad about Henry VIII.'s doings. He travelled far, starting suddenly from Orleans to Catalonia, in order to show nine Scotch and English pilgrims the way to St. James's shrine at Compostella. He warned the poor fellows that it was a very hard journey, saying he would rather go six times from England to Rome than once from Orleans to Catalonia. How ever they went; and, Spain being then as now a country where the traveller's constant difficulty is how to avoid being starved, they all suffered a good deal: and in coming back "thorow Spayn, for all the crafte of Physycke that I coulde do, they dyed, all by eatynge of frutes and drynkynge of water, the whych I did ever refrayne myselfe." How he rejoiced when he got into Aquitaine, the land of plenty, where "a peny worth of whyte bread may serue an honest man a hoole weke." He "dyd kis the ground for ioy," he says, "burdious and byon (Bordeaux and Bayonne) being so much better than the baryn countrey of Byskay . . . for Aquitany for Aquitany hath no falow for good wyne and bred. Whan I was ther I had ix kakys for a peny; and a kake serued me a daye, and so it wyll any man, excepte he be a rauenner." But, much as he disliked Spain, we find him again in Catalonia at the time when Charles V. is embarking for his expedition against the pirate Barbarossa. Having found that "the vnyuersytes off orlyance, pyctauensis (Poitiers), Tolosa, mountpyller, and the reuerend father off the hed charterhouse, a famuse clark, and partt

(president) off the vnyuersyte off parys doth hold with our soveryne lord the kyng in his actes," he was glad to be able to add to this the more important news that "the emprow (Emperor), with all other kynges in the courtes of whom I haue byn, be our redoubtyd kynges frendes and louers." Curiously mixed up with this account how "the emprowe tok sheppyng in to barbary," is a notice that "I have sentt to your mestershepp the seedes off reuberbe, the which come owtt of barbary. in thes partes ytt ys had for a grett tresure." Then follow directions for sowing, which Cromwell could not have attended to, for it was not till 1742 that Collinson first raised "true Rhubarb from seed sent me out of Tartary by Professor Segisbeck of Petersburgh." This letter, important enough to be endorsed "Andrewe bord, prest. how king h. 8 is well esteemed in ffraunce and other natyons," is followed by one to the prior of the London Charterhouse, explaining how he has been dispensed from religion at the Grand Chartreuse; his fear lest he might be claimed as a runaway monk urging to take this precaution. He then comes home and goes to practice and study medicine in Scotland, probably that he may pick up information; for we can scarcely suppose that Edinburgh had as yet attained any eminence as a school of medicine. He got on as well as was to be expected: "It is naturally geuen (he says), or els it is of a deuellyshe dysposicion of a Scottysh man not to loue nor fauour an englishe man. And I, beyng there, and dwellyng among them, was hated; but my sciences and other polices did kepe in favour that I did know theyr secretes." Boorde repays their hatred with dislike-a dislike which he extends beyond Scotland: "Wold to Iesu (he writes to Cromwell) that you hade neuer an alyon in your realme, specyally skottes, for I neuer knew alyon goode to ynglonde exceppt thei knew profytt and lucre shold com to them." It is likely, however, that he is, in writing thus, rather falling in with Cromwell's views than giving his own; for the man who liked Aquitaine so much, and who enjoyed life so thoroughly, in such dissimilar places as Holland and Montpellier, can hardly have been so narrow and insular as he there makes himself out. But the Scotch be certainly was not fond of: "Shortly to conclude (he says), trust yow no Skott, for they wyll yowse flatteryng

wordes and all ys a falsholde." That the English in those days were not very popular abroad we may gather from the Doctor's experience that "in all the partes off crystendom that I haue trauyllyd in, I know nott v Englysh men inhabytours, exceppt only skolers for lernyng." Nevertheless an exception is always made in favor of the place where bread and wine are so cheap and abundant. After finding fault with nearly all Europe "from Calais to Calais back again," Boorde says, "I can not geue to greate a prayse to Aquitany and Langwadock, to Tolose and Mountpilior... in Tolose regneth treue justice and equite off al the places that euer I dyd com in."

In Scotland he condescended to hide his name and nationality: "I resortt (he tells Cromwell) to the skotysh kynges howse, and to many lordes and lardes, and truly I know ther myndes, for thei takyth me for a skotysh manes sone, for I name my selff Karre, and so the Karres kallyth me cosyn, thorow the which I am in the more fauer."

After some stay in Yorkshire he is in London (1537) worrying Cromwell about two horses stolen, he knows very well by whom, as he was travelling southward. Then he goes abroad again. It is such a pity that his "Itinerary" is lost, except the English part of it (printed by Hearne); but Mr. Halliwell is sure, from internal evidence, that he really visited all the countries mentioned in his First Book of the Introduction of Knowledge. He visited his old friends at Montpellier on this fourth journey, and there got drunk, as his opponent Barnes, in his Defence of Beards against Boorde's attack upon them, takes care to tell us: "Your frend Marttyn the surgyen brought you to dyner upon a daye to one Hans Smormowthes howse, a Duche man, in which howse you were cupshote, or therwyse called dronkyn, at whiche tyme your berde was longe." And Barnes goes on, with the minute personality of the time, to explain why "ye abore berdes." Men in those days lived in glass houses, and yet were not at all afraid of throwing stones, ay, and dirt too of the most offensive kind.

Boorde was a staunch Romanist, though he had struggled against the “ rugorosyte" of the Carthusian rules; he is therefore the object of attack of men like foul-mouthed Bishop Bale, one of those

creatures whom an evil fate mixed up with the beginnings of the Irish Protestant Church, and who calumniates Boorde at Winchester, where he settled on property left him in that city by his brother, in a way that makes old Anthony a Wood protest. Ponet, Bishop of Winchester, in his Answer to Gardiner Pighius and other Papists (1555), makes the same charge. Of the truth or falsehood of the charge Mr. Halliwell expects some proof when the Winchester records come to be published. Anyhow, it seems certain that Boorde at Winchester came to grief. Whether the women spoken of were really what Ponet and Bale call them, or were, as Wood says, "only patients that occasionally recurred to his hous," it is certain that our Doctor, who had displayed his sanctity by drinking only water (a great piece of self-denial for him) three days a week, and wearing a hair shirt, and every night hanging his shroud at his bed's foot, died in the Fleet Prison in 1548-9. It is very probable that his being there was a case of religious persecution; for he was very bitter against monks and priests who had broken their vows by marriage, so that a strong party must have been eager to punish him. Here is Bale's account of his end (Scriptorum Illustrium Catalogus): "quum sanctus hic pater, Vuintoniæ in sua domo, pro suis concœlibibus Papæ sacrificalis prostibulum nutriret, in eo charitatis officio deprehensus, uenenato pharmaco sibijpsi mortem accelerauit, ne in publicum spectandus ueniret."

So much for Boorde's life. Of his

books all are worth reading, his Breuyary of Helth, no less than his "Itinerary." He is the first father of all "domestic medicine" books, just as we said he is of all Murray's Handbooks: "I do nat wryte," he says, "for lerned men, but for symple and unlerned men."

:

His Itinerary of Europe is lost he says, "the whiche boke at Byshops-Waltam. one Thomas Cromwell had it of me. And bycause he had many matters of state to dyspache for al England my boke was loste." So is his book of Sermons, much regretted by Mr. Halliwell, who says we should have had in it a perfect picture of his times. Romanist though he was, he testified that, "in Rome I dyd neuer se no vertue nor goodnes but in Byshop Adrian's days," who was soon