we wish for a score to explain to us the reality of what he imagined. When Crashaw is at his best he outstrips either Donne or Herbert. We should look long in them before we came upon such well-springs as these:— 'A happy soul, that all the way To Heaven hath a summer's day'; this from 'The Flaming Heart' to St. Theresa: 'By all the heavens thou hast in Him, Fair sister of the Seraphim; or his graceful and certainly sincere tribute to George Herbert : ... Know you, fair, on what you look? But when we turn the page, and come upon the pearls and roses (teeth and lips), corals, rubies, diamonds, snows, and the ever-reviving Phoenix-one wishes he could have been consumed once for all in his own fires-and the rest of the budget, we have to confess with a sigh that Crashaw at his worst is a very different thing. It may be thought that religious poets should be set apart in a class by themselves. If so, poets of love, of war, of romance and chivalry should also be set apart. Whatever stirs this mortal frame, and makes the blood run quicker, is a minister, not only of emotion, but of poetry. It may be true that Herbert, Crashaw, Cowper, Keble, and Newman would not have been poets at all but for the flame of divine love which caught up their spirits. 'My music shall find Thee, and every string Shall have his attribute to sing: That all together may accord in Thee, And prove one God, one harmony.' If they had been musing on earthly things the fire might never have been kindled; but they caught fire, and at last they spake * George Herbert, 'The Thanksgiving.' with their tongues. Vaughan the 'Silurist' is a striking instance of this. He had the fluency and the sensitive ear and hand of an accomplished versifier. If he had been independent of Herbert, we might have given him a higher place; but he owes so much to Herbert that he must be counted among the imitators. What is his own is the ardour of piety; and that is sufficient to make him more than an imitator and to give him rank as a poet-a second-rate or third-rate poet, but a poet, because he expresses high emotion in beautiful words. The like may be said of the Wordsworthian Keble, whose grave and thoughtful piety could only utter itself in verse. To the present age, which requires something more passionate and less saintly, Keble seems prosaic. But Herbert and Vaughan would have loved him; and his sober muse was in tune with the beginnings of the Anglican revival, as his brotherpoets testify in the Lyra Apostolica,' the Cathedral,' and other works. Newman brought genius to the revival, and Pusey learning but Keble supplied character-a character of sobriety and saintliness, to parallel which we must look back to such churchmen as Herbert and Nicholas Ferrar. The parallel between the Laudian revival and the Oxford movement is very close, and not only one of imitation; and the poets give it voice as truly as the divines. Donne's religion was more academic, Crashaw's more ecstatic; and Crashaw found his true home, like Newman, in the Roman Church; Herbert and Vaughan are the prototypes of Keble and Isaac Williams. 6 A good deal of poetry in all ages is patchwork of the current ideas or tricks of style. If we look at The English Parnassus,' a worthless little book printed in 1657, containing' A Collection of all rhyming Monosyllables, the choicest Epithets and Phrases, with some General Forms upon all Occasions, Subjects, and Theams, alphabetically digested,' we shall find a complete manual of the art of poetical theft, and how not to be original. All the stock-in-trade of the seventeenth century is there; and the poetical youth of the Commonwealth are instructed how to thrive upon commonplaces. The poets of to-day use no such Gradus; but they, too, have their commonplaces, and resemble each other as Frenchmen do. Like the poets of King James's time, they study exquisiteness. Like them, they have a right to their taste, and will exercise an influence on the next generation. Like them, they have no great leader to give his own colour to his brothers in art. They have perfected versification and the use of the adjective. Tennyson began it, Swinburne developed it; and those who do not admire Tennyson and do not imitate Swinburne are nevertheless bound by it. Just now there is a tendency, which reminds us of Donne, to vary metres, to study balance and the use of resolved feet. Mr. Bridges is the hierophant of this tendency. He may not have many followers, for to go against the received taste is for a time more unpopular in metre than in anything else; but he will have influence; and when the great poet of the rising century appears, he will be burdened, or ballasted, with the strict study of metre which came in after the loose numbers of Scott and Byron. Nor will the cult of the adjective be neglected. It is a reflection from France; and it is so attractive and so necessary, when once perceived, that the danger is that the adjective may take precedence of the noun, the ornament of the thing ornamented. Periods of depression are periods of preparation; and if we cannot produce any 'bright particular star at this moment, there is a good deal of diffused light among our Pleiads and Hyads. The Elizabethan pastorals and plays, besides bringing to light a certain number of great poets, trained the ear and the poetical sense of their generation : so in another way did the stylists, of whom Donne and Herbert were the chief; each succeeding school lives in and instructs posterity; and our poet, now in his cradle or at school, who will bring his own fuel and fire with him, will also be enriched by the experience of many modest but genuine artists, whose names are not written in the roll of mighty poets.' An anthology of Jacobean poems would contain some imperishable verse; and an anthology of later Victorian poems will have much the same character. We must wait patiently, till the made-up roll is unfolded once more. ART. XII.-DOMESTIC PARTIES AND IMPERIAL T GOVERNMENT. HERE is some ground for anxiety lest the temper of national complacency, induced by the spectacle of Lord Roberts's triumphal progress through the territories of what were the Boer Republics, may tend to check the assimilation of the lessons taught by the earlier experiences of the past twelve months. If so, recent successes will, indeed, have been bought dearly. For seldom has a nation been put to school so sharply as was England in the months October 1899-February 1900; seldom has a nation been shown so unmistakably the things belonging to its future peace, welfare, and security, and allowed to emerge from the course of instruction, as she has, unhumiliated and unshaken. The lessons taught have been manifold, and some of the most essential of them cannot even be glanced at here. The absolute necessity of large measures of military reorganisation and development is recognised now, and will, it may be hoped, be insisted on by a public whose minds were closed to the most conclusive exhibitions, on paper only, of the signal defects of an army system dealing with the finest human material in the world. But a great deal more than army reform, even in the widest sense, has been demonstrated to be wanting, before the great fabric of the British Empire can be regarded as reasonably secure against the dangers by which it is beset. The magnitude and the proximity, not to say the imminence, of those dangers have been publicly declared to the nation by the two statesmen whose acquaintance with foreign affairs is immeasurably greater than that possessed by any of their colleagues or rivals. It would be impossible to exaggerate the gravity of the language on this subject employed at intervals of a few months by Lord Rosebery and Lord Salisbury. If, when the ex-Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister, in the House of Lords, on February 15th, 1900, struck the note of alarm, the present holder of those offices, for reasons perhaps too sufficiently obvious, declined to treat his warning as justified, the Primrose League speech, on May 9th, gave us Lord Salisbury's testimony, in terms absolutely unequivocal, to the reality of the public perils which, for a time, he had seemed to make light of. We all know now that the best-informed statesmen recognise, in the extraordinary outburst of anti-British virulence which has raged through the Continental press during the past nine months, the evidence, not of a merely artificial and whipped-up sentiment, but of large and menacing bodies of Vol. 192.-No. 383. R genuine national feeling. So far, no doubt, these forces have been held in check by the enlightened self-interest of sovereigns and statesmen. But circumstances can easily be conceived in which those controlling influences might be lacking where they are now present, or might prove ineffectual. Lord Salisbury has expressly indicated the possibility of such contingencies; and no one can contemplate the recent history or the present condition of either France or Russia without discerning the force and cogency of his warning. The immediate danger doubtless seems greater on the side of France, for in that country there is presented the extraordinary phenomenon of a party or at least a numerous, if heterogeneous, faction-ready to force on a war even if it were likely to prove unsuccessful for their nation, in the conviction that such failure would re-act fatally on a form of government which they dislike. No such faction exists, or at least is at present prominent, in Russia. None the less, however, is it highly probable that if France, on whatever grounds of quarrel, became involved in war with England, the pressure of military opinion upon the Czar in favour of thoroughgoing co-operation with the allied Republic would be of overpowering strength. Nor is it at all reasonable, however agreeable, to assume as a self-evident truth that a common hatred of England, and a common desire for the spoil of her shattered Empire, could in no circumstances bring about a working aggressive co-operation between Germany and France. The idea of such a combination may seem to us odious, and in view of history unnatural. But it would be sheer wilful blindness, having regard to the significance attached by Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery to the general manifestations of ill-feeling towards this country during the South African war, to consider the formation of a great Triple League against England as by any means beyond the range of possibility. We are therefore in presence of national perils greater in effect than have surrounded our country at any previous period in her history, even during the last stage of the war which resulted in the loss of the American Colonies. The dangers are greater, because the hostile combination would be relatively more powerful than that which arrayed itself in league with our revolted dependencies. They are greater because in the event of defeat we stand to lose immeasurably more in territory, in population, and in prestige than we lost even through the war which issued in the establishment of a long-hostile nation of our own blood on the further side of the Atlantic. That is so not only for the reason that the Empire has grown enormously in the interval, but because the United Kingdom has become dependent |