an aberration of judgement hard to pardon, coquetted with Russia, in order to break the power of the nobles. It is broken, but the party now known as New Finnoman see in a coalition with the Svekoman the only source of strength and stability. In this young party, growing up in the place of the original heroes and patriots, who but for their one fatal mistake might be called the fathers of their country, lies the hope of Finland. The Svekoman sees that the energy, the independence, the doggedness of the Finn, his tenacity of purpose, reserve, and prudence, give him a force which presents an almost impervious front to Russian chicanery and intrigue. The Finnoman in his turn sees that the higher social culture of the Svekoman is not a thing to despise. Hence has sprung up a young Finnoman party, which includes most of the talent, wit, and genius of Finland, and has for its aim the glorification and maintenance of Finnish nationality alike in art, literature, education, manufacture, and commerce.'

The Finns are very democratic, very proud of their progress and of the way in which they have grappled with the questions of the redistribution of land, the liquor trade, the rights and employment of women, people's libraries, &c.; so they are not disposed in things temporal or spiritual to ape Russia and the Russians. They remind you of that great empire of which the Archbishop of Kherson and Odessa frankly said he saw no signs (1889) of any coming dawn.' In Finland there are daylight and energy. It is to this energy that we owe the series of papers on Finland. Let us glean from the very massive volume before us some details as to the methods in which Finland expresses her aspirations as well as her powers.

The literary reputation that rises first to our lips is that of Runeberg. He was at college with Lönnrot, but whereas the one devoted himself to the old runos in the Finnish tongue the other was the great ornament of the Swedish literature of Finland. The friends founded the Private Lyceum of Helsingfors, and a sentiment of love for the Fatherland became the chief spring of their literary activity. Runeberg's first home in East Bothnia early developed that love of nature which his masterpiece, the 'Elk-Hunters,' exhibits, but it is his lyrics which live in the mouths and hearts of men and women. By 1839 his reputation was made, and Xavier Marmier, in his studies on the literature of the north, places beside Oehlenschläger and Tegner the poet of Borga. His wife, Fredrika, was a poetess, and the house which the gifted pair occupied in Borga is now a National Museum. The Vårt land' of Runeberg, set to music by Pacius, has become Finland's national anthem, and when he died, in May 1877, all the four estates took part in his funeral,

6

The divine spark is not extinct in the family, and Walter Runeberg modelled the statue which commemorates his father's genius in the centre of Helsingfors. Literature,' says Aspelin, was the first expression of the thoughts and 'feelings of the Finnish people, but the attainment of a high 'standpoint and the circumstance that the Finnish language is now being employed in most departments of 'human knowledge justify the assertion that the result 'of the work of developement is a national literature.' Nothing can be more true than that Finlanders turn their attention to all departments of human knowledge. In the country you find not only excellent roads, but telegraphs, telephones, the electric light, and all modern resources, unless indeed it be carriages more luxurious than the droskies that ply in Abo and Viborg. It is true that in those towns the pavements are not suited for vehicles of a better kind, but, on the other hand, when you have jolted over the stones to the bank you find there polyglot partners and four or five fair-haired lady clerks behind their desks. In Finland the question of employment for women has received great attention. The country is poor, the middle class is both well educated and ambitious, if very simple in dress and living, and the daughters are now brought up intelligently. As bank and telegraph clerks, and as masseuses, many of them earn their living most creditably, and even when they emigrate Finnish governesses are in demand in Canada and the far West.

There is another direction in which public interests and personal ingenuity intend to help each other. We mean the opening out of the country to tourists and for the purposes of business as well as of sport.

There is near Willmanstrand a factory for the bobbins used in the Lancashire and Yorkshire mills, for which the wood of the birch trees is best adapted. At Joensuu the great house of Egerton, Hubbard, & Co. have their sawmills, leasing from the government and from private owners large tracts of forest. There are English vice-consuls at Helsingfors, Abo, and Viborg, and since 1871 three companies of insurance against fire offer a protection against a danger which in a land of wooden houses is always to be borne in mind. The hills of Finland are poor in ores, but the riches of the rocks lie in their granites and porphyries. There is near Jääskis a pale blue porphyry of the rarest beauty, and for the monument which is being raised in the Kremlin to

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the memory of Alexander the Blessed M. Basil Joukovsky has selected from Finland some exquisite slabs. The pavement is being laid down by him in a shade of dark olive green, of which the effect must be seen to be believed, contrasting as it does with the brickwork of the terraces that reach down to the banks of the Moskva and with the mosaics and the golden lilies of the roof. The stones used for the construction of St. Petersburg are generally taken from Finnish quarries.

When we come to think of touring in Finland the question resolves itself into one of the means and cost of communication. Life is cheap, so is travelling; the roads are adapted for cycling, but the natural lines of traffic are formed by the Gulfs of Finland and Bothnia and by the numerous lakes, rivers, and canals. Small hotels are springing up; at Juustila and Lauritsala rough accommodation is to be got; the hotels of Imatra and Raupa are more civilised, and an English company now contemplates the purchase of Taipale, which is certainly the gem of the estates on the Saima Canal. Sport is less certain than might be wished, because poaching is very common, and because the kestrels are allowed to work their wicked will among the game of Finland. You may see as many as four hawks in the course of an hour, while a naturalist may be pleased to learn that as many as twentytwo Camberwell beauties' have been counted in a three hours' drive through a forest of which the glades and woodland spaces are always gay with butterflies. There are trout and salmon in the rivers, but it must not be forgotten that during the greater part of the tourist season shooting is prohibited, and that the hazel hens and the wild ducks only appear on the table after the leaves have begun to turn their colour and the days to grow short. Canoeing has become fashionable on the inland waters, and it is generally easy to hire a boat; but for the amenities of life in Finland, among both gentle and simple, our readers cannot do better than first read Miss Clive Bayley's pleasant and well-written pages, and then go to Finland to judge for themselves. They may perhaps be tempted, like our authoress, to linger there after St. Bridget's summer in October is Fast, and till winter has come to open new communications across the morasses, even till high winter,' as it is called, sets in after New Year's Day, and with its increase of light gives the first promise of returning spring.

ART. V.-Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Edited by ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE. London: 1895.

R. ERNEST HARTLEY COLERIDGE has done good service. to English biography by the publication of a selection from the letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Since the death of the latter in 1834 a number of his letters have been printed, but they are scattered up and down various biographical works and can only be read in a fragmentary form; others, and not the least important, have remained unpublished. The present correspondence has been gathered from both sections, and is intended by the editor to be a representative selection. It extends from the year 1785, when Coleridge was a schoolboy at Christ's Hospital, thirteen years of age, to July, 1834, when he was a confirmed invalid, and indeed was within a few days of his death. Though a number of other letters are in existence, this collection is sufficiently large and varied to enable us to realise with greater vividness than has ever hitherto been possible the personality of Coleridge. This must yet for many years to come be of extreme interest to all students of our literature, for we cannot regard Coleridge as a mere abstraction and separate the work from the creator. In every page of his poems, his philosophy, and his criticism we come in contact with some matter which causes some reference to the writer's personality. Even were this not so, Coleridge was a man of so unique and so interesting a nature that there will always be some who will find him, apart from his work, a perpetual subject of consideration and analysis. By means of these letters we are brought into contact with him as a man; we realise his strength and his weakness, his extraordinary intellectual power, and his equally extraordinary shortcomings. Around few English writers has gathered a larger quantity of special literature, in part biographical, in part critical; nor do additions to it cease, for the editor of these volumes has lately published, under the fanciful and rather misleading title of 'Anima Poetæ,' a selection from Coleridge's manuscript notebooks, and the main reason for the appearance of a still more recent work, The Gillmans of Highgate,' is Coleridge's connexion with this excellent family. But among recent works the first place must be given to the admirable biography by the late Mr. Dykes Campbell, which was published in 1894, and is not likely to be superseded as an impartial yet a friendly narra

tive of Coleridge's life, marked as it is by the most scrupulous accuracy and by a judicial yet large-minded criticism. But, excellent as this work is, and interesting as are the views which we obtain of Coleridge in the biographies of Wordsworth and Southey, we cannot in any of these books enter into that long personal intercourse with him which we do by a perusal of a sequence of his letters, extending over a period of nearly fifty years. For this purpose a coherent and consecutive edition of his letters was necessary. Coleridge's was the most interesting personality among the literary men of the first half of this century. No one of his age had his versatility or his capacity, or, it may be added, his curious weaknesses. Such a man can never be properly understood until we have been able to follow his correspondence year by year. Without it we never really get within his own feelings for his friends. With his own words to guide us in regard to his intercourse with his relatives, his friends, and his contemporaries, we stand at his own point of view. Some of the letters by themselves may seem uninteresting and even trivial, but we do not understand a man when we only see him in full dress, so to say; thus, as parts of the whole, such letters are of importance, since they enable us to become more truly intimate with this extraordinary man, to enter into his aims and his failures, to sympathise with his intellectual and moral life, and to feel a kindness even for his shortcomings. Coleridge more than most men poured out oftentimes his whole heart in a letter; he laid bare his soul with a childlike simplicity; he was never averse to enter by correspondence into an abstruse philosophical argument, nor did he keep his literary criticisms only for public reading. Thus both his personal and his intellectual character will become clearer to any one who will take the trouble to read through these two volumes: that character will be better realised by such a perusal than by accepting the most careful and accurate summaries of his actions and his works. We shall endeavour, so far as it is possible in a limited space, to make a few selections from these letters, with a view of placing our readers to some extent on the same terms of intimacy with Coleridge as are reached by those who have not unsympathetically read this remarkable correspondence. For there is little that is new to be said in the form of criticism either of his poetry or his prose. His position as a poet, a philosopher, and a critic is pretty clearly ascertained. The facts of his life have been ately chronicled; his actions and his infirmities have