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for them. To save herself from one of the mob who attempted even worse outrage, one woman leaped from the gallery of the meeting-house to the floor. The riot lasted for hours and in the presence of thousands."

We may include amongst works of a biographical character the two volumes of Pope's correspondence which have been published by Mr. Elwin during the year. This book is in one sense an almost unparalleled literary phenomenon. Mr. Elwin has devoted the labour of years to producing a perfect edition of the poetical ruler of the eighteenth century; it is as carefully and conscientiously done as if it were a labour of love, and yet, the effect of this long familiarity with Pope upon his editor's mind has been to produce-not, as is usual, a spirit of indiscriminatory admiration, but its very contrary. Mr. Elwin apparently feels towards Pope as we may imagine a galley-slave would feel to the companion to whom he had been chained for many years, if one galley-slave were a virtuous philosopher who had got into his awkward position by some unaccountable scrape, and the other a villain of a peculiarly cowardly and contemptible type. Mr. Elwin carries his dislike of Pope into the criticism of his poems. We have seldom read a more curiously inappreciative commentary, though it will be enough here to say that he has prefixed to the "Essay on Man" a prose essay about three times the length of the text, intended to show that Pope's theological and philosophical opinions are lame and confused: as if any body ever doubted it! Mr. Elwin, however, has undoubtedly exposed many frailties which Pope's admirers would gladly have disbelieved. He occupied 120 pages of his first volume in proving that Pope had garbled his correspondence, and garbled it in such a way as to injure his friend's memory, and to reflect undeserved credit upon himself, and that he had resorted to a series of the most complete and contemptible intrigues in order to make it appear that the publication of his correspondence was not his own act, but that of piratical publishers. In short, he lied basely and profusely.

Pope, whose taste was almost always correct with regard to literary matters knew quite well that ease and freedom are essential to good letter-writing. He knew well that such compositions ought to be unpremeditated, and that whatever charm they possess should be caught from the feelings of the moment. Again and again he assures his correspondents that he is writing in careless haste, that he does not stay to correct, that his words spring warm from his heart, that his letters are "wretched papers and "unconsidered trifles;" but these assertions did not always deceive his correspondents (they never deceived Swift), and we now know as a fact, what Johnson and Cowper guessed at without our knowledge, that Pope's letters are manufactured, and that, in the language of Bowles, the ease is laboured and the warmth studied.

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The truth is Pope was blinded by his literary vanity. In his eagerness to carry out what Swift shrewdly calls his "schemes of epistolary fame," he resorted to the most pitiful arts; and as the result of all his pains not only disgraced himself as a man, but actually lowered his reputation as an author. The interest of Pope's correspondence is, nevertheless, very great. He was the first man of letters of his day; the most powerful intellect of that time was his friend and correspondent for a quarter of a century; he wrote to and received letters from the principal wits of the town; he was the friend of Atterbury and Arbuthnot, of Bolingbroke and Gay, of Steele and Parnell;

and thus Pope's letters, strained and laboured though they be, present to us in suggestive fragments a picture of the age for which we may look in vain elsewhere. Indeed, the literary history of the period could not be written without a familiar acquaintance with this correspondence, and the large and important additions made to it in Mr. Elwin's "Pope" would be a sufficient reason, even if it were the only one, why this edition of the poet should supersede the editions of Bowles and of Roscoe. We think Mr. Elwin has acted wisely in arranging the letters in classes, instead of placing them in chronological order, so that we can refer at once to the correspondence with Wycherley, with Caryll, or with Swift; and as the editor states the source whence each letter is derived, and explains perplexing allusions in the notes, the reader's path is made smooth. There is a good deal, however, in Pope's share of the correspondence which cannot be explained; for, as Mr. Elwin observes," he had cultivated the art of using words to conceal his thoughts;" but it is probable that we lose little by our ignorance of the meaning sometimes hidden or supposed to be hidden under a cloud of verbiage.

The characters of many of Pope's correspondents are curiously illustrated in these volumes. We may especially mention Gay, Bolingbroke, and Swift. The last is, in our opinion, by far the ablest letter writer of the party. We conclude by quoting two descriptive sketches of themselves- -one by Swift writing to Pope, and the other by Pope writing to Swift.

Swift says:-"I awake so indifferent to every thing which may pass either in the world or my own little domestic, that I hardly think it worth my time to rise, and would certainly lie all day abed if decency and dread of sickness did not drive me thence. . . . I dine tête-à-tête five days a week with my old Presbyterian housekeeper whom I call Sir Robert, and so do all my friends and neighbours. I am in my chamber at five, there sit alone till eleven, and then to bed. I write pamphlets and follies merely for amusement, and when they are finished, or I grow weary in the middle, I cast them into the fire, partly out of dislike and chiefly because I know they will signify nothing. I walk much every day and ride once or twice a week, and so you have the whole state of my life."

Here is Pope's account :-"The changes of weather affect me much; otherwise, I want not spirits, except when indigestions prevail. The mornings are my life; in the evenings I am not dead, indeed, but sleep, and am stupid enough. I love reading still better than conversation; but my eyes fail, and at the hours when most people indulge in company I am tired, and find the labour of the past day sufficient to weigh me down; so I hide myself in bed, as a bird in his nest, much about the same time, and rise and chirp the earlier in the morning,"

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Passing to works on general history, we may first notice Mr. Freeman's Essays," reprinted from various Quarterlies, some of which, we regret to say, must now be numbered amongst the dead. Mr. Freeman has an established reputation even amongst those who are very little acquainted with the works to which he has affixed his name. We are all pretty well acquainted with the severe censor who swoops down inevitably upon any poor scribe who ventures to write erroneous opinions about the Holy Roman Empire, or even to speak of the Great Charles by the time-honoured name of Charlemagne. More than once we have seen something like a page of this work filled with an

elaborate argument to show-not that a writer had made a downright mistake or even an incomplete statement of fact-but that he had used some epithet from which it might be generally inferred that his views of history were not quite so clear and comprehensive as they ought to be. Never, in short, was any man taken with so strong a taste for breaking butterflies upon a wheel as Mr. Freeman. And yet we should do wrong to speak of his services lightly. In spite of, or rather on account of his little foibles, Mr. Freeman has really and perceptibly raised the general standard of scholarship as applied to history, and has succeeded by diligent iteration in drumming two or three useful pieces of knowledge into the heads of most tolerably educated Englishmen. It is perhaps a pity that so much energy should be allowed to run to waste through anonymous channels, and we are therefore glad that Mr. Freeman has collected into a single volume many scattered essays of real value, many of which would scarcely be accessible but for this judicious revival. They will go far to establish Mr. Freeman's claim to be an authority of almost unequalled weight within the subject which he has made his own, His studies of the history, not merely of this country, but of Europe generally, have been surprisingly wide and accurate. His proficiency in many subsidiary branches is scarcely less remarkable; and when we take into account his manifold labours to which nothing but an unflinching industry could have made him equal, we may safely say that no man in England has done more to spread sound historical knowledge. He has the fault of sneering at that kind of writing which he does not appreciate; and apparently considers that the adjective "philosophical" as prefixed to history comes to much the same thing as superficial or erroneous. And yet Mr. Freeman's painful investigation of annals would to our thinking be simply so much labour thrown away were it in fact true that no generalizations could be founded upon it.

In spite of the frequent narrowness produced by this tone of thought, and by the occasional exaggerations into which Mr. Freeman is betrayed by his praiseworthy anxiety to render full justice to certain medieval times, which results in crediting them with virtues and talents to which, as it seems to us, they can hardly lay claim, his book is one of genuine value, and abounds in true historical reflections of the greatest value and solidity. The last fifteen pages of the essay on Frederick II. are admirable for weighty judgment. The essays on Charles the Bold, and the Franks and the Gauls, may teach a novice more of the true state of Europe before the great settlement of Munster, which more than any thing else made it into the modern Europe of the atlas than he would gather from long and elaborate books. Mr. Freeman has the great merit of writing suggestively, as when he says, for instance, that "the conscious idea of nationality had not [in the thirteenth century] the same effect upon men's minds which it has in our times." In this way, though lack of space prevents him from elaborating the discussion of important differences of conception between past and present, he prevents the reader from passing close to them without becoming aware that they are there.

The year has not been fruitful in historical works, but we may briefly mention Dr. Ihne's History of Rome, which appears in an English as well as in the German edition. It may be asked whether there is room for another Roman History, and whether Mommsen should yet be superseded. We may reply that the two writers take lines sufficiently different to allow space for

both. Mommsen writes for scholars and students: Ihne may be studied with profit by readers who come quite fresh to the subject. He is not so dogmatic as Mommsen, and, in difficult cases, places the evidence on both sides fairly before us and gives us reasons for the views which he adopts. The first volume brings us down to the conquest of Italy, and is concluded with an interesting chapter on the condition of the Romans immediately before their great struggle with Carthage. The second volume is concerned with the Punic wars, and brings us down to the decisive victory of Zama. Ihne treats the subject at much greater length than Mommsen, and does not pass over a single detail.

The Punic wars suggest abundant matter for discussion, and the entire subject in all its bearings seems to us to be admirably treated by Dr. Ihne. During the struggle, no less a question was being debated than one involving the whole future history of Europe. Polybius saw clearly that the conquerors at Zama must of necessity get the complete control of the known world. It has been often said that we have reason for congratulating ourselves on the victory of Rome, inasmuch as the civilization which she was the means of spreading was of a nobler and more vigorous kind than that which we usually associate with the Oriental character of Carthage; but Dr. Ihne reminds us that our knowledge of the Carthaginian mind and modes of government is too contracted to enable us to pronounce a judgment with any reasonable confidence. At all events, Livy and Polybius were perfectly right in attributing an altogether exceptional importance to the contest. The latter historian was of opinion that the rival cities were pretty equally matched in strength and resources. On this point we find Dr. Mommsen and Dr. Ihne in substantial agreement. Both think the advantage was on the whole on the side of Rome. The Carthaginians from first to last occupied much the same position in Africa as we do in India. They remained strangers to the end, and their empire, like that of Austria, was made up of various nationalities which hardly admitted of growth into one people. The Roman State confronted them with a well-defined geographical and ethnographical unity. Romans, Latins, Samnites, and Lucanians were races of the same blood, and could be welded together into a homogeneous material. This Dr. Ihne believes to have been the main cause of Roman superiority. The victory, he says, was won by nerve and sinew rather than by skill and courage. He not inaptly compares it to a fight between two equally matched pugilists, in which the question is, Who can keep his breath longest and remain longest on his legs ?

In the last chapter of his second volume Dr. Ihne sums up the general results to Rome of her successful termination of this great war. He points out how some of the worst features of the Roman character now became most offensively prominent. The citizen militia had been turned into a professional soldiery. The door was thus opened to a multitude of sources of moral corruption. Roman generals were apt to degenerate into mere plunderers. They were followed by a legion of contractors and speculative traders, who made haste to be rich at the expense of the unhappy countries which were at their mercy. The treatment of Sicily by Marcellus had already been a disgraceful blot on the Roman name. The "blood and iron" element in the national character was now rendered more hideous by an insatiable greed. Greek culture, which was becoming fashionable, was little better than a

varnish spread over a barbarous surface. Another disastrous effect of the wars by which Rome made herself master of the world was to place a huge mass of pauperism side by side with extravagant wealth. Hannibal's dream of a dreadful serpent which crushed fields and plantations beneath its coils had been fulfilled in the deplorable depopulation of Italy. Nothing can be gloomier than the picture which is presented to us in the concluding chapter of this volume. The reader will find a great deal in it which will help him in understanding the subsequent course of Roman history. It brings together in a very moderate compass and in a very clear form the results of much thought and learning, and fitly concludes a work which, as far as it has been carried, treats a well-worn subject with freshness, and will, we are sure, be welcomed by all scholars and historical students. We ought to add that Dr. Ihne is his own translator, and that his style will be found uniformly agreeable.

We shall content ourselves with mentioning only two other books in this division of our subject; and we place them here because they form a kind of link between works of a historical and those of a philosophical character. Mr. John Morley has published a Study on Voltaire, written with his usual vigour of style. The view which he takes of the general character of his hero's intellectual influence is the one which will commend itself to the school of positivist writers, with whom Mr. Morley has many points of sympathy. More orthodox persons will, of course, be less satisfied; and yet much that Mr. Morley says would deserve the most respectful attention. In truth, the time has come when Voltaire as a writer should be judged with less prejudice than has hitherto been the case. We do not speak merely of the extraordinary merits of his style, of the services which he rendered to history, or of the vigour with which he opposed the last remnants of religious persecution; even in that direction in which his action has been most bitterly condemned we may at least condemn him without thinking and without holding him up as a kind of unparalleled monster. Nobody indeed will deny that Voltaire attacked the faith of his contemporaries with a reckless coarseness, with a mixture of blasphemy, obscenity, and cynicism at which they had a good right to be revolted. But it must also be added that the kind of religion which excited his wrath was really that very unamiable and frigid phenomenon which satisfied the intellects of men in the eighteenth century without touching their hearts. If his assault was unscrupulous, it at least cleared the path of much pharisaism and hypocrisy, and made room, little as he might have expected such a result, for the revival of a more spiritual form of religion in the present century. Mr. Morley is a rather lenient judge of this portent which so startled our grandfathers. In certain cases this seems to betray him into judgments which certainly strike us as paradoxical. That a special taste for licentious writing was among his hero's most marked characteristics was, we had fancied, a matter on which all his critics were agreed, though some might excuse and some exaggerate the offence. It is a disagreeable subject to touch on; but the plain truth should be told on this as on other matters, if they are alluded to at all. Mr. Morley repudiates the charge altogether. "The fact," he says, that the greatest man of his time should have written one of the most unseemly poems that exist in any tongue is worth trying to understand. Voltaire, let us remember, had no special turn like Gibbon or Bayle, least of all like the unclean Swift, for extracting a malodorous diversion out of grossness or sensuality. His writings betray no

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