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it would be easy to add such a clause as would make the profession of the biographical pirate dangerous, if not impossible. But Parliament is not likely ever to do justice to the poor author, since the poor author cannot turn an election nor hamper a Government. And as politics is (and must be) a species of blackmail, nobody will ever be protected by our Ministers who cannot threaten those Ministers with ruin. Wherefore the Glydes of this earth will flourish exceedingly, unless the good feeling of critics and readers discourage their impertinence.

But by a kind of irony, Edward FitzGerald has lately been flung into the deepest pit of notoriety. Not only has he found an absurd biographer-he has become the victim of an absurd cult. The man who spent his whole life far from coteries, whose best companion was the captain of his lugger, whom not even warm-hearted friendship could drag to town, has been forced to lend his name to a dining-club. This satirical insult cannot be matched in the history of letters, and if anybody ever turned in the grave, then must Edward FitzGerald move restlessly in Boulge Churchyard, when the Chianti of Rupert Street sparkles red in the wine-glass. There is, in fact, a club, called after Omar Khayyám, which meets more often than it need, either for its own glory or for the glory of Edward FitzGerald. Its members, we believe, are respectable men of letters, and there seems no reason why they should not pursue collectively a worship which each affects of his individual will. But although the club was recently described as "a modest coterie, which never advertises," its dinners are always the signal for a public outburst of enthusiasm. We are told how these respectable men of letters sit with vineleaves or some other vegetable encircling their scanty locks; we have a vision of them pouring the cheap wine

of Italy over the roses of Shiraz; their weak little parodies of the Master's quatrains are passed round an appreciative press, until we are forced to believe that "the modest coterie which never advertises" believes the eye of posterity is upon it. It would all be very droll but for the careless use of FitzGerald's name. A dinner is as good an excuse for advertisement as anything, and logs are easily rolled across a dining-table. But why should Edward FitzGerald be thrust into this orgie of culture? He never belonged to a modest club, he never sat with vineleaves round his head in the very presence of an industrious press, and the Omar Khayyám Club may not even plead the recklessness of hot youth for its unwarranted usurpation of an honored name.

But there is another charge which may be laid at the door of our modest coterie-the charge of hypocrisy. Inspired by the sentiment of the "Rubáiyát," its worship cannot but be insincere. The honored men of letters, who conspire to do honor to the famous translator, are surely not moved even by admiration to the bland Epicureanism which was the essence of the Persian's gospel. They are not so blind to the morrow as to withhold their little verses from the press; they have no "winter garment of repentance" to fling "in the fire of spring," as they fill the cup; they cannot say, with honest hand upon beating heart, that they were "never deep in anything but wine." No; their worship is barren as well as indiscreet; they not only traduce the translator; they are false to the doctrine of the gay and wise original.

In brief, they, like the unauthorized biographer, have sought to make common what should have been rare, to make popular what should have remained exclusive and aloof; and, so doing, they have played their part in the tragedy of publicity which is daily

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Tobias Smollett is a contrast ready made to Edward FitzGerald. The Suffolk squire was a man of letters in his own despite; literature flowed in his veins like blood, and he did but write because he could give the world the very best of himself. Dr. Toby, on the other hand, followed his calling like a trade. He knew how to extract golden sovereigns from the ink-pot; he edited, he compiled, he fought with all the acrimony of an acid temper. Not for him the admiration of a few; an advertisement had its value even in the eighteenth century, and Smollett knew perfectly well that if he discredited his rivals he made his own position the stronger. So, as Mr. Henley explains in his admirable introduction to the new edition,' the author of "Roderick Random" was half hack, halt man of genius. When he is at his best he ranks with the immortals; when he is at his worst, he sinks lower than the bittergalled journalist. It is, therefore, not easy to find his place in the history of literature, and the enterprise might have appalled a more timid critic than Mr. Henley. The biography of Burns proved how fine a talent Mr. Henley has for drawing a full-length portrait in a few strokes. What he did for Burns he has done on a still smaller scale for Smollett. He does not perplex his readers with too many docu

1 The Works of Tobias Smollett, with an Introduction by W. E. Henley. Westminster: Archibald Constable & Co.

ments; he does not skip off down a byway and drag his hero off from the highroad of truth. He presents the essentials only, and the result is an admirable picture of the vanity, the brutality, the immeasurable talent that went to make up the man Tobias Smollett, who will be remembered as long as the English language is studied and revered.

The least attractive trait in the character of Smollett is his vanity. He had not that divine gift of self-knowledge which distinguishes the greatest men. He esteemed himself for his failures, and thought his triumphs the mere accidents of life. His poor, pitiful tragedy of the "Regicide" gave him more pleasure than the accomplished observation, the boisterous humor of "Roderick Random." He used his popularity, as Mr. Henley points out, not to give another splendid romance to the world, but to print his tasteless drama. That Churchill pilloried the "Regicide" is not surprising, and the famous lines in the "Apology" are not surcharged by a comma:

Whoever read "The Regicide" but

swore

The author wrote as man ne'er wrote before?

Others for plots and underplots may call;

Here's the right method-have no plot at all.

Who can so often in his cause engage The tiny pathos of the Grecian stage, Whilst honors rise, and tears spontane

ous flow

At tragic Hah! and no less tragic Oh!

Thus Churchill lavished upon Smollett some of the abuse which that gentleman reserved for his rivals. And it is impossible to say that Churchill was unjust. But with his novels it is, as he himself would have said, other guess-work. Smollett, as Mr. Henley most wisely points out, derived from Le Sage; Fielding derived from Cer

vantes; and Fielding is as high above his rival as his exemplar was above the exemplar of Smollett. You will vainly seek in "Roderick Random," or even in "Humphrey Clinker," the urbanity, the scholarship, the Homeric simplicity of "Tom Jones." But a comparison is not inevitable; and it is Dr. Toby's misfortune that Fielding, whom he hated with a jealous hatred, was ever mentioned by his side. Sir Walter Scott, from whom we differ with hesitancy and regret, did his hero less than justice when he put him near Fielding's throne. But an inapposite comparison need not blind us to the very real genius of him who invented Oakum and Tremaine, Whiffle and Weasel. And here begins our quarrel with Mr. Henley. He insists more strongly than is necessary upon Smollett's coarseness. Smollett was coarse that is true; but he belonged to a coarse age, and he was writing of coarse men. It was impossible to touch the British Navy of the eighteenth century with hands decently covered in kid; it was impossible to describe the wonderful life of the highroad, the splendid uncertainty of the village inn, in such terms as would commend themselves to a modern drawing-room. But if Smollett paints the grosser side of life, he paints it with an impartial brush. The personages of "Roderick Random" are not the ladies and gentlemen one would wish to meet. They are, with few exceptions, blackguards and rapscallions. But they are neither held up for our imitation nor dissected after the manner of obscene psychology. Here, on the contrary, is the strong, open, sincere esprit Anglais, and we should never hesitate to put either "Roderick" or "Peregrine" into the hands of a boy, conscious that no prurient construction could ever be placed upon a single episode in these strange novels of the road. But if Mr. Henley's Puritanism now and again seems to get the better of him, his genBlackwood's Magazine.

we

eral criticism of Smollett is admirably just and intelligent. In the first he explains in eloquent terms the vital quality of his author. Whatever faults may be imputed to Smollett, one virtue is his-the virtue of life. His characters are not dummies; they breathe and speak and act of their own will. When once he has put them down, they are stronger than he, and no one can read his splendid romances without making fresh friends and without forgetting the drab gravity of our own poor society. Mr. Henley frankly confesses that he has said what he believes to be the worst that can be said of Smollett. That is quite true, but there is another side. Smollett's master-quality—again quote Mr. Henley-is "a peculiar power of realizing character, not by description and analysis, but out of the character's own mouth." So it is that we know the incomparable ruffians that crowd his canvas. No sooner do they appear than their character is amply revealed. The navy has never been painted in darker colors than Smollett employed; yet it is easy to prove that Smollett's colors are wantonly dark. He knew the navy from the inside, and there is no doubt that his stern portraiture made reform possible-almost easy. Oakum existed; even the monster Whiffoe, a far worse blackguard, degraded the service; and Smollett, in throwing a light on these villains, made clear the way for Nelson, and (in his own walk) for Marryat himself. So we readily condone the faults of our author, remembering that if he himself were an assassin in the thickets of literature, his books are honest and free, at full liberty to come and go in all hands, clean companions, of that manhood and valiance that is Britain's boast and Britain's solace. Wherefore, we thank Mr. Henley for the final edition of a great English classic.

A MADRIGAL.

On a fair Spring morning
Love rode down the lane,
Youth and Joy and eager Hope
Followed in his train;
All the primroses looked up

Such a sight to see

Leaning from her lattice high

Mockingly sang she:

"Love that's born at Spring-tide

Is too lightly won,

It will pass like silver dew
'Neath the midday sun!"

All in glowing Summer

Love went riding by,
Not a single downy cloud
Flecked the azure sky;
Generous roses o'er his path

Their sweet petals shed

Lingering on the terraced walk

Wistfully she said:

"Love that burns so fiercely

May have life as brief,

It will all be dead and cold
Ere the falling leaf!"

Late in golden Autumn

Love passed up the street,

When the reapers' sickles flash

Through the ripened wheat;

Russet leaves about his way
Fluttered in a cloud-

Half she stayed, then turned aside

With a gesture proud:

"Love though late a-coming

Might be swift to go,

Flying as the swallows fly

From the early snow!"

Through the shivering forest

Swept the wintry blast,

Thundering o'er the frost-bound roads

Love came riding fast;

Snowflakes froze upon his beard,
Yonder lay the waste,

As he paused before her door
Like a man in haste:

Swift she ran to meet him,
"Love, forgive and stay,
Never any more, Dear Heart,
Will I say thee Nay!"

The Argosy.

Christian Burke.

CIRCULATING-LIBRARY RELIGION.

Books, says Milton, are "as lively and as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon's teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men." "I assure you, sir," said a country bookseller, lately, "half the books that go out of my shop aren't fit to be perused." The British matron, however, now reads everything herself, and likes her girls to do the same. The sixpenny edition, which may extinguish the country bookseller and the circulating library as well, finds its way to the schoolboy's locker and the servants' hall, and brings the New Morality within the reach of every purse. Miss Broughton tells us wittily that she used to be regarded as a Zola, but is now looked on as a Charlotte Yonge; so fast do we progress. modern work of genius, however, differs entirely from the free-spoken drama or tale of days when to call a spade a spade was almost a circumlocution. "Peep," says Thackeray, "into the cottage at Olney, and see there Mrs. Unwin and Lady Hesketh, those highbred ladies, those sweet, pious women, and William Cowper, that delicate wit, that trembling pietist, that refined gentleman, absolutely reading out Jonathan Wild to the ladies! What a change in our manners since then!" The poem, play, or nove of our more prudish

The

days might-much of it at any rate-be read aloud in the family circle. The language is all to be found in the most decorous dictionaries. There are described no delightful, wicked rakes on the one hand, no persecuted Pamelas on the other. Nevertheless, the book bound in art-linen usually leaves the oldfashioned reader with a bad taste in the mouth. If the novel which delighted our forefathers pointed a moral rather plain-spokenly, or was as frankly and boisterously non-moral as a Punch and Judy show, at any rate there was no namby-pamby new Christianity in it, no sophisticating of the broad distinction between right and wrong, no cant about the emancipation of thought and breaking forth of light, or about the supersession of the Ten Commandments by a higher code of ethics. After reading about the pure woman faithfully presented, the woman with a past, the woman with a past tense, the woman of the future, the revolted daughter, and the like, we find ourselves longing for five minutes of the wholesome intolerance of Dr. Johnson. "Sir," he would say but perhaps we had better not imagine what he would say.

Mimetic art presents life as too rounded and complete a thing ever quite to satisfy Christianity, which appends to drama and tale a "to be con

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