that I asked him when we were on this subject of Homer if he had never thought of doing much more. He said: 'To translate Homer would be the work of a lifetime; and when done the benefit of it rests with the translator.' The lines I was thinking of as even better than the original were those from the Iliad, viii. 552:

As when in heaven the stars about the moon
Look beautiful, when all the winds are laid,
And every height comes out, and jutting peak
And valley, and the immeasurable heavens,
Break open to their highest.

This my friend Mr. Arthur Sidgwick called 'truly an incomparable rendering.'

All his classic poems show Tennyson at his best. Ulysses has in it an element of autobiography referring to his turning to work as a remedy for the desolation into which his grief at the death of Arthur Hallam had plunged him; and how fine are Enone and Demeter, and best of all Tithonus, with the pathos of the boon granted by love at love's request turning out a curse, and finally Lucretius, speaking of which, and especially of the passage about the abode of the gods,

Where never creeps a cloud or moves a wind

Nor ever falls the least white star of snow,

I said: 'Of course that is Homer,' and the poet said: 'Yes, but I improved on Homer, because I knew that snow crystallises in

stars.'

I was still a small boy when Tennyson sent to my grandfather his Charge of the Light Brigade. I have it just as he sent it, a cutting from p. 780 of the Examiner of 1854. After the first twenty lines as they now stand was a break, and then came four which are now omitted:

Into the valley of death

Rode the six hundred,1

For up came an order which
Someone had blundered.

The rest is as we have it now, except that "Charge for the guns!" he said,' was at first ""Take the guns," Nolan said,' and 'Flashed as they turned in air' was well substituted finally for 'Flashed all at once in air.'

But even in this early original after the line 'Plunged in the battery smoke' four lines of the Examiner cutting had been blacked out, and eight new ones written in by Emily Tennyson, six of which are still retained, ending with

Then they rode back, but not,

Not the six hundred."

1 'Hundred' in Lincolnshire is pronounced 'hunderd.'

* Only 195 out of 607.

The metre is very happy, but not a common one, and I once asked Tennyson if he had taken it from Drayton's Agincourt. He said: 'No, when I wrote it I had not seen Drayton's poem, but The Times account had "Someone had blundered," and the line kept running in my head, and I kept saying it over and over till it shaped itself into the burden of the poem,' where it was repeated at least twice. Knowing that, it is hard to understand how he allowed himself to be persuaded to omit the expression from the poem altogether when it first came out in book form in the Maud volume; but Ruskin, remonstrating and telling him that it was the key to the whole thing, got him to put it back.

Another instance of his getting wrong advice, though he did not this time take it, he told me about when we were talking of his Lincolnshire dialect poems. He said that, as it was twentyseven years since he had left Lincolnshire, he felt that he had probably got some mistakes in his first Northern Farmer, so he sent the MS. to a friend who lived near Brigg, and he altered it all into the dialect spoken in that northern part of the county. He felt sure that was not the dialect of East or Mid-Lincolnshire, and sent it to my father, who put it all back as he had written it. After that the dialect poems were always sent to one of our family before they were given to the public, but the first Northern Farmer has still in it several traces of the wrong dialect in the use of 'o,' as in 'hoight' and 'squoire' and 'doy,' in place of 'a,' which the poet himself explains in his note to the Northern Cobbler to be the proper vowel sound. He loved Lincolnshire, and the sight of a Lincolnshire face was always a delight to him. Knowing this, I once asked: 'Why did you call it the Northern instead of the Lincolnshire Farmer?' and he said: 'You see, I was modest: I had been so long out of the county that I did not feel sure my memory would serve me'; but really he was right all through. How careful he was to be perfectly accurate may be shown by the following: Once at Farringford he asked me how they pronounced turnips' about Spilsby; he had been told 'turmuts.' I said, 'No, "tonnops "'; and some months later, going to see him again at Farringford, when I had forgotten all about the 'tonnops,' his first words to me were 'You were right about that word.' He also said: 'I think you are right, too, about greät," not "graät," for I see it is sometimes spelt "greet.' This is an instance of his perfect accuracy, for to many the distinction between 'great' and 'graät' is hardly perceptible. His poems were always printed and kept by him for some time before he published them, and many a new unpublished poem has he read to me, as to others, under the strictest promise of secrecy, in his study, upstairs, or in the garden, both at Farringford and Aldworth. Those were indeed delightful readings. Owd Roa, one

"

of his last dialect poems, he read to my wife and myself, and subsequently he made me read it aloud to him, and encouraged me to make suggestions on certain words, all of which when it came out I saw he had adopted. The line he made most of, speaking it with a kind of awe in his voice, is in the Globe Edition printed in italics :

But 'e coom'd thruf the fire wi my bairn i' 'is mouth to the winder there.

He liked particularly to find that the hearer appreciated the humour of a line, and he looked up for it. His eye fairly twinkled as he read the lines

When 'e cooms to be deäd

I thinks as I'd like fur to hev soom soört of a sarvice reäd,

and mouthed out with splendid emphasis :

If I beän't noäwaäys—not now-a-daäys-good for nowt,

Yet I beän't such a nowt of all nowts as 'ull hallus do as 'es bid.

I once read The Spinster's Sweet-arts at a penny reading at Freshwater in the proper Lincolnshire dialect, and next morning the poet greeted me with 'You gave me a bad night.' 'How? ' I said. Two of the maids sleep over my room, and they were laughing half the night over The Spinster's Sweet-arts.' I saw by his humorous smile that I was easily forgiven. The story itself is full of humour, and was, he told me, entirely spun out of his own brain,' though the critics say I have no imagination.' His son had suggested, when he was seeking a subject for a new Lincolnshire poem, that he should make an old woman talking to her cats.

She names her cats after her four suitors, and talks to them sometimes as cats and sometimes as if they were the men themselves, mixing them up in the same sentence, or even in the same line, for instance

Naäy, let ma stroäk tha down till I maäkes tha es smooth es silk,
But if I 'ed married tha, Robby, thou'd not 'a' beän worth thy milk;
Thou'd niver 'a' cotch'd ony mice, but 'a' left me the work to do,
And 'a' taäen to the bottle beside, so as all that I 'ears be true;

and again—

Hed I married the Tommies-O Lord,

To love an' obaäy the Tommies! I couldn't 'a' stuck by my word,
An' no'an o' my four sweet-arts 'ud 'a' let me 'a' hed my oän waay,
So I likes 'em best wi' taäils when they 'even't a word to saäy.

WILLINGHAM FRANKLIN RAWNSLEY.

(To be continued.)

PROGRESS

PROGRESS is one of those comfortable sounds which are beloved of after-dinner speakers, and which lull the minds of those who hear them by the soothing vagueness of their connotation. Somehow and somewhither we are progressing. Few, except the professional pessimists, would be so bold as to deny this statement. Let us examine the meaning of this familiar word and the extent and direction of our progress.

The word is, of course, derived from the Latin progredior, and means a going forward, an advance. We are supposed to have made progress since the time of the Flood, since the time of Julius Cæsar, since the beginning of the last century. The goal towards which this progress is being made is not always precisely defined, but it is generally understood to be a greater perfection of some kind than has previously been attained. Progress, therefore, implies the gradual approach to some ideal, not expressly stated, but supposed to be good and worthy of attainment.

Another form in which this theory is sometimes stated is that we are evolving. By some more or less mechanical process the human race is, century by century, supposed to become more perfect, and just as the man is held by some to have ' descended ' from the ape, so will the superman be brought forth by the man. This theory, as generally stated, is quite untenable. In the first place, there is no historical evidence that mankind to-day differs very much in essentials from mankind six thousand years ago. Great men have arisen and overtopped their fellows in various fields of genius, but collective humanity still follows primitive pursuits such as war-making and gain-getting.

Secondly, this theory, pushed to its logical conclusion, would imply determinism. In a humanity which evolved to perfection by purely mechanical processes there would be no place for freewill man could not choose but become superman; whereas it is painfully obvious that in many cases he is free to become, and does become, infra-man.

Moreover, the analogy from Nature is not a true one. The evolution of Nature is finished and perfect. Since the beginning of history only minor changes have occurred in the species, and

these mainly artificial, that is due to the activities of man. The horse and sheep of to-day are in all essentials the horse and sheep of earliest Babylon. If Nature were still evolving there would be, in a period of eight thousand years, at least some indications of changes in the species. But there are none.

Finally, there is too great a gap between the highest animal and the lowest human being to assume that the one could ever have produced the other. Man has various principles which the animal has not, principles, such as reason, which enable him to control the animal kingdom; therefore to assume that the lower could have produced the higher, the lesser the greater, is unphilosophical. Evolution, as generally taught, is but half a truth; and when its principle is applied to human progress it becomes a dangerous delusion.

It will be useful to consider the various human activities one by one and to compare the degree of our present-day attainment in them with that of the past. By so doing we shall be able in some measure to ascertain the amount of real progress which has been made.

To examine first of all the province of religion. It could hardly be maintained that we are as yet living in a great religious epoch. The war, as was natural, produced a certain amount of religious revival, but at present religion is not a vital and universally accepted part of national life. Any great religion which is truly loved and entered into by its devotees infallibly produces visible results. Its beauty will be expressed in the creations of those who are inspired by it; it will bring into being a great art, a great poetry, a great architecture. Where are the signs of any such in the world to-day? There are many epochs in the history of the world in which religion has entered far more deeply into the lives of men than is now the case. We have only to look back to the priest-kings of Egypt to find a people whose religion was the most important thing in their national life. Their beautiful rituals, their architecture, their sculpture, all these sprang inevitably from the concentration of their minds upon God.

In Greece, too, men worshipped with their whole nature. Phidias wrought his masterpieces not upon the Government buildings of Athens, but upon her temples. Greek tragedy itself had a religious origin, and the gods were real and near to men. Our own country under the Druids was probably more religious than now, while in the Dark Ages those who built the great cathedrals, though few in number, were at any rate on fire with zeal. Whatever the cause, we cannot be said to have progressed in religion.

Religious progress must be in one direction towards a more exalted idea of God and in another towards a practical application