vise them, and they seem to us, in their present form, abundantly to fulfill his modest hope that they "will be found to have that unity which comes of method and an honest regard for letters." Their thoroughness is unobtrusive, their charm is unfailing, and they are absolutely sane. We have noted, in the whole book, only one little lapse of memory, and that is in the very impressive summing-up of Tolstóy: "If he chose, he could be as keen a satirist and as indefatigable a student of the meannesses and the minor miseries of life the toothaches and the pimples of existence-as Thackeray. But as Thackeray. But he does not choose." Surely Mr. Henley had forgotten his Anna Karénine when he wrote this, the protuberant veins on her husband's dry and soulless hands, the maddening cracking of his finger joints! And did not the lover of that unhappy lady have a toothache pre- precisely a toothache at a very inopportune moment, so that the undignified malady had a distinct influence on her doom? It is not that we can always agree with Mr. Henley's estimates or accept his judgments without an appeal. We love him for his love of Scott and Dumas père, but his Thackeray is not ours, nor can we quite admit either his Meredith or his Disraeli. But he never fails to refresh and stimulate. One goes back to him with a sense of relaxation, from much of the irrelevant stuff which is proffered us in the way of literary criticism, and he may always be re-read with profit. Let us be frivolous, and try a Sors Henliana, culling a quotation from the page at which the small book may choose to open. Here it is, the last paragraph of the paper on Homer and The ocritus: "It is a relief to turn from the dust and din and clatter of modern life, with its growing trade in heroes and its poverty of men, its innumerable regrets and ambitions and desires, to this immense tranquillity, this candid and shining calm. They had no Irish question then, you can reflect, nor was theology invented. Men were not afraid of life nor ashamed of death, and you could be heroic without a dread of clever editors, and hospitable without fear of rogues, and dutiful for no hope of illuminated scrolls. Odysseus disguised as Irus is still Odysseus and august. How is it that Mr. Gladstone in rags and singing ballads would be only fit for a police station; that Lord Salisbury hawking cocoanuts would instantly suggest the purlieus of Petticoat Lane? Is the fault in ourselves? Can it be that we have deteriorated so much as that? Nerves, nerves, nerves. . These many centuries the world has had neuralgia, and what has come of it is that Robert Elsmere is an ideal, and the bleat of the sentimentalist might almost be mistaken for the voice of living England." mas. The Three Plays will also be found very good reading, though they were professedly written for the stage, and not the closet. Beau Austin and Deacon Brodie have been subjected to the test of representation, and have borne it better than the majority of modern English draAdmiral Guinea has never been seen. It is the most original of the three, but it contains two rôles as difficult as they are alluring. Pending the discovery of an ideal pair to play these two remarkable parts, Mr. Henley has resisted many overtures, and in fact has obstinately declined to have the piece acted at all. It is one more instance of that self-restraint which we began by noting, and which receives fresh illustration from his verse. In his poetry, if anywhere, a man is expected to let himself go, but Mr. Henley's anxiety always appears to be lest he should reveal himself too freely. To the memorable series of poems In Hospital he has prefaced this motto from Balzac: "On ne saurait dire à quel point un homme, seul dans son lit et malade, devient personnel." The proud "Cora's riding and Lilian's rowing, Nothing is left for the men to do." The envoy is distinctly malicious, but it must not be suppressed : "Prince, our past on the dust-heap lies! It is always a little rash to change the title of a book. The public feels that its own rights are infringed. When Mr. Henley, a little more than a year ago, made a second collection of his poems, he named it from the fiery Song of the Sword. Now we have a new edition of the same book, much rearranged, somewhat enlarged, a little improved, and it is called London Voluntaries. The latter is unquestionably the better title, since it emphasizes what is most original in the new volume. The Song of the Sword has been essayed by many, from King Olaf's favorite minstrel onward; but the Voluntaries describe with matchless fidelity some of the more impressive aspects of the monster town. It is with a sense of something like suffocation that one who knows his London reads the following: "Out of the poisonous East, Over a continent of blight, Like a maleficent Influence released The hangman wind that tortures temper and light Comes slouching, sullen and obscene, Of excremental humors, roused to strife A craftsman at his bench, he settles down To the grim job of throttling London Town." This movement of the Voluntaries is 1 London Voluntaries. By W. E. HENLEY. London: David Nutt. 1893. appropriately prefaced by the direction Largo e mesto. But there is a London scherzo as well, from which we cull a picturesque passage: "For earth and sky and air Are golden everywhere, And golden with a gold so suave and fine The looking on it lifts the heart like wine. Trafalgar Square The fountains volleying golden glaze — Gleams like an angel-market. High aloft Over his couchant Lions in a haze But it is time to stay the hand in quotation, and we will even let the reader escape the literary moral half promised at the beginning of these desultory remarks. Who knows but it may have pointed itself in the course of them? DEAN STANLEY. 1 DEAN STANLEY died in 1881, and a series of obstacles, narrated in the preface to his Life and Correspondence, prevented till now the publication of any full record of his career. The reader has the advantage in a better perspective; a period of thirteen years is long enough to permit the softening of some outlines, the depression of some incidents which loomed up mightily at the time they occurred, but not too long to permit the fading of a strong character which rises out of the pages of this full memoir with a distinctness of personality almost as great as belonged to the man whose life Stanley made so contributory to English thought. Stanley's Arnold was a model biography in its full yet restrained portraiture; Prothero's Stanley has to do with a character no less marked than that of Arnold, but set in a much more complex frame of circumstance. Arnold, moreover, was but forty-seven when he died; Stanley, born ten years later than Arnold, was sixty-six when he died; and the most emphatic impression made by the book before us is of the abundance of a life led in the very centre of English thought and action. Mr. Prothero, 1 The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, late Dean of Westminster. By ROWLAND E. PROTHERO and G. G. BRADLEY. with a candor not always to be found in a biographer, and with a fidelity which implies loyalty to truth, and not partisanship, has used a great many lines in drawing Stanley's portrait, more, perhaps, than a greater artist would have required; but the result is worth the pains taken. We could have dispensed with some of the delightful letters of travel, if we could have had more details of Stanley's intercourse with men, as, for example, in the Revision Committee; for when a man's writings are so considerable and so interpretative as Stanley's, the biographer's task is rather to draw upon material not thus accessible to readers; and in the great variety of Stanley's social intercourse lay the opportunity for a fresh illustration of his character. Mr. Prothero also devotes himself with perhaps too great assiduity to comment on Stanley's theological position. Yet, after all the minor criticism one may make, these two volumes constitute an honorable monument to the memory of a man who was conspicuous in his generation rather than eminent, who exercised a strong personal influence rather than left a great impress upon his time, but who, by virtue of his In two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1894. . strong sympathies, his generous nature, and the positions which he occupied, never can be left out of account in any assessment of the England of to-day. The external incidents of his career follow in swift and mounting succession. Born of an ancient family, the son of a clergyman who became Bishop of Norwich, early satisfying his passion for travel, a boy at Rugby when Arnold was setting his stamp upon impressionable youth, a student at Oxford when the University was stirred by a great ecclesiastical revival, secretary to the commission which was long engaged in reforming the higher education of England, tutor of University College, canon of Canterbury, professor of ecclesiastical history in the University, canon of Christ Church, the chosen companion of the Prince of Wales in his journey to Egypt and Palestine, married to a lady high in the favor of the Queen, established at Westminster as dean, in a position practically independent of ecclesiastical control, such a career stated in mere outline has power to arrest the attention; and when one considers further the wide range of Stanley's travel, the scope of his familiar acquaintance, and the deep security of his domestic life both before and after marriage, one sees the rich possibilities of a life so led. It was because Stanley gave freely that he received freely. His achieve ments as a student, less in the formal academic way than in the eager essays at high literary expression, had already marked him among his fellows, at first in school, afterward in college. His Life His Life of Arnold showed him a literary artist of no mean order, and his successive publications attested both the fecundity of his mind, and those qualities of appreciation, of vivid reproduction, which are acceptable in the field of nature, but far more keenly enjoyed when the material wrought upon is human history, and especially that history concerned with the ideas which underlie action. If Maurice, in the same day and generation, was the prophet who disclosed the thought of God in human history, Stanley was the poet who reconstructed that which had been treated as sacred history, so that its humanity was restored, and its sanctity made to be resident in it, not imposed upon it. It was by his Sinai and Palestine and his Jewish Church that Stanley acquired the widest repute, and the constructive, imaginative art of these books is likely to keep them alive among the people when more exact scholarship demands a treatment severer and more critical. But these books, though the deposit of his observation and reflection in travel and study, hardly suffice to account for the popularity of Stanley, and for the great interest which attaches to his personality, - an interest which these two volumes of Mr. Prothero's labor clearly attest, and in a large degree explain. A single word may perhaps set this forth, but it is a large word. Stanley's patriotism was the rock upon which his fame was built. The patriotism of an intellectual man who was also a Churchman, who stood publicly for an order, yet never aggrandized that order, was something very fine in its quality and passionate in its lofty fervor. It did not expend itself in phrases, but was as deep-seated as life itself. It is possible to look at the term noblesse oblige until it becomes the synonym for a pharisaic complacency; but when a man whose familiar associations are with those who inherit rank and power strikes hands, by force of his nature, with those who are shut out from power or feel the weight of the classes above them, and does this without any sense of condescension, and with no consciousness of separation from his own order, we may justly say that he reckons himself under a common obligation. Stanley caught fire from Arnold's enthusiasm for a church and state which knew no dividing barrier. All the dialectics in the world could not serve either in its constitution, to act otherwise; but the impelling power which drove all these mental forces in the direction of national well-being was not intellectual, it was emotional; the passion of patriotism was a steadily burning flame, and every activity was kindled by it. of these men to make their proposi- all its operations, so highly associative tion logically whole; but Stanley, unlike Arnold, who shot pamphlets at the mark, expended a life of restless energy in demonstrating in his own person how a great idea may dominate the soul, and inge every part of one's activity. The The deanship of Westminster was a vantage ground for a man so possessed, but it was also the natural and just landingplace of one with Stanley's patriotic pas sion. That it was, so to speak, the only official post in England where a man with Stanley's ideas could put them into official expression may intimate that a general acceptance of these ideas was not practicable; but it would be truer to say that the sentiment which dominated the Dean of Westminster was one entirely possible to Englishmen, whatever might be their theories of church and state; that Stanley's sentiment was infinitely more precious than his theory; and that the conspicuous use which he made of his opportunities served in the public mind very much as the colors of a forlorn hope. When Stanley forbade the use of the abbey to the Pan-Anglican Synod because it was in plan and purpose sectarian, though catholic in name, and opened its pulpit to nonconformists and laymen because he desired it to be the meeting-house of the English nation, he involved himself in a network of casuistic discussion, but his singleness of mind was vindicated. There was much that was imaginative, but there was more of lofty, comprehensive conception of national being in the whole attitude which he took toward English historic life, and the life of contemporary England. His delight in pageant, his amplification of trivial coincidences, his quick sense of occult comparisons, were the exuberant manifestations of a nature which was profoundly loyal, and gave itself unceasingly to every effort which looked toward unity and solidarity. It was impossible, one might say, for a mind so instinctively unifying in It is hard for an ardent American, especially of the educated class, to read attentively such a book as this without a passing envy of the conditions under which a career like Stanley's was consummated. At first blush, there seems so much greater concentration of opportunity, so much closer connection between the man and the nation. Stanley seems almost to have given one hand to the Queen, the other to the workman, and to have held both firmly in his grasp. The personal element is noticeable, and the firmer texture of society makes every stroke of a man's work more evident. Instead of a vast area of manifold interests, isolated in great measure from each other, an island, with one controlling nervous centre; instead of a group of loosely organized religious bodies, an establishment, with its roots for better or worse in the very soil of the social and political world; instead of a multitudinous company of local magnates, a compact body of legislators, whose concern is both local and imperial. It is no wonder that, as one compares the two countries, the possibility of making one's personality tell upon national well-being in the United States seems inconsiderable beside that offered to ingenuous youth in England. Dissipation of energy appears to be the rule in one case, concentration of power in the other. It would be a weak nature, however, which would be discouraged by such a superficial survey. Cathedrals, venerable universities, great estates, a highly organized society, these have strong attractions, especially for those who look at them in the distance, from a fore |