But perhaps, of all the classes which have been held, the most interesting was one for working men, held in St. John's Gate itself. It was indeed a fitting-on of the old time to the new, and a legitimate development of the Hospitaller spirit, when these men-warriors in a campaign whose victims are more numerous than in what is generally called war-came together week after week, at no slight cost in selfsacrifice and self-denial, to acquire a knowledge which was not to make themselves great or rich, but merely useful to their fellows. And they were only types of thousands who have done the same, although not under circumstances of such sentimental interest.

The St. John Ambulance Association, although admitting of much decentralized work, is governed from St. John's Gate by a central committee, composed entirely of members of the Order. As in the cases above mentioned, there is a special ambulance department, and its representative on the Council, the Director, acts as Vice-Chairman of the St. John Ambulance Association. All the examiners of classes are detailed by the Central Committee, and a uniform value is thus secured for the certificates granted to successful pupils. All orders and rules governing the association are issued by the Central Committee; and yet there is sufficient decentralization. to permit much useful local action and healthy rivalry, and to relieve the governing body of purely local details. As all correspondence and all publications date from St. John's Gate, this last child of the Order has done more than any other to call attention to the fact that there yet stands in London this interesting remnant of the Hospitallers' Priory.

Hemmed in by nineteenth-century buildings and associations,— with that modern agency, a Board of Works, burrowing and streetmaking in its vicinity,—and with only a few hints, as on the signs of taverns near it, to tell of the old times-the historic Gate still stands, and the faith of the knights of to-day in their work is as strong as the archway itself. No longer do they keep themselves apart from the world for a special purpose; they do better they carry their purpose into the world. They sanctify their leisure and their energies to the relief of suffering; and their belief is invincible that, in working pro utilitate hominum, they are also working pro gloriâ Dei!

FRANCIS DUNCAN.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL,

POET AND ESSAYIST.

I

PART I.-POET.

NGENIOUS reader, I will not disguise from you the nature of

this essay. It might be an extended Saturday Review article, or a sort of crotchety, uncut-leaf-skimming affair, or a Spectator article founded on a single sentence somewhere in the preface, or a short Quarterly, designed to show off the reviewer, which it seems is the chief, if not the only, function of most new books.

I, too, am a reviewer. I have views on all Mr. Lowell's subjects. I differ from him here and there, am quite ready to supply gaps and various kinds of padding, to light up with my own intelligence several problems which he finds a little stiff, and to make his own very wide reading appear scanty in comparison with my own astonishing research. I should sometimes like "to talk down" upon him after the manner of the omniscient critic who, having picked up all he knows of the matter from your own book, proceeds to bandy words with you, and alternately pats you on the back and pooh-poohs you.

I feel quite equal to a little of this light business in twenty pages, but then, where would Mr. Lowell be?-Why, where he was before, and "he is passing well there," you say, "in native worth, a name and a presence respected and loved throughout two worlds." "Yes," I answer, "but he may be catalogued again, for all that."

We are all familiar with the illustrated catalogues sold at the National Gallery, where certain pictures are singled out, roughly sketched and sapiently annotated thus, "a copy with slight alterations," or "fine windy landscape, dark and mysterious."

Well, that is precisely the nature of these two essays-not a dry catalogue, bare names and dates, but an appreciative one-ay, and a somewhat selective one-for, as J. R. L. says, "There is a smack of Jack Horner in us all, and a reviewer were nothing without it;" and then—

well, if the irrepressible "ego" must peep out here and there, I warrant you he will be sparing alike with his "parce, precor," or his "plaudite," and hardly more offensive than good Lancelot Gobbo, when he occasionally steps forth with his "Ergo! old man, I beseech you!"

There is a certain class of people for whom it seems we must write certain paragraphs as regularly as we put flower-pots on sticks for snails to crawl into. They insist on their attention being first called to what is unimportant. Their only object in reading different authors is to cheapen one by the other, and spot the repetitions-like people who travel solely with a view to discovering the same wines at every hotel. Let us uncork for them at once their sour "vin ordinaire" and have done with it.

Does Mr. Lowell write like other people? Yes, and unlike other people, too. Does he copy, imitate, plagiarise? By all means, and a good deal more besides. Well, and what does it matter if his early poems flash at times with a certain sympathetic lustre? Beethoven wrote like Mozart, and Mozart like Haydn, and Keats, we are told on the best authority, wrote like the authors he happened to be reading.

When Lowell writes,

Wise with the history of its own frail heart,
With reverence and sorrow, and with love,

we seem to hear Wordsworth, and the lady Rosaline, of whom he declares,

Thou look'dst on me all yesternight :

Thine eyes were blue, thy hair was bright, &c.,

did not live a hundred miles from "Oriana," "Mariana," et id omne genus.

Is not Mr. Bryant's delicate love of the woods in "The Oak" and the "Birch Tree"? does not Scott sing in "Sir Launfal"? and mark, dear Snail, before you enter your pot, the most curious rings of Moore and Poe mixed up together in

O my life, have we not had seasons

That only said, live and rejoice!
That asked not for causes and reasons,

But made us all feeling and voice;

When we went with the winds in their blowing,

When nature and we were peers,

And we seemed to share in the flowing

Of the inexhaustible years?

VOL. CCXLVII.

NO. 1798.

H H

Have we not from the earth drawn juices
Too fine for earth's sordid uses?

Have I heard-have I seen

All I feel and I know?
Doth my heart overween ?
Or could it have been

Long ago?

and Echo seems to answer :

Ulalume! Ulalume!

The unhappy lot of Mr. Knott, with its

Meanwhile the cats set up a squall,

And safe upon the garden wall

All night kept cat-a-walling,

is quite à la Hood, is it not? and "An Ember Picture" is quite à la Longfellow.

Every poet abounds in similar phenomena; if, for instance, George Herbert writes:

Immortal Love, author of this great frame,'

Sprung from that beauty which can never fade,
How hath man parcelled out thy glorious name
And thrown it on the dust which thou hast made,

and Tennyson writes :

Strong Son of God, Immortal love

Thou madest death, and lo! thy foot
Is on the skull which thou hast made,

put in thy horns, O Snail, but otherwise no one is much moved by the striking coincidence, and Mr. Lowell is the last person, as we shall notice by-and-by, to scorn or deny the tributaries which have washed down their many golden sands into his bright lake.

It is also tolerably idle to enquire whether Mr. Lowell is more of a poet than a teacher, or more of a teacher than a poet. "Here's Lowell," he writes anonymously of himself,

who's striving Parnassus to climb

With a whole bale of isms tied together with rhyme;

The top of the hill he will ne'er come nigh reaching
Till he learns the distinction 'twixt singing and preaching.

He never learnt it-he never meant to learn it. Song, satire, and parable-more and more as he lives and ponders and pours forthare all so many pulpit illustrations or platform pleas. But the world calls him poet, and thereby confers upon him a higher kind of excellency than any ambassadorial rank. And the world is right.

The key-note is struck early in the poems ranging from 1839-49. "The leading characteristics of an author who is in any sense original may commonly be traced more or less clearly in his early works." And what he further says of Carlyle is also true of himself, for in his earliest writings "we find some not obscure hints of the future man." Indeed, the early poems are as good as texts— the tales and works are the homilies.

The deep religious instinct emancipated from all forms, but vibrating with the fitful certainty of an Æolian harp to "the wind which bloweth where it listeth," this is the first thing in Lowell's mind, as it is the second in Longfellow's, and the third in Bryant's:

There is no broken reed so poor and base,
No rush the bending tilt of swamp-fly blue
But He therewith the ravening wolf can chase
And guide His flock to springs and pastures new ;
Through ways unlooked for and through many lands,
Far from the rich folds built with human hands,
The gracious footprints of His love I trace.

In harmony with which wider prospects the Bible-thumber is aptly rebuked:

Slowly the Bible of the race is writ,

And not on paper leaves nor leaves of stone:

Each age, each kindred, adds a verse to it,
Texts of despair or hope, of joy or moan.

And next to this deep love of God, of which more hereafter, is our

poet's love of man.

It is the love of the man in all men, of the

womanly in every woman—the true enthusiasm of humanity—which

Sees beneath the foulest faces lurking

One God-built shrine of reverence and love.

Further in harmony with which essential humanity, his pity for the frail and erring is characteristically edged with the fiercest scorn: Thou wilt not let her wash thy dainty feet

With such salt things as tears, or with rude hair

Dry them, soft Pharisee, that sittst at meat

With Him who made her such, and speakst Him fair,
Leaving God's wandering lamb the while to bleat
Unheeded, shivering in the pitiless air.

With the clear-headed young poet, a man already counts only for one, and every one to be weighed in the same balance. Burns' "A man's a man for a' that" often rings in our ears-it flashes out in "Where is the true man's Fatherland?" and broadens at length into that long magnificent and victorious cry for freedom which