both Defoe and Fielding had a real lesson to teach mankind. The thieves and harlots whom Defoe prides himself on punishing, but whose adventures he describes with the minuteness of affection, are what we ourselves might have been; and in their histories we hear, if not the "music," yet the "harsh and grating" cry of suffering humanity. Fielding's merit is of the same kind; but the sympathies which he excites are more general, as his scenes are more varied, than those of Defoe. His coarseness is everywhere redeemed by a genuine feeling for the contumelious buffets to which weakness is exposed. He has the practical insight of Dickens and Thackeray, without their infusion of sentiment. He does not moralize over the contrast between the rich man's law and the poor man's, over the "indifference" of rural justice, over the lying and adultery of fashionable life. He simply makes us see the facts, which are everywhere under our eyes, but too close to us for discernment. He shows society where its sores lie, appealing from the judgment of the diseased class itself to that public intelligence which, in spite of the cynic's sneer on the task of "producing an honesty from the combined action of knaves," has really power to override private selfishness.

The same sermon has found many preachers since, the unconscious missionaries being perhaps the greatest. Scott was a Tory of the purest water. His mind was busy with the revival of a pseudo-feudalism; no thought of reforming abuses probably ever entered it. Yet his genial human insight made him a reformer against his will. He who makes man better known to man takes the first steps towards healing the wounds which man inflicts on man. The permanent value of Scott's novels lies in his pictures of the Scotch peasantry. He popularized the work which the Lake poets had begun, of reopening the primary springs of human passion. "Love he had found in huts where poor men lie," and he announced the discovery; teaching the "world" of English gentry what for a century and a half they had seemed to forget, that the human soul, in its strength no less than in its weakness, is independent of the accessories of fortune. He left no equals, but the combined force of his successors has been constantly growing in practical effect. They have probably done more than the journalists to produce that improvement in the organization of modern life which leads to the notion that because social grievances are less obvious, they have ceased to exist. The

novelist catches the cry of suffering before it has obtained the strength or general recognition which are presupposed when the newspaper becomes its mouthpiece. The miseries of the marriage market had been told by Thackeray with almost wearisome iteration, many years before they found utterance in the columns of the Times.

It may indeed be truly said that after all, human selfishness is much the same as it ever was; that luxury still drowns sympathy; that riches and poverty have still their old estranging influence. The novel, as has been shown, cannot give a new birth to the spirit, or initiate the effort to transcend the separations of place and circumstance; but it is no small thing that it should remove the barriers of ignorance and antipathy which would otherwise render the effort unavailing. It at least brings man nearer to his neighbor, and enables each class to see itself as others see it. And from the fusion of opinions and sympathies thus produced, a general sentiment is elicited, to which oppression of any kind, whether of one class by another, or of individuals by the tyranny of sectarian custom, seldom appeals in vain.

The novelist is a leveler also in another sense than that of which we have already spoken. He helps to level intellects as well as situations. He supplies a kind of literary food which the weakest natures can assimilate as well as the strongest, and by the consumption of which the former sort lose much of their weakness and the latter much of their strength. While minds of the lower order acquire from novel-reading a cultivation which they previously lacked, the higher seem proportionately to sink. They lose that aspiring pride which arises from the sense of walking in intellect on the necks of a subject crowd; they no longer feel the bracing influence of living solely among the highest forms of art; they become conformed insensibly to the general opinion which the new literature of the people creates. A similar change is going on in every department of man's activity. The history of thought in its artistic form is parallel to its history in its other manifestation. The spirit descends, that it may rise again; it penetrates more and more widely into matter, that it may make the world more completely its own. Political life seems no longer attractive, now that political ideas and power are disseminated among the mass, and the reason is recognized as belonging not to a ruling caste merely, but to all. XII-419

A statesman in a political society resting on a substratum of slavery, and admitting no limits to the province of government, was a very different person from the modern servant of “a nation of shopkeepers," whose best work is to save the pockets of the poor. It would seem as if man lost his nobleness when he ceased to govern, and as if the equal rule of all was equivalent to the rule of none. Yet we hold fast to the faith that the " cultivation of the masses," which has for the present superseded the development of the individual, will in its maturity produce some higher type even of individual manhood than any which the old world has known. We may rest on the same faith in tracing the history of literature. In the novel we must admit that the creative faculty has taken a lower form than it held in the epic and the tragedy. But since in this form it acts on more extensive material and reaches more men, we may well believe that this temporary declension is preparatory to some higher development, when the poet shall idealize life without making abstraction of any of its elements, and when the secret of existence, which he now speaks to the inward ear of a few, may be proclaimed on the house-tops to the common intelligence of mankind.

ROBERT GREENE

(1560-1592)

REENE was a true Elizabethan Englishman: impulsive, reck. less, with a roving instinct that in many a life of that

restless age found a safe vent in adventure on the sea. But with his gifts and failings, and the conditions in which his life was cast, the ruin that overwhelmed him was the fate of many poets of great mind and weak will. Yet with all his sin and weakness, there were struggles toward a better life and nobler work which should make our judgment lenient, remembering Burns's lines:

"What's done we partly may compute,

But know not what's resisted.»

Greene was born about 1560 in Norwich, and belonged to a family of good standing. That his father was a man of some wealth may be inferred from Greene's tour to Italy and other countries, -a great expense in those days, which he made after taking his B. A. degree at Cambridge in 1578. In his 'Repentances' he shows that he was affected by the vices of Italy, and became fixed in those dissolute habits that were his ruin. On his return he was engaged in literary work at Cambridge, and took his M. A. degree from both universities. He then went to London and became "an author of plays and penner of Love Pamphlets, so that I soone grew famous in that qualitie, that who for that trade growne so ordinary about Lon don as Robin Greene."

In 1585 he married, and apparently lived for a time in Norwich. After the birth of a child he deserted his wife, because she tried to persuade him from his bad habits. From that time he lived permanently in London, where he seems to have had some influential patrons. Among those to whom his works are dedicated we find the names of Lord Derby, the Earl of Cumberland, Lady Talbot, and Lord Fitzwater. He tells us that "in shorte space I fell into favor with such as were of honorable and good calling." Yet his restless temper made such society irksome to him; and as there was then no reputable literary Bohemia, such as arose later under Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, he sank to the company of the lowest classes of London. In spite of his dissipated life he was constantly at work, and "his purse, like the sea, sometime sweld, anon like the same sea

fell to a low ebbe; yet seldom he wanted, his labours were so well esteemed."

Not only did he write for the stage, but it is probable that he appeared at times as an actor. At one time, when a gust of repentance swept over him, he resolved to write no more love pamphlets, and to devote himself to more serious writings. He then published a series of tracts exposing the tricks of London swindlers, in "trust that those my discourses will doe great good and bee very beneficial to the Common wealth of England." His 'Repentances' were intended to warn young men by the unhappy example of his own life. His career was cut short in 1592 by an illness resulting from too much indulgence in Rhenish wine and pickled herrings. Deserted by his friends, he died in extreme poverty at the house of a poor shoemaker who had befriended him. Just before his death he wrote to his forsaken wife this touching letter:

Sweet Wife:

As ever there was any good-will or friendship betweene thee and mee, see this bearer (my Host) satisfied of his debt: I owe him tenne pound, and but for him I had perished in the streetes. Forget and forgive my wrongs done unto thee, and Almighty God have mercie on my soule. Farewell till we meet in heaven, for on earth thou shalt never see me more.

This 2 of September 1592.
Written by thy dying husband

ROBERT GREENE.

Gabriel Harvey soon after published in his 'Foure Letters' a virulent attack on Greene's character. That and Greene's confessions, in which like many another he no doubt exaggerated his sins, have given rise to a probably too harsh estimate of the poet's failings.

Of his numerous dramatic works but five have survived, all published after his death: 'Orlando Furioso'; 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay'; 'James the Fourth'; Alphonsus, King of Aragon'; and 'George-a-Greene, the Pinner of Wakefield.' 'A Looking-Glass for London and England' was the joint work of Thomas Lodge and Greene. Greene did for the romantic drama what Marlowe accomplished for tragedy, and his works form a noteworthy step in the development of the old English drama. His most popular drama was 'Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay,' in which he pictures Old English. life at Fussingfield, with a touching love story. His 'George-aGreene' has the best constructed plot of any of his plays; and in the Pinner, a popular English hero like Robin Hood, he portrays an ideal English yeoman, faithful, sturdy, and independent. Nash called Greene the Homer of women; and it is remarkable that, dissolute as he was, he has given the charm of modest womanhood to all his female characters.