of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation. This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give, than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.'

65-83. 'The forces that made Wordsworth a poet were far different from those conscious reasonings on Man and Society, of which he gives an account in the Prelude: his inspiration sprang from mysterious sources which, as he shows us in the first book of his curious metrical autobiography, had been unconsciously pouring images into his mind from earliest childhood.'- Courthope: The Liberal Movement in English Literature; Essay iii.

93-102. In his old age Wordsworth became a High Churchman and a Tory. With what curious feelings must he have read this confession of the Pantheistic faith of his youth! Byron might have written these lines; his own belief in Pantheism is not more unmistakably nor more beautifully expressed :

My altars are the mountains and the ocean,

Earth, air, stars-all that springs from the great Whole
Who hath produced, and will receive the soul.

Don Juan, iii. 54.

121-133. Such sentiment as this, unintelligible to many, was undoubtedly religious truth to Wordsworth. Professor C. C. Everett suggests as explanation of the joy we receive in the contemplation of Nature: 1) our more or less conscious recognition of the freedom of the life of Nature; 2) the identity of our lives with that of Nature; 3) the fulness of the life of Nature; 4) its divinity; 5) its prefiguration of a perfection which we have not yet attained.1

LAODAMIA.

Protesilaus was a Thessalian chief in the army of Agamemnon. While the Grecian fleet lay wind-bound at Aulis, the oracle declared that victory in the coming contest should rest with that side which should lose the first warrior. Protesilaus resolved to sacrifice himself for his country. When the fleet reached Troy, he was the first to leap ashore and the first to meet death from the sword of Hector.

When Laodamia, the wife of Protesilaus, heard of his death, she besought the gods to grant her once more sight of her husband. At this point in the story Wordsworth's poem begins.

1 For the ingenious and beautiful argument by which this explanation is sup. ported, see Everett's Poetry, Comedy and Duty, Cap. I. For a very different view of Nature, see J. S. Mill's Essay entitled Nature.

65-66. Parcæ. See note on Fury,' Lycidas, 75.

See note on this word in L'Allegro, 3.

Stygian.

79-84. Alcestis. See Notes on Childe Harold, Canto iv. Stanza

xvi.

Medea; Aeson: Cl. Myths, § 145-146.

115-120. Aulis. For the story of Iphigenia in Aulis, see Cl. Myths, p. 288; Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women, 101-120.

158-163. Wordsworth changed this stanza twice, each time for the worse. The version on p. 202 is his latest and is therefore given there; the second reading is :

By no weak pity might the Gods be moved;
She who thus perished, not without the crime
Of lovers that in reason's spite have loved,
Was doomed to wear out her appointed time,
Apart from happy Ghosts- that gather flowers
Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers.

The original reading is:

Ah, judge her gently who so deeply loved!
Her, who in reason's spite, yet without crime,
Was in a trance of passion thus removed;
Delivered from the gailing yoke of time
And those frail elements to gather flowers
Of blissful quiet mid unfading bowers.

During the years 1814-1816 Wordsworth made a deep study of Vergil; the effects of this ennobling discipline are perceptible in the lofty tone and (at times) majestic diction of Laodamia.—With whatever fatuity Wordsworth may have clung to his theory 'that there neither is nor can be any essential difference between the language of prose and [of] metrical composition,' his practice, and that of all great poets, show there is a decided difference. No man can employ the language of the peasantry (to this reductio ad absurdum was Wordsworth driven in defending his theory) and write a poem like Laodamia; - a poem that ranks not unworthily with the creations of that

Wielder of the stateliest measure ever moulded by the lips of man.

ODE ON THE INTIMATIONS OF IMMORTALITY. "Even the "intimations" of the famous Ode, those corner-stones of the supposed philosophic system of Wordsworth, - the idea of the high instincts and affections coming out in childhood, testifying of a divine home recently left, and fading away as our life proceeds, this idea, of undeniable beauty as a play of fancy, has itself not the character of poetic truth of the best kind; it has no real solidity. The instinct of delight in Nature and her beauty had no doubt extraordinary strength in Wordsworth himself as a child. But to say that universally this instinct is mighty in childhood, and tends to die away afterwards, is to say

what is extremely doubtful. In many people, perhaps with the majority of educated persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. In general we may say of these high instincts of early childhood, the base of the alleged systematic philosophy of Wordsworth, what Thucydides says of the early achievements of the Greek race: “It is impossible to speak with certainty of what is so remote; but from all that we can really investigate, I should say that they were no very great things."— Matthew Arnold: Essay on Wordsworth.

See also remarks by J. S. Mill, quoted in Notes on Tintern Abbey, 35-49.

ODE TO DUTY.

Had the man who wrote this Ode lived in the days of Ahab the son of Omri he would have rested under the juniper-tree with Elijah the Tishbite and would have ascended with him unto Horeb the mount of God.

Had he lived in days of Milton, stoutly would he have fought against the prcfane Cavalier, the word of the Lord in his mouth and a two-edged sword in his hand.

When the bugle-call of Duty sounds, such men are Ready! Aye Ready! If they fall, they fall with face to foe; their names shine forth imperishable, emblazoned forever in the Book of The Hero and The Martyr!

This Sonnet was written in 1802. No one acquainted with the social condition of England then, can deny the truthfulness of Wordsworth's picture. - In both the matter and the manner of this Sonnet we see Wordsworth at his best; we have here a fine illustration of one part of Arnold's oft-quoted criticism: 'Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.'

MACAULAY.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was born in 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, was the friend and co-adjutor of Wilberforce. At fifteen Macaulay had read widely enough to deliver a critical judgment on the comparative merits of Chaucer and Boccaccio; at Cambridge (1818-1822) he detested mathematics, but took prizes in the classics and in English. His Edinburgh Review articles on Milton (1825) and on Mill (1829) made him famous; the Whigs were glad to secure so promising a recruit and in 1830 he entered Parliament under their patronage. The debates on the Reform Bill of 1832 showed him to be a match for the most experienced orators of the day; after four years of intense political and literary activity, he accepted the lucrative position of Member of the Supreme Council of India, with the honorable motive of assisting his younger brothers and sisters, and of making possible for himself a purely literary life. Returning to England in 1838, he was induced to assume, for three years more, the 'wasteful drudgery of office; ' this delayed the publication of the Lays until 1842, and of the first two volumes of the History of England until 1848. In 1852 his health began to fail, but he worked on manfully, publishing occasional Essays and the third and fourth volumes of his History. He was raised to the peerage in 1857, but lived to enjoy his well-earned honors a short time only. He passed quietly to rest on the 28th of December, 1859.

Truthfully may we apply to him almost the very words he wrote of Johnson: The more we know of his private life, the more is our conviction strengthened that he was not only a great but a good man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. The sincerity and sweetness of Macaulay's character portray themselves in his Life and Letters edited by his nephew G. Otto Trevelyan. No one can afford to be ignorant of this delightful book. Morison's Macaulay (E. M. L.) is more critical than biographical. Thackeray's Nil Nisi Bonum (in his Roundabout Papers) contains an affecting tribute to Macaulay by one who knew and loved him well. For the History, see Macaulay's Speeches; Spencer Walpole's History of England, Cap. vii. - xiv. (1820-1837); McCarthy's History of Our Own Times, Cap. i.-xl. (1837-1859). CRITICISM (on the Poetry).-J. S. Mill in the Westminster Review; Vol. xxxix. (Old Series); Leslie Stephen in Hours in a Library, Third Series; J. Cotter Morison in his Life of Macaulay, Cap. iv. Those who desire to study Macaulay's Poems with a copious and scholarly commentary, can find it in the excellent edition of the Lays by Professor J. C. Rolfe (Harpers).

HORATIUS.

In his General Preface to The Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay writes: 'In the following poems the author speaks, not in his own person, but in the persons of ancient minstrels who know only what a Roman citizen, born three or four hundred years before the Christian era, may be supposed to have known, and who are in nowise above the passions and prejudices of their age and nation. To these imaginary poets must be ascribed some blunders which are so obvious that it is unnecessary to point them out. The real blunder would have been to represent these old poets as deeply versed in general history, and studious of chronological accuracy. To them must also be attributed the illiberal sneers at the Greeks, the furious party-spirit, the contempt for the arts of peace, the love of war for its own sake, the ungenerous exultation over the vanquished, which the reader will sometimes observe. To portray a Roman of the age of Camillus or Curius as superior to national antipathies, as mourning over the devastation and slaughter by which empire and triumphs were to be won, as looking on human suffering with the sympathy of Howard, or as treating conquered enemies with the delicacy of the Black Prince, would be to violate all dramatic propriety. The old Romans had some great virtues, fortitude, temperance, veracity, spirit to resist oppression, respect for legitimate authority, fidelity in the observing of contracts, disinterestedness, ardent patriotism; but Christian charity and chivalrous generosity were alike unknown to them.

'It would have been obviously improper to mimic the manner of any particular age or country. Something has been borrowed, however, from our own old ballads, and more from Sir Walter Scott, the great restorer of our ballad-poetry. To the Iliad still greater obligations are due; and those obligations have been contracted with the less hesitation, because there is reason to believe that some of the old Latin minstrels really had recourse to that inexhaustible store of poetical images.

'It would have been easy to swell this little volume to a very considerable bulk, by appending notes filled with quotations; but to a learned reader such notes are not necessary; for an unlearned reader they would have little interest; and the judgment passed both by the learned and by the unlearned on a work of the imagination will always depend much more on the general character and spirit of such a work than on minute details.'

Macaulay's Preface to Horatius is as follows:

There can be little doubt that among those parts of early Roman history which had a poetical origin was the legend of Horatius Cocles. We have several versions of the story, and these versions differ from each other in points of no small importance. Polybius, there is reason to believe, heard the tale recited over the remains of some Consul or Prætor descended from the old Horatian patricians; for he introduces it as a specimen of the narratives with which the Romans were in the habit of embellishing their funeral oratory. It is remarkable that, according to him, Horatius defended the bridge alone, and perished in the waters. According to the chronicles which Livy and Dionysius followed, Horatius had two companions, swam safe to shore, and was loaded with honours and rewards.

'These discrepancies are easily explained. Our own literature, indeed, will