"Blasted lay that rose-acacia We're so proud of. Hy, Zy, Hine! And "Gr-r-r you swine!" has for the last 66 : opinion have taken place, so have Mr. Car- | bridle and regulate it for us, and guide it lyle's utterances become wilder and more into higher and wider regions, the question spasmodic. Each new book that he has pub- of utter death or of nobler life for the lished has still more and more shown a mind poor Country was so uncertain." Here is a undisciplined- has revealed more and more chance for the Froudes and the Kingsleys. and more in growing ugliness the results of William the Bastard, as he called himself, unbridled license. Of late years he has is now to be whitewashed. The man who taken no pains to conceal his contempt for plundered our fathers, who strove to his utthe great body of his fellow-creatures. He has most to extirpate our language, because be couched his thoughts, too, in a jargon which could not understand it, the man who made reminds us more of the language of Brown- killing a red deer of greater importance ing's Spanish monk than of anybody else:- than killing a fellow-creature, is to be the new saint in the English hagiology. This, however, by the way. It is with the main question that we are most interested. And here we are not quite without some guidance whether utter death or a nobler new life is reserved for England. The trade of prophecy is rather dangerous. Mr. Carlyle, however, cannot object if we judge his present prophecy by his previous performances in the same line. We have some recollection of the dismal vaticinations which he uttered seventeen years ago in his a col-Latter Day Pamphlets." Not one of them, however, has come true. Anarchy has not yet overtaken us, and England still pays her dividends. The nation has gone on its own way. The remedies of the " LatterDay Pamphlets" were unregarded, and its prophecies are still unfulfilled. We must therefore be pardoned if we refuse to be credulous both as to Mr. Carlyle's prophecies and remedies, especially when we discover that they are exactly the same kind which he offered us nearly twenty years ago. We become weary, too, with having the same tale told us, especially when all practice negatives its truth. Bitter invectives against "self-government," caustic homilies upon liberty of conscience, loud tirades against Free-trade and Bentham, can now only be looked upon as literary curiosities. The words fall upon us meaningless. They are full of sound and fury, but signify nothing. To read such sentences in "Shooting Niagara" as "the fool of a world,” “the Almighty Maker has appointed the nigger to be a servant," "servantship must become a contract of permanency," simply creates a smile. Our answer is not given by words, but by an appeal to facts. The world is certainly not so foolish as it was. Even in the short lifetime of a single man much improvement is visible. Much to soothe man's sorrow, much to increase his joys, has been wrought even within Mr. Carlyle's own memory. Since the first Reform Bill passed, England may almost said to be another and a better land. We are no optimists. We know too well by the very condition of Knowing all this, we are not at all surprised at Mr. Carlyle's last utterance in Macmillan's Magazine, "Shooting Niagara and After? We should have been much surprised had it been anything different to what it is. The man who has consistently all his life admired the doctrine of Force, is not so much likely to be convinced of his error, as to raise a fresh scream at the spectacle of a great nation fast progressing to self-government. The man who latterly seems only to have felt any remorse when he remembered that white men cannot be sold and treated like slaves, is not likely to be touched by the thought of enfranchisement. The moral decrepitude of Mr. Carlyle's later writings has prevented us from even hoping that any such change could take place. Mr. Carlyle's latest utterance is nothing more than an echo of what he has said twenty times before. There are thoughts in his "Shooting Niagara" which correspond nearly word for word with others in his "Discourse on the Nigger Question." And yet it would be unjust to say there is nothing new. The very first sentence shows us that there is a new hero yet to take his place in the Carlyleian Walhalla. Mr. Carlyle begins his paper with -"There probably never was since the Heptarchy ended, or almost since it began, so hugely critical an epoch in the history of England as this, in which with no Norman invasion now ahead, to lay hold of it, to .... From the Saturday Review. THREE ENGLISH STATESMEN.* things that life must have is shadows as | tell whether the waters gain or lose. We well at its sunshine. Speaking broadly, commit the the task of improvement to time, however, we affirm that the condition of all which is more powerful than the brief threeAnd as to the men has improved during the present half- score and ten years of man. century. Justice, however much it may mis- moral of Mr. Carlyle's paper, we say emcarry, is administered more fairly than ever phatically this it is better that Niagara it has been. The hand of charity-not in- should plunge over the falls headlong, than discriminate, but thoughtful has never that it should be dammed up with artificial been so open. Museums, reading-rooms, barriers; for in the one case it reaches its mechanics' institutes, and hospitals have natural channel, but in the other it would been built for the poor. Gardens are only burst its bounds and destroy all within thrown open to the public. New schools are its reach. daily being opened, and lectures given. The material requirements and pleasures of life are cheaper and better than they ever have been. The poor are better clothed and better fed than at any other period of our English history. Science, too, has wrought no less benefits than trade. The middle WHILE Mr. Goldwin Smith's new volume classes can now take their holiday, and is too historical to satisfy the ardent politivisit the Continent, and the artisan by ex-cian, and too political to add much to history, cursion trains can leave the workshop, and it is, as we might expect from its author, a see something of his own land. There is, work which neither historian nor politician of course, a dark side to all this. Material can safely afford to neglect. For the first, wealth brings with it new dangers. The indeed, there is the masterly sketch of workman may spend his wages in drink and Cromwell, of which we shall have more to vice, and the servant-girl deck herself out say hereafter. But, besides this, there in sham jewellery. But the darker side is shine throughout the book those nobler daily becoming less dark, whilst the brighter moral qualities which still, as of old, raise side grows more bright. If Mr. Carlye will their possessor high above the sentiment see only the shadow, we cannot help it. of Mr. Froude or the "middle-class philisWe ourselves prefer to look at the substance. tinism" (if we may borrow Mr. Arnold's As for Mr. Carlyle's remedies, they have al- phrase) of Lord Macaulay. It is a merit ready been tried. There was a day when never greater than in our own days when both black and white men were slaves. The an historian can steer his way across themes experiment, however, of feudalism is over. such as those which Mr. Goldwin Smith No return to it is now possible. In vain treats of here without swerving into a heroMr. Carlyle may preach his homilies. It is worship that ends in imperialism, or a blind neither in his nor in any man's power to re- horror of revolutions that sinks into a converse the present order of things. He might servatism of fear. It is hardly less a merit have done much good, but instead, he has pre- that, from beginning to end of these lecferred to do what little harm was possible. tures, there is none of that moral cowardice He has made, as we have said, some mark which is sapping nowadays, in many who on the literature of the day, but none on the claim the name of Liberals, all vivid enthureal work of the age. He has sat still in siasm for what a true Liberalism holds dear. his study and cursed progress, whilst others Religion, freedom, a faith in England and have borne the heat and burden of the day. in Englishmen, are still enthusiasms with But the fault, perhaps, after all lies in Mr. Mr. Goldwin Smith. For the politician, Carlyle's peculiar temperament. He is too however, there is a topic of somewhat more much in a hurry to reach the Golden Age. novelty than this; for, on their political Because he cannot find it ready made, he side, these lectures reflect the sentiments of will manufacture Utopia. We, on the other a class of thinkers on statesmanship whose hand, believe that all good comes slowly. views, familiar as they may be in a purely litNothing which is done quickly is worth erary sense, have never yet found formal much. It is a long cry to Loch Awe. Be- expression in Parliament. They can hardly cause man is not suddenly transformed into be excluded now. Whatever else Reform an angel, we do not despair. There is a may effect, it is almost certain that it will reverse to the "Nemo repentè fuit turpissimus." A man's lifetime is but a short period in the history of the world. Stand on the shore for a moment, and you cannot *Three English Statesmen; Pym. Cromwell, and Pitt; a Course of Lectures on the Political History of England. By Goldwin Smith. Lon don: Macmillan & Co. 1867. sweep into St. Stephen's, if not Mr. Goldwin | is the art of avoiding it, and of making proSmith, at any rate many whose thoughts are gress at once continuous and calm." But his thoughts. Whoever the men may be they Pym did more than this; he impressed a will bring their special questions into Parlia- continuity and calm on the very Revolution ment with them-questions very different itself. So long as the great statesman lived, from those which have hitherto penetrated the most radical changes were linked tointo the presence of the Speaker. Parlia- gether by one consistent policy into unity ment will have to discuss, and England her- with the traditional progress and liberty of self through Parliament, will have to discuss, the English people. His lavish reference to not merely the reversal of our foreign policy precedent, his abstinence from new princiin East and West alike, or the reduction of ples, were so many bridges of gold over our forces, or the destruction of the aristo- which the general opinion of the bulk of cratic character of our army, but questions men about him passed without a shock from which as yet statesmen have been able to one state of things to another. In one pooh-pooh, while the mere stirring of them point only did Pym avowedly pour a new will be certain to send shuddering and bit- spirit into the politics of his time, and we terness through the land — namely, the best regret that this lecture passes so lightly over means of dispensing with party government, what, after all, was the distinguishing feathe abolition of a State Church and an ture of his policy. The ideal notion of a hereditary Peerage, the compatibility of an religious commonwealth, of a State bound hereditary Sovereign with free institutions. together by its common loyalty to a divine We are, of course, far from expressing any law, however Royalists jeered at it and Fifthopinion here upon points such as these; but Monarchy men perverted it in after years, these lectures, considered simply as expres- was laid down by Pym as the basis of his sions of the political thought of a man who statesmanship with incomparable clearness is, after all, but the type of a class of think- and eloquence. The noblest State paper ers that Reform is fated to bring into prac- we know is the letter- undoubtedly of tical contact with politics, are quite enough Pym's composition which was addressed to prove that political problems of a wholly by the Parliament to the garrison and citinew and far deeper sort than of old are zens of Hull at the very outset of the war. destined to force themselves on the attention With Charles already demanding at the of English statesmen. gates "the keys of his own town," Pym It is perhaps to the consciousness of this points out that the true voice of the King aspect of the policy which he advocates is to be heard only as expressed in the that we owe the selection of the three par- voice of his Parliament, and that true loyalticular statesmen who form the subjects of ty lies in obedience, not to the King alone, Mr. Goldwin Smith's addresses. The choice but to that law which is at once the judgmay indeed have been simply an accidental ment of the King and the estates of the one, for it is a characteristic of our history realm. But from the law of the land he that, differ as one period may in form from does not scruple to pass at once to a higher another the differences are slight in face of law which to his eyes was guiding both the real identity; so that, as a string on King and people; "remember that ye are which to hang political observations which called into great things" is the text of an shall at once be true of the past and appli- appeal to their consciousness of a right cable to the present, one statesman's life is above all mere constitutional precedent pretty nearly as good as another's. But which would, no doubt, be sneered down as certainly, if the title of Mr. Goldwin Smith's theoretical by doctrinaires, but which turned book ran, as it might not inappropriately out to be practical enough in the hands of have done," English Statesmen face to face the most practical of English statesmen. with a Revolution," we can conceive no It is just this poetic, this creative side of better instances of the type of statesman- Pym's genius, in the appreciation of which ship which guides or which drifts than the we think the lecture most deficient; but his characters of Pym and of the younger purely constitutional side is exhibited with Pitt. Pym is, worthily enough, the lec- a rare ability, and the sketch concludes turer's ideal of an English statesman. Not with a description of Pym's end, the simple that much is added here to the known facts grandeur of whose pathos is well worthy of his life, or to the impressions which Mr. of its theme: Forster's researches gave us long ago of the man; but his very name points the moral which runs throughout the book:-"Let us never glorify revolution; statesmanship Work tells upon the sensitive organization of men of genius. Pym had been working, as the preacher of his funeral sermon tells us, fron three in the morning till evening, and from evening again till midnight. He must have borne a crushing weight of anxiety besides. The loathsome fables invented by the royalists are not needed to account for the failure of his health. He met his end, if we may trust the report of his friends, with perfect calmness. At the last, we are told, he fell into a swoon, and when he recovered his consciousness, seeing his friends weeping round him, he told them that he had looked death in the face, and therefore feared not the worst he could do: added some words of religious hope and comfort, and, while a minister was praying with him, quietly slept with God. Funeral sermons are not history. No character is flawless, least of all the charac ters of men who lead in violent times. But if the cause of English liberty was a good cause; Pym's conscience, so far as we can see, might well bid him turn calmly to his rest. It was just the want of this ideal and creative side, as it seems to us, which so completely unfitted the mind of the younger Pitt for dealing with the great Revolution which burst suddenly on him in the midst of his political career. We are far indeed from thinking that Mr. Goldwin Smith has done Pitt justice in denying him all creative faculty, and painting him rather as a clever administrator, successful in sunny weather, but wrecked easily enough in a storm. His failure was surely attributable, not to the want of a distinct conception of politics, but to the narrowness, the "strictly practical" character, of the conception he had formed. One can hardly deny that Pitt was a creative statesman in a measure; that he created middle-class government; that his economic reforms, his new type of political character, his conception of a new policy of peace, differing from Walpole's in being an international policy, all tended to this result. The very fault of Pitt indeed in his statesmanship appears to have been this predominance of the originative faculty. His policy derived both its strength and its weakness from being his own, from being strangely ahead of the thoughts either of his followers or his foes. Even as a peace-Minister his failures showed the gulf between the leader and the men he led; it was in vain that he advocated Parliamentary Reform, Roman Catholic Emancipation, the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the commutation of tithepayments in Ireland. Where he did succeed, it was sometimes as in his origination of colonial independence through the Parliament of Canada-simply owing to the mere ignorance of his contemporaries as to his drift. It was this singular severance from the current facts of the politics about him that wrecked his career in the great struggle with the Revolution. His mind was of the philosophic class; it could look with a remarkable prescience into the future, supposing that that future moved in a groove similar to the groove in which the present was moving. It was the leap of the world out of its groove that made the prescience of Pitt useless. His old conception of politics was rudely upset, and events followed too fast to give him time for the reflection which was needful to form a new one. Every mail brought a fresh revolution, and every revolution fresh complications and crushing administrative work. A his death the Hawkesburys and Castlereaghs lesser man would have done better, as on did do better; for if affairs are to be conducted without a policy they can be conducted only by the mere administrator, the man of ready shifts and fertile in expedients, who can at any rate fence deftly enough to gain time till the revolution is spent. And so Pitt died broken-hearted, and Waterloo crowned Lord Liverpool with its laurel-wreath. 'Of the two sketches from the Great Rebellion, Mr. Goldwin Smith has evidently thrown all his affection and real admiration into that of Pym, but he has thrown his power into Cromwell. The greatness of his subject lifts him in this one lecture wholly out of the region of contemporary politics. We have left ourselves no space to comment on the remarkable sketch of the Protector's policy which is given here; we can only point out the clearness with which his conception of constitutional rule is shown to have been exhibited in the famous Instrument of Government under whose condition, he accepted the office of Lord Protector. According to this provisional constitution a scheme of Cromwell's own making the elective ruler shared his power with a permanent Council of State, chosen by the successive section of the Parliament, the existing Council, and the Protector. In the intervals between one meeting of Parliament and another, the power even over the army was to be shared between the two. But Parliament must be convoked every three years, or immediately on any apprehension of war, and in it alone, thus convoked, all power of legislation and taxation is vested. "The organic legislation of Cromwell's time may still," says Mr. Goldwin Smith, "deserve the consideration of constitutional reformers if the nation should ever desire to emancipate itself from the government of party." Not less remarkable is the light "To which the lecture throws on the peculiar grandeur of Cromwell's toleration. save free conscience was a desire not less passionate in the lowest Independent trooper than in the Lord Protector. What was simply his own was that, while bound as tightly as they in the thraldom of dogmatic exclusiveness, his theories yielded at a touch to the instinct of tolerance, even in cases where his Ironsides were as bitter as Melvill or Laud. He protected the Quaker, he freed the Socinian, he strove for the re-admission of the Jews, he put an end to the persecution of Roman Catholic priests. "It was in this matter of freedom of conscience," sums up the lecturer, "that the man was most before his age." With a final quotation, however, we must part from the one picture of the Protector before which we can stand, reverent of a greatness seldom seen among men, but not brutalized into hero-worship:— To whatever age they belong [the lecturer says], the greatest, the most godlike of men are men, not Gods. They are the offspring, though the highest offspring, of their age; they would be nothing without their fellow men. Did Cromwell escape the intoxication of power which has turned the brain of other favourites of fortune, and bear himself always as one who held the government as a trust from God? It was because he was one of a religious people. Did he amidst the temptations of arbitrary rule preserve his reverence for law, and his design to reign under it? It was because he was one of a law-loving people. Did he in spite of fearful provocations show on the whole remarkable humanity? It was because he was one of a brave and humane people. A somewhat larger share of the common qualities-this, and this alone it was which, circumstances calling him to a great trust, had raised him above his fellows. The impulse which lent vigour and splendour to his government came from a great movement, not from a single man. The Protectorate with all its glories was not the conception of a lonely intellect, but the revolutionary energy of a mighty nation concentrated in a single chief We regret to notice this week the death of Mrs. Austin, probably the best translator from German into English ever known in literature. She had a faculty quite special to herself of making Germans talk as they do talk, and yet as they would have talked had they thought in English. She will be greatly missed by a large circle of friends, for whom for years she held a salon which in some years approached the best French examples. - Spectator. From the Spectator. DEAN RAMSAY ON SCOTTISH HUMOUR.* SOME people, were they told that a book had been written about the humour of the Scotch, would answer-in sublime forgetfulness of Sir Walter and of Robert Burns "Scottish humour! There is no such thing as humour in Scotland." The feeling, we believe, that would prompt such a remark is shared by thousands of Englishmen, though they would not acknowledge it so broadly. For it is rather the fashion to consider Scotchmen as plodding beings — dull, good fellows-who work hard and drink whisky six days of the week, and on the seventh drink whisky and listen to discourses on predestination and justification by faith. But, in truth, the Scotch have a humour of their own, a humour eminently national; and, as Dean Ramsay says in the preface to the book which suggests our observations, the characteristic peculiarities of the Scottish people are indicated in a very marked manner by Scottish anecdotes. Scottish humour is far removed from the rich merriment of the Irish, from the genial satire of which we are so fond in England, from the brilliant epigrams of the French, and from the cruel, quiet wit with which an Italian will barb the arrows of his speech. Perhaps, its special characteristic is shrewdness. Sometimes a quick sense of humour induces shrewdness (indeed, the former is rarely possessed without the latter); but in the Scotch character, we are inclined to think, it is the shrewdness that induces the humour. A Scotchman is nothing, if not 'canny." 66 The object of the Dean of Edinburgh's most popular work has not been to string together mere funny stories, or to collect amusing anecdotes. "The object of these pages," he says, "has been throughout to illustrate Scottish life and character by bringing forward those modes and forms of expression by which alone our national peculiarities can be illustrated and explained." Besides Scottish replies and expressions which are most characteristicand which the Dean, with pardonable impartiality, considers "unique for dry humour" he has entered upon the question of dialect and proverbs. He reminds us that some years back the Scottish tongue existed almost as a separate language; and he says it has a force and beauty of phrase * Reminiscences of Scottish Life and Character. By E. B. Ramsay, Dean of Edinburgh. Edmonston and Douglas. Fourteenth edition." |