Lovers of Jane Austen will be pleased to hear that two new editions of her works are to be published this season, each with exceptionally interesting features. One of them is to he in the illustrated pocket classic series of the Macmillans, furnished with introductions by Mr. Austin Dobson. The other, known as the Hampshire Edition, introduces a novel experiment in illustration. Within the front cover of each volume is a map (in the old style, showing trees, buildings, and hills) of the country or town in which the scenes of the story occur, prepared from views and guide-books of the period; and within the back cover the neighborhood supposed to be inhabited by the principal characters is pictured in a similar style, giving the relative sizes, distances, and positions of

houses and walks according to the author's descriptions.

It is a novel and fascinating field of investigation to which Mr. Archer Butler Hulbert invites the reader in his series of monographs on "The Historic Highways of America." He takes as his motto the words written by Horace Bushnell long ago: "All creative action, whether in government, industry, thought or religion, creates Roads"; and he undertakes to trace American history so far as it may be followed along the highways of war, commerce and social expansion. The initial volume is upon the "Paths of the Mound-Building Indians and Great Game Animals" and in it he shows to what a marvellous degree we are indebted to the instinct of the buffalo for finding passage-ways through the mountains, and marking out trails which have been adopted first by highways and then by railways in the evolution of transportation. He traces also the part which the mound-building Indians took in opening the great thoroughfares on the water-sheds of America; and examines the archæological remains which mark their lines of migration. The author draws upon knowledge gathered through years of patient archæological research, and he writes with an enthusiasm which marks him as a Nature-lover as well as a student of men. A second volume will be devoted to "Indian Thoroughfares"; a third to Washington's Road, on which he made his night march from Fort Necessity, and SO on through sixteen volumes, the last of which will furnish an index to the series. The work is published in attractive form by the Arthur H. Clark Company of Cleveland.

Though it be a truism to say that chronological divisions have no natural relation to the human events which take place in them, it is remarkable how often an epoch of thought or art appears to us as contained within a century. The coincidence is accidental and the accident takes accent from our temptation to show the feet of human change keeping step with the beats of time. But even if there were less of truth than there is in the suggested unison, it would still be convenient to shut off within the circumscription of a cycle the events contained in it, just as we are content to let a window make a framework to a section of landscape, even if the outline of a hillside may be curtailed, one stretch of woodland severed from another, or some reach of a river made to lose its continuity with the stream. Occasionally the severance works for fragment, but as often as not it involves a composition. So it is with history, and especially perhaps with the history of art; and at all events it is certain that in isolating thus the nineteenth century for the purpose of presenting the aspect of a cycle of English poetry, we do succeed in getting something like a com

"The Victorian Anthology." Edited by Sir M. E. Grant Duff. London: Swan, Sonnenschein & Co. 1902.

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plete picture. It may be said, not unfairly, that the birth of the century was contemporaneous with that of a new poetic era, and that its close saw the exhaustion of the movement which its opening happened to inaugurate; and, with this assumption, we may hope that it will not be uninteresting to pass in review, partly for the sake of chronicle, but partly also for appreciation, the names of those who have made the chief show in verse from 1801 to 1900. We may well begin with a reflection with which we might appropriately end: the work of the period has been a redemption; from slovenliness we have risen to style; from vagueness to precision; from levity to earnestness; from triviality to high purpose; from convention to reality in feeling and thought. And, without venturing upon what would be a wide disquisition, we will content ourselves with ascribing-as to two great parent causes the birth of so happy and so vast a change to the impulse of scientific discovery, and to the purifying fires kindled by the French Revolution. The great poetic outburst which illumined our Elizabethan era, and has continued without a lull, though with much variation in volume and quality of light, ever since, came at so mature a point in the literary development of

Europe that it has been marked by two apparently contradictory characteristics. It has been at once derivative and individual. Derivative, because with Homer and such of his followers as have come down either in fragment or tradition, the Attic Tragedians, the Lyrists, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Dante, and Petrarch, all soliciting imitation and supplying models, it was impossible not to accept and digest the grand result of time. Individual, because with such a wilderness of choice before him, a poet was almost bound to follow his own bent, and to become epic, dramatic, lyric, classic, medieval, romantic, mystic, or a compound of some or all of these, as Nature made and bade him. And a capricious diversity was made all the easier because there was no academic and conservative public audience with its powerful traditions to coerce him, as at Athens, and no Imperial coterie to dictate his taste and subject-matter, as in Augustan Rome. Leaving out Shakespeare, who stands alone, as incapable of imitation as of approach, Marlowe, Jonson, Ford, Milton, Marvell, Denham, Congreve, Addison, Dryden, Swift, Pope, Goldsmith, to say less of Prior, Beattie, Collins, and the rest, had by the close of the eighteenth century provided their successors with a variety of native type and model, both in motive and treatment, unparalleled in the literature of any country. As it was with Adam and Eve on leaving Paradise, when

The world was all before them where to choose

Their place of rest,

so it was with the poetical aspirants of the nineteenth century, and they accordingly scattered themselves over the whole domain. From the start onwards we have had satire, unalloyed, or as sauce to didactics; we have had tragedy, melodrama, comedy, lyrics,

one epic at least, a pretty natural daughter of the middle ages, in classic name and fancy dress, and thinking to dance her steps under the tuition of Apollonius Rhodius; we have also had a most remarkable series of epical cameos, most properly named Idylls, but esteemed by some as an Arthurian cycle; besides scores of truncated narrative, that sometimes recall the limits, and occasionally the topics, of Theocritus; and, lastly, we have had didactic gossip by the square yard, and introspective stanzas by the cartload.

For the multitudinous and no less multifarious poetic production of the last hundred years the spread of education has been largely responsible; and this through one of its thousand consequences, good and bad, that selfesteem which is apt to mistake taste for power, and the desire of achievement, which is so common a possession, for creative instinct, with which so few are dowered. The repeal of the paper duties, and the mechanical appliances which have cheapened production, have been contributory and facilitating causes. Something also must be laid to the charge of the many forms and devices of unscrupulous advertisement, to the recklessness, the lack of sense, and occasionally of conscience, in inferior criticism, not to do more than mention the pernicious habit of a group of authors reviewing one another in turn. But, just as true merit was never permanently obscured either by hostility or neglect, so no mediocrity has ever been made illustrious in the long run by unmerited laudation. It is certain, however, that after we have swept away the piles of rubbish which vanity has produced, and incompetence or dishonesty has recommended, the poetic work of the nineteenth century remains very splendid. A mere review of it, even without anything like an attempt to classify it or to account for it, is of supreme interest. Crabbe,

Campbell, Rogers, Southey, and Words worth may be said to have led off the procession. Two out of these five, Crabbe and Wordsworth, were something more than "considerable,” and both of them may, one certainly will, prove to be immortal. It is a few of his small pieces such as "Hohenlinden," "The Mariners of England," "Lord Ullin's Daughter," "O'Connor's Child," and "The Battle of the Baltic," which give Campbell his chief title to renown. Of these "Hohenlinden" approaches nearest to greatness. "Lord Ullin's Daughter" it may almost be said that it is saved by its theme in spite of its treatment. "O'Connor's Child" is fantastic and secondary, and little better than a vamped-up reproduction of rags and tags from the store closets of the old ballads. As to the "Pleasures of Hope," what are they? Blameless no doubt, with a strong smack of the school exercise, and such a prophetic forecast of the Prize Poem as illustrates his own well-repeated dictum that

Of

Coming events cast their shadows before.

Patches they have, and many, which are hardly purple, and filled they are with facile generalities, touches of conventional landscape and morality; they abound in platitudes most remotely connected with the pleasures of hope; and lastly they are interspersed with occasional flashes of outrageous hyperbole, of which one specimen is enough:

The chief merit of Campbell is his blamelessness, and the literary modesty which saved him from such disastrous failures of over-vaulting ambition as made Southey the laughingstock of every good judge from Porson and Byron until now. Of Rogers it is unnecessary to say more than that he was a cultivated gentleman who chose to employ a strenuous leisure in writing tolerable verse.

Crabbe, as he was infinitely superior to Campbell, so he more vividly recalls their common poetic ancestry. He is of the race of Pope, Dryden, Swift, Goldsmith, and Cowper. He may lack the philosophic insight, the neatness, the antithesis of the first, the rollick and burliness of the second, the causticity, wit, and political grasp of the third, the grace of the fourth; but then, to make up for these deficiencies, he has been spared the matchless dreariness of the fifth, and there are moments when he shares the qualities of all. But he poured new wine into their old bottles, and he has a characteristic which differentiates him: his purpose was his own. It was at once sad and solemn; he was the first of our moderns to take seriously to heart, and consciously to write about, the suffering, temptations, difficulties, and degradation of the poor, urban and rural, as he knew them. This he did in no vague or reflective fashion, but in narratives drawn from concrete experiThe population of the Eastern Counties among whom he was bred, half agricultural and half seafaring,

ence.

string of poems as "The Village," "The Parish Register," and "The Borough." These may not have added much to the graces of English poetry, any more than the pictures of Teniers did to the æsthetic beauty of painting. But they have directness of incident, firmness of touch, and distinctness of portraiture. In fact Crabbe was a serious, purposeful Teniers in verse; and so has perpetuated for us some of the many contemporary phases of poverty for which the generation among whom they were manifested will be held unwontedly responsible at the bar of history. His intent was somewhat akin to that of Wilkie in painting, and still more to that yearning towards the delineation of her own class and neighborhood which so soon afterwards produced the novels of Miss Austen. But no poems like his have since been attempted, and their predecessors, "The Deserted Village" and "Gray's Elegy," were both so far removed from them that we may fairly say of them that there is nothing "quid prius dicamus, nec viget quicquam simile aut secundum." Crabbe's powers were undoubtedly great enough to make his literary work permanently valuable as a picture of manners and a record of sentiment, although perhaps they were not great enough to place him very high among the poetic expositors of man's nature to man.

The contribution of Coleridge to the permanent literature of England is in very poor proportion to his genius. He must be classed among the first poets of the second order, that is to say of the order which comes next after the four Giants of Epic, Shakespeare and the three great Athenians; and yet he will be remembered by less of his work than will any undeniable master. It is indeed deplorable that the soul from which could emanate "Christabel," "Kubla Khan," "The Ancient Mariner," and the two great adaptations of Schiller, should have shed so

niggard a lustre upon the world. But so it is, and Coleridge can only be mourned as a shattered, half-redeemed prodigal, whose very creations cry out against him, and who for his wandering and self-waste must ever demand pardon of his kind.

Sir Walter Scott is an illustrious example of a man endowed with the highest genius who, having tried both, came to the conclusion that his natural vehicle of expression was prose, not verse. It would be incorrect to say that he never wrote a poem after the production of "Waverley," but his occasional relapses do not interfere with the fact of his resolve. And after all, as might be expected, it was wise. The world would not be so very much the poorer if “Marmion,” “The Lay of the Last Minstrel," and "Rokeby" were to perish, but it will remain infinitely richer so long as "Old Mortality," "The Antiquary," "The Monastery," "The Legend of Montrose," "Quentin Durward," and a score at least of the other novels survive. Considering the swing and rapidity of the verse in his longer poems, it sounds strange to say that he perpetually fails to produce music in his shorter lyrics, but it is stranger still that nobody seems to have noticed the extreme clumsiness of many a line in some of the best known of them. To take one only, though dozens might be collected: can anything be worse than

"Hail to the Chief who in triumph advances"?

But, thank Heaven, the fame of Sir Walter has been otherwise won. Might it not be true to suggest that one reason why his poetry remained below his natural level was that he is one of the very few men who have risen to the height of literary greatness without fully belonging to, or being in keen sympathy with, their epoch? Far otherwise was it with the two poets whose