Scott's excellence may be called superior and supreme. Goethe's Götz von Berlichingen the remote spring whence this river of Metrical Romance arose: Influence of Götz and Werter. Curious, how all Europe is but like a set of parishes; participant of the selfsame influences, from the Crusades and earlier! Half-regretful lookings into the Past gave place to Ernulphus' cursings of the Present. Scott among the first to perceive that the day of Metrical Chivalry-Romance was declining: Let it shakeoff its rhyme-fetters, then, and try a wider sweep. The Waverley Novels: A certain anonymous mystery kept up, rather piquant to the public. Scott's Letters, never without interest, yet seldom or never very interesting. A dinner with the Prince-Regent: Another at James Ballantyne's, on the birth-eve of a Waverley Novel. A Sunday-morning ramble. Abbotsford infested with tourists and wonder-hunters, what Schiller calls 'flesh-flies': Captain Basil Hall compressed. The good Sir Walter bore it as he could; and did not sweep his premises clear of them. His guests not all of the bluebottle sort: A Boccaccio picture: Singular brute-attachments to Sir Walter Scott: A wise little Blenheim cocker:

Strange animal and human resemblances. Alas, Scott, with all his health, became infected: The inane racket must now be kept up, and rise ever higher. A black speck in every soul (56).—Had Literature no task but that of harmlessly amusing, the Waverley Novels were the perfection of Literature. Difference in drawing a character, between a Scott, a Shakspeare and Goethe. Not by quaintness of costume can romance-heroes continue to interest us; but simply and solely by being men. Incalculable service these Historical Novels have rendered History (73). The extempore style of writing. No great thing ever done without difficulty: The 'soul's travail.' Cease, O ready-writer, to brag openly of thy rapidity and facility! Quality, not quantity, the one thing needful (78).—Scott's career, of writing impromptu novels to buy farms with, could not in any case have ended in good. Alas, in one day his high-heaped money-wages became fairy-money and nonentity. It was a hard trial: He met it proudly, bravely; like a brave proud man of the world. The noble War-horse that once laughed at the shaking of the spear, how is he doomed to toil himself dead, dragging ignoble wheels ! Extracts from his Diary: His Wife's death Lonely, aged, deprived of all; an impoverished, embarrassed man. Adieu, Sir Walter, pride of all Scotchmen, farewell! (83).

VARNHAGEN VON ENSE'S MEMOIRS

Inexhaustible interest of Veracity and Memoir-writing: Varnhagen's peculiar gifts and qualifications (p. 88).-Glimpses of literary Worthies; Schleiermacher; Wolf; La Fontaine. A pleasant visit to Jean Paul, at

his little home in Baireuth. A Battle-piece : Napoleon at Wagram; and Varnhagen's first experience of War. Varnhagen at the Court of Napoleon: What he saw; and what he thought of the Emperor. The eye sees only what it brings the means of seeing: Mystery and strength of originality (93).—Varnhagen most of all rejoices in the memory of Rahel, his deceased wife. A kind of spiritual queen in Germany: One of the first to recognise the significance of Goethe. Her face with no pretensions to beauty, yet lovable and attractive in a singular degree: Its characteristics. Her Letters, of the subjective sort; an unprofitable kind of writing. Not by looking at itself, but by ascertaining and ruling things out of itself, can the mind become known (106).—Her brilliant conversational powers. A few short extracts from her Letters: Obscure glimpses of the wealth and beauty of her loving woman's soul. Her deathbed. That such a woman should have lived unknown, and as it were silent to the world, a suggestive lesson to our time: Blessed are the humble, they that are not known. Seekest thou great things, seek them not'; live where thou art, wisely, diligently. The Working of the good and brave, seen or unseen, endures literally forever, and cannot die (110).

CHARTISM

CHAPTER I. Condition-of-England Question

Condition and disposition of the Working Classes: The Chartist Petition. 'Chartism' a new name for a thing which has had many names. Why Parliament throws no light on this dark question: Collective Folly of a Nation. Rights and Mights: Submission to the inevitable. Working-Class discontent (118).

CHAPTER II. Statistics

Statistic-Society Reports: Tables beautifully reticulated, but which hold no knowledge. Conclusive facts only separable from inconclusive by a head that understands and knows. Condition-of-England question, a most complex concrete matter: What constitutes the well-being of a Thrift decreasing, and almost gone (124).

man.

CHAPTER III. New Poor-Law

Refusal of out-door relief the one recipe for the woes of England: Not a very noble method. Merely to let everything and everybody well alone, a chief social principle false and damnable, if ever aught was. The Poor-Law Amendment Act, a half-truth, and preliminary of good. He that will not work according to his faculty, let him perish according

to his necessity. Supervisal by the Central Government. The claim of the poor labourer something quite other than that 'Statute of the Fortythird of Elizabeth' (p. 129).

CHAPTER IV. Finest Peasantry in the World

The poor man seeking for work, yet unable to find it. Irish perennial starvation: The Irish National character degraded, disordered. English injustice to Ireland. Circuitous, yet stern retribution: England invaded by Irish destitution (p. 135).—English labourers approximating more and more to the condition of the Irish competing with them: Labour disturbed and superseded by Mechanism. Laissez-faire applied to horses, or to poor ignorant peasants. Mere wages no index of well-being in the working man. A world not a home, but a dingy prison-house of reckless unthrift and rancorous rebellion (141).

CHAPTER V. Rights and Mights

Not what a man outwardly has or wants, that constitutes the happiness or misery of him: The feeling of injustice, the one intolerability to all men: Revenge (p. 144).—No conquest ever became permanent, which did not prove itself beneficial to the conquered: Romans; old Norman Nobles. The Wise man the only strong man. The grand question as to the condition of our Working Men. Of lower classes so related to upper, happy nations are not made. The French Revolution not yet completed: Bankruptcy of Speciosity and Imposture. Glory to God, our Europe was not to die but to live! (146).-The rights of man, little worth ascertaining in comparison to the mights, or practical availabilities, of man: How his notions of his 'rights' vary according to place and time, An Ideal of Right in all men, and procedures of men: Nothing unjust can continue in this world (152).

CHAPTER VI. Laissez-faire

The principle of Let-alone applied to English affairs: Church, Aristocracy, Fact. Under what tragic conditions Laissez-faire becomes a reasonable cry. Inalienable 'right' of the ignorant to be guided by the wiser. True meaning of Democracy (p. 155). — An Aristocracy a corporation of the Best and Bravest. Priesthoods, and the one question concerning them: How France cast its benighted Priesthood into destruction: The British Reader's self-complacent yet futile solacement. Cash-payment the sole nexus of man to man. Protection of property : What is property? The Ideal, and the poor imperfect Actual. Nothing, not a reality, ever got men to pay bed and board to it long (160).

CHAPTER VII. Not Laissez-faire

Better relations between Upper and Under Classes. The preliminary of all good, to know that a work must actually be done. Habits of Parliament for a century back. Parliament with its privileges is strong; but Necessity and the Laws of Nature are stronger. Cash-Payment; and so many things that cash will not pay (p. 166).

CHAPTER VIII. New Eras

A new Practice indispensable in every New Era. Sauerteig on the Eras of England. Romans dead out; English are come in. Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach of Thanet. Six centuries of obscure endeavour: A stormy spring-time, if ever there was one for a Nation. Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour; but give them centuries, they are found to be identical. The land of Britain. Normans and Saxons originally of one stock (p. 170).—Two grand tasks in World-History assigned to this English People. Rights, everywhere, correctly-articulated mights. A real House of Commons come decisively into play: Material and spiritual accumulations and growths of England (175).-New England: The little ship Mayflower of Delft-Haven. The Elizabethan Era a spiritual flower-time. Manchester; its squalor and despair not forever inseparable from it. Richard Arkwright; James Watt. Our greatest benefactors walk daily among us, shrouded in darkness. All new things unexpected, unforeseen; yet not unexpected by Supreme Power (178).

CHAPTER IX. Parliamentary Radicalism

Where the great masses of men are tolerably right, all is right; where they are not right, all is wrong. Claim of the Free Working-man to be raised to a level with the Working Slave: A Do-nothing Guidance, in a Do-something World. English notion of 'Suffrage.' Reform Ministries, with their Benthamee formulas, barren as the east-wind: Ultra-radicalism, not of the Benthamee sort. Obedience the primary duty of man: Recognised or not, a man has his superiors, a regular Hierarchy above him (p. 185).

CHAPTER X. Impossible

'What are we to do?'-No good comes of men who have 'impossible' too often in their mouths. Paralytic Radicalism. Two things, great things, might be done (p. 190).-Education: The grand 'seedfield of Time' is man's, and we give it him not. Consequences of neglect. Intellect or insight: Twenty-four million intellects, awakened into action. Difficulties occasioned by 'Religion': Cast-iron Parsons: In

order to teach religion, the one needful thing to find a man who has religion. What a real Prime-Minister of England might do towards educating the people (192).-Emigration; the one remedy for 'overpopulation.' Malthusian controversies: Preventive check': Infanticide by 'painless extinction.' What a black, godless, waste-struggling world, in this once merry England, do such things betoken! (199).

PETITION ON THE COPYRIGHT BILL

Assuring to each man the just recompense of his labour, the business of all Legislation and Government among men. To have written a genuine enduring book, not a sufficient reason for the forfeiture of the Law's protection. Why, then, should extraneous persons be allowed to steal from the poor book-writer the poor market-price of his labour? (p. 205).

ON THE SINKING OF THE VENGEUR

The first public notice in England of Lord Howe's victory and the destruction of the Vengeur (p. 208).—The French Convention, in its Reign of Terror, had to give its own version of the matter. Barrère reports it as a glorious victory for France: At length, unable to conceal the defeat, he pictures the manner of it as a spectacle for the gods. His Report translated, and published without comment, in the Morning Chronicle. The French naturally proud of so heroic a feat. It finds its way into English History. Extract from Carlyle's 'French Revolution': Letter from Rear-Admiral Griffiths, denying altogether the correctness of the account. Another Letter, giving an emphatic statement of the facts, as witnessed by himself. Letter from T. Carlyle to 'a distinguished French friend': In the interest of all whom it may concern, let the truth be known (209).—Letter from Rear-Admiral Griffiths to T. Carlyle, enclosing a Copy of Letter from Rear-Admiral Renaudin, Captain of the sunken Vengeur. The French Journals and official persons in no haste to canvass the awkward-looking case. Response of one who did respond: Not a recantation of an impudent amazing falsehood; but a faint whimper of admission that it is probably false. Every windbag at length ripped; in the longrun no lie can be successful. Of Nothing you can, with much lost labour, make only-Nothing (217).

BAILLIE THE COVENANTER

Mr. Robert Baillie, a solid comfortable Parish Minister of Kilwinning: How he became gradually heated to the welding-pitch by the troubles of the Seventeenth Century (p. 226).-Happily his copious loquacity