plaint from one end to the other of the German lines. From what we could gather, however, our impression is that consideration was the exception, and that if the conduct of the Prussians was arrogant and exacting towards their enemies, it was notably so with regard to those who were neither enemies nor friends. The Alabama dispute has enlightened us on the duties of neutrals towards belligerents, but we should like to see those of belligerents towards neutrals as clearly defined. If there are to be neither exemptions nor privileges for the latter, it becomes a very one-sided kind of reciprocity. Now, throughout the war of 1870-71, the Prussians made a point of treating the subjects of a neutral power exactly as they did the people of the country with whom they were fighting. They laid it down as a maxim that anyone choosing to live on French soil was amenable to the same laws and treatment as the French themselves. Any departure from this rule appears to have been in favor of the Russian and American flags, both of which seem to have been more delicately handled than the Union Jack. As late as last October the marks of the Prussians were on the walls and windowshutters of the cottages and buildings in the vicinity of large towns; and are visible on doors in many of the small towns still. Whether these chalk inscriptions are suffered to remain as evidence of the unconscionable number of men and horses the several householders were bound to entertain, or whether the Tourongeaux -notoriously a peaceful, apathetic race, whom even the convulsions of the great Revolution failed to upset in any great degree-have not thought it worth while to remove them, we know not; but there they are to demonstrate, in almost every instance, that the size of the lodging was altogether out of proportion to the number of the enemy and his incumbrances it was expected to lodge. It is curious what conflicting opinions could be gleaned as to the behavior of the victors; whilst the conduct of their unwilling hosts was equally varied. In some houses the Germans were endured as necessary evils, The yearly gathering in of the grapes they were given plenty to eat and drink, provides a great field for the occupation and to all intents and purposes treated of children of both sexes; and as the vinlike visitors who have outstayed their wel- tage takes place at the time of the general come, but from whom a certain amount holidays, the schooling of the boys and of civility cannot be withheld. Others girls is in no wise interfered with; at the made no attempt to conciliate them, but same time it is a healthful and profitable gave exactly what they were compelled to mode of spending the season of recreation, give and no more, on no account taking and in this work they are very largely emtheir meals with them-a practice they ployed in all the wine-growing districts of stigmatized as an incomprehensible want France. This arrangement is in fact alof patriotism on the part of those who, most a necessity, from the very great scarfrom economy, could not maintain two city of adult male labor at all times, but estables. One lady assured us that she pecially at the time of the vintage, partly could say with pride that, throughout the because it is a work which, like hoptime the Prussians were under her roof, gathering or harvesting, naturally takes she had never even seen them. It is pro- place everywhere at the same moment, bable also that the behavior of the con- and partly because almost everyone has quering army was unequal as regards his own grapes to gather and his own both time and place during the war. To- wine to make. This literal dwelling of wards the termination of the struggle they "every man under his own vine" is pleabecame exasperated at the unexpected re- sant to see; but it is a pleasure mixed sistance they encountered, and showed with regret, as the mind naturally reverts less and less regard for the feelings and to the different state of affairs among our property of the vanquished. In some own laboring people. places, also, it is beyond doubt that the behavior of the officers was intolerable, whilst of the men there was hardly a com And why should there be so radical a difference in their condition? The secret which lies at the root of the whole matter 1873. WORDSWORTH. is the more equal, and therefore more equitable, division of land among the people of the land. In a country like France, where everything is cheap, why should male labor be comparatively dear? The reason is simply this so few are obliged to till the land of others that it is not always easy to find an odd man for job work; and when you have found him he can pretty well command his own price. Except at very outlying country places, fifteen or twenty miles from any town, a man, or even a boy of sixteen, cannot be had for the commonest farm work for less than half-acrown a day in summer, or fifteen shillings From November 1st until the a week. beginning of March, they receive two francs a day, and this not for skilled labor but for the most ordinary and simple operations in farm or garden. We have alluded to the comparative scarcity of adult male labor; the following statistics will make the matter plain to our readers : The superficial area of France is 250,000 The square miles, or 170,000,000 acres. population, according to the return of the last census taken, is 35,000,000, or five acres of land to each inhabitant. There are 8,000,000 of electors-adult males; therefore, each of these must be calculated to have on an average 21 acres. There are, however, in France only 5,000,000 of landed proprietors, leaving of The 3,000,000 who do not possess The average of landed properties being 34 acres, it has been ascertained that of the 5,000,000 proprietors, 3,800,000 hold between 20 and 40 acres, 1,100,000 between 5 and 20 acres, 86,000 between 40 and 100 acres, and 14,000 above 100 acres. Figures as well as facts are stubborn things, and the figures we have given above tell their own story, and require no comment to add to their force. Our space does not permit us to describe as minutely as it deserves this beautiful portion of France, its productions and monuments; and we regretfully take leave of the subject in the words of Martin Marteau, who, in his " Paradis délicieux de la Touraine," affirms, "C'est une des plus belles, meilleures, excellentes et agréables, voire mesme des plus fertiles provinces de cet opulent royaume, pour ne pas dire de ce grand monde."-Macmillan's Magazine. WORDSWORTH.* BY SIR JOHN DUKE COLERIDGE, M.P. FOR EXETER, H.M.'S ATTORNEY-GENERAL. I owe it, no doubt, to the fact of having had the honor to represent Exeter in Parliament for some years, that I have been requested to appear before you to night in the capacity of lecturer. It has in consequence cost me no small trouble to consider and determine what subject I should choose for my discourse. I wished to choose some subject which, at any rate, could do no harm, and of which I am not wholly ignorant; but I have found the task of selection by no means easy. Innocent subjects indeed abound; but the * A Lecture delivered before the Literary Society of Exeter, in April, 1873. knowledge of them possessed by a man immersed in business and wholly occupied with the labors of public life, is not equally abundant. Men, no doubt, habitually lecture upon subjects of which they know nothing and understand nothing, and as to which I should think, if they have common modesty, they must be very conscious of their ignorance. These examples are certainly at once amusing and amazing; but I do not desire that astonishment should tempt me into imitation. What I am about to lay before you, if not new, shall, I hope, be true; if familiar, it ways follow, that what is true and familiar is, I think, important; and it does not al is so practically accepted and acted on as to make insistence on it needless. I suppose that the majority of you whom I address are engaged in some business or profession; that you have to work in some way or another; that you cannot treat life as a mere enjoyment, nor do always what you please or what you fancy; that you have toil and struggle and labor, and dull duty, perhaps repulsive, at least uninteresting, out of which your life is for the most part made, and on which in large measure your days, perhaps your nights, are spent. If this be so, in this at least you and I are at one; I wish therefore to suggest to you the true practical value, to such as we are, of great imaginative and poetical compositions; and as an example of such compositions I will take the works of the poet I know best next to Shakspere, the works of William Wordsworth, and urge upon you their reverent study. I am speaking only as a man of business to men of business. The really great and profound men of letters I pass by with true respect. They have their own noble work to do, and many of them do it nobly. The smart critics who settle a reputation with a sneer and dismiss a great author in a parenthesis, they too do their work which is not noble, and to their work I leave them. Let us see whether for you and for me there be not sound and sensible reasons in support of the opinion I have advanced. I am not sure but that in selecting such a subject for my address to you to-night I have been influenced in some degree by a certain perversity. For I have seen the love of Wordsworth imputed almost as a discredit and a disqualification for the holding of high legal office; and the fact that the Lord Chancellor quoted him at a legal dinner, suggested by the conversation which he had had upon the subject during dinner with the Chancellor of the Exchequer and myself, seems to have struck some public writers as incongruous, not to say as indicating a certain weakness and effeminacy of mind. Well, I admit to having a perverse satisfaction in taking a natural opportunity of proclaiming my utter and peremptory dissent from any such notions. But I have a better and weightier motive for addressing you, which is this. The study of Wordsworth has been to me from my childhood so great a comfort and delight; it has, so far as I can judge, been of such real and abiding use to me; that it is a plain duty of gratitude to say so openly on all fitting occasions, and to endeavor if I can to lead others to enjoy what I have found so delightful, and to benefit by that which I have found so profitable. Wordsworth, it is true, is probably now by most cultivated and intellectual men admitted to be a great and original writer; a writer whose compositions it is right to be acquainted with as a part of literary history and literary education. Few men would now venture to deny him genius or to treat his poetry with contempt. No one probably would dare to echo or even to defend the ribald abuse of the Edinburgh Review. But he is not generally appreciated: even now he is far too little read; and, as I think, for the idlest and weakest of all reasons. He suffers still from the impression produced by attacks made upon him by men who, I should suppose, if they had tried, were incapable of feeling his beauty and his grandeur, but who seem to me never to have had the common honesty to try. Fastening upon a few obvious defects, seizing upon a few poems (poems admitting of complete defence, and, viewed rightly, full of beauty, yet capable no doubt of being presented in a ridiculous aspect), the critics of the Edinburgh Review poured out on Wordsworth abuse, invective, malignant personality, which deterred the unreflecting mass of men from reading for themselves and finding out as they must have found out, the worthlessness of the criticism. They destroyed his popularity and blighted his reputation, though they have had no power whatever over his fame. Lord Jeffrey was the chief offender in this matter. I do not pretend to judge of his merits as a lawyer or a politician. As Lord Advocate and Lord of Session, he may, for what I know, have been more than respectable. As a man he had warm friends; and I do not doubt that he deserved to have them. But his collected essays show him to have been as poor, as shallow, as mistaken a critic as ever succeeded in obtaining a temporary and factitious reputation. If you look through his essays you will find scarcely an original judgment of his which has stood the test of time. Even in the instances of Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott, the universal favorites, whom Lord Jeffrey in common with everybody else praised and honored, it is very seldom right praise or for right reasons which you will find bestowed on them by him. That such a man could not measure the greatness of Wordsworth, and was incapable of feeling the perfection of his art; that he should have found him dull, and trifling, and prosaic, and a poor artist, is not at all astonishing. To him originality in poetry was as color to a blind man. That he should have pursued with bitter personal vituperation so pure and noble and highminded a man as Wordsworth is unpleasant to remember. But that such criticism as his (except that he was always clear, intelligible, and decided) should have been able to produce the effect which followed it, is wonderful indeed. "Yarrow Unvisited" he calls "a tedious, affected performance;" of "Resolution and Independence" he says, "We defy the bitterest enemy of Mr. Wordsworth to produce anything at all parallel to this from any collection of English poetry, or even from the specimens of his friend Mr. Southey" (a sentence which, in a very • different sense from that which Lord Jeffrey gave it, I should desire to adopt ;) of the " Ode on Immortality," that "it is the most illegible and unintelligible part of the publication." There stood the beauty and tenderness of "Yarrow Unvisited," the grandeur and dignity of "Resolution and Independence," the intense and profound imagination of the "Ode on Immortality," to confute the critic. Nay, Lord Jeffrey quoted noble passages at length as subjects for sneer and for derision. But the sentence of the critic either suspended men's judgments or overbore them, and the poems were unread. The power of the Edinburgh Review of those days, written as it was by a set of men of splendid and popular abilities, was indeed prodigious. It stopped for years the sale of Wordsworth's poems; and though he outlived its calumnies, and found at length a general and reverent acceptance, yet prejudices were created which impeded his popularity; and even now the echoes of Lord Jeffrey's mocking laughter fill the ears of many men, and deafen them to the lovely and majestic melody of Wordsworth's song. It is against prejudices such as these, unworthy and unfounded prejudices, that I protest. It is not only, it is not chiefly, that they prevent the formation of a sound literary judgment, though this is something. It is that they stand between working men, using that expression in the sense I have explained, and a writer who might be of such great use to them and such an abiding comfort. I think Wordsworth, with the doubtful exception of Chaucer, of whom I am ashamed to say I do not know enough to form a judgment, a name in our literature to which Shakspere and Milton are alone superior. But, right or wrong, this is not the point on which I wish to insist. What I do wish to insist on is, that for busy men, men hard at work, men plunged up to the throat in the labors of life, the study of Wordsworth is as healthy, as refreshing, as invigorating a study as literature can supply. He is the poet to whom you and I may turn with great and constant advantage. And I will tell you why I say so. tere. First, the man himself, his life, his character, whether as a man or as an artist, are subjects for the study and imitation of every hard-working man. His life was pure and simple; I might almost say ausWith very narrow means he sat himself down to pursue his calling with a single eye to do what he thought his duty, and according to his convictions and to the best of his abilities to benefit mankind. No money difficulties, not even the pressure of almost poverty, diverted him for an instant from his high purpose, or bowed him at any time to an unworthy condescension. No mockery disturbed his equanimity, no unpopularity shook his confidence. He believed he had a work to do, and he did it with all his might. "Make yourself, my dear friend," he said to Lady Beaumont, " as easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not yourself with their present reception; of what moment is that compared with what, I trust, is their destiny? To console the afflicted; to add sunshine to daylight by making the happy happier; to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, and feel, and therefore to become more actively and seriously virtuous this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered. in our graves." Again he says: "Be assured that the decision of these persons (i. e., 'the London wits and witlings') has nothing to do with the question; they are altogether incompetent judges. . . . My ears are stone deaf to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensible as iron to these petty stings; and after what I have said I am sure yours will be the same. I doubt not that you will share with me an invincible confidence that my writings (and among them these little poems) will co-operate with the benign tendencies in human nature and society, wherever found; and that they will in their degree be efficacious in making men wiser, better, and happier." Once more, he says to Sir George Beaumont: "Let the poet first consult his own heart as I have done, and leave the rest to posterity,—to, I hope, an improving posterity. I have not written down to the level of superficial observers and unthinking minds. Every great poet is a teacher; I wish either to be considered as a teacher or nothing." And in a very fine passage in his famous Preface, speaking of the imagination, he says: "And if bearing in mind the many poets distinguished by this prime quality, whose names I omit to mention, yet justified by the recollection of the insults which the ignorant, the incapable, and the presumptuous have heaped upon these and my other writings, I may be permitted to anticipate the judgment of posterity upon myself, I shall declare (censurable, I grant, if the notoriety of the fact above stated does not justify me) that I have given in these unfavorable times evidence of exertions of this faculty upon its worthiest objects; the external universe, the moral and religious sentiments of man, his natural affections, and his acquired passions, which have the same ennobling tendency as the productions of men in this kind worthy to be holden in undying remembrance." In this spirit of noble self-confidence he turned away from London, from offers of lucrative employment, from the fascinations of society to which he was by no means insensible, and spent his life amongst the mountains of Westmoreland in the steady undeviating pursuit of what he knew he could do best. Competence, if not wealth, came to him in after years, but came unsought; a great and genuine popularity at length followed him, though he had never followed it; but these things did not change in the smallest measure the simplicity of his life, or disturb the repose of his character. Virgilium vidi tantum. It was my privilege, when I was yet a boy and he an old man, to spend a month in constant intercourse with him; and I have retained undying recollections of the dignity and power which he bore about him, and which were singularly impressive. But his poems are the man, and what I saw, and I hope profited by, you may see and profit by in the books which he has left behind. No man more than he, moreover, carried conscience into his work. His style, his language, were always the best he could produce, and his works were labored at and corrected with uncompromising severity. Sometimes, it is true, he in later years corrected into tameness the grand conceptions of his youth; but his principle was high and right. "I yield to none," says he, "in love for my art. I therefore labor at it with reverence, affection, and industry. My main endeavor as to style has been that my poems should be written in pure intelligible English." "Make what you do produce as good as you can," is his comment on an answer of Crabbe, that it was "not worth while" to take the trouble to make his poems more correct in point of English. Farthermore as far as literature is concerned, he set himself to a great task, and he completely accomplished it. He had Cowper certainly for a forerunner, but from many causes the influence of Cowper was limited; and though he preceded Wordsworth, yet Wordsworth has done more to make Cowper appreciated than Cowper did for him. Poetry he found, in spite of Cowper and in spite of Gray, overlaid with unreality and affectation, severed for a time from the truth of nature, and become useless and ineffective for purposes of refreshment and improvement. He set himself to bring Poetry back to simplicity and truth; he sent her once more to Nature for her images, and to the heart of man for her thoughts; and created—as he has said himself, every great poet must create Say the taste by which he was himself to be relished. In the best sense he revolutionized the style of English literature. what men will, very few of his contemporaries were not-there is not a great living writer who has not been-deeply and permanently impressed by him. In Browning, in Tennyson, in Sir Henry Taylor, in Matthew Arnold, you not only catch echoes of Wordsworth from time to time; but in that which at their best all have in common in their simple, direct, energetic |