ledge, and again taxing me with the unpardonable crime of being amusing.

Amusing-good heavens! we shall none of us be amusing much longer. Mr. Wright would perhaps be more indulgent to my vivacity if he considered this. is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark; the last glimpse of colour before we all go into drab. Who that reads the Examiner does not know that representative man, that Ajax of liberalism, one of our modern leaders of thought, who signs himself "Presbyter Anglicanus ?" For my part, I have good cause to know him; terribly severe he was with me two years ago, when he thought I had spoken with levity of that favourite pontiff of the Philistines, the Bishop of Natal. But his masterpiece was the other day. Mr. Disraeli, in the course of his lively speech at Oxford, talked of 66 nebulous professors, who, if they could only succeed in obtaining a perpetual study of their writings, would go far to realise that eternity of punishment which they object to." Presbyter Anglicanus says "it would be childish to affect ignorance" that this was aimed at Mr. Maurice. If it was, who can doubt that Mr. Maurice himself, full of culture and urbanity as he is, would be the first to pronounce it a very smart saying, and to laugh at it good-humouredly? But only listen to Mr. Maurice's champion :—

"This passage must fill all sober-minded men with astonishment and dismay; they will regard it as one of

the most ominous signs of the time. This contemptible joke, which betrays a spirit of ribald profanity not easily surpassed, excited from the Bishop, the clergy, and laity present, not an indignant rebuke, but continued laughter.' Such was the assembly of Englishmen and Christians, who could listen in uproarious merriment to a Parliamentary leader while he asserted that the vilest iniquity would be well compensated by a forced perusal of the writings of Frederick Denison Maurice !"

And, for fear this trumpet-blast should not be carried far enough by the Examiner, its author, if I am not greatly mistaken, blew it also, under a different name, in half a dozen of the daily newspapers. As Wordsworth asks :

Of that man's mind, what can it be? . . ."

was he really born of human parents, or of Hyrcanian tigers? if the former, surely to some of his remote ancestors, at any rate,-in far distant ages, I mean, long before the birth of Puritanism,—some conception of a joke must, at one moment or other of their lives, have been conveyed. But there is the coming east wind! there is the tone of the future !-I hope it is grave enough for even the Guardian;-the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future! Yes, the world will soon be the Philistines'; and then, with every voice, not of thunder, silenced, and the whole earth filled and ennobled every morning by the magnificent roaring of the young

lions of the Daily Telegraph, we shall all yawn in one another's faces with the dismallest, the most unimpeachable gravity. No more vivacity then! my hexameters, and dogmatism, and scoffs at the Divorce Court, will all have been put down; I shall be quite crest-fallen. But does Mr. Wright imagine that there will be any more place, in that world, for his heroic blank verse Homer than for my paradoxes? If he does, he deceives. himself, and knows little of the Palatine Library of the future. A plain edifice, like the British College of Health enlarged: inside, a light, bleak room, with a few statues; Dagon in the centre, with our English Caabah, or Palladium of enlightenment, the hare's stomach; around, a few leading friends of humanity or fathers of British philosophy;-Goliath, the great Bentham, Presbyter Anglicanus, our intellectual deliverer Mr. James Clay, and . . . yes! with the embarrassed air of a late convert, the editor of the Saturday Review. Many a shrewd nip has he in old days given to the Philistines, this editor; many a bad half-hour has he made them pass; but in his old age he has mended his courses, and declares that his heart has always been in the right place, and that he is at bottom, however appearances may have been against him, staunch for Goliath and "the most logical nation in the whole world." Then, for the book-shelves. There will be found on them a monograph by Mr. Lowe on the literature of the ancient Scythians, to revenge them for the iniquitous neglect

with which the Greeks treated them; there will be Demosthenes, because he was like Mr. Spurgeon: but, else, from all the lumber of antiquity they will be free. Everything they contain will be modern, intelligible, improving; Joyce's Scientific Dialogues, Old Humphrey, Bentham's Deontology, Little Dorrit, Mangnall's Questions, The Wide Wide World, D'Iffanger's Speeches, Beecher's Sermons;—a library, in short, the fruit of a happy marriage between the profound philosophic reflection of Mr. Clay, and the healthy natural taste of Inspector Tanner.

But I return to my design in writing this Preface. That design was, after apologising to Mr. Wright for my vivacity of five years ago, to beg him and others to let me bear my own burdens, without saddling the great and famous University, to which I have the honour to belong, with any portion of them. What I mean to deprecate is such phrases as, "his professional assault," "his assertions issued ex cathedrâ,” "the sanction of his name as the representative of poetry," and so on. Proud as

I am of my connection with the University of Oxford, I can truly say, that, knowing how unpopular a task one is undertaking when one tries to pull out a few more stops in that powerful, but at present somewhat narrow-toned organ, the modern Englishman, I have always sought to stand by myself, and to compromise others as little as possible. Besides this, my native modesty is such, that I have always been shy of assuming the honourable style

of Professor, because this is a title I share with so many distinguished men,-Professor Pepper, Professor Anderson, Professor Frickel, and others,—who adorn it, I feel, much more than I do. These eminent men, however, belonging to a hierarchy of which Urania, the Goddess of Science herself, is the sole head, cannot well by any vivacity or unpopularity of theirs compromise themselves with their superiors; because with their Goddess they are not likely, until they are translated to the stars, to come into contact. I, on the other hand, have my humble place in a hierarchy whose seat is on earth; and I serve under an illustrious Chancellor who translates Homer, and calls his Professor's leaning towards hexameters "a pestilent heresy." Nevertheless, that cannot keep me from admiring the performance of my severe chief; I admire its freshness, its manliness, its simplicity; although, perhaps, if one looks for the charm of Homer, for his play of a divine light . Professor Pepper must go on, I cannot.

My position is, therefore, one of great delicacy; but it is not from any selfish motives that I prefer to stand alone, and to concentrate on myself, as a plain citizen of the republic of letters, and not as an officebearer in a hierarchy, the whole responsibility for all I write; it is much more out of genuine devotion to the University of Oxford, for which I feel, and always must feel, the fondest, the most reverential attachment. In an epoch of dissolution and transformation, such as that on