so general and unhappily so increasing, of a familiarity with the best models, especially of those which antiquity has left us. And this leads us to an objection occasionally urged against Mr. Arnold's critical point of view. He is sometimes spoken of as an upholder of the classical as opposed to the Romantic style, and in a sense he is so. Thus he cannot yield to the dogma frequently announced now-a-days, that "the poet who would really fix the public attention must leave the exhausted past, and draw his subjects from matters of present import, and therefore both of interest and novelty." He believes, on the contrary, that the best materials for poetry are to be found not in situations and incidents in themselves mean and disagreeable, however they may be elevated by the power of the imagination, but rather in events and ideas in themselves grand and beautiful, possessing an immediate dignity and interest, irrespective of the force of association; and, so far, he holds with the classicists. He believes, further, that distance from ourselves, either in time or idea, tends to bestow this immediate dignity and interest, while nearness to ourselves tends to take it away. Poetry, according to his idea, should approach, as with the most classic of the great poets it did approach, to sculpture, at once in natural beauty of subject, and in perfection of form. Yet he is far from confining poetry to classical themes in the strict sense of the word. He does not so limit his own choice. Most of his largest poems come from very different sources-from Northern mythology, from Eastern legend, from the cycle of Arthurian romance. His view, in short, is, that all noble subjects are fitting for poetry, only that the more distant the subject the more likely it is to possess this element of nobility, not having been exposed to the vulgarizing influences of familiarity. In this point of view Macbeth becomes as classical as Agamemnon-the Weird Sisters, " withered and wild in their attire," as classical as the awful Eumenides—Una, with her lion, as classical as Antigone or Electra. We believe Mr. Arnold to be right in his theory. Despite such successes as those of Wordsworth or of Tennyson, we suspect that what is so glibly called "the poetry of every-day life," will generally prove a very sorry affair. The poet is indeed, as is often said, the interpreter of his age, but he is so indirectly, by allusion, by general tone, by his point of view, not directly by depicting the common life of people round about him. No great poet has done this not even Shakspeare, the most universal of all. Not in this way have the highest peaks of Helicon been scaled. Aspects of life so different from those familiar to us as to seem of another world-or, it may be, other worlds altogether, creations of imagination or of faith; such are the fit and chosen

materials of the highest poetry. Seeing that the "poetry of every-day life theory" has found a supporter so acute as the late Mr. Brimley in his essay on Tennyson, we are glad to find it opposed by Mr. Arnold.

But while it would be incorrect to call Mr. Arnold a disciple of the classic style, as the expression is employed by Schlegel, no man can have a truer appreciation of classical literature, or value a familiarity with it more highly. Men, he says, who often enjoy commerce with the ancients, seem to him "like persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience, they are more truly than others, under the empire of facts, and more independent of the language current among those with whom they live." Now, no one can reproach Mr. Arnold with admiring the ancient beyond due measure, because of ignorance of modern literature. He but adds another to the many instances which show that it is the most accomplished and most cultivated men who most value the cultivation of antiquity. It is the want of this cultivation more than any other cause, which fosters, especially among us Scotch, those sins of eccentricity, and over-estimates, and fine writing, on which we have already remarked. Criticism can do much to restrain these things, but the discipline which the study of the classics gives can do far more; nay, without such discipline we may not hope for any such criticism. It is very idle to quote Shakspeare with his "little Latin and less Greek;" we are speaking now of ordinary mortals, of men who write from intelligence and understanding, not of the divine sons of genius. It is impossible, within this range, to rate too highly the importance of a knowledge of the classics as a regulating and corrective influence. Here we can cite in our favour a witness whose testimony can never be otherwise than acceptable, and who certainly had no love for Latin and Greek in excess, Sydney Smith:-"Whatever, therefore, our conjectures may be, we cannot be so sure that the best modern writers can afford us as good models as the ancients: the moderns have been well taught by their masters; but the time is hardly yet come when the necessity for such instruction no longer exists." It is a thing of some moment just at present, that the value of the ancient writers should have found so powerful an advocate as Mr. Arnold -a man eminently qualified to form an opinion on the matter, and not less capable of upholding it.

This subject naturally leads the mind to Oxford, on which nothing has ever been written more beautiful than the following passage--in itself no unfavourable example of the grace of Mr. Arnold's style :

'No; we are all seekers still seekers often make mistakes, and I wish mine to redound to my own discredit only, and not to touch

Oxford. Beautiful city! so venerable, so lovely, so unravaged by the fierce intellectual life of our century, so serene!

There are our young barbarians, all at play.'

And yet, steeped in sentiment as she lies, spreading her garments to the moonlight, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the Middle Age, who will deny that Oxford, by her ineffable charm, keeps ever calling us near to the true goal of all of us, to the ideal, to perfection, to beauty, in a word, which is only truth seen from another side?-nearer, perhaps, than all the science of Tübingen. Adorable dreamer, whose heart has been so romantic! who hast given thyself so prodigally, given thyself to sides and to heroes not mine, only never to the Philistines! home of lost causes, and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names, and impossible loyalties! What example could ever so inspire us to keep down the Philistine in ourselves, what teacher could ever so save us from that bondage to which we are all prone, that bondage which Goethe, in those incomparable lines on the death of Schiller, makes it his friend's highest praise (and nobly did Schiller deserve the praise) to have left miles out of sight behind him; -the bondage of was uns alle bändigt, DAS GEMEINE? She will forgive me, even if I have unwittingly drawn upon her a shot or two aimed at her unworthy son; for she is generous, and the cause in which I fight is, after all, hers. Apparitions of a day, what is our puny warfare against the Philistines, compared with the warfare which this Queen of Romance has been waging against them for centuries, and will wage after we are gone?"

Readers who have accompanied us thus far do not need to be told that, in our judgment, Mr. Arnold's little volume is a work at once of sterling merit and of great value. That he may be, as indeed we believe him to be, wrong in many of his practical results such as his admiration for academies, and his choice of English hexameters as a vehicle for rendering Homer--is a thing of no real moment. The virtue of his teaching consists in the excellence of the standard he sets up, and in the soundness of the principles he applies. The more widely he is read, the greater the influence he obtains, the brighter the prospects of our literature. And it is because of this high estimate of Mr. Arnold's labours that we have dwelt more fully on those points where we differ from him than on those where we agree with or yield to him; and, would that we were not forced to add, that it is also because of this estimate that we regret deeply the foppery, the arrogance, the affectation which marred the beauty of the lectures on Homer, which, in the preface to these essays, moves a sorrowful laughter, and which appears rarely indeed, yet too often, disfiguring the essays themselves, lingering like a subtle poison. With these weaknesses Mr. Arnold has done, and yet will do, much; but, without them, how much more! Admiring him as we do, we can forgive him; but how can he forgive himself?

ART. VII.-The Holy Roman Empire. By JAMES BRYCE, B.A. Oxford, 1864.

Ir may seem a hard saying, but it is one which the facts fully bear out, that hardly one student in ten of mediæval history really grasps that one key to the whole subject without which medieval history is simply an unintelligible chaos. That key is no other than the continued existence of the Roman Empire. As long as people are taught to believe that the Empire came to an end in the year 476, a true understanding of the next thousand years becomes utterly impossible. No man can understand either the politics or the literature of that whole period, unless he constantly bears in mind that, in the ideas of the men of those days, the Roman Empire, the Empire of Augustus, Constantine, and Justinian, was not a thing of the past but a thing of the present. Without grasping the medieval theory of the Empire, it is impossible fully to grasp the theory and the career of the Papacy. Without understanding the position of the Empire, it is impossible rightly to understand the origin and development of the various European States. Without such an understanding, the history of the nations which clave to the Empire, and the history of the nations which fell asunder from it, are alike certain to be misconceived. Unless viewed in the light of the Imperial theory, the whole history of Germany, Italy, and Burgundy becomes an inexplicable riddle. The struggle of Hildebrand and Henry loses half its meaning, the whole position of the Swabian Emperors becomes an insoluble puzzle, the most elaborate prose and the most impassioned verse of Dante sinks into purposeless gibberish, if we do not fully realize that, in the mind of all contemporary Europe, the Hohenstaufen were the direct and lawful successors of the Julii. How Germany, once the most united state of Western Europe, gradually changed from a compact and vigorous kingdom into one of the laxest of confederations, can never be understood unless we trace how the German kingdom was crushed and broken to pieces beneath the weight of the loftier diadem which rested on the brow of its kings. Those misrepresentations of all European history with which French historians and French politicians are apt to deceive the unwary can never be fully exposed, except by a thorough acquaintance with the true position and true nationality of those Teutonic Kings and Cæsars, whom the Gaul is so apt to look upon as his countrymen and not as his masters. The relations between Eastern and Western Europe can never be taken in, unless we fully realize the true nature of those rival Empires, each of which asserted and believed itself to be the one true

and lawful possessor of the heritage of ancient Rome. We see our way but feebly through the long struggle between the East and the West, between Christendom and Islam, unless we fully grasp the position of the Cæsar, the chief of Christendom, and the Caliph, the chief of Islam; unless we see, in the complex interpenetration of the divided Empire and the divided Caliphate, at once what the theory of Christian and of Moslem was, and how utterly those theories failed to be carried out in all their fulness. In a word, as we began by saying, the history of the Empire is the key to the whole history of medieval Europe, and it is a key which as yet is found in far fewer hands than it ought to be.

The immediate cause of the failure of most historical students to realize the paramount importance of the Imperial history, is of course to be found in the fact that hardly any of the books from which students draw their knowledge give to the history of the Empire its proper prominence. This is indeed little more than a truism. The question is, how it comes to pass that even able and well-informed writers have failed to bring forward this most important portion of history as it should be brought forward. The causes, we think, are tolerably obvious.

First, our own national history has been less affected by the history of the Empire than that of any other European country. Britain, Spain, and Sweden, in their insular and peninsular positions, were the parts of Europe over which the Imperial influence was slightest, and of the three, that influence was even slighter over Britain than it was over Spain, and hardly greater than it was over Sweden. Of direct connexion with the Empire, England had very little, and Scotland still less. The external history of England does indeed ever and anon touch the history of the Empire, in the way in which the history of every European state must ever and anon touch the history of every other state. Once or twice in a century we come across an Emperor as a friend or as an enemy, in one case as a possible suzerain. As England supplied the spiritual Rome with a single Pope, so she supplied the temporal Rome with a single King, a King who never visited his capital or received the crown and title of Augustus. But the whole internal history of England, and the greater part of its external history, went on pretty much as if there had been no Holy Roman Empire at all. Our one moment of most intimate connexion with the Empire brings out most fully how slight, compared with that of other nations, our usual connexion with the Empire was. Every reader of English history knows the name of Richard, Earl of Cornwall and King of the Romans, and knows the part which he played in the internal politics of England. But very few readers, and we suspect by no means all writers, of English history seem to have any clear notion what a King of the