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to the statesman are pleasant. The sage was evidently pleased by the attention paid to him by Peel; but certainly their politics had little in common. Mr. Froude professes to be a disciple of Carlyle's "ereed," which, he says, saved him from atheism and positivism, and taught him that the wise and good ought to govern, and the mass of mankind are only fit to be governed. He fails, however, to give any indication how the wise and good are to be selected from the mass. Indeed, the only indication of how the "creed" is to be put into practice that these volumes afford is an invitation given by the sage of Chelsea to Lord Wolseley of all people to play the part of Cromwell, or attempt a sort of imitation of the 18th of Brumaire :

He was much struck with Sir Garnet, and talked freely with him on many subjects. He described the House of Commons as "six hundred talking asses, set to make the laws and administer the concerns of the greatest empire the world has ever seen;" with other uncomplimentary phrases. When we rose to go, he said, "Well, Sir, I am glad to have made your acquaintance, and I wish you well. There is one duty which I hope may yet be laid upon you before you leave this world-to lock the door of yonder place, and turn them all out about their business."

our universal immorality and cowardly untruth than even in such sympathies.

His views of French writers were simi

larly enlightened. "A new Phallus worship, with Sue, Balzac & Co. for prophets, and Madame Sand for a virgin," was his description of the great school of literature which has influenced Europe far more deeply than Carlyle ever did or ever will.

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As for the attitude of the "creed" to science. In reviewing the "Reminiscences we quoted Carlyle's violent invective against Darwinism. With a candor that does him credit, Mr. Froude now admits that the sage's antagonism to Darwin was based on the ground that his views might be correct, and if they were, they would be fatal to the doctrines of Ecclefechan. A "creed" which depends for its existence on the falsity of the doctrine of evolution is not likely to enjoy a long life.

From The Antiquary.

WOLF-HUNTING IN ENGLAND. WOLVES, the last of the beasts of forest, are said to have been a favorite object of sport with the Britons and the Saxon So much for "the creed "in its political chiefs; and in feudal times estates were aspect. Now for "the creed" in its rela- sometimes held by the serjeantry or sertions to literature. Take the great names vice of keeping wolf-dogs for the use of in the English literature of the nineteenth the king whenever he should visit the century. In the "Reminiscences" we various districts in which those estates had sufficient evidence of Carlyle's appre- lay. But a spirit of destruction as well ciation of Lamb and Coleridge. Wordsworth, we are assured over and over again, was "a genuine, but small diluted man. Of Shelley Carlyle showed his knowledge by writing to Sterling, "I do not say ghastly, for that is the character of your Puseyism, Shelleyism, etc." For Keats he expresses equally profound contempt:

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Milnes has written this year [1848] a book on Keats. This remark to make on it: "An attempt to make us eat dead dog by exquisite currying and cooking." Won't eat it. A truly unwise little book. The kind of man that Keats was gets ever more horrible to me. Force of hunger for pleasure of every kind, and want of all other force-that is a combination! Such a structure of soul, it would once have been very evident, was a chosen "Vessel of Hell;" and truly, for ever there is justice in that feeling. At present we try to love and pity, and even worship such a soul, and find the task rather easy, in our own souls there being enough of similarity. Away with it! There is perhaps no clearer evidence of

as a spirit of preservation in respect of
wolves seems to have animated our fore.
fathers from an early period. The tax or
tribute of three hundred wolves a year
imposed by Edgar on the Welsh prince
Judwal is well known to all; and though
it did not succeed, and probably was not
meant to succeed, in exterminating these
animals in England, there can be no
doubt that it must have thinned their
numbers very considerably, and driven
them, at least temporarily, from one of
their favorite strongholds. Our old friend
the Charta Canuti makes mention of
wolves in somewhat contemptuous terms,
saying that nec forestæ nec veneris haben-
tur, and ranking them, therefore, after
wild boars, which were termed forest
beasts though not beasts of venery. And
in Blount's "Tenures of Land
wolves classed with "martens, cats, and
other vermin," for the destruction whereof
dogs were to be kept by the tenant of
certain lands in Pightesle (Pytchley),

we find

Northamptonshire - a place associated in which they removed in 1156, died more modern times with the pursuit of another than one hundred and fifty years before kind of animal. Mr. Harting, in the book Edward III. came to the throne. And to which we have already referred, says though Burton, in his Monasticon Eborathat in the half-century between 1327 and cense, which Mr. Harding follows, tells 1377, "while stringent measures were be this story about the monks being forbiding devised for the destruction of wolves den to keep mastiffs, Conan's charter in all or most of the inhabited districts itself, if it be correctly given in Dugdale, which they frequented, in the less pop- contradicts him flatly in this matter. It ulous and more remote parts of the would appear that, far from "forbidding country, steps were taken by such of the them to use any mastiffs," Conan exprincipal landowners as were fond of pressly commanded the monks to keep hunting to secure their own participation them. Such express command may, no in the sport of finding and killing them. doubt, fairly be deemed to show that, but In Edward III.'s time, Conan, Duke of for its insertion in the charter, the monks Brittany, in 1342, gave pasture for cattle would not have been allowed to hunt through all his new forest at Richmond in or disturb the wolves in Wensleydale. Yorkshire to the inmates of the Abbey of Though wolves survived in Scotland and Fors in Wensleydale, forbidding them to Ireland until about the middle of the last use any mast.ffs to drive the wolves from century, in England they probably became their pastures" (pp. 146, 147). The gen- extinct during Henry VII.'s reign. Maneral statement with which the passage wood was, therefore, fully justified in say above quoted begins is, we dare say, true ing "wee haue none here in England, nor enough; but the particular illustration I thinke we neuer shall haue in any of our which follows is unfortunate. Conan, Forests." The season for wolf-hunting Duke of Brittany and Earl of Richmond, is said to have lasted from Christmas to who gave to the Abbey of Fors the valley | Lady Day. watered by the Ure (Foreval, Jervaux), to

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Between the remains of her brother Edward
And of her husband Arthur,
Here lies the body of Bridgett Applewhaite.
Once Bridgett Nelson.
After the fatigues of a married life,
Borne by her with incredible patience
For four years and three-quarters, bating three
weeks,

And after the enjoyment of the glorious free-
dom

Of an easy and unblemished widowhood,
For four years and upwards

She resolved to run the risk of a second mar-
riage-bed;

But death forbade the banns :
And having with an apoplectic dart

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SHAFT-SINKING IN QUICKSANDS.- A paper has been read by M. Haton de la Goupillière before the Société d'Encouragement upon the system of sinking shafts in watery soils and quicksands invented by Herr Poetsch, by means of hollow iron tubes with cutting sabots, sunk in a circle round the well. Within these are placed other smaller tubes pierced with holes, and through them a refrigerating liquid is forced in a continuous current until the soil all around is completely frozen, and thus the intrusion of the sand and water is prevented so as to allow the sinking of the main shaft.

(The same instrument with which he had for- The plan has been adopted with great success

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by Messrs. Siemens at their colliery at Schenkendorf, in Prussia, where the vein of brown coal is overlaid by a quicksand, making it very difficult to get at, for the shaft could not resist the enormous pressure of the water. By applying Herr Poetsch's system, however, a great wall of ice was gradually formed round the shaft, causing such a low temperature that the masses of sand before they arrived at the surface had to be thawed again. The quicksand was completely subdued, and a very promising colliery developed in consequence.

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For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage.

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From The Edinburgh Review. THE WORKS OF ALEXANDER POPE.*

M. Taine's unfeeling estimate may be set the sympathy of Sainte-Beuve for "cette quintessence d'âme, cette goutte de vif esprit dans du coton."

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POPE received the present homage of his generation. For a time he basked in the fullest sunshine of popular favor; but The heated atmosphere of personality during the last century the chill shadow in which Pope lived infected his literary of disrepute has rested on his name. The executors. From Warburton to Roscoe reaction was inevitable. He is the most his editors were partisans. They might un-English of our poets; his merits are be friendly or hostile, they could not be exactly opposed to those of the succeed- impartial. Each strove rather to demolish ing school. His work was one of disci- the opinions of his predecessors than to pline; he enforced the need of proportion; establish a true view of his author. Thehe gave laws to the anarchy of genius. ories, not facts, were the battle-ground; For the varying clouds and gleams, which arguments, not enquiry, the weapons. constitute one of the charms of our litera- The text of their author was of secondary ture, he substituted the metallic brilliancy importance, relatively to the ventilation of of the classic model. There was truth in their own crotchets. Thus engaged, they the charge that English vigor was sacri- had neither leisure nor inclination for reficed to French netteté, thought to style, search. They embodied time-honored tracreative power to delicacy of workman-ditions, kept alive century-old slanders, ship. His drudgery of finish and patient accepted venerable inferences from insuflabor of composition were intolerable to ficient evidence or unsupported gossip. his successors; yet their easy, graceful Pope lay buried beneath the mass of use of their own language is an eloquent irrelevant or superfluous lumber which tribute to the genius they disparaged. To was piled upon him by the pompous panehis detractors his poetry seemed townish, courtly, artificial not genuine, ephemeral not universal, the poetry not of nature but of art, the offspring of the fashion to write verse rather than prose, and not of that high-strung sensibility which compels the true poet into song. The adulation of his admirers, who claimed for him a place by the side of Shakespeare or of Milton, was even more dangerous to his reputation than the depreciation of his enemies. The controversy which raged round his name left his right to the title of poet in dispute and threatened his prescriptive claim to correctness. His moral character inflamed the bitterness of the contest. Every part of his life is beset with difficulties, or obscured by mysteries, which involve his literary position and bias the sober judgment of the critic with the scorn of the moralist. Even French critics, from whom general appreciation might be expected, are divided. But of late years, against

The Works of Alexander Pope. New Edition; including several hundred unpublished letters and other new materials. Collected in part by the late Right Hon. JOHN WILSON CROKER, with Introduction and

Notes by Rev. WHITWELL ELWIN and WILLIAM JOHN
COURTHOPE, M.A. Vols. i., ii., iii., iv., vi., vii., viii.
London: 1875-1883.

gyrics of Warburton, the miscellaneous learning of Warton, the hasty prejudice of Bowles, the credulous adulation of Roscoe.

A new edition in the place of the rambling, discursive commentaries of previ ous editors was urgently needed. Within the last thirty years modern investigation has revealed more of the personal and literary history of Pope than transpired during the previous century. Not only has new knowledge been obtained, but the wells of information, which were once so freely used, are proved to be poisoned at the very source. Impartiality had become easy. The personal enmities which Pope's genius and satire provoked are long forgotten; the bitterness of the lit erary contest that his name formerly aroused is assuaged; the interval between the present edition and that of Roscoe terminates the rivalry of successive editors. There were newly discovered treasures of correspondence to be published, new results of enquiry to be incorporated with old material. It was full time to remove the reproach that Pope was the worst-edited of English poets by offering the dispassionate criticism of editors who

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