popular courses vehemently, and to tax it in all others-but, nevertheless, to go on in your honourable common wealth courses as you do."

Now, judged by the morality of our day, we should say that a man following these counsels would be a contemptible hypocrite and a very dangerous citizen. But in an age where court favour is the first object of political ambition, morality is of a more accommodating temper. To me, this Letter to Essex contains the true key to Lord Bacon's character and conduct in matters relating to the world: it is, in its own way, very wise, and in any way it is very mean. It shows where Bacon's knowledge of the world was profound, and also where it ran into perilous shallows beset with rocks and shoals. It explains the rules by which he shaped his Own career and sullied his own honour; how he came to rise so high, and to fall so low. It seems also to justify, on the score of wisdom, the meanness of his supplicatory attitude after his fall. ‘I believe his self-humiliation was more a pretence than a reality; that he did for himself what he had recommended to Essex-sought to seem, rather than to be. An abject bearing was the best means to his end, which was to retrieve as far as possible the effects of his reverse. His lowliness was Ambition's ladder. The more he seemed bowed down with penitent shame, the more he converted the wrath even of his enemies into compassion. And the course he adopted in this seeming self-abasement proved its merely worldly sagacity. Step after step he began to re-arise. His fine was released-the rest of his punishment remitted he re-appeared at court-he was readmitted to the House of Lords-his piteous importunities for his pension were successful--he got from the Government his £1200 a-year. All that his wisdom saw it possible to effect after such a reverse, he effected through the meanness which perhaps was not constitutional with

him, but an essential element of that which, in dealings with the world, he conceived to be wisdom. It is not true, as Mr. Basil Montagu and others would have us believe, that he did nothing which the contemporaries who condemned him really thought wrong; but it is also not true that what he did was thought wrong in the codes of that wily Italian school of policy in which Bacon's youth had been trained. In the Cecil Correspondence, men of the greatest name and the purest repute exhibit a laxity of sentiment in what we now call honour, and a servile greediness for what were then called honours, which would not in our time be compatible with dignity of mind and elevation of character. But in that day such contrasts were compatible. Far from being worse or lower types of our kind in the age of Elizabeth than ambition exhibits now, the men of that age may rather be said to have joined meannesses which no ordinary mean man now-a-days will avow, with lofty qualities of heart and intellect and courage which no man, ordinarily noble, now-a-days can rival. And thus it was that, in analysing the springs of conduct, and sufficiently showing his condemnation of vice in the abstract, Shakespeare so mercifully, in his mixed characters, awards judgment on the outward fate of the offender, and so tenderly merges the hard law of poetic justice into the soft humanity of poetic love--dealing with such characters as if they were indeed his children, and he could not find it in his father's heart to devote to the avenging Furies the erring offspring he had born into the temptations of the world.

It seems to me that, among modern poets, Goethe ranks next to Shakespeare, at however wide an interval, in the combination of abstract, metaphysical speculation, and genial, easy, clement knowledge of the actual world. But this latter knowledge is perhaps even less shown in his dramas, poems, and

charge is not without some foundation when confined to him as artist; but it does not seem just when applied to him as man. When, through his private correspondence and conversation, we approach to his innermost thoughts, we are somewhat startled to discover the extent of his enthusiasm for all that is genuinely lofty, and all, therefore, that is upright, honest, and sincere. It is this respect for a moral beauty and sublimity apart from the artistic, which made him so reverent an admirer of Lessing-this which rendered so cordial his approbation of the heroic element in Schiller. It was this which made him so hostile to parodies and travesties. "My only reason for hating them," says he, "is because they lower the beautiful, noble, and great, in order that they may annihilate it." It is this which, in spite of his frequent and grave defects in orthodoxy, made him so thoroughly comprehend the religious truth which he has so resolutely expressed. "Art is based on a strong sentiment of religion it is a profound and mighty earnestness; hence it is so prone to co-operate with religion." Again "Art is a severe business; most serious when employed in grand and sacred objects. The artist stands higher than art, higher than the object. He uses art for his purposes, and deals with the object after his own fashion."

Goethe dealt with this art after his own fashion-a fashion not to be commended to any one less than Goethe. He says somewhere, "Oesser taught me that the ideal of beauty is simplicity and tranquillity." That maxim is true, but only to a certain extent-viz., so far as affects form or style; and it is only through his smaller poems, and perhaps in his dramas of Iphigenia and Tasso,' that Goethe carries out the principle of composition it inculcates. In the works which give him his European celebrity, simplicity and tranquillity are the last qualities we detect. It is not these merits that impress the

เ

reading world in 'Werter' and 'Faust. In truth, ideal beauty not only requires a great deal more than simplicity and tranquillity, but can exist without being either simple or tranquil. The milkmaids whom I now see out of my window are simple and tranquil, but they are certainly not beautiful. But if the Tragedy of Othello,' as a work of art, is ideally beautiful, which no Englishman can deny, nothing can be less simple than the character of lago, and Othello himself becomes poetically beautiful in proportion as he ceases to be tranquil. The fact is, that the intellect of poetry requires not simple, but very complex thoughts, sentiments, emotions; and the passion of poetry abhors tranquillity. There is, no doubt, a poetry which embodies only the simple. and the tranquil, but it is never the highest kind. Poetry is not sculpture; sculpture alone, of all the arts, is highest where the thought it embodies is the most simple, and the passion it addresses, rather than embodies, is the most tranquil. Thus, in sculpture, the Farnese Hercules rests from his labours, and bears in his arms a helpless child; thus the Belvidere Apollo has discharged his deathful arrow, and only watches its effect with a quiet anger, assured of triumph. But neither of these images could suggest a poem of the highest order-viz., a narrative or a drama; in such poems we must have the struggle of the mind and the restless history of the passion. But Goethe's art was not dramatic; he himself tells us so, with his characteristic and sublime candour. He tells us truly, that "tragedy deals with contradictions-and to contradictions his genius is opposed;" he adds as truly, that, from the philosophical turn of his mind, he "motivates" too much for the stage. That which prevents his attaining, as a dramatist, his native rank as a poet, still more operates against Goethe as a novelist. Regarded solely as a novelist, his earliest novel, 'Werter,' is the only one that

has had a marked effect upon his age, and is the only one that will bear favourable comparison with the chef-d'œuvres of France and England. Wilhelm Meister' is the work of a much riper mind; but, as a story designed to move popular interest, it as little resembles an artistic novel as Comus' or 'Sampson Agonistes' resembles an acted drama. But through all the various phases of Goethe's marvellous intellect there runs an astonishing knowledge of the infirmities of man's nature, and therefore a surpassing knowledge of the world. He cannot, like Shakespeare, lift that knowledge of the world so easily into the realm of poetic beauty as to accord to infirmity its due proportion, and no more. He makes a hero of a Clavijo-Shakespeare would have reduced a Clavijo into a subordinate character; he makes of a Mephistopheles a prince of hell-Shakespeare would have made of Mephistopheles a mocking philosopher of "earth, most earthy." But knowledge of the world in both these mighty intellects was supreme -in both accompanied with profound metaphysical and psychological science in both represented in

exquisite poetical form; and if in this combination Goethe be excelled by Shakespeare, I know not where else, in imaginative literature, we are to look for his superior.

I have said that I think a Juvenal, a Rochefoucauld, a Horace Walpole, were not rendered better and nobler, and therefore wiser men, in the highest sense of the word wisdom, by their intimate knowledge of the world they lived in. This is not to be said of a Shakespeare or a Goethe. They were not satirists nor cynics. They were so indulgent that scarcely a man living dare be as indulgent as they were; and they were indulgent from the same reasons: 1st, The grandeur of the age in which they lived; 2d, The absence of all acrid and arrogant self-love, and of all those pharisaical pretensions to an austerity of excellence high above the average composite of good and evil in ordinary mortals, which grows out of the inordinate admiration for self, or the want of genial sympathy for the infirmities of others, and the charitable consideration of the influence of circumstance upon human conduct.

(To be continued.)

IT is difficult to account, by any natural law, for the vast development attained by fiction within the last twenty or thirty years. It would be vain to say that this was a mark of national frivolity or incapacity for better things, for the same period has seen the growth and progress of much valuable work in many different branches of literature; but at no age, so far as we are aware, has there yet existed anything resembling the extraordinary flood of novels which is now pouring over this land-certainly with fertilising results, so far as the manufacture itself is concerned. There were days, halcyon days-as one still may ascertain from the gossip of the seniors of society-when an author was a natural curiosity, recognised and stared at as became the rarity of the phenomenon. No such thing is possible nowadays, when most people have been in print one way or other-when stains of ink linger on the prettiest of fingers, and to write novels is the normal condition of a large section of society. The same art which once glorified Fanny Burney into a celebrity all but historical, is now contemptuously treated by witty critics as a branch of female industry not much more important than Berlin wool; and it would almost be safe to say that, for every untiring pair of hands able to produce a Rachel at the Well, with pink lips and black eyes, worked in floss silk, you could find another equal to the achievement of a story in three volumes. This is what fiction has come to. Yet though we laugh at it, sneer at it, patronise it, we continue to read, or somebody continues to read, else even the omniscient Mudie would fail to crop the perpetual efflorescence. Out of the mild female undergrowth, variety demands the frequent production of a sensational monster to stimulate the languid life; and half-a-dozen inoffensive

stories go down in the same gulp with which we swallow the more startling effort. For the service of the modern novelist every species of moral obliquity has been called in to complicate the never-ending plot, which is apt to grow threadbare with perpetual using; and there are novels which thrive very well without any plot at all, as well as some which have nothing but an ingenious puzzle and skilfully-handled mystery to recommend them. But even in its novels the English character vindicates itself. What is piquant on the other side of the Channel is out of the question within "the four seas." We turn with a national instinct rather to the brutalities than to the subtleties of crime. Murder is our cheval de bataille; and when we have done with the Sixth Commandment, it is not the next in succession which specially attracts us. The horrors of our novels are crimes against life and property. The policeman is the Fate who stalks relentless, or flies with lightning steps after our favourite villain. The villain himself is a banker, and defrauds his customers; he is a lawyer, and cheats his clients-if he is not a ruffian who kills his man. Or even, when a bolder hand than usual essays to lift the veil from the dark world of female crime we give the sin itself a certain haze of decorum, and make that only bigamy which might bear a plainer title. Ours are not the dainty wickednesses which are nameless before tribunals of common law. Even in his fiction the Englishman loves to deal with something which he can satisfy himself is an indictable offence. This peculiarity reappears in many a phase in the novels of the day. Sometimes the entire story is conceived in the spirit of circumstantial evidence, and the detective officer, more or less skilfully disguised, is the hero