Past, a worship blind to its vaster selfishness and materialisms, or waste their chivalry in schemes for the sudden attainment of a miniature Utopia. Such was not Wordsworth's case. It needs less of insight and imaginative ardour to discover the elements of noble spiritual life in the democracy than in the bourgeoisie. Henry Crabb Robinson has recorded that he once heard Wordsworth say, half in joke, half in earnest, "I have no respect whatever for Whigs, but I have a great deal of the Chartist in me." This is literally true. Wordsworth could at no time have become a Whig politician, whose creed must be written in useful prose, not in harmonious song; but had the period of Wordsworth's youth, when a spring-like courage and animation flooded his being, fallen in with the days of the Chartist movement, one can hardly doubt that he would have conceived it to be his special mission to organize the aspirations of the working classes around great ideas, and thus to spiritualise the democracy.

The descent from the pamphlet on the Convention of Cintra, to the Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818), is steep and sudden. The addresses were written to oppose the candidature of Brougham, and aid in securing the return to Parliament of a member of the House of Lowther. The long years of hostility to France and loyalty to England have manifestly told upon Wordsworth, and it would require a recession into very broad and abstract doctrines indeed to discover that his principles are now the same with those which he held in 1793. His sympathy with the earlier stages of the French Revolu

tion, which survived until at least the date of the "Cintra" pamphlet, has now ceased to exist; his condemnation of the war of England against the Republic. also distinctly declared in 1808, has now changed into approval. The constitution which Bishop Watson has been reproved for admiring overmuch is now "the happy and glorious Constitution, in Church and State, which we have inherited from our Ancestors." The ideal to which his imagination renders tribute is not now the fierce and fair Republic, but "our inestimable Church Establishment." In 1793 Wordsworth wrote, "If you should lament the sad reverse by which the hero of the Necklace has been divested of about 1,300,000 livres of annual revenue, you may find some consolation, that a part of this prodigious mass of riches has gone to preserve from famine some thousands of curés, who were pining in villages unobserved by Courts." In 1818 he wrote, "Places, Pensions, and formidable things, if you like but far better these, with our King and Constitutión, with our quiet firesides and flourishing fields, than proscription and confiscation without them!" Wordsworth had indeed lost courage, as he confesses, when, in the prospect of each possible change, visions of proscription and confiscations rose before him.

The axioms of faith, of hope, of sacred daring, had been set forth in his earlier writings, and formed the points of departure in his trains of impassioned reasoning; now their place is taken by axioms of prudence, of caution, of distrust. In Wordsworth's new creed there was much that was noble, for, like Burke, he was always an extraordinary, not an ordinary Conservative in

politics; but one thing that creed necessarily wantedthe power of impulsion, the power of initiating and supporting a steadfast and generous advance. And, as might be anticipated, from this period onward a decline is observable also in the poetry of Wordsworth. He entered into no novel states of feeling; he was not precisely exhausting an earlier accumulation of power, but he was with feebler energy and insight repeating processes which had at one time been so admirably productive. According to the Wordsworthian method in poetry, a certain emanation, partly given by the object, partly by the poet's mind, a tertium quid which is neither mind nor object, but an aspect or an influence partaking of both, becomes the subject of song. Wordsworth had now acquired a power of applying this method at will to any topic, and the application of this contemplative method had grown into a habit, only at irregular times inspired by new and vivid emotion, or fed by a fresh, quick outwelling of thought. Thus one is compelled to state the main fact. But it is also true that in Wordsworth's poetry his earlier self, though encumbered by the growth of his later personality, was not extinct. To one who does not wholly fail in sympathy with Wordsworth's genius, while the fading of spiritual light from his poetry is manifest, a mild and equable splendour remains as in the western sky at sunset; places still alive and instinct with intense glory may be discerned, and there are mysterious flushings and brightenings at times; therefore we are unable to withdraw our eyes, though momently we may note how quiescence comes, and the repose which will be long.

WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.

THERE are two kinds of written lives of men which deserve to remain amongst us as enduring and faithful monuments. There is the rare and fortunate work of genius; this in its origin is related to imagination and creative power as closely as to judgment and observation ; we can hardly pronounce whether it be the child of Memory, or of her daughters, the Muses, for it is at once a perfect work of art and an infallible piece of history. It portrays the man in few lines or many, but in lines each one indispensable and each characteristic; it may seem to tell little, yet in fact it tells all; from such a biographer no secrets are withholden, nor does he need many diaries, letters, and reminiscences of friends; he knows as much about the man he undertakes to speak of as Shakspere knew about Hamlet, or Titian about his magnificoes—that is, everything. Mr Carlyle's Life of Sterling was perhaps the last volume placed on the narrow shelf containing the biographies in all languages which belong to this class.

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But there is also what we could ill lose, the work of knowledge, and labour, and patience, and zeal, and studious discrimination, and enforced impartiality. such a portrait the lines must be many, and the more numerous they are (provided that they are not entirely

insignificant), the better the portrait grows: but some characteristic lines may come in by chance, and even in the end we can scarcely be quite sure that some are not forgotten. As we read the book we gradually form such an acquaintance with the man as we should were we introduced to his familiar circle in real life, seeing him in various circumstances, in various attitudes, in various moods of mind; distracted and perhaps misled by some things that are accidental and superficial, and little related to character, but discovering much that is permanent and structural, until at last we speak of the man as an old acquaintance, and declare that we know him well. It is true it may happen that we never know him perfectly.

To this second class of Biographies belongs the life which we possess of Landor. The information supplied by Forster's work is full, precise, and trustworthy; great pains were taken to make the presentation of character complete; there is no approach to tampering with facts through an unwise zeal of friendship; the biographer, allowance being made for some necessary reserves, before all else endeavoured to be truthful, and because entirely just, he felt that in treating of such a man as Landor generosity is a part of justice. At the same time it must be confessed that the work to which we must turn for information about the events of Landor's life is far from being one of the rare and fortunate works of genius.

The character of Landor is one which, in consequence of the prominent and disproportioned development of some of its elements, appears from a distance and at first