pellucid sense about an old play or a new poem could place the essayist in the rank of Bacon or Hume.

A truce to all such hectic extravagances when we dwell on the delightful things left us by these two men, so diverse in nature and yet so much akin in suffering and broken hopes. Needless to-day to rehearse the pangs and tragedies in the life of either, to speak of the low estate, scanty education, drudgery, and ill-health of Lamb, with the horrible catastrophe and life-long burden imposed on him by his sister's malady. Nor need we speak of Keats's life of struggle and sickness, his intense sensitiveness, his mad and hopeless passion, the agonies of his dying hours, and the fatality of death in early youth.

Still less need we pretend to weigh, to appraise, to criticise either of these men, or seek to forecast the place they will hold in the final roll of English literature. It is amply enough for us to-day that, perhaps all through this century, their work, so different, so rare, has been steadily gaining in the esteem of all good judges, so that we may say that we have reached a right estimate of both. No one compares them to each other, or dreams of offering any relative judgment about the two. It is enough to say-and this sums up the case each had a rare, unique, fascinating gift of his own.

As humorist Charles Lamb stands in the foremost rank, less poetic, less idyllic than Goldsmith, less sardonic than Swift, less graceful than Addison and Steele, less robust than Fielding, less manysided than Thackeray, less creative than Dickens, but withal a man having a spark of the Falstaffan humour, that humour of the "Canterbury Tales" and the "Antiquary," the grand Homeric humour of the great imaginative masters of the Human Comedy. Not that I compare Lamb's sweet and simple Pan-pipe to these immortal conceptions. But he is of their kith and kin; he can use their mother tongue; he is free of their guild.

And how buoyant is his style! How artless, and yet what art, could we only get to see it! How pure, how natural, how jovial is the English of Elia! Let him who would study plain, easy prose read Lamb's "Essays" or "Letters." You cannot copy or imitate them. They are inimitable, and yet so plain that a child can follow them. They well up straight from a gay, sympathetic, loving heart, as if the brain hardly aided in the act of expression. The quaint little parlour of Bay Cottage rings with his laughter! How kindly, how garrulous, how bright!—and yet written amid such cruel griefs, toils, anxieties, and disappointments.

problem. His was far the

John Keats presents a remarkable shortest life in the whole roll of English literature (if we except the

boy Chatterton, who was hardly a poet at all). five years and four months old at his death.

Keats was but twentyNow Shelley was thirty,

and Byron was thirty-six, and they are the youngest of our poets. And neither Shelley nor Byron had written such poetry as Keats before he was twenty-four. It would be difficult in all modern literature to name any one who had produced such exquisite work at so early an age. Keats' whole work was composed at an age earlier than that at which Milton wrote "Lycidas," or Shakespeare wrote "Venus and Adonis." In our thoughts about Keats, let us always remember that he was "a wonderful lad"-an unformed, untrained, neuropathic youth of genius-whose whole achievement came earlier in life than that of almost any other man recorded in our literature— indeed, in any literature. I am inclined to think that, in the whole series of men eminent in various ways in recorded history (unless we go to painters like Giotto and Raffaelle, or to musicians like Pergolese, Mozart, and Bellini), no man has left such considerable work under the age of twenty-five as did Keats-" the wonderful lad."

It is right to bear in mind that all we have of Keats were the first experiments of a genius who by the civil law was not yet sui juris, whose short life was a chronic fever, and whose aspirations and ideals were in constant flux. But we cannot assume, because in his first flight he left a few hundred of exquisite verses, that at fifty he would have been the peer of Shakespeare and Milton. Let us also remember that injudicious editors and admirers have preserved not only those horrible love-letters of his last agony-"those wild and wandering cries"" those confusions of a stricken youth" (we may say)—but also much of the raw and tawdry stuff which Keats, like all men of genius, poured out in his first efforts to soar. Of all poets, perhaps (unless it be Byron, who had a mania for scribbling), Keats is the most unequal. Considering his extreme youth, and his shabby training, this was natural enough. Keats can give us perfect gems like the "Ode to the Nightingale," the "Ode to the Grecian Urn," some of the "Sonnets," much of the "Lamia," and most of the "Pot of Basil" (not a thousand lines in all), and then some gross failures in various experiments which ought not to be printed at all.

Almost all poets but Milton have left behind them much that is immeasurably below their best, and something very poor indeed. Shakespeare himself has done so, and Dryden, Pope, Byron and Wordsworth are conspicuous examples of the same bathos. What wonder if Keats at twenty-two did this also? Even on an occasion when we meet to do honour to a delightful poet, I will not fall in with the hysterics of some eminent critics and tell you that Keats. stands beside Shakespeare in the foremost ranks of our poets. We have far too much of this neuropathic mouthing in our day, which seems the age of the hyperboles of cliques and fanatics and of exaggerated delight in some special beauty of phrase or note. It is enough for me that we find in Keats some odes of exquisite passion

and charm, a delight in glow and colour that touches us like a canvas by Giorgione, a few short lyrics which stand in the everlasting lyrical triumphs of cur tongue, a promise of command over the melody of verse, a power of painting in winged words which (if he had lived another twenty or thirty years) might have placed him well in the rank of poets somewhere below Milton and Shakespeare. Might have done this, if only promise were always followed by performance; if we could be sure that the nature of Keats as a man, his brain, and hold on truths and realities, equalled his mastery over language; if we did not too often feel (even in his best and latest work) that the instrument wherefrom he wrung forth such luscious music, seemed endowed with magic gifts to dash itself free from the hands and consciousness of him who held it.

And now, before I pull the veils aside and show you Mr. Frampton's beautiful work, I will end with a moral (for I am one of those incorrigible people who are never easy till they get down to the moral of the thing), and there is a memorable lesson taught us by the lives of these two men. Here was Lamb, a man born in the class of office servants in the Temple, educated in the Bluecoat school, where he never reachedt he upper class, chained as a subordinate clerk in a public office, never much above indigence, afflicted with a terrible domestic calamity, and yet to-day recognised as one of the most exquisite writers of the age, and still one of the most accomplished critics of the older drama.

Again, here is Keats, the son of a livery stable-keeper, apprenticed at fifteen to a Scotch surgeon, drudging at surgery till the age of twenty, struck down soon after with a mortal malady, poor all his life, unsettled, self-taught, wholly dependent on himself for guidance which he sorely needed, and yet recognised as having, at the age of twenty-five, written sonnets which would not disgrace Milton, lyrics that Shelley might have owned, and letters that Byron could hardly surpass. Keats knew no Greek, and yet his "Ode on a Grecian Urn," his "Lamia," are redolent of the essence of Greek myths. Milton himself was hardly more truly Greek in imagination.

Here are two of our brightest men of genius, one a writer of exquisite prose, the other a poet endowed with the luscious note of a nightingale. Yet both were wholly bereft of any education of the official and academic sort. They gave themselves the whole of the education they had, with scant leisure, meagre resources, cruel hindrances. How few indeed of our famous writers in prose or verse, even our men of learning or of science, owe their success to the conventional school and college curriculum! Not Shakespeare, certainly, nor Marlowe, nor Pope, nor Shelley, nor Byron, nor Burns, nor Scott. All of these made themselves, formed their own minds, their own ideals and form. And so, too, did Swift and Defoe, Goldsmith and Gibbon, Mill and Grote, Spencer and Darwin. Milton,

Gray and Johnson are the few examples of those who received complete academic training, and even they gave themselves the best part of their own education.

You, too, may give yourselves your own education!

Nay, you

must do so! It is as true almost for those of us who are not endowed with genius, as it is for those who are, that education can only give us the means of training our own minds. You who have free use of such libraries as this, who can find evening schools, literary and scientific institutes within a few miles of your home, have far more means of training the mind than ever had Lamb or Keats. Lamb had to beg, borrow, screw and scheme to get sight of a "Fletcher" or a "Ben Jonson" or a "Marlowe." Keats quite worried a friend to lend him a "Fairy Queen." If such men could have had the run of such a storehouse of standard literature as is contained on the shelves around us, with what rapture would they have fallen on the feast; how they would have celebrated in prose and verse the munificent founders of these public libraries!

Why is it, I often ask myself, that our English people, which for ages has bred such imaginative genius, which has a literature that nothing in the modern world can rival, are the least reading people of all the nations of Europe north of the Alps and west of the Carpathians? Why are we so far behind our American kinsmen? Why, in the matter of free libraries and books, do we come behind Germans, Scandinavians, Hollanders and Belgians, French, and certainly Americans? Why cannot we make better use even of the munificent gifts of patriotic citizens? I know not but it is so.

I sometimes fancy that the mechanical and bureaucratic methods of our official education, with our primary schools, and standards, and tests, our endless examinations (which mean endless cramming), and all our engine-turned, compound-action machinery for forcing facts into young brains, as if we were forcing carbonic acid gas into spring water, may make useful clerks and accountants, but is benumbing to the sense of literature, fatal to art, fatal to poetry. It teaches millions, it is true, the art of correct correspondence, quick arithmetic, and some popular statistics of a remunerative sort. But it deadens originality of mind, vulgarises form, dulls the desire for literature, and would cramp genius, if it ever could seize the chance.

Strive to lift this reproach from our English name, that we are indifferent even to our own immortal literature. Let us make more use of the libraries we have; think less about colleges, and examinations and degrees; dispute less about education. Let us think more of educating ourselves, as Lamb did, as Keats did; let us use the books we have-and take care always to use the best books.

FREDERIC HARRISON.

THE TROUBLES OF A CATHOLIC

DEMOCRACY.

HAT there is among Catholics, especially of the younger generation, a great and growing unrest in the presence of modern problems it would be vain to deny. The years of Leo XIII., shining once with all the milder lights of reconciliation, are drawing towards sunset, and clouds come up from the north and the west. Secessions have taken place-not many, indeed, but with no little clamour; books are denounced to the Index; persons fall under suspicion; the battle of the nations, never quite asleep, has broken out afresh in Rome; and the singular episode, which will go down to history with a misleading title as "Americanism," bears witness, emphatic though unwelcome, to lines of cleavage that may be dissembled, but are nevertheless real, between parties, schools, and public leaders. "Reaction" is the cry of assault and defence. The elements in conflict are many; it is a tangled situation, which we may view from the standing ground of theology, politics, or historical criticism. Nor is it easy foretell the issue. An institution so vast and complex as the Catholic Church will endure without permanent injury a strain which would rend in pieces any system less profoundly rooted in traditions of the immemorial past. Yet a new chapter seems to be opening, and, if we dare not prophesy, at least we may contemplate the forces which are now in action.

to

It was a happy stroke, however unscrupulous, to fasten the name of "Americanism" upon a bundle of opinions with which Americans had nothing in common, and then by sheer force of lungs to get these condemned at Rome. Once they had been tossed upon the European tide, condemned they must have been, for they were manifestly unsound, and some of them heretical in a degree which bordered on the ludicrous. But with dogma the Americans had never meddled.