Though free of the forge, I had not practised the albeytarian art for very many years, never since-but stay, it is not my intention to tell the reader, at least in this place, how and when I became a blacksmith. There was one thing, however, which stood me in good stead in my labour, the same thing which through life has ever been of incalculable utility to me, and has not unfrequently supplied the place of friends, money and many other things of almost equal importance-iron perseverance, without which all the advantages of time and circumstances are of very little avail in any undertaking." Lavengro.

Sir Richard Burton was a greater traveller and a greater linguist than Borrow, besides possessing a remarkable personality and an insatiable thirst after knowledge. He was fascinated by the East, and determined to interpret many of its secrets to the West. He published fifty works and mastered thirty-five languages during the sixty odd years of his life, between 1821 and 1890. The story of his marriage and of his wanderings is, in itself, a romance. He published works on many little-known districts of America, Africa, and Asia, and printed a translation of "The Arabian Nights" for students, which contains the result of his vast researches into the customs and manners of the people.

The writer who has a profound knowledge of nature, and is able to give expression to what he has learnt in the woodlands and fields, is always sure of a hearing, and so it was in the case of Richard Jefferies. Born in a farmhouse at Coate, Wiltshire, not far from Swindon, he became a journalist before he was twenty. In 1877 his ambition induced him to leave his home and try to win fame for himself in the Capital. He turned to good account his gift for composing sketches of natural history and rural life. "The Gamekeeper at Home," reprinted from articles in the Pall Mall Gazette, brought his name into notice, and he followed up this work by others more or less successful, "Wild Life in a Southern County," in 1879, "Wood Magic" two years later, "Life of the Fields," "Red Deer,"

"The Open Air," and many others of a similiar type. Perhaps the works by which he is best remembered are "The Story of my Heart," written in 1883, which is introspective in style, and "After London," 1885, an imaginative account of London and England of many thousands of years hence, when it will have returned to its primeval condition of swamps and forests.

John Henry Newman was born in 1801 in London, entered Trinity College, Oxford, in December, 1816, and was made a Fellow of Oriel in 1822. From the day he reached Oxford the ideas and principles began to seethe in his brain which in 1833 culminated in the so-called Oxford Movement, in which Keble and Hurrell Froude participated. Newman was himself the leading and shining light of it. His leaning towards the Roman Church was part and parcel of the reaction against the growing rationalism of the day. Newman endeavoured to prove that compromise was impossible. Between the extremes of atheism and catholicity there could be, to his idea, no resting-place for the philosophic mind. His writings naturally expressed the principles he wished to enforce and became the literature of the Movement. He was master of an exquisitely pure prose style. His contributions to "Tracts for the Times," 1834-1841, which showed an everincreasing bias towards Roman Catholicism, caused a great stir in all quarters in which they were read. Four years

after the appearance of the last of these Tracts Newman joined the Church of Rome. After this decisive step he poured forth a stream of lectures, sermons and other publications, all of them with a view to strengthening the position of those members of the Movement who had gone over to Rome with him and to disseminate the tenets of the Roman Catholic religion. In "Loss and Gain," 1848, a novel, the same purpose is evident. Newman, cornered by the pamphlet hurled by Charles Kingsley "What then does

Dr. Newman mean?" was forced to reply in 1864 by the famous "Apologia pro Vita Sua," and in this defence of the position his feelings are expressed with a fiery eloquence which gave to the work a far more lasting value than many of his less personal writings possess. Newman had surrendered his freedom, and his pen showed traces of the fetters. The clear and beautiful language in which he wrote is advantageously displayed in the spiritual poem "The Dream of Gerontius," published in 1865.

Newman died in 1890 having given to the world a number of works coloured by the religious enthusiasm to which he devoted the whole of his powers. Of his sermons many were preached from an Anglican pulpit, but those of Roman Catholic origin contain power and dignity even more pronounced.

Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds belong to the æsthetic or emotional school of critics. The former was a writer of marked individuality, who handled the subjects of his critical essays from an introspective, personal standpoint, which did more to secure the author's fame as a master of a peculiarly subtle and complex style than to throw fresh and convincing light upon those of whom he wrote. Among Pater's numerous volumes published may be mentioned "Studies in the History of the Renaissance," 1873, and an ambitious work entitled "Marius the Epicurean," which deals with the spiritual problems besetting the life of a noble Roman in the days of Marcus Aurelius. Symonds put some of his best endeavours into the "Renaissance in Italy," 1875-1886, of which, however, the value is lessened by his anxiety to get literary effect rather than to convey his knowledge in simple and useful form. The same tendency is noticeable in his "Essays, Speculative and Suggestive" and his monographs on Shelley, Sir Philip Sidney, and Ben Jonson,

CHAPTER XXVI

CLOSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

A TEACHER in the school of neo-medievalism, William Morris aspired to give society fresh aims on a more harmonious and beautiful basis, applied to art, poetry, handicrafts and even politics and economic conditions. Following in the footsteps of Ruskin and Rossetti, he saw the value of expressing beauty for beauty's sake concurrently in decorative and literary art. The former branch of art he carried out in greater nicety of detail than did his forerunners, applying his principle to the decoration of walls, tiles, fabrics, windows, carpets, and, indeed, to almost all utilitarian purposes. To this end he instituted a business company of which he afterwards became sole manager. From his house at Hammersmith he produced, on his own press, specimens of fine typography, among them the noted Kelmscott Chaucer.

His verse is beautiful, graceful and again decorative. In "The Earthly Paradise," 1868-70, and the earlier "Life and Death of Jason" he gives a rendering of classical legends. "Sigurd the Volsung," an outcome of visits to Iceland, is a version of the great Nibelungen story. It is a very fine poem, full of the wild strength of the theme. His earliest volume, "The Defence of Guinevere, and other Poems," 1858, contained some of the verses reprinted from The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, a periodical issued by him in 1856. "Love is Enough," published in 1872, was an attempt to bring medieval drama into fashion again.

Morris was born in 1834 and was brought up at Walthamstow in the neighbourhood of Epping Forest. He was educated at Marlborough and Exeter College, Oxford, where he became friendly with Burne-Jones, who, only one year older, allied himself with Morris in carrying out the principles of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Morris died in 1896, two years earlier than Burne-Jones, having established to his own satisfaction the value of the decorative arts in their relation to modern life and progress.

Robert Louis Stevenson was the only son of Thomas Stevenson, a member of an Edinburgh firm of civil engineers. He was born on November 13, 1850, at 8, Howard Place, Edinburgh. From his mother he inherited a certain constitutional weakness as well as mental alertness and vivacity. His father was of a practical, even solid, type of mind, and could not understand his son's inability to follow in his own footsteps and become a builder of bridges and lighthouses, nor why he should prefer to devote himself to a career of letters which promised little return in either fame or fortune. Louis, as he was always called at home, realised the disappointment he was inflicting, but, much as he deplored it, could not change his nature. Writing was his one possible means of expression and he had practised it more or less surreptitiously from boyhood. Two great gifts were his, personality and style; and many of his readers have found it difficult to define where love for his writings ends and love for the author begins. His letters are full of self-revelation, and to read them is to feel oneself in the presence of the author. His charm of manner depends mainly on his happy choice of fitting phrase-not achieved without labour -of a certain optimism and humour even under the most depressing conditions, of a remarkable underlying fortitude and a rare courtesy. He carried on a crusade against realism, and estimated truly the importance of selection and