of his. The modern poet, too, has made one last desperate effort to re-arrange Alcestis in the place which the arbitrary intervention of the god has compelled her to resume: but we put aside his last version of her tale as a thing scarcely worthy of his genius, and return to his noble comment upon the original. Here he has taken up a labour greater than that of Hercules, and worked at it like a man. He has done all for the heroine of Euripides that mortal can do. He has made an almost passionate effort to drag her husband up to her level and make her and the reader forget his ignoble weakness. He has put him through a process of reformation elaborate and anxious, letting slip no chance of improvement for him. He has brought all possible influences to work-the sudden reality of loss which stuns him, the sharp fire of anger which burns away the veil over his eyes, the sense of void and vacancy in his life, the hateful entry, hateful countenance, of the widowed walls.' All these he masses together with subtle touches of description and accumulation, labouring to work us up into a belief that the slight soul of the man had grown deep and true, and that his own meanness and misery had become intolerable to him. But with all this great strain and effort, we are compelled to admit that Mr. Browning has not been successful. Admetus remains Admetus still. It is not easy to change nature; and the vehement desire which the poet has to do so is often attended with very little result. Admetus finds out that the price he has paid for his life is a very heavy price indeed, and that the existence he has thus secured is full of drawbacks as well as advantages. He is sorry and he is ashamed, and has a certain consciousness that he has not come through the transaction with much credit to himself. But this is not reformation. Even his contrast between the fate of Alcestis and his own, which Mr. Browning accepts as showing a real sense of her virtue and his own shame, might bear a much less amiable interpretation:

'Her, indeed, no grief will ever touch, And she from many a labour pauses now, Renowned one! Whereas I, who ought not live,

But do live, by evading destiny,

Sad life am I to lead, I learn at last!

For how shall I bear going indoors here?

Accosting whom? By whom saluted back,

Shall I have joyous entry?'

Mr. Browning accepts these words, we say, in his anxiety, as proof of the change that has taken place in Admetus; but we cannot agree with him. To us it seems evident that at the best

it is his own suffering which is the only thing that has moved him. Somehow or other (he seems to feel) it is his wife who always has the advantage of him. Even when the world supposes she has been made a sacrifice of, is it not he who is the worse sufferer still-left to bear grief, while she is past all grieving? This is not repentance; it is rather the last stronghold of selfishness, and shows that the man is really unchanged. But Mr. Browning at least has the satisfaction of feeling that he has reformed him and made him fit to stand once more by Alcestis' side, and be her closest companion. We do not share this charitable opinion, but the conversion is as good, no doubt, as many a one which an anxious wife has trusted to, and which has passed muster with the world.

But this is all that can be said. The modern poet, with his subtler reasonings, has not succeeded in bridging over that gulf between Admetus and Alcestis. And the ancient poet has not attempted to bridge it over. He has left it as human problems have to be left so often, without explanation, a revelation of the dread gaps and breaks that come into life, without any suggestion of a cure or even any strong sense of its necessity. He goes off into the easier arbitrary world of gods and miracles with a light heart, ignoring all the difficulties. But not so Mr. Browning. To him, as to his age, it has become the chief of wonders, the greatest of griefs, that such a mystery should be left unsolved. But the mystery exists and baffles the observer, notwithstanding his anxiety. It is a difficulty which with all his intimate and universal knowledge of humanity he has not been able either to harmonise or to explain.

ART. X.-1. Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Local Taxation. 1870.

2. Report of the Right Honourable George J. Goschen, M.P., President of the Poor Law Board, to the Right IIonourable the Lords Commissioners of Her Majesty's Treasury, on the Progressive Increase of Local Taxation, with especial reference to the Proportion of Local and Imperial Burdens borne by the different Classes of Real Property in the United Kingdom, as compared with the Burdens imposed upon the same Classes of Property in other European Countries. March 1871.

3. Reports from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Malt Tax. 1867, 1868.

4. Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue on the Duties under their Management, for the years 1856 to 1869 inclusive; with some retrospective History, and complete Tables of Accounts of the Duties from their first Imposition.

1870.

5. The Local Taxation of Great Britain and Ireland. By R. H. J. PALGRAVE. London: 1871.

THAT

HAT the Tory party should have discarded its former appellation in favour of the term Conservative is not without a corresponding significance in facts. It was essentially the party of Authority; it has become the party of Resistance to Change. Its present chief, Mr. Disraeli, has on more than one occasion evinced a preference for the older designation, and has pointedly described himself as the leader of the Tory party.' He has aspired and laboured to divest his following of the character of opposition to progress, and to rest it, as our ancestors would have said, on a new foundation, or, as we say, using an Americanism which is suggestive of less solidity and less security, on a new platform. In spite of his courage and his ingenuity, he cannot be said to have achieved success in either attempt. He has on three several occasions led his party to victory and to power, and induced them, by the hope of prolonging their tenure of office, to consent to assume the character of a party of progress, and to compete with or to outbid measures they had withstood when proceeding from others. But Mr. Disraeli has not succeeded in changing the principle of his party; he has only succeeded in showing that it will on an occasion, and under the influence of temptation, sacrifice that principle. Still less has he succeeded, like Bolingbroke, in

finding a basis on which to re-construct it more substantial than a cloudland of high-sounding phrases, such as that revealed in the pages of 'Coningsby' and of Sybil,' of 'Tancred' and of Lothair.'

By whatever name, however, the party be called, it has, especially of late, courted the affection, and presented itself as the champion, of particular orders, classes, or interests, in contradistinction to the claims of the nation at large. Its appearance in the capacity of the 'friend' now of one section of the community now of another, has been due partly to its character as the party of resistance, which renders it naturally the protector of any privilege, title, or monopoly of which the sanctity is profaned by the advancing footsteps of reform; partly, and even more, to the weakness of a minority, which has led it to grasp any momentary support, and to watch the chance of any passing combinations with discontented malingerers in the ranks of its opponents.

Two important bodies, however, the Conservative party claims as permanently its own, the Established Church and the Agricultural Interest. Both have shown sufficient tendency to identify themselves with it to give ground for the claim. Especially has this been the case with the Church if we understand thereby, not the members of the Church in general, but the clergy and those their lay brethren, of whom Mr. Walpole may be taken as a favourable type, who are as ecclesiastically minded as ecclesiastics themselves. For some years, while Mr. Gladstone sat for the University of Oxford, a considerable number of the most thoughtful and energetic churchmen, under the influence of his high character and inspiring genius, gravitated towards Liberalism. The more stationary portion of the clergy and their lay disciples employed the fatal gift of voting papers bestowed upon them by Mr. Dodson's Act to sever the connexion between Mr. Gladstone and the University. Few will forget the shouts of exultation which hailed this, the almost solitary triumph of the Conservatives at the election of 1865. It was a case in which it might be said, slightly parodying a well-known line

'Weep ye may full well for Oxford, let none dare to weep for him.' The short-sighted victors inflicted almost irreparable injury upon the cause they thought to serve. They lowered the claim of the University to rank as the most enlightened and intellectual of the constituencies by deliberately rejecting, not for the first time, the most brilliant of her sons. They loosed the moral hold they naturally and legitimately retained upon

the most powerful statesman in the country so long as he sat in Parliament as their representative. They lost to the University and to the Church the liberalising influence, so beneficial to both, which he as the member for Oxford insensibly exercised. Lastly, they contributed in no slight degree, by banishing the one Liberal among all the members for the old Universities, to identify the Church with one political party.

The Irish Church contest aggravated this last evil. That upon such a question the bulk of the clergy, especially of the country clergy, should have been scared, and unable to take a dispassionate and statesmanlike view, is not to be marvelled at. Professional zeal, chivalry towards their clerical brethren in Ireland, alarm for their own position, all combined to intensify the conviction so sincerely entertained by many, that an act of injustice and of spoliation was being committed, and an injury inflicted upon the cause of true religion. Now, however, that the Irish Church question has been some time disposed of, is it too soon to hope that the flame of frenzy and of panic it kindled may subside; its history and its lesson be studied by the clear and steady light of reason, and the statesmen who took part in it be fairly and impartially judged? Nor should the adherents of the Established Church be unmindful of the fact that the present Government has carried an Education Bill for England, highly favourable to the Church, nor that it has stood between them and Mr. Miall; and that by both these steps it has materially compromised its popularity with its most advanced supporters. Seriously we would ask the clergy whether they think Lord Derby or Mr. Disraeli a better churchman than Mr. Gladstone; or, setting aside all considerations of individuals, whether they are of opinion that the Establishment would stand on any firmer basis if a Conservative Government were to accede to office?

The Established Church claims to be the national Church of England. To justify this position she must show herself comprehensive and tolerant in religious, and even more so in secular matters. We would invite the zealots of the Establishment to examine and consider the ground on which it rests. The Established Church, if not a corporation properly so-called, is an institution made up of an aggregate of corporations. The clergy as the ministers of an established church are an order in the State. From this point of view both are creatures of the State, and what the State has made it has the right to unmake. If men friendly to the maintenance of an Establishment, but who hold it to be essential, not only to the prosperity but to the stability of society and of the empire, that our government