AUBREY DE VERE.* WHBN Mr. Aubrey de Yere published his

Recollections, his friends complained that be had omitted to speak of him- self, the most interesting to them of all his many intimates. The omission, which was eminently characteristic, has been supplied by Mr. Wilfrid Ward in a Memoir which quite sustains his reputation as a master in the difficult and delicate art of the biographer. He has also been fortunate in his subject, for Aubrey de Vero was not only an interesting but a separate person, like no one except himself. It was therefore less difficult to describe him than if he had shared his qualities with one-half of his contemporaries, as is not unfrequently the case with a modern Englishman.

The younger son of an Irish Baronet, he followed no pro- fession, was never married, and resided during a lifetime of eighty-eight years in the ancestral home in the County Limerick where he was born. It was a life dedicated to poetry, religion,- and friendship. His poetry was highly prized within a limited circle. A great critic, Walter Savage Landor, spoke of it with enthusiasm, preferring his treatment of Greek subjects to that of Goethe. But it was never popular. His friend Mr. Hutton, in a letter to the author, gave the true reason. " You write," he said, "on religious subjects and in a Catholic sense, and you can hardly expect a large public. Poetry to be really popular needs a considerable volume of force. Yours is all qualitative." The truth is that, in his later years especially, Aubrey de Vere's sense of the responsibility of the poet as a teacher interfered with the freedom of poetic utterence.

He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin ; but through his brother, he made many friends in Cambridge, and at a somewhat later period in Oxford. He was thus introduced to the philosophical and religious speculations which were at the time shaking the dry bones in the English Universities. Educated in High Church principles, he felt dissatisfied with the vague speculations of the " Cambridge Apostles," which he thought offered no secure foundation for religion. The

writings of Maurice pleased him better, but it was in the religious teaching of Coleridge that he found what he wanted; and throughout all his changes of opinion, he remained in

spirit a disciple of Coleridge. The Church of Rome had as yet no attraction for him. In the year 1839 he paid a visit to Rome ; and although he enjoyed Roman society, he felt no disposition to oast in his lot with a Church which he regarded

as superstitious, tyrannical, and depraved intellectually by an over-elaborated theology. Of some friends who joined the Roman Communion he remarked that when they awoke from their illusion about a perfect Church, he feared they would be as much discomposed as was Jacob when he found that instead of having married his Rachel, "behold it was Leah." In a letter written to a friend from Rome he gives a very unfavourable estimate of the influence of the Church on the social life of Italy :—

" No one who has not been in Italy can imagine the extraordinary power and innumerable ramifications of the priestcraft, with its confessors, its purgatory, indulgences, celibacy and monasteries, planted like the legions of old in every part of their empire, pre- serving under all circumstances and at all distances the same discipline and inflexible obedience. This Church contrives to stamp its own peculiar character on everything and every one its influence can reach. From the humblest cottage hearth, to the haughtiest council chamber, it makes its influence felt alike, and that influence is to weaken every other tie of human life, domestic, social, or national, in order to make the ecclesiastical bond all in all There is one redeeming point about the system, which is that it inculcates most strongly, though not perhaps on very pure principles, the great virtue of humility ; and has thus preserved among the mass of the people a childlike spirit of submission, to balance a childlike ignorance and gregariousness, and more than childlike weakness in resisting impulses and passions."

Twelve years later, the author of this trenchant criticism was received into the Church of Rome in the city of Avignon, hardly the place, one would have thought, to awaken reverence for the Papacy. He was led to take this step mainly by his desire to have an external authority to aid personal faith, without which, he thought, it would always oscillate between

enthusiasm and scepticism. Like most of those who passed over to the Roman Communion at this period, he knew Ireland.

nothing of the principles and methods of historical criticism, which were indeed unknown at the time in the theological circles of the English Universities. He was not, therefore, in a position to examine the historical foundations on which the claim of Rome rests to teach and rule the nations with infallible truth and justice. His candid biographer admits that in the critical faculty he was deficient.

None of Mr. Aubrey de Vere's friends showed a disposition to follow him into the Church of Rome. On the other hand, there was no estrangement. His cordial relationship with his old literary friends remained undisturbed by a change which, to some of them at least, probably appeared of small moment one way or another. This seems to have been the view of Mr. Browning, to whom he had given the reasons of his change at some length. Mr. Browning wrote :-

" I was much interested by the hours you gave me on that last evening of yours in Florence, and grateful too, and not tired.' The sense of the spiritual, the exercise of the soul's instinct, the attitude of the life towards the Truth and the Love, are always interesting to me. I am never tired of sunrises. That I believe you to be mistaken in much is obvious ; but you think worse of the act of mistaking than I do—which is obvious too—and so it is true (though a paradox) that I differ less from you than you differ from me. In spite of which you were very patient, and at the same time loyal with me, for which I thank you entirely."

His friendship with Carlyle remained unbroken to the

end, although he was pained at times by Carlyle's fierce denunciatory tone, " recklessly overrunning and down- trampling both the springing field and the harvest field of the very highest truth." His view of Carlyle is that which is now pretty generally accepted. He was a great prose= poet, but not a thinker in the proper sense of the word. " Carlyle," he wrote, " was deep-hearted—though not by any means, as his votaries fancy, deep-minded." In another place . he writes : "A great thinker Carlyle could not be, for he had not the faculty of thinking with self-possession."

During his whole life Aubrey de Vera followed with interest the course of public policy, especially when it affected moral and religious questions or the welfare of his native Ireland, to which he was fondly attached. He gave his warm approval to Mr. Gladstone's proposals for the Dis.

establishment of the Protestant Church of Ireland, so far as they removed the Roman Catholic grievances ; but be was in favour of concurrent endowment, not of the alienation to secular purposes, of funds given for the support of religion. He was unable to give his support to Mr. Gladstone's Land Bill, of which his brother, Sir Stephen de Vere, warmly approved, having, indeed, recommended nearly the same thing to the Government in 1870. He lost confidence in the statesmanship of both the leaders of the great parties, writing that Mr. Disraeli was a Democrat who had become a Tory, and never quite knew whether he preferred to improve Toryism, or to improve it off the face of God's earth; while Mr. Glad- stone was a Tory who had become a Radical, while all his religious sympathies were with authority and antiquity. "Neither of them ever really belonged to the party of which fortune by way of a practical joke made him the head— the party he has educated' alike out of its principles and traditions."

In connection with the Irish question, this biography gives us a glimpse of a still rarer character than Aubrey de Vere, his elder brother, Sir Stephen de Vere,—an Irish landowner who with apostolic zeal devoted his life to the welfare of the tenants on his estate. He taught, we are told, in the schools, abstained from wine for twenty years that he might encourage temperance among the poor, and often turned his house into

a hospital for the sick and dying. Like his brother, he became a Roman Catholic, and at an earlier date, not

persuaded by books or arguments, but drawn to a faith which did so much to help and to console the poor peasants of

The correspondence in this volume will be found of

great interest. Mr. Aubrey de Vere was not an actor but an observer of life,—perhaps on that account more impartial. He knew most of the men best worth knowing among his contemporaries, and his own letters, with those of his corre- spondents, make a substantial contribution to the social