BOOKS.
PROVINCIAL LETTERS.* .
READERS of the Pages from a Private Diary will welcome the present volume of essays by -the same author. Their title, which might suggest to the unwary a. translation of Pascal's immortal diatribes, carries with it no such dreadful implica- tion; it merely indicates that the first half of the book in devoted to a series of pleasant papers for which various provincial localities—Lichfield, Canterbury, Wensleydale, and the like—afford a subject, or rather an excuse. Nothing. indeed, could be further from the fierce and deadly irony of the great jansenist than these urbane musings on places and people and books. They preach no doctrine, they air no enmities ; and, though they are full of humour, it is not of the kind that stings. Their real parentage is obvious enough: they belong to the family of Elia. But their ancestry is not the only thing they have to boast of, and they can stand securely on their own merits. Their spirit is more deliberately antiquarian and less fantastic than Lamb's. The fundamental melancholy, too, which shows itself so often in the Essays of Ella is absent here. The author, whether spontaneously or of set purpose, hardly touches at all upon the more serious aspects of life; he is content with a courteous and witty familiarity with the obvious face of things, and asks for no closer intimacy. "For this relief much thanks !" one is tempted to exclaim in these days of the confidential and introspective essayist. Among these quiet pages the reader may enjoy the comfort- able conviction that be will come upon no personal revelations, and that he is in no danger of being carried off from a chronicle of small beer to a dissertation upon the deepest mysteries of life and death.
The papers which give the book its name are full of this spirit of restraint and delicacy. The reader wanders without fatigue from Bloomsbury—which the author happily ranks, by implication, among "provincial" places—to the Cotteswold country, with its splendid monuments of a long-departed glory ; or from Lichfield, with its queer memories of Miss Seward and Erasmus Darwin and Dr. Johnson, to a nameless village in Hertfordshire, where "the Lambs" are remembered very well :—" Oh, they lived quite near at Brocket Hall. The house was begun by Sir Matthew„ the first Baronet, and finished by the first Lord Melbourne." The paper on Canter- bury contains a curious series of eighteenth-century letters, preserved among the Cathedral archives, and connected with a request from the Ring of Sardinia for the remains a St. Anselm. The letters are chiefly interesting from the light which they throw upon the character of the astute Archbishop of the day, who was ready enough to practise a pious fraud on the Sardinian King, in the hope of obtaining in ,return some benefit for the Protestants in his dominions. "I think it is worth the Experiment," he tells the Dean, "and really for this End I should make no Conscience of palming on the Simpletons any other old Bishop with the Name of Anselm." Unfortunately, however, we never learn the outcome of the "Experiment."
Two of the later papers are devoted to the study of a more famous and redoubtable episcopal personage,—Bishop Atterbury. The author has attempted to present us with a more sympathetic portrait of the man than the traditional one of the truculent prelate, impatient to proclaim the Pretender at Charing Cross, in his lawn sleeves. The picture has been skilfully and carefully drawn, but whether it is altogether convincing remains open to doubt. If it is true that Atterbury was "by temperament a reformer," was he not also by temperament an intriguer ? And, if he indeed possessed "strong principles," is it not somewhat remarkable that those principles allowed him to carry on a correspondence with the Pretender, while he was enjoying the emoluments of the bishopric of Rochester, and had sworn allegiance to the house of Hanover, "without equivocation, or mental reserva- tion, on the true faith of a Christian" ? His conduct at Carlisle and Christ Church, even as it is described in the present volume, seems to raise the presumption that his enemies were telling the truth when they declared that be was made a Bishop because be was so bad a Dean; and it
• Provincial Lotter& and other Papers. By the Author of Pages from • Private Diary." London Smith, Eider, and Co. aaL)
certainly justifies the remark of his successor :—" Atterbury goes before, and sets everything on fire, and I comenfter him with a bucket of water." His quarrel with Prior is referred to, and Prior's epitaph is quoted, beginning
"Meek Francis lies here, friend ; without stop or stay,
As you value your peace, make the best of your way"; " but no mention is made of Atterbuile own epiteph on Lord Cadogan, one of Marlborough's protégés, which certainly deserved to be quoted, if only as an -example of alliterative force
"Ungrateful to the ungrateful man he grew by, A bad, bold, blustering, bloody, blundering booby."
This is strong language from a Bishop; but it was not without excuse, for Cadogan had exclaimed, when the question arose whether "meek Francis," convicted of treasonable corre- spondence, should be exiled or executed : "Fling him to the lions in the Tower !" Atterbury, though he quarrelled with Prior, remained on good terms with Pope, and maintained till his death the privileged position of being, as our author says, "one of the few persons at whom the great satirist did not sneer." There is, however, some reason to believe that it was his wisdom rather than his affection which induced him to cultivate Pope's good graces ; for the author of the lines on Atticus was not a man to quarrel with lightly, and, if tradition is to be trusted, the Bishop was responsible for at least one savage epigram on his friend,—an epigram which the Pro- vincial Letter Writer has, wisely for his case, omitted to record. The story went that a gentleman, anxious to curry favour with "Saint Atterbuty," as Horace Walpole called him, was profuse in praises of Pope; the Bishop made no answer. The gentleman doubled the dose ; and at last the Bishop, with a shake of the head, simply replied : "Mena curve in corpore curvo," which effectually put a stop to the conversation.
The two papers on Shakespeare are among the most interesting in the book. The first is an admirable abstract of the known facts of Shakespeare's life, and of the principal problems relating to his biography with which scholars of the present day are still confronted. The second contains a dis- cussion of the characteristics of Shakespeare's mind, and the light which is thrown upon it by his works. The author's refutation of the contention that Shakespeare drew his own portrait in Hamlet, and that he was a man "of a feminine, sensual temperament, melancholy, soft-Shred, neuropathic," is quite conclusive.
Among the purely literary essays, an excellent review of English patriotic poetry deserves mention. The principles which should guide the patriotic song-maker are discussed with abundance of illustration, and an explanation is offered of the singular scarcity in English literature of really successful patriotic verse. One name, however, has been omitted from the list of modern poets who have made the attempt, and it is particularly unfortunate that, where so much is said of Mr. Kipling, nothing should be said at all of one of Mr. Kipling's masters. It is difficult to believe that the Barrack-Boom Ballads would ever have been written if Mr. Swinburne had never lived; and the " Armada " is one of that poet's noblest poems. Its concluding lines might have served as a text for the essay
" England, none that is born thy son, and lives, by grace of thy glory, free,
Lives and yearns not at heart and burns with hope to serve as he worships thee; None may sing thee the sea-wind's wing beats down our songs as it hails the sea."
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