BOOKS.

SIR HENRY TAYLOR'S CORRESPONDENCE.*

INTERESTING as was the autobiography of the author of Philip van Art evelde, this selection from his correspondence is even more interesting. It affords not, indeed, a complete por- trayal of the man, but one which is not only photographically accurate as far as it goes, but true in the higher sense of being full of life. As Sir Henry Taylor says in one of the most

charming of these letters, it is not only a man's own letters which embody his biography :

"The letters written to a man will often tell us as much of him as the letters written by him ; and what is often miscalled a man's correspondence' should be what it professes to be, and not what

it generally is, only his letters Even if those the man has written be better worth reading than any he has received still they will be read with more pleasure occurring amongst others than in a simple sequence."

The editor has wisely acted upon this *Uer dictum of his subject, and shown us the life of Sir Henry Taylor not merely in its personal substance as revealed by his letters, but by its context, so to speak, as contained in a sufficient selection from those written to him by the famous men, dead and living,

with whom he was on more or less intimate terms. The result is a volume which will take a permanent place among the classics of English epistolary literature. The practice of writing long letters may have disappeared with the advent of the penny post; but that the art of letter-writing has been by no means lost, the present volume amply proves :—

" I am no believer," writes Sir Henry Taylor in the letter just quoted, "in the doctrine that the best letters are those which are written with a careless ease. I prefer them written with a skilful ease, thoughtfully, though genially, in the language of life no doubt, and not in the language of literature, but in such a lan- guage of life as a man uses when he speaks his best—in his wisest, or brightest, or gayest, or wildest, or most passionate moods."

Just such letters are those now before us, not one of which has not a value of its own, apart from the light thrown upon the intellectual life of their writer, in the kindly, acute, sympathetic, and informed observations they present upon the men and manners, upon the opinions and controversies, of the last sixty years. For the first of the series was written in 1823, the last in 1885. In the above sentence, we refer, of

course, to Sir Henry Taylor's own letters ; but it is only necessary to name a few of the writers of the letters addressed to him, to show the importance and interest, not by any means merely biographical, of the contextual portion of

the correspondence,—Wordsworth, Southey, James Stephen, Miss Fenwick, Spedding, Earl Grey, Mr. Gladstone, Aubrey de Vere, Swinburne, Macaulay, Sir F. Elliot.

Sir Henry Taylor was no politician. "On most political questions," he writes to Lady Agatha Russell in 1878, "I have been all may life a man of no opinions." He meant, probably, on most party questions. And notwithstanding his strenuous

labour and eminent service in the Colonial Office, it is not as a public servant that he principally claims our admiration. A.

• Correspondence of Henry Taylor. Edited by Edward Dowden, London: Longir ans. 1888.

certain want of breadth, and even of generosity, is apparent in his treatment of some great questions, partly of an administra- tive, partly of a political character. On the Jamaica rebellion he can write :—

What I have always wished that Eyre had done was to execute Gordon, lawfully or unlawfully [the italics are ours], and then to let off all the negroes remaining to be tried, except the ringleaders."

Again, in the letter we have just quoted from, he combats the view taken by the Spectator at the time, that the value of human life is identical in all races, civilised or barbarous. Surely this is a self-evident axiom which in political practice could not, with ultimate advantage to the race, be disregarded.

In a letter to Earl Grey (1866) on the Irish Question, he refuses to recognise the Irish people "in all respects as our equals,"—that is, the equals of Englishmen, to whom he thinks the Irish are "in some of the most essential qualities which lend themselves to good government, an inferior race." But it is a mere assumption to say that the Irish are an inferior race ; all that can be safely asserted is that their traditions are inferior to our own, and this inferiority is explicable, at all events in major part, by the geography and history of the island. And, finally, in the very last of these letters, dated 1885, he views Colonies as being rather friendly allies than part and parcel of an Empire. We believe this to be a totally inadequate and superficial conception of the matter. No one who has resided in a British Colony can have failed to note the strength of the Imperial sentiment,—not wholly or even mainly as a political one, but as a racial and social feeling, with the roots struck deep in a common history, and of infinitely greater real strength than any based upon a mere political bond could be.

Perhaps the principal interest of these letters lies in the views they give of the remarkable men whom Sir Henry Taylor met in the course of his career, and with many of whom he was on terms of valned intimacy. With men of science and industry he seems to have had no conversation. Of Art, his appreciation does not appear to have been great; the beauties of Nature made no impression on him ; he was not, like Southey, a lover of books. "His (Southey's) con- versation," he writes, "is so peculiarly impersonal, and my interests lie so much in personality, and my knowledge of books and interest in them is so much less again than his in persons." He was, indeed, as his dramas sufficiently show, a student of man,—or rather, of men in the flesh, of individual men who interested him by reason of their position in the world of letters or in the world of politics. He disliked the

utilitarians, but admired John Mill, whom he heard, at the age of nineteen, take rart in a debate, "an animated, deter-

mined-looking youth the apostle of the Benthamites," who "draw their conclusions from their narrow premises with logical dryness and precision." In 1873, writing of Mill's autobiography, he calls it-

" A true and painful picture. The intention was that he was to walk in his way in the world a disembodied intellect, and what happened was that, when he had gone a certain distance, a passion sprang out of the bush like a hundred Ashantees, and he was carried away captive. I am told that those who know the lady found nothing in her to justify the extravagant terms in which he speaks of her. They say that he mistook the echo of his own mind for a voice of inspiration from hers."

He shared Wordsworth's dislike for Byron, but whether on independent grounds is not stated. It needed, probably, a broader mind than Taylor's to forgive the poet of Childe Harold his petty egotism and senseless vanity, so different from Wordsworth's simple recognition of his own genius and noble pride in his work. Of Wordsworth a good deal is said in this volume, especially in the letters of Miss Fenwick, who was Sir Henry Taylor's cousin, which are among the most in- teresting items of the contextual portion of this correspondence.

We cannot refrain, despite the limitations of space, from one or two quotations. An anecdote related in an early letter may first be cited. Some visitors were being shown over Rydal Mount, and the servant, on entering the parlour where the poet's books were kept, said,—" This is his library, but his study is out of doors." The italics are Miss Fenwick's, and are expressive of the character of his genius. "In the midst of his strongest emotions," she writes, "his attention may

be attracted or his imagination excited by some of those external objects which have such influence upon him ; and his feelings subside like the feelings of a child, and he will go out and compose some beautiful sonnet." The infirmity of will, which Dean Church has so well illustrated, is referred to by Miss Fenwick, who also notices the singular faith in himself which carried him through so much adverse criticism, as it did Dante through the pain of hopeless exile.

"Nothing," she writes in one of the most charming of her letters, "appears more remarkable to me in him than the constant and firm persuasion of his own greatness, which maintained itself through neglect and ridicule and contempt, and when in devoting himself to that culture which he conceived best adapted to it, he encountered a life of poverty and obscurity, and must have in- curred the censure of his friends, as leading a life of idlenesa originating in self-conceit and vanity?'

Though an admirer of Wordsworth, a poet of Nature though a philosophic poet also, Sir Remy Taylor saw no merit in, Burns,—about whom, nevertheless, he had often wished to change his mind, but his mind would not be changed. "For one reason or another," is the harsh and almost absurd criticism of the great Scottish poet, "99 per cent. of what he wrote was worthless, and I think that nothing he wrote was of such excellence as to found a poet's fame." Of Carlyle, Sir Henri Taylor wrote in 1845 :- "He is constantly complaining of this man and that for not being able to take any clear and coherent view of the nature of things, and I cannot help thinking that he is himself vexed and harassed by the same inability, so as to have acquired a sort of personal dislike to the minds which give him a reflection of the

dark side of his own He is full of renunciations, denuncia- tions, disavowals, and contempt of everything that is current in. the opinions and proceedings of mankind ; but it is difficult to understand what he would wish to substitute."

The criticism is most just and penetrating. Carlyle was, in. fact, an " inarticulate " prophet, despite his literary power, and made furious by his inarticulateness. In 1848, Sir Hem7 Taylor met Cobden at dinner, and mentions him in a letter to his father as "rather a small man. to make a great noise." Many great events, however—the revolutions of 1834 and 1848, the Coup d' tat, what may be termed the evolution

of railways and steam navigation, and the Indian Mutiny— hardly seem to have attracted his notice, and some great men- may well have shared their fate. Like most of us, Sir Henry

Taylor was an ardent admirer of Mr. Gladstone, to whom he addressed an ode in 1874, which contains some sound advice_ On one occasion he objected to a phrase that had been used by Mr. Gladstone in reference to the Bulgarian atrocities,—" It is monstrous to place on the same footing the cruelties of the oppressed and the cruelties of the oppressor,"—suggesting that retaliation was in no case justifiable, and that the cruelties of revenge were as hateful and detestable as those of oppres- sion, to which Mr. Gladstone answered that he thought the objection just, and subscribed to every word of the suggestion. Here we must stop. There are letters to and from Aubrey de Vere, James Stephen, and Spedding of the deepest interest—finished essays, indeed, some of them are—which tempt to quotation; but quotation would do them injustice. Sir Henry Taylor clearly reveals himself and is revealed in. this portion of his correspondence ; his beliefs and unbeliefs- and he had, perhaps, more of the latter than the former—are set forth with equal honesty and conviction, and in a better and stronger light by the presentment of a portion of the

other side in the epistolary dialogue. But we must refer the reader to the volume itself, which he will hardly lay down, until he has read it from cover to cover. It is unnecessary to say a word about the manner in which Professor Dowden! has executed his task; the fact that the task has been executed,

by him is sufficient for all who care to know what was the cast of mind, what the form and substance of the opinions, of one of the most remarkable men of the century.