BOOKS.

ALFRED DE MUSSET.*

WE are glad to receive this volume, edited as it is by perhaps the most capable of the scholars who are busy helping us to

enjoy half-forgotten masterpieces, whether of foreign or English literature ; but ours is a saddened pleasure, for since we have received this sympathetic essay on the French poet, and its remarkable translations from his verses, the young writer is dead. His ears are closed to our sincere recognition that he has well comprehended the beauty and wealth of modern French poetry, and that he is rightly bold to praise "some of the most charming lyrics in the world," and " a fountain of song as fresh and spontaneous as any that has flowed within the present century in any quarter of the world." English- men, without any dullness on their part, find themselves at fault when judging French verse. The differing course of the English and French language, the history of con- tinental and insular literature, explain what is almost a superstition of correct expression among writers who are more or less influenced by the traditions of the Academie.

Our best poets are chiefly engaged in "the criticism of life," with its complex faiths and ideals, and are less careful of literary performance governed by tradition. In our best examples, no doubt, beauty asserts itself alike in manner as in matter; but our standard of criticism is different from that of Paris. We think that Musset's poetry at its best ranks with the most perfect of its century, but much of it shocks our moral taste at first reading. Yet how pure is the gold of his

best work ! It is the very essence of poetry. His Pegasus is like the Dauphin's horse in Henry V., "the earth sings when

he touches it." If we could imagine Keats in Musset's en- vironment, some likeness might be found, for both poured the new wine of their era into Greek vases; but Musset is a son of the Gaul and the Frank, and Keats's raptures are those of the Northman who discovers Ida and Latmos. Few poets have been more sensitive to circumstance than was Musset. His verses were at all times struck out of him by the shocks of life rather than by his own will ; yet what writer is so individual P

In the first volume he gave to the world, critics discovered imitation. Byron was in the height of his popularity ; Andre Chenier was the presiding genius of the Cenacle ; Sainte- Beuve was bold to say that Musset's young women were of

the family of Rosalind, and Shakespeare, no doubt, was one of the young poet's deities : but the boy—and he was all his

life a boy—had no master but his own genius when he wrote his Nuits. Even in the poems published when he was but twenty, some lines reveal a lambent flame of passion, some epigram revives a keenness of wit that in the splendid past of French literature had hardly been attained. The Cenacle, of which Hugo was chief bard and Merimee chief conteur, had just then discovered Spain as a stage for romantic drama. Cloak and rapier pieces were in fashion, and when Musset

blushingly confessed to Sainte-Beuve, " I too have written pieces," it was natural that they should be of that order,

natural that the Cherubino of the Romantics should attempt new rhymes, and even write his Portia with something of Parisina in it. Sainte-Beuve's critical faculty was never truer than when he said to Hugo and his set : " We have a child of genius among us." We doubt if there was one of them who could have written the lines in Don, Paez beginning :- " L'amour Mau du monde, execrable folie," or the picture of the heroine :- " Comme elle est belle au soir, aux rayons de la lune, Peignant sur son con blane sa chevelure brune ! Sons la tresse d'ebene, on dirait, h, la voir,

• line jeune gaerriere avec un casque noir !"

Musset could not be an absolute " Romantic," had he tried.

To be in the fashion, he actually spoiled the rhymes of L'Andalouse, which had been correct. He too wrote a ballade, but it was in mockery, a mockery that cost him

• Alfred de Musser. By C. F. Oliphant. " Foreign Classics for English Readers." Edinbargh Blackwood and Bons. 1890.

much. The sentimentalists objected to his disrespect towards the moon, which he likened to the point on an " i." The maintainers of decency had a right to their disgust, but not to the indifference which even Lamartine showed for Musset's later work. Perhaps, indeed, when the Meditations are neglected, the airy singer of the soul of good in things evil will be judged the truer classic. His verse has an enduring echo even in English ears, and he shot bright arrows through the darkness of ennui that at least show us of what poor stuff was the pessimism of the day.

Alfred de Musset was born in 1810, of parents respectably endowed with brains and with the sense of race, stronger in France than amongst us. Victor, the poet's father, was em- ployed in Napoleon's bureaux, and his son's imagination was nursed on the splendours, the triumphs, and the sudden strokes of a Fate that dwarfed the life and men of the Restoration. But the Mussets were not Bonapartist, and Victor earned his five hundred a year• as chef de cabinet until his death by cholera in 1832. His sons, Paul and Alfred, were from their boyhood admitted into fairly good society, and the tone of it is never lost in their writings. Of the authors of the day, not one could have set on the stage as perfectly, the high-bred lady of the Faubourg St. Germain, as Musset in his Madame de Igry, so different from the most exalted of Balzac's Duchesses, in her ease, her sweetness, and true inheritance of that social tradition which may be proved by a gesture or a smile. The Duchesse de Castries was, indeed, one of Musset's kindest friends, and she was the original, it is said, of Balza,c's Duchesse de Langeais. The Marquise in the " proverbe," Il faut qu'une porte soil ouverte ou fermee, is even more charming an example of Musset's delicate and firm touch, as well as insight. We know of no brighter figure among poets than his ; but we doubt if the extreme dandyism of the D'Orsay period suited him as would have a costume of the Rigence. He idealised the gaudiness of excess, he gave wit and brilliance to orgy, in his earlier writings. The fair-haired boy, graceful as a high-bred colt, carried his fine head high. " Prince Phosphor of the flying Heart," as he was called by the friend who knew him best and at his best, had not to seek for adventures ; he had but to take what Paris has to offer. He did too freely accept its dissipations, with a fine scorn of them, but an insatiable hunger for the realities of passion. In almost all his plays, or stories, or poems, he bares for us his heart without a shade of egotist pretence. He hated shams of vice as of virtue, and was so absolutely sincere that he accepted blame and criticism as frankly as applause. In his first poems, there are two hundred lines of Nanwuna that express Musset's con- ception of Don. Juan. Unlike the splendid personage of Moliere's play or Byron's idle libertine, Musset's phantom is the incarnation of unquenchable desire for ideal beauty which he never finds amid the waste of his life. It is hard to believe that the poet was but twenty when he described in lines that haunt us with their music, the "eternal Hydra" of realisation for ever mocking his search for perfect love. Under the stained but jewelled mantle of his earlier verse, there is even then a bitterness of remorse which we can imagine in the

prodigal son of the parable. Even then, as Theophile Gautier said, "joy and sorrow conversed together" in his airiest

poems,—sorrow such as Frank's in La Cave et la Levre, sorrow haunted by the crime of sense personified in Belcolore, and exclaiming of it :- " La mer y passerait sans laver is sonillure,

Car rabime est immense et la tache est an fond."

In his most daring poems, there is vivid recognition of good as of evil, and of divine law, however obscure may be its adjustments. Yet Voltaire was not seldom at his elbow in his sarcasms on religion as he saw it practised, and Crebillon fits has a hand in some of his dramatic situations. But we make no comparisons for Musset ; he stands apart, his blue eyes, full of fire, turned, if towards any other poet, towards Shakespeare : his sensitive nostrils breathe somewhat the same air,—the air of As You Like It. Lorenzaccio, his Florentine Hamlet of the Renaissance, and his own favourite among his plays, explains at once the likeness and the disproportion between him and the great master.

After he was twenty-three, Musset was in many ways an altered man. In that year Rolla appeared, and was applauded enthusiastically. The power and versification of its burning words were admired by Romantics and Classicists alike. The apostrophes, now to Christ, now to Voltaire ; the passionate

aspirations and regrets spoken in the very lair of vice ; the sleep of the girl lying as some strayed jewel in the gutter ; the splendid scene of a society in which such things could be as Rolla's ruin, startled the readers of the Revue des Deux Mondes, where the poem appeared. Rolla both made and marred the author's career. It roused Madame Sand's wish to know him. He was placed next her at a literary dinner. She was six years older than he, but at the height of her charm, and of the success of her Indiana. We have heard but too much of what followed, both from her and from Paul de Musset, Alfred's elder brother. Theirs were useless recriminations ; in later writings of the poet's, we find touching excuses for her robuster nature, her wider if less concentrated sympathies, in the Madame Pierson of the Confession, and in the lovely poem of Souvenir. Yet the truth remains that after Musset and George Sand's journey in Italy, he returned to his mother and brother a wreck. For many weeks he could only endure his " brother " Solitude, whom he exquisitely personifies in the Nuit de Decembre. In work he found relief, and one of his characteristic tragedies enacted among flowers, On ne badine pas avec l'Amour, was the first effort of his reviving genius. Of the many works that followed within the year, La Nuit de Mai is the finest, and it is well translated—being untranslatable —by Mr. Oliphant. Once more his true Muse came to him,- " May was again on his cheeks " as he greeted her. He lighted up his room to receive her, and kept her visits as festivals, in the same spirit as Buffon's when he wore court-dress to write in. We have not space to quote largely from Musset's noble and pathetic verse of this period. At twenty he was in love with garish pleasure, but now with sorrow and pain, and he was equally sincere in either mood. We doubt if even Lamartine could have equalled the letter addressed to him by Musset, with its concluding message from the " angels of sorrow," of which the last stanza is thus given by Mr. Oliphant :—

" Thy name, thy glory, will with Time decay, Thy bones within the grave in dust shall lie,

Thy love, if well thou lovest, lives alway- Thy soul remembers, and it cannot die."

In the original lyric, poetry rises above the lyrisrne to which Lamartine was at that time tending. Beautiful as are his elegies, we hardly think his inspiration was ever so frankly beautiful in its human emotion as Musset's tribute to Malibran. The lines go to our hearts ; they are admirable in form, and we think them unrivalled in the French poetry of this century. Again we can afford to use Mr. Oliphant's translation, though but of the final stanza, and with a change of one word :—

"Die then, thy death is sweet, thy task is o'er.

What men call genius in the world to-day, Is nothing but the need of love, no more, And human love full soon must pass away. Happy thy fate, worthy a soul like thine, To perish for a love that was Divine."

It is strange now to look back at the contemporary neglect of such poetry as Musset's ; but his cult of sorrow did not amuse Paris as his .Rggence mood had done. He was cast down, but never made angry by neglect. Meantime, social ties and entanglements were Will-o'-the-Wisps to him, that led his soul into desolate places. At thirty, he looked upon his life as spent. No kindly urging from his brother, or from his marraine, Madame Jaubert, could shake him from his idleness. He had debts, but he would not invoke his Muse, who was also his Beatrice, to help in paying them, and from time to time a proverbe or a nouvelle in prose met some tailor's bill.

We have said nothing of Musset's prose, yet it had grace and charm, and whoever would gauge his insight of humanity in its vast capacities for good and ill, its darkest and its tenderest moods, should read Lorenzaccio and Mimi Pinson, the Caprice, or, if the reader does not shrink from plain speech of human weakness, the Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle, a book not to be taken as the author's history, but as his witness against sin. We have but to measure Musset's short stories with those of Maupassant, to see the whiteness of the poet's fire in the darkest and most miry places. If we have the courage to study Desgenais' and Octave's arguments, we shall know how Mussel's lesser light shines besides Rousseau's lurid fire.

At thirty, Musset was old, and there is no important poem of his after that :—

" L'oubli, l'ennui, font ce me semble Route ensemble,"

for his later days. A chance success of his Caprice at St. Petersburg reminded Paris of him. It was played at the Comedie Francaise, and his name became known to a larger public than his poetry had reached. He wrote some light comedies to order, but not with the love he had given at twenty to the Nuit Venitienne, which had failed. Musset was elected an Academician, but with some difficulty. Rachel and Ristori, indeed, would have embodied his creations had he cared ; but " that unrest which men miscall delight " was over for him. "All this is not life, it is the noise of life," he had said, even when a boy, of his pleasures, for he was haunted by the Unknown Eros. The pain of loss he had endured had driven him to eager study of what is the true end of life. From St. Augustine to Spinoza, from Aristotle to Rousseau, " I have read enough," he says, " inquired enough, considered enough. Tears and prayer are essentially divine. It is a God who has given us power to weep, and since tears are from him, prayer returns to him." He amplified these words next day in his poem, L'Espoir en Dieu.

The symptoms of heart-disease excuse his indolence, and partly, perhaps, even his excess in drinking, during the last years of his life. " Ah ! ce qui n'est qu'un mal, n'en faiths pas un vice," he wrote in sad reply to a friend's remonstrance; and we are tempted to say, as his friend did : " Let us not pity or blame him,—we are but children beside his immense superiority." He embraced in his haste earthly life too closely, but none of his sins, too frankly recorded by him, " cast him lower than the cleansing flame." His last action was a kindly one ; he dragged himself through heavy rain, for no cab was to be found, to vote for Emile Angier at the Academy ; and a month later the chill incurred had killed him. " Sleep—at last—I shall sleep," were his last words. Then followed recognition of his genius, and fashion and applause, and Paris adored and imitated, and set to music, her lost poet ; but he had "out- soared the shadow of our night." Let us think of him as a true star, and forget the fumes and vapours that beset his rising.

MR. KINGSFORD'S " SONG OF LEWES."* WHEN, in 1839, the late Mr. Thomas Wright presented the Camden Society with his volume of Political Songs, it is not too much to say that English students were hardly pre- pared to appreciate the most important poem it contained. By lumping together the centuries from St. Augustine of Canterbury to the Reformation under one general head of the " Middle Ages, " by ascribing to them one general religion, " Romanism," and one general polity, "Feudalism,' all sense of proportion, of growth, or of development was naturally lost. According to this rough-and-ready way of writing history, Simon de Montfort and Wyclif were un- accountable phenomena, springing from nothing, and ending as they began ; Chaucer was the " Father of English poetry ;" Friar Luther chanced one day upon a Bible, and " produced " the Reformation. Walter Map—if he was known to anybody but Mr. Wright—got tipsy, and wrote scandalous Latin verses against everybody : he wished to " die drinking in an inn," as he is well known to have said. What, then, could be the value, except to Dryasdust or Smelfungus, of some thousand lines of leonines which Mr. Wright said were about the battle of Lewes ?

Nor did Mr. Wright do much to forestall such criticism. In speaking of The Song of Lewes, which he then for the first time printed, it is true he called it a " long, but singularly interesting poem," and " the popular declaration of the principles with which the Barons entered into the War and the objects which they had in view." He was struck, as no one reading it could fail to be struck, with the unique mixture of immature Protestantism and precocious Constitutionalism to be found in a poem dated 1265, and he concluded his remarks by saying : " We might almost suppose ourselves transported to the days of Wickliffe or Cromwell." But he did not see (and we are not sure its new editor, Mr. Kingsford, does either) the extreme importance of the Song to the history of the English Renaissance (taking that much-abused word in the catholic sense so finely expressed by Michela, rather than as meaning an abrupt, inconsequential revival of classical art or letters) ; and failing, moreover, a clue to authorship in the poem itself, the average student had • The Song of Lewes. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by O. L. Kings- ford, M.A., St. John's College, Oxford. Oxford ; Clarendon Press. 1899.

to wait until scholars like Canon Creighton or the Bishop of Oxford indicated the significance which lay alike in its source and intention. Here, if ever, a monograph was needed ; and as a volume for the Rolls Series must, apparently, be bulky, it was fitting that the want should be supplied by the Clarendon Press. We feel some difficulty, however, in estimating fairly Mr. Kingsford's performance now we have got it. From a purely archaeological standpoint, there seems nothing to com- plain of ; transcript, translation, notes, and appendices are scholarly, accurate, and exhaustive, and omit little, if anything, in the way of precise information. It is only when he comes to inference and attempts to " place " the poem—when, in fact, he deserts archaeology for history—that he falls short of an ideal editor, and exhibits a rigidity of tone and absence of sympathy which are fatal to the finality of his work.

In his ascription of the authorship to a Franciscan (probably, though not certainly, an Oxford Franciscan), it is impossible to read the poem and disagree with Mr. Kingsford. He has displayed in his Introduction an amount of external evi- dence, direct and inferential, bearing upon this point, which alone is fairly conclusive. The most instructive is the extract from the Office for the Anniversary of the Earl, which was

almost certainly the work of a Franciscan, and if not of the very Franciscan who composed the Carmen de Bello Lewensi,

the comparison, as Mr. Kingsford says, " is not without value as supplying some evidence as to the language used by Earl Simon's immediate friends." But, curiously enough, Mr. Kings- ford has missed what to our mind is the one plain indication of a Franciscan source which the poem itself contains. We mean that complacent reference, in 11. 198-206, put into Earl Simon's mouth by the poet, to the persons eligible for con- ducting peace-negotiations with the Royalists :—

" Optimos eligite, quorum fides uiuit, Qui decreta legerint, nel theologian' Decenter docuerint sacramque sophiam, Et qui sciant regere fidem christianam," There can surely be little doubt as to the identity of these men of lively faith, these explorers of the decretals, these seemly teachers of theology and sacred philosophy : the words are almost Eccleston's own ; the spirit of them is

entirely his. There was no body of men in England to whom

they would apply but the Franciscan body. Mr. Kingsford does venture to assume (p. xix.) that the writer of the Song

was one of the Minorites who accompanied the Bishop of Chichester upon his mission of peace, as is stated in the Dover Chronicle ; yet in his note upon the lines we have cited, he has nothing more to offer• than that " the Bishops had acted as mediators on several occasions," mentioning with due care as many of the occasions as he can discover. He of course took the line, " Et qui sciant regere fidem christianam," as necessarily implying Episcopal authority (which it does not), regardless of the fact that the entire passage is a dramatic eulogy of the popular party, and refers rather to general principles than particular requirements. But, after all, to those who are acquainted with the tone of Franciscan litera- ture, all this weight of argument is superfluous. It is only

necessary to turn from Eccleston to the Song to perceive the true flavour of the followers of Francis and Anthony of Padua. The De Adventu .111inorumt is an English Fiaretti, neither more nor less, and The Sang of Lewes is just

such a mixture of psalm and political broadside as we should expect from those clear-sighted enthusiasts who, for a short space, managed to unite the simplicity of child- hood with the patient wisdom of old age. It was the Franciscan way of looking at things, the unshackled scrutiny of Nature as an open book, glowing with the beneficent splendour of God, which produced such astonishing results in the history of European ideas, and which, while it made possible a Christian Art for Italy, made inevitable a Christian political ideal for England.

his because Mr. Kingsford does not appear to see this, that we cannot regard his work as satisfactory. He looks through

the poem, if we may say so, to scholastic Oxford, and is con- tent that his eyes should rest there ; but it is possible to get

behind Oxford in tracing the Renaissance of the thirteenth century, though it may be that only a Renan can successfully accomplish the feat. And when, quoting from Bishop Stubbs that the Song is " clearly a manifesto, amongst themselves, of the men whose preaching guided the people," Mr. Kingsford goes on to say : "As such, therefore, it is the most complete

contemporary statement of the programme put forth by the constitutional party, and it is to this that the Song owes its position as an historical document of the first importance,"—and again, " it is its very character as a party pamphlet which constitutes the true value of the Song "- he seems to us to miss the very marrow of the matter, which is, that The Song of Lewes is the key to the part played by the Friar Minor in the English Renaissance. Wherever he went, that impressionable soul took his hue from the colour of the national mind : in England, his realism became rational, his enthusiasm drove him into politics, and his sympathy to the popular side; he became a reformer before De Montfort, a socialist before John Balle. It is true the Song displays the sentiments which Earl Simon was prepared to enforce with his life. It is true that, so far, it is not " original." But the populace knew not Oxford, and beheld Earl Simon from afar off. A translator was neces- sary. Imagine this poem done into old English, chop it up into short, pithy sentences, colour it with local saws and allusions, season it with the homely salt of broad humour like Haymo of Feversham's, and serve it up with all the con- vincing charm that clings to the utterance of a family friend, and you have the force which threw Pope Clement's Bull into the English Channel, and which, by the reign of Edward I., resulted in the accomplishment of reforms in popular repre- sentation which must have seemed fantastic to their very propounders in the reign of Henry III. This is where the importance of it lies. Here we have the declaration of those who were the connecting link between the Earl and the back- bone of his party, the communes. Here we have what we may be quite sure was declaimed in every market-place and parish church and cottage-doorway. Oxford and the School- men, scholasticism and mysticism, have their charm and their value in the story of the Renaissance ; but in England, at least, the Renaissance first and last was essentially democratic ; and in studying its progress, we must always work with one eye on the masses and their guides. It has long been familiar where the Franciscan worked ; and with M. Meyer's Conies de Bozon in one hand, and a decent edition of The Song of Lewes in the other, we might hope to gain a clear idea of how he worked.

But though we may regret these shortcomings, they are at least remediable by historians (who will find Mr. Kingsford's facts sound enough), and point rather to want of sympathy and critical faculty than to error or oversight. When it comes to what appears to be positive misapprehension of the writer's political theory, it is another• matter. The famous passage beginning (1. 765) :— " Igitur communitas regni consulatur, Et quid uniuersitas senciat, sciatur, Cui leges proprke maxima aunt note," he renders : " Therefore let the commonalty of the realm take counsel, and let that be decreed which is the opinion of the community to whom their own laws are most known." This is perhaps as near as we can get to the antithesis of the original, and " commonalty " for uniuersitas is certainly more elegant than Mr. Wright's " generality," if not so accurate ; for strict accuracy, indeed, the words should be transposed. " Com- monalty " is the correct rendering of " communitas," and " community " better expresses " uniuersitas." Upon this astonishing passage and the lines which follow it down to 1. 811, Mr. Kingsford observes (p. 111), that " the writer took a large view as to those who were entitled to have a voice in the administration of the country ; such a view, in short, as it was natural for a supporter of Earl Simon to hold." He might have added that it is a view larger than that to be gathered from any of the contemporary writers on kingship whom he quotes in his appendix, not excepting the great Bracton himself. The Dominican William Perault makes the nearest approach to the elective principle in the passage (cited by Mr. Kingsford) suggesting the counsellors who should be provided for Princes; but he does not suggest how they are to be secured, nor does he hint that the advice of the Commons should be taken as of right. Mr. Kingsford, however, has made up his mind that Braxton and the poet are at one in the main points of their theories of kingship and the common weal. That they both derived the kingly power from God, and that, in a sense, they put the Law above the King, is clear, and under the circumstances natural.

But what does Mr. Kingsford make of the passage beginning (1. 847) :-

" Premio preferimus uniuersitatem ;

Legem quoque dicimus regis dignitatem Regere, nam credimus ease legem lucem, Sine qua concludimus deuiare ducem " ?

Apparently be makes nothing of it, for not only does he leave it out in his analysis, which goes on smoothly enough to 1.846, and begins again (a fresh paragraph) with 1. 848, but he has

no note upon it either. The truth is, that any note upon 1.847 would have necessitated some modification of that upon 11. 848-90, wherein he says : " The writer now turns to develope his theory of the true relation of the King to the Law, and the consideration of this question occupies over forty lines (848.90) the whole theory, as set forth in these passages, is one that is found in many mediaeval writers, and is based upon the omnipotence of God and the derivation of all human power from him." So it is ; but why leave out the first clause of the sentence ?

That clause, so far as we are aware (and so far as Mr. Kingsford shows), is to be found in no other " mediwval writer," certainly not in Bracton. It is based upon the "omnipotence of God," no doubt ; but the recognition of the omnipotence of God is to be found in St. Francis as well as in Bracton ; and with St. Francis and his followers it implied the equality of men in God's sight, while with Bracton it implied nothing of the sort. The fact is—the point is really worth

attention—that the principles enunciated in The Song of Lewes from 1. 701 to the end go a clear step beyond Bracton

or any jurist of the time. Let the candid student consider the following passages :—

" Let every King understand that he is the servant of God

and let him seek His glory in ruling, not his own pride by despising his equals (701-4) Again, let him know that the people is not his own but God's, and let him be profitable to it as a help. And he who is for a short time set over the people, is soon closed in marble and laid beneath the earth. Let him make himself as one of them ; let him regard David dancing with his handmaids (709-14) Therefore let the commonalty of the realm take counsel, and let it be known (sciatur) what is the opinion of the community to whom their own laws are best known ; nor are all the men of the province such fools as not to know better than others the customs of their own realm, which those who are before bequeathed to those who come after (765-70) From this it can be gathered that the kind of men who ought rightly to be chosen for the service of the Kingdom, touches the commonalty (777-79) If therefore the King has not the knowledge to choose by himself men who know how to counsel him, it is hence clear what ought then to be done (803-5) We give the first place to the community ; we say also that the law rules the dignity of the King; for we believe that law is a light without which we infer that the guide goes astray (847-50) And let the King prefer nothing of his own to the common-weal, as though the safety of all gave way to him who is but one (893-94). The King shall keep the natives in their rank, and by this management shall rejoice in ruling. But if he have sought to degrade his own men, have overturned their rank, it is in vain that he will ask why when so deranged they do not obey him ; nay, they would be mad if they were to do so" (963-68).

The italics and translation are our own, but the latter differs from Mr. Kingsford's only in the rendering of " communitas " and "uninersitas," and in a return to the conventional and (in mediaaval Latin) invariable meaning of " sciatur." If,

then, he can reconcile these sentiments (which form the gist of the last 265 lines of the poem) with any passages in Braxton, quoted or not quoted in the notes or appendix,

we shall be curious to know by what gymnastic process it is accomplished. Even the interpolated passage in I.,

269 (Rolls Series), only goes to say that, after God, the Law is the King's superior, that the Earls and Barons are "quasi

socii Regis," and that he who has an associate has, in a sense,

a master : " Et ideo si Rex fnerit sine frwno—i.e., sine lege, debent ei frzenum ponere." But, as Mr. Maitland explicitly

proves, this is directly contradicted by other unquestionable statements of Bracton's (Note-Book, i., 31); and the furthest point the great judge can be allowed to have reached is where he says that the King ought, upon petition, to make atone- ment, and that, if he does not, he may expect the ven- geance of God : " Nisi it qui dicat quod uninersitas regni et baronagium suum hoc facere debeat et possit in curia ipsius Regis" (Note-Book, i., 31-2). St. Thomas Aquinas went further than Bracton; Walleys and Alexander of Hales went perhaps further yet. But St. Thomas was a friar, and so were Walleye and Alexander; and therein, after all, lies the simple explanation of the ultra-democratic tone of The Song , of Lewes. The poem is unscientific and visionary; there is the manner of the Schoolmen in it, but the spirit is the Mendicants'. According to these enthusiasts who paved the way for Lewes, and whose faith was the faith of Assisi, the Law was above the King, the Community (uniuersitas) was above both. The " colour " of the poem from beginning to end, its real eloquence and frequent felicity of expression, its Scriptural phraseology and citation, its lofty tone and fervent cultus of the popular hero, form a two-edged argument whereby, on the one hand, we can guess its authorship, and, on the other. measure its sincerity and gauge its effect.

That we may part on good terms with Mr. Kingsford, we may say, in conclusion, that a somewhat diligent perusal of his book has only revealed one misprint ; and that, with the exception of the three words we have noticed, there is no fault to find with a truly spirited translation.