will be trying, will be in many ways mischievous; but many prejudices will be shaken by it; the limits of Church power and its grounds will be put to open debate in quarters hitherto inaccessible to the faintest spark of troublesome inquiry; and truth and justice must gain in the end by it all. or less The Belgian independence is thus celebrated under a more portentous shadow. By a curious coincidence, the country is called to contend for the independence of its civil power at the moment it had set apart for commemorating its national independence. The bishops have refused to take the part in that commemoration which was originally assigned to them. But the people's thanksgivings will be as sincere and as acceptable as if they were pronounced by anointed lips; and perhaps, when they think of it, they have few more real causes of thanksgiving to record than that they have been condemned from the first to a long and constant fight for their liberties against the Catholic Church. It has been said that he only is a freeman who daily conquers his freedom for himself. conflict with Rome has made free men of the Belgians. It has filled them with the spirit and the instincts of free men in a measure which is hardly anywhere else exhibited except among the Anglo-Saxon race. The cloud which has long hung over Belgium may have broken at an unseasonable hour, but it will not find the country unprepared for it. The present act of the drama may not be its last, but none in the future can be so decisive. If Rome is defeated with the resources it has now called into the field, it cannot hope to succeed better by any subsequent movement; and if the Belgian Government holds its own against its present odds, it will have settled for itself and other Catholic nations the problem of the fate of modern constitutional liberties in Catholic countries. JOHN RAE. VOL. XXXVIII. א CONTEMPORARY MEN OF LETTERS ON THEIR PREDECESSORS. Burke. By JOHN MORLEY. Bunyan. By J. A. FROUDE. THE HE word publisher may be made to cover a considerable number of very respectable ideals, none of them wanting in either use or ornament; and the word literature is still wider. But, taking both words in their easiest and least disputable sense, it is safe to say that no publishers have in our own time been doing more for literature than Messrs. Macmillan & Co.-none have shown more enterprise of the steady-going, defined order, aiming at objects large and easily apprehended, and hitting them well. Two of these have not been without hazard, of the literary kind. Many difficulties, indeed, waited upon the attempt to carry through the series of Science and Literature Primers, and the series of English Men of Letters. In the former series there is some confusion of purpose, or perhaps we should rather say of workmanship. Several of the little books are written "down to" very young readers; while still more are over the heads of all but wellread and thoughtful men and women. A manual, said Clough, in the preface to his "Plutarch," is not for beginners, but for those who already know the subject of it—a true saying, which is too often forgotten, and which contains the key to a thousand failures. Mr. Stopford Brooke's "Primer of English Literature" is anything but a failure, but to call it a primer in the sense in which Mr. Lockyer's "Astronomy" is one, would be pleasantry: it is a summary, full of concentrated criticism. In every work of this kind it is necessary, or is supposed to be necessary, to employ experts of the first class, and of course these will differ very widely in their ways both of conceiving and executing their tasks. We have used the alternative supposed to be necessary," because it might well be maintained that in all books of the "primer" class, the working pen should be one genially and broadly familiar with the subject rather than that of an expert proper; while for the latter there would still remain a work to be done that, namely, of correcting details, and pointing out blanks. Of course this plan would have difficulties, but so has any plan. We observe that one of the critics of the "English Men of Letters" observes that " Mr. Leslie Stephen's 'Johnson' will convey to its readers a better idea of Johnson than either of Mr. Macaulay's two essays"—or than both of them together, we presume. But that is not so-clearly not. Mr. Leslie Stephen's lively, acute, and almost exhaustive little study will convey to the reader twenty times as much information as Macaulay's essays, but assuredly not a better idea of Johnson. If Goldsmith were living he would write a better primer of English history than Mr. Freeman, though the latter might sorely mangle the little Irishman's details. It is true that Macaulay was an expert, but he wrote before the new regimen set in, and his standards and methods were different from those which have recently been in the ascendant. Glancing at a few of the " English Men of Letters," we are confronted at least with a splendid list of names. We have before us Milton, Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, Bunyan, Johnson, Pope, Hume, and Cowper. This furnishes a wide range for all the purposes of criticism, and merely placing the names in a certain order is suggestive: thusMilton, Scott: Bunyan, Hume: Johnson, Defoe: Cowper, Pope: Burke, Shelley. The list of the living writers who have treated the topics supplied by these great names is as brilliant as it could well be. We have Mr. Froude, Mr. Hutton, Mr. Huxley, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Mark Pattison, Mr. Goldwin Smith, Mr. Leslie Stephen, and Mr. J. A. Symonds. Two of the gentlemen who have engaged in this pleasant labour are historians; two or three have shown marked historical aptitude; one is a very distinguished naturalist, who has devoted much attention to metaphysics, whether he likes likes that word or not; one is a student of Art and cognate matters, who has written fine verse, some of which narrowly escapes-and that chiefly by lack of spontaneity-the name of poetry; while another is a psychological critic of marked individuality, and strong religious faith which he never conceals, or rather which he openly "works into "his criticisms. All of them are highly cultivated men, with some sort of prestige about them. It cannot be said that either of them obtrudes his special beliefs or opinions: Mr. John Morley on "Burke" is the most decided and unmistakable in the self-disclosure of ultimate assumptions. But nobody can complain of having his own beliefs attacked-if we except some passages in Mr. Huxley's "Hume;" and that was a case in which everybody knew what to expect. A writer who was capable of taking up the attitude of Buridan's ass would not be worthy of attention; and, indeed, no skilled reader would find any difficulty in arriving at the elements of the personal religiousbeliefs of Mr. Hutton from his criticism of Sir Walter Scott, or at Mr. John Morley's estimate of human relations to the unknown from his thoughtful and closely-studied "Burke." It would not, however, be very easy to determine from Mr. Goldwin Smith's "Cowper," or Mr. Froude's "Bunyan," the last religious opinions of the authors— the documents which are in evidence are not sufficient. No doubt catholicity was the mot d'ordre of the undertaking, even though it were only whispered: the confidence of the accomplished editor in his contributors being absolute. Thus, we are of course not to expect to hear any given keynote of opinion upon ultimate questions maintained in this series. Indeed, the first thing that strikes us is the variety which underlies the literary tolerance. One or two of the passages bearing upon the most vital of all topics are in themselves so good, so striking in their candour and suggestiveness, or otherwise so noteworthy, that they well deserve the respectful isolation which comes of being quoted, and set in some kind of vein of comment. It will not surprise any one who knows Mr. Goldwin Smith to see the very easy and luminous mastery with which he sketches the main characteristics and results of the Evangelical, and especially the WesleyanEvangelical movement of the eighteenth century. A little more fluency and warmth a little more poetic responsiveness-a little more respect for Cowper both as a man and a poet, would have been welcome; not to say that the lack of them is sorely felt by a tender-hearted reader-any malicious person may, of course, substitute tender-headed here. But in spite of its intelligence and candour, the "line of beauty and grace” is not to be traced in Mr. Smith's treatment of Cowper, and the reader sighs in vain "Blow over all the garden, blow, Thou wind that breathest of the south !" For the air of this writing is a nipping and an eager air. Yet, as we have said, the sentences now to be quoted are admirable, both in the distinction they draw and in the general outcome: "It is needless to enter into a minute description of Evangelicism and Methodism, they are not things of the past. If Evangelicism has now been reduced to a narrow domain by the advancing forces of Ritualism on one side, and of Rationalism on the other, Methodism is still the great Protestant Church, especially beyond the Atlantic. The spiritual fire which they have kindled, the character which they have produced, the moral reforms which they have wrought, the works of charity and philanthropy to which they have given birth, are matters not only of recent memory, but of present experience. Like the great Protestant revivals, which had preceded them in England, like the Moravian revival on the Continent, to which they are closely related, they sought to bring the soul into direct communion with its Maker, rejecting the intervention of a priesthood or a sacramental system. Unlike the previous revivals in England, they warred not against the rulers of the Church or State, but only against vice or irreligion. Consequently, in the characters which they produced, as compared with those produced by Wycliffism, by the Reformation, and notably by Puritanism, there was less of force and the grandeur connected with it, more of gentleness, mysticism, and religious love. Even Quietism, or something like it, prevailed, especially among the Evangelicals who were not, like the Methodists, engaged in framing a new organization, or in wrestling with the barbarous vices of the lower orders. No movement of the kind has ever yet been exempt from drawbacks and follies, from extravagance, exaggeration, breaches of good taste in religious matters, unctuousness, and cant-from chimerical attempts to get rid of the flesh and live an angelic life on earth-from delusions about special providences and miracles-from a tendency to overvalue doctrine and undervalue duty-from arrogant assumption of spiritual authority by leaders and preachers from the self-righteousness which fancies itself the object of a divine election, and looks out with a sort of religious complacency from the Ark of Salvation in which it fancies itself securely placed upon the drowning of an unregenerate world. Still it will hardly be doubted that in the effects produced by Evangelicism and Methodism, the good has outweighed the evil. Had Jansenism prospered as well, France might have had more of reform and less of revolution. The poet of the movement will not be condemned on account of his connection with it, any more than Milton is condemned on account of his connection with Puritanism, provided it be found that he also served art well." One may not be quite certain of seeing the force of the remark that "Quietism, or something like it," tended to prevail among those Evangelicals who were not, like the Methodists, engaged in actual war with vice or irreligion. We cannot trace any such line of distinction, if it is supposed to be carried any farther than the obvious remark that John Woolman, Thomas à Kempis, or Madame de Guyon would hardly be the manual for a Whitfieldite field-preacher or a Wesleyan class-leader. Many aggressive persons, from Milton downwards to very active reformers in later times, have shown a tendency to Quietism, or something like it; and without any greater theoretic inconsistency than is common to human beings, if any at all. Passing this by, however, for the present, it must be said that Mr. Goldwin Smith has made a valuable criticism in noticing the difference-one being political and the other nonpolitical-between the great Puritan movement of the seventeenth century and the great Evangelical movement of the eighteenth. But to this we may add the remarkable extension that the Nonconformists, who more nearly represent Puritanism than any living body, have been and still are the backbone of political freedom in England. The rationale of the whole story is almost too obvious to be argued about; but the fundamental thought of it receives yet another turn in the concluding passage of Mr. Goldwin Smith's very complete essay. This passage we cannot omit: "Cowper belongs to a particular religious movement, with the vitality of which the interest of a great part of his works has departed or is departing. Still more emphatically, and in a still more important sense, does he belong to Christianity. In no natural struggle for existence would he have been the survivor, by no |