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pothesis that it was written by Dr. Latham. | Semitic and Oriental writings; but there is

It was said, and it might well have been true, that the reviewer was a learned and accomplished man. Nothing more likely yet a child of seven, with the sensibility which he lacked, would not have fallen into his error, or any error of a similar kind. To take another illustration. There are millions of people, including men of great learning and piety, who seem absolutely blind to the difference between the Christ of the Latin imagination and the child-like Christ of the Teutonic imagination. But to return to Love and the Talinud. Every one will remember the exultation (surprising to those who are familiar with their Apocrypha as well as with their Bible) with which certain Talmudic deliverances about women were received when the article of M. Deutsch appeared in the Quarterly Review. "What becomes now of the Teutonic origin of the household virtues?" asked an able pen in the Pall Mall Gazette. Whoever has said that the household virtues were of Teutonic origin has talked nonsense. But the question as to Love, between the Western spirit and the Oriental or Semitic spirit, has nothing to do, one way or the other, with the household virtues. Let us try and see what really it is.

no room in the Semitic or Oriental spirit (even though it were shown that chivalry itself came from the Arabs) for love of the highest type known to the Western mind.

In the first place, reading writers like Tieck and Fouqué, we become conscious of a peculiar and inscrutable, but deeply fascinating, purity of atmosphere. A purity which is so child-like that it permits free reference to topics which to the Latin or Celtic intelligence are inclosed in company with topics relating to the accidents of nutrition- a never-failing sign of the non-Teutonic spirit. There are love passages in Tieck and in Fouqué which could not be read aloud in a mixed circle in England; there are two sentences in "Undine " (the last of Chapter VII. and the second of Chapter VIII.) which are omitted in some of the English translations. But can anything be more childlike-pure, or more near to heaven? And yet it is utterly foreign to the Eastern or Semitic spirit. That spirit always finds the woman an inferior and unclean nature. She is subjected. She is the temptress. She has to be "purified." Among the Hebrews the mother of a girl had to undergo a quarantine of twice the length appointed to the mother of a boy— (Levit. xii. 5, and Rev. xiv. 4).

And,

Many of our readers probably know Miss Dora Greenwell as the author of some ten-whatever modifications this way of looking der poetry and some thoughtful prose. at women undergoes, it is never (we speak She is a perfectly orthodox writer, as any- advisedly) wholly absent from Oriental or body who has read her "Two Friends" Semitic writings. The Teutonic way of must be aware. She has also written a set thinking of a woman is just the reverse, of poems of the sonnet type, entitled "Li- thus far. ber Veritatis." There is a series of tenderly passionate love-poems, not on a level with Mrs. Browning's Portuguese sonnets either in the passion or the poetry, but quite real and true. Their author must know something of what love really is. Now, in the little book called "Two Friends "— which, as we have stated, is strictly orthodox - Dora Greenwell boldly says that Love is not to be found at all in the New Testament (p. 171, second edition). "The silence of the New Testament is a wonderful thing." Not at all wonderful, say we, for Love is utterly alien to the Oriental or Semitic spirit. The curious thing is that Miss Greenwell does not go on to remark that Love is also wholly wanting in the Old Testament. And the reason is the same. Love, considered as passion, or the desire is essential to that spirit, and is never abto possess something beautiful; love, as household friendship, with special regard shown to the weaker by the stronger; and love, as mere appetite (appetite, we say, as distinguished from passion), you find in

Nor does the difference end here. The characteristic points in the Teutonic or Scandinavian ideal are two. First, the balance between the sexes is restored by the fact that the woman is held to be the power by which the spiritual impregnation of the man is effected; so that love is not only a liberal education, but, in the high sense, a conversion, and the creation of a moral or spiritual unity out of two in a way which places the woman on a throne peculiarly hers. Secondly, the woman is never possessed, and never patronized. "What is thy petition, Queen Esther, and what is thy request, and it shall be done to thee, even to the half of my kingdom." That is the Eastern or Semitic spirit. Above all, absolute possession in the sense of mastery

sent from it. But what a difference when we come to Scandinavian legends, even of the rudest times! When King Gunther has married Brunhilda, he is not a whit nearer. Cette fière beauté," as a French

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friendship on the one hand, and from the Coleridge.-Love, as distinguished from sion that too often usurps its name, on the other

"Lucius (Eliza's brother, who had just joined the trio, in a whisper to Coleridge).

around the subject, and there is a luminous | ridge exposes this fallacy in a curious piece haze of superstition about love overhanging called The Improvisatore," which is inall the literature of imagination. It is true you cluded among his poems: now and then come across an essay in which the subject of falling in love is discussed as if it came as much within the calculable province of life as buying a hat, and you are told to be sure and do it wisely, because - because of reasons which might find a place in Poor Richard's Almanac." "Last night," said a half-mad poet and painter, "I came unexpectedly upon a fairy's funeral" and he proceeded to describe the ceremony as only a poet and a painter could. What wonderfully good advice might be given in an essay on Seeing Fairies' Funerals! Be sure you never see a fairy's funeral, unless, &c., &c.

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There is no thoroughly sincere person, with a grain of spiritual sensibility, who does not, in his heart, rebel when Poor Richard takes upon himself to preach about love matters. What the troubadours called amour-pour-amour, love for love's own sake, is what every human creature with a soul above buttons goes in for. And we feel a subtle pang of disapprobation when anything in the round heaven or in the living air is put before love, or turned into a cause or a justification of it. There is a legend of a distinguished preacher's courtship, which relates how he went down into the kitchen, and, addressing his maid-servant, said, "Betty, do you love the Lord Jesus Christ? "Yes, sir," said Betty. And, Betty," resumed the good man," do you love me?" Similar in spirit is that letter of Governor Winthrop's wife to her husband in which she tells him she loves him for two reasons

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First, because thou lovest God; and, secondly, because thou lovest me." The dullest feels that here there is a play upon words; and there is. Far better was Rowland Hill's courtship. "In the first place," he wrote to the lady, "I think I can say before God that I love your person. Without this, such a union could never be happy." The quotation is from memory, but it is substantially correct, and we feel in a moment that Rowland Hill was straightforward and true, while the Puritan lady, pressed upon by the etiquette of the current talk of her set, and not able to disentangle herself from a fallacy, was untrue to nature and to herself. This was nothing remarkable; most people are untrue to nature and to themselves.

The most plausible and the most common of the fallacies about Love is that which supposes it is the Friendship that Laura sought, with something added to it, instead of being, as it is, a thing sui generis. Cole

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But is not love the union of both?

Coleridge (aside to Lucius).— He never loved who thinks so."

And then follows Coleridge's own account of love, of which it can only be said, that if he had written it when he was younger, it would probably have been as perfect in form and expression as it is inclusive in what we might call the categories of love:

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"Katherine.-I too seem to feel what you mean. Interpret the feeling for us.

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Coleridge.—I mean that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the supplement and completion of its own,- that quiet, perpetual seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends, where the heart momently finds, and finding, again seeks on;-lastly, when life's changeful orb has passed the full,' thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity,

the very bosom of hourly experience."
When you have read this, you feel that it is
correct, and even affecting. But yet -

"What wants that knave

That a king should have?" something is wanted, and in that something everything!

The recent discussions about the Talmud have disclosed a depth of benightedness in society, even among men whom you might expect to know better, that is extremely irritating, if not surprising. Surprising, indeed, it is not; for it is only the old difference between seeing and not seeing which everlastingly divides men and women. the talent is nothing, and all the culture is nothing; do you see? is the question. To descend to a trivial illustration. viewer, not very long ago, attacked a preface written by Dr. Johnson, upon the hy

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no room in the Semitic or Oriental spirit (even though it were shown that chivalry itself came from the Arabs) for love of the highest type known to the Western mind.

pothesis that it was written by Dr. Latham. | Semitic and Oriental writings; but there is It was said, and it might well have been true, that the reviewer was a learned and accomplished man. Nothing more likely; yet a child of seven, with the sensibility which he lacked, would not have fallen into his error, or any error of a similar kind. To take another illustration. There are millions of people, including men of great learning and piety, who seem absolutely blind to the difference between the Christ of the Latin imagination and the child-like Christ of the Teutonic imagination. But to return to Love and the Talinud. Every one will remember the exultation (surprising to those who are familiar with their Apocrypha as well as with their Bible) with which certain Talmudic deliverances about women were received when the article of M. Deutsch appeared in the Quarterly Review. "What becomes now of the Teutonic origin of the household virtues ?" asked an able pen in the Pall Mall Gazette. Whoever has said that the household virtues were of Teutonic origin has talked nonsense. But the question as to Love, between the Western spirit and the Oriental or Semitic spirit, has nothing to do, one way or the other, with the household virtues. Let us try and see what really it is.

And,

In the first place, reading writers like Tieck and Fouqué, we become conscious of a peculiar and inscrutable, but deeply fascinating, purity of atmosphere. A purity which is so child-like that it permits free reference to topics which to the Latin or Celtic intelligence are inclosed in company with topics relating to the accidents of nutrition- -a never-failing sign of the non-Teutonic spirit. There are love passages in Tieck and in Fouqué which could not be read aloud in a mixed circle in England; there are two sentences in "Undine" (the last of Chapter VII. and the second of Chapter VIII.) which are omitted in some of the English translations. But can anything be more childlike-pure, or more near to heaven? And yet it is utterly foreign to the Eastern or Semitic spirit. That spirit always finds the woman an inferior and unclean nature. She is subjected. She is the temptress. She has to be "purified." Among the Hebrews the mother of a girl had to undergo a quarantine of twice the length appointed to the mother of a boyMany of our readers probably know Miss (Levit. xii. 5, and Rev. xiv. 4). Dora Greenwell as the author of some ten-whatever modifications this way of looking der poetry and some thoughtful prose. at women undergoes, it is never (we speak She is a perfectly orthodox writer, as any- advisedly) wholly absent from Oriental or body who has read her Two Friends" Semitic writings. The Teutonic way of must be aware. She has also written a set thinking of a woman is just the reverse, of poems of the sonnet type, entitled "Li- thus far. ber Veritatis." There is a series of tenderly passionate love-poems, not on a level with Mrs. Browning's Portuguese sonnets either in the passion or the poetry, but quite real and true. Their author must know something of what love really is. Now, in the little book called "Two Friends "- which, as we have stated, is strictly orthodox-Dora Greenwell boldly says that Love is not to be found at all in the New Testament (p. 171, second edition). "The silence of the New Testament is a wonderful thing." Not at all wonderful, say we, for Love is utterly alien to the Oriental or Semitic spirit. The curious thing is that Miss Greenwell does not go on to remark that Love is also wholly wanting in the Old Testament. And the reason is the same. Love, considered as passion, or the desire to possess something beautiful; love, as household friendship, with special regard shown to the weaker by the stronger; and love, as mere appetite (appetite, we say, as distinguished from passion), you find in

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Nor does the difference end here. The

characteristic points in the Teutonic or Scandinavian ideal are two. First, the balance between the sexes is restored by the fact that the woman is held to be the power by which the spiritual impregnation of the man is effected; so that love is not only a liberal education, but, in the high sense, a conversion, and the creation of a moral or spiritual unity out of two in a way which places the woman on a throne peculiarly hers. Secondly, the woman is never possessed, and never patronized. "What is thy petition, Queen Esther, and what is thy request, and it shall be done to thee, even to the half of my kingdom." That is the Eastern or Semitic spirit. Above all, absolute possession in the sense of mastery is essential to that spirit, and is never absent from it. But what a difference when we come to Scandinavian legends, even of the rudest times! When King Gunther has married Brunhilda, he is not a whit nearer. "Cette fière beauté," as a French

"When I thought her love to gain, she bound

me as her thrall,

Unto a nail she bore me, and hung me on the

wall."

And it is only by magic that King Gunther finally conquers and makes his bride yield up her girdle. These two points - the woman is never to be possessed

"She's not and never can be mine'

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man ludicrously calls her (missing the point, | to place it alongside of the makeshifts and like a true Celt), teaches King Gunther a the counterfeits which pass for it in life or lesson: in fiction. The novelists, as a rule, seeni to have lost all power of painting, or even hinting what it is! Charlotte Brontë knew something about it. So does Mr. Charles Kingsley. So does George Eliot. So does Mrs. Oliphant. And there are others. But both in life and in fiction we usually get presented to us for love, mere longing thing which brings no sense of obligation in itself, and is therefore shoved aside for the most degrading reasons. If love be all and that she is in herself" (not as conse-of it, there is assuredly no reason whatever that novelists and moralists in general make crated, but in herself) pure and divine, why the contemptible things which are aland the source of moral impregnation to lowed to interfere with it should not do so. the man, are of the essence of the Teutonic It is, in fact, not worth making novels about; or true Western idea of love. By making certainly not worth making poems about. a moral unit of two beings, this involves not But it is sufficiently plain that the human only monogamy, but (as an ideal) perpet- heart has an ineradicable suspicion or preual monogamy. It involves, also, the high-sentiment of something better than what it est type of self-sacrifice. the finest illustration of its action in this respect being to be found in the legend of Helmfrid, told in Fouqué's "Thiodolf the Icelander":

"If yours you seek, not her delight, Surely a dragon and strong tower Guard the true lady in her bower."

thing better-more than the strongest deis so frequently put off with. That somesire, more than the strongest attachment, and more than the most perfect household virtue may be a flower that blooms only once in a hundred years; but is the time come to disbelieve that it ever does bloom?

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And it also involves heroism, of whatever Or to pretend that you can pick it up in the

kind, in the man:

"You love? That's high as you shall go;
For 'tis as true as Gospel text,
Not noble then is never so,

Neither in this world nor the next."

Mr. Tennyson has not shown the deepest possible sense of what love is, but here he is (as he would not fail to be) at one with the highest idea of it, for he makes King Arthur say:

"I know

Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words,
And....
love of truth, and all that makes a
man."

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This is not quite satisfactory, and the words we have omitted, "courtliness and the desire of fame," are least satisfactory of all. If there is anything to make a man careless of fame," it is surely love. It is the one thing which discloses, for once and for ever, that which is real and good, and confers the turquoise that changes colour when a lie is in the atmosphere. Now, fame is the paltriest of cheats and the worst of lies.

It is worth while, in these confused and confusing days, to recall the highest meaning of the word love; nor is it unnecessary

streets, or find it by merely looking for it, or grow it like mustard and cress? Or to deny that it is the flower which to have gathered and worn is (not to put the case too high) as much as to have made a lot of money or invented a new pill?

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heard his mistress describe the upper, mid-
There was once a footman who, having
dle, and lower classes as china, delf, and
crockery, and being then told to bid the
nursemaid bring down young master for a
visitor to see, called out to her, Hollo,
Crockery, bring down little Chaney!"
The irony was not bad, but we cannot
allow crockery love to flout the love which
is porcelain; much less the love which is
opal. All the loves are affiliated; but it is
no more true that, just because we are all
human, Zeke Hickorybole's love was like
the love of Pericles, than it is true that the
poor beetle that we tread upon in corporal
sufferance feels a pang as great as when a
giant dies. One evening Zeke was found
to have chalked on his bed's head this sim-
ple rhyme:

"My love, she is my heart's delight,
Her name it is Miss Betsy;
I'll go and see her this very night,
If Heaven and mother 'll let me."

The next day it was discovered that Zeke
had chalked up another verse: —

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wal, I did,

"I loved Miss Betsy
And I went there to tell her;
But, like to goose-grease, quick I slid,

For she'd got another feller.”

We know an elevated character who, being devoted to what he calls "grand, broad, human views," maintains that the sentiments of Zeke Hickorybole and those of the celebrated Dante Alighieri, who also wrote a poem and missed winning his heart's delight, were identical. But they differed, as shandygaff and champagne differ. Nay, as shandygaff and ambrosia differ. If Dante Alighieri had happened to catch Zeke cuddling Betsy, and Zeke had said, Am I not a man and a brother?" Dante would have allowed the plea. But he would never have introduced Zeke into the polite society of the Paradiso. And as for Poor Richard's idea of love, there is reason to fear, from the expression of Dante's face as shown in the familiar portrait, that he would have kicked Poor Richard after perusing his essay upon the subject.

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Coleridge; "The Mermaid," where Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and Beaumont were wont to meet; Dolly's Chop House," the resort of Goldsmith and his friends; "Will's," where Dryden long occupied the seat of honour. And again what historical hints these same signs supply. In them we find traces of the Crusader and the Saracen, of the kings of the Tudor and Brunswick lines, of the monks and priests of a different period, and many reminiscences of manners and customs long passed, away :

the old "Queen's Head," and to quaff ale trom Charles Lamb delighted to smoke his pipe at the tankard presented by one Master Cranch (a choice spirit) to a former host, and in the old oak-parlour where tradition says "the gallant Raleigh received full souse in his face the contents of a jolly black-jack from an affrighted clown, who, seeing clouds of tobacco smoke curl. ing from the knight's mouth and nose, thought he was all on fire."

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"A relic of old London is fast disappearing," says a journal of that city-"the Blue Boar Inn,' or the George and Blue Boar' as it came to be called later, in Holborn. For more than two hundred years this was one of the famous coaching-houses, where stages arrived from the Northern and Midland counties. It is more famous still as being the place if Lord Orrery's chaplain, Morrice, may be credited-where Cromwell and Ireton, disguised as troopers, cut from the saddle-flap of a messenger a letter which they knew to be there, from Charles the First to

Henrietta Maria."

The "Peacock," at Matlock-on-the-Derwent, was long the chosen resort of artists, botanists, geologists, lawyers, and anglers; and perhaps at no rural English inn of modern times has there been more varied and gifted society than occasionally convened in this romantic district, under its roof.

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THE volume with this somewhat eccentric title contains a selection from the writings of Mr. Tuckerman, an American Essayist. Dr. Doran has written a pleasant and learned introduction, and has taken the opportunity of illustrating the papers of his friend by many a note and comment. The subjects treated are not confined to America, but are world-wide in their application. Here are Essays on Inns, Authors, Pictures, Doctors, The Hotel Gibbon," at Lausanne, suggests Lawyers, Actors, Newspapers, Preachers, to one familiar with English literature the life of and many other men and things, all written that historian, so naively described by himself, with a freedom from affectation and in a gos-work in the scene of its production; and nightly and keeps alive the associations of his elaborate siping, pleasant manner, which never fails to fascinate. Mr. Tuckerman is especially free from the besetting vice of many American writers, who too frequently bolster up their style by the continual use of a bombastic and grandiloquent phraseology.

The first Essay of the volume is devoted to "Inns," and this, supplemented by Dr. Doran's historical account of the ancient taverns and alehouses of London, forms an interesting and readable paper. Mr. Tuckerman reminds us how many classic names the old tavern signs frequently recall. The "Black Bull" at Islington, once the mansion of Sir Walter Raleigh; the Salutation and Cat" at Smithfield, the scene of many an animated discussion between Lamb and

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colloquies, that are embalmed and embodied in genial literature, immortalise the " sky-blue parlour" at Ambrose's "Edinburgh Tavern."

Probably no inn has afforded so much mirth and fun to all as the "Boar's Head," Eastcheap, with fat Jack Falstaff and buxom Mrs. Quickly, the rubicund Bardolph, the witty Poins, and the careless, dissolute Prince Henry as its visitors. Dr. Doran informs us that a certain Will Leedes kept the "Boar's Head" in 1633, according to a list of the city taverns furnished by the temperance party of that time. Here 66 Will Leedes may have seen Shakespeare, who had not then been dead a score of years; and we may fancy mine host's guests dis

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