out spirit. Imperialism, if it could see itself, is in fact a world of Sanchos, and it would not be the less so if every Sancho of the number were master of the whole of physical science and used it to cook his food. Of the two court-poets of Cæsar's successor, one makes Cato preside over the spirits of the good in the Elysian fields, while the other speaks with respect, at all events, of the soul which remained unconquered in a conquered world,-"Et cuncta terrarum subacta præter atrocem animum Catonis." Paterculus, an officer of Tiberius and a thorough Cæsarian, calls Cato a man of ideal virtue ("homo virtuti simillimus"), who did right not for appearance sake, but because it was not in his nature to do wrong. When the victor is thus overawed by the shade of the vanquished, the vanquished could hardly have been a "fool." Contemporaries may be mistaken as to the merits of a character, but they cannot well be mistaken as to the space which it occupied in their own eyes. Sallust, the partisan of Marius and Cæsar, who had so much reason to hate the senatorial party, speaks of Cæsar and Cato as the two mightiest opposites of his time, and in an elaborate parallel ascribes to Cæsar the qualities which secure the success of the adventurer; to Cato those which make up the character of the patriot. It is a mistake to regard Cato the younger as merely an unseasonable repetition of Cato the elder. His inspiration came not from a Roman form, but from a Greek school of philosophy, and from that school which, with all its errors and absurdities, and in spite of the hypocrisy of many of its professors, really aimed highest in the formation of character; and the practical teachings and aspirations of which, embodied in the reflections of Marcus Aurelius, it is impossible to study without profound respect for the force of moral conception and the depth of moral insight which they sometimes display. Cato went to Greece to sit at the feet of a Greek teacher in a spirit very different from the national pride of his ancestor. It is this which makes his character interesting, that it was an attempt at all events to grasp and hold fast by the high rule of life, in an age when the whole moral world was sinking into a vortex of scoundrelism, and faith in morality, public or private, had been lost. Of course the character is formal, and in some respects even grotesque. But you may trace formalism, if you look close enough, in every life led by a rule; in everything between the purest spiritual impulse on the one side, and abandoned sensuality on the other. Attempts to revive old Roman simplicity of dress and habit in the age of Lucullus were no doubt

futile enough: but after all, this is but the symbolical garb of the Hebrew prophet. We are in ancient Rome, not in the smokingroom of the House of Commons. We are among the countrymen, too, of Savonarola. The character, as painted by Plutarch, who seems to have drawn from the writings of contemporaries, is hard of course, but not cynical. Cato was devoted to his brother Cæpio, and when Cæpio died, forgot all his Stoicism in the passionate indulgence of his grief, and all his frugality in lavishing gold and perfumes on the funeral. Cæsar in Anti-Cato accused him of sifting the ashes for the gold, which, says Plutarch, is like charging Hercules with cowardice. Where the sensual appetites are repressed, what ever may be the theory of life, the affections are pretty sure to be strong, unless they are nipped by some such process as is undergone by a monk. Cato's resignation of his fruitful wife to a childless friend, revolting as it is to our sense, betokens less any brutality in him than the coarseness of the conjugal relations at Rome. Evidently the man had the power of touching the hearts of others. His soldiers, though he gave them no largesses and indulged them in no license, when he leaves them, strew their garments under his feet. His friends at Utica linger, at the peril of their lives, to give him a sumptuous funeral. He affected conviviality, like Socrates. He seems to have been able to enjoy a joke, too, at his own expense. He can laugh when Cicero ridicules his Stoicism in a speech; and when in a province he meets the inhabitants of a town turning out, and thinks at first that it is in his own honour, but soon finds that it is in honour of a much greater man, the confidential servant of Pompey, at first his dignity is outraged, but his anger soon gives place to amusement. That his public character was perfectly pure, no one seems to have doubted; and there is a kindliness in his dealings with the dependents of Rome, which shows that had he been an emperor he would have been such an emperor as Trajan,-a man whom he probably resembled, both in the goodness of his in tentions and in the limited powers of his mind. Impracticable, of course, in a certain sense he was; but his part was that of a reformer, and to compromise with the corruption against which he was contending, would have been to lose the only means of influence, which, having no military force and no party, he possessed, that of the perfect integrity of his character. He is said by Dr. Mommsen to have been incapable even of conceiving a policy. By policy I suspect is meant one of those brilliant schemes of ambition with which some literary men are

to have passed almost suddenly away, Though Shakspere had hardly reached forty, in one of his Sonnets which cannot have been written at a much later time than this, there are indications that he already felt the advance of premature age. And at this moment the outer world suddenly darkened around him. The brilliant circle of young nobles whose friendship he had shared was broken up in 1601 by the political storm which burst in a mad struggle of the Earl of Essex for power. Essex himself fell on the scaffold; his friend and Shakspere's idol, Southampton, passed a prisoner into the Tower; Herbert, Lord Pembroke, younger patron of the poet, was banished from the Court. While friends were thus falling and hopes fading without, Shakspere's own mind seems to have been going through a phase of bitter suffering and unrest. In spite of the ingenuity of commentators, it is difficult and even impossible to derive any knowledge of Shakspere's inner history from the Sonnets; "the strange imagery of passion which passes over the magic mirror," it has been finely said, "has no tangible evidence before or behind it." But its mere passing is itself an evidence of the restlessness and agony within. The change in the character of his dramas gives a surer indication of his change of mood. The fresh joyousness, the keen delight in life and in man, which breathes through Shakspere's early work disappears in comedies such as "Troilus" and Measure for Measure." Disappointment, disillusion, a new sense of the evil and foulness that underlies so much of human life, a loss of the old frank trust in its beauty and goodness, threw their gloom over these comedies. Failure seems everywhere. In "Julius Cæsar" the virtue of Brutus is foiled by its ignorance of and isolation from mankind; in Hamlet even penetrating intellect proves helpless for want of the capacity of action; the poison of Iago taints the love of Desdemona and the grandeur of Othello; Lear's mighty passion battles helplessly against the wind and the rain; a woman's weakness of frame dashes the cup of her triumph from the hand of Lady Macbeth; lust and self-indulgence blast the heroism of Antony; pride ruins the nobleness of Coriolanus.

But the very struggle and self-introspection that these dramas betray were to give a depth and grandeur to Shakspere's work such as it had never known before. The age was one in which man's temper and powers took a new range and energy. Sidney or Raleigh lived not one but a dozen lives at once; the daring of the adventurer, the philosophy of the scholar, the passion of the lover, the fanaticism of the saint,

towered into almost superhuman grandeur. Man became conscious of the immense resources that lay within him, conscious of boundless powers that seemed to mock the narrow world in which they moved. All through the age of the Renascence one feels the impress of the gigantic, this giant-like activity, this immense ambition and desire. The very bombast and extravagance of the times reveal cravings and impulses before which common speech breaks down. It is this grandeur of humanity that finds its poetic expression in the later work of Shakspere. As the poet penetrated deeper and deeper into the recesses of the soul, he saw how great and wondrous a thing was man. "What a piece of work is a man!" cries Hamlet; "how noble in reason; how infinite in faculties; in form, and moving, how express and admirable! in action, how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals!" It is the wonder of man that spreads before us as the poet pictures the wide speculation of Hamlet, the awful convulsion of a great nature in Othello, the terrible storm in the soul of Lear which blends with the very storm of the heavens themselves, the awful ambition that nerved a woman's hand to dabble itself with the blood of a murdered king, the reckless lust that "flung away a world for love." Amid the terror and awe of these great dramas we learn something of the vast forces of the age from which they sprang. The passion of Mary Stuart, the ruthlessness of Alva, the daring of Drake, the chivalry of Sidney, the range of thought and action in Raleigh or Elizabeth, come better home to us as we follow the mighty series of tragedies which began in "Hamlet" and ended in "Coriolanus."

Shakspere's last dramas, the three exquisite works in which he shows a soul at rest with itself, and with the world, "Cymbeline," "The Tempest," "Winter's Tale," were written in the midst of ease and competence, in a house at Stratford to which he withdrew a few years after the death of Elizabeth. In them we lose all relation with the world or the time and pass into a region of pure poetry. It is in this peaceful and gracious close that the life of Shakspere contrasts most vividly with that of his greatest contemporary. If the imaginative resources of the new England were seen in the creators of Hamlet and the Faerie Queen, its purely intellectual capacity, its vast command over the stores of human knowledge, the amazing sense of its own powers with which it dealt with them, were seen in the work of Francis Bacon.

History of the English People, Vol. ii.
Book vi., 1858.

of the old censure, and has abandoned some of the old arguments. It was reserved for Madame de Staël, who, in a youthful work upon the Passions, had commended suicide, to reconstruct this department of ethics, which had been somewhat disturbed at the Revolution, and she did so in a little treatise which is a model of calm, candid, and philosophic piety. Frankly abandoning the old theological notions that the deed was of the nature of murder, that it was the worst of crimes, and that it was always, or even generally, the offspring of cowardice; abandoning, too, all attempts to scare men by religious terrorism, she proceeded, not so much to meet in detail the isolated arguments of its defenders, as to sketch the ideal of a truly virtuous man, and to show how such a character would secure men against all temptation to suicide. . . . Sentiments of this kind have, through the influence of Christianity, thoroughly pervaded European society, and suicide, in modern times, is almost always found to have sprung either from absolute insanity, from diseases which, though not amounting to insanity, are yet sufficient to discolour our judgments, o from that last excess of sorrow, when resignation and hope are both extinct. Considering it in this light, I know few things more fitted to qualify the optimism we so often hear, than the fact that statistics show it to be rapidly increasing, and to be peculiarly characteristic of those nations which rank most high in intellectual development and in general civilization. In one or two countries, strong religious feeling has counteracted the tendency, but the comparison of town and country, of different countries, of different provinces of the same country, and of different periods of history, proves conclusively its reality.

History of European Morals, Vol. ii. Chap. iv.

GEORGE ELIOT,

is the nom de plume of Miss Marian C. Evans, and Mrs. Lewes, the widow of George Henry Lewes, born in the north of England about 1820. As a novelist she stands in the first rank.

Scenes of Clerical Life, Lond., 1858; Adam Bede, 1859; The Mill on the Floss, 1860; Silas Marner, 1861; Romola, 1863; Felix Holt, Radical, 1866; The Spanish Gipsy, a Poem, in Five Books, 1868, new edit., 1875, 12mo; Middlemarch, 1871-72; The Legend of Jubal, and other Poems, 1875, 12mo; Daniel Deronda, 1876; Novels, new editions, 1870, 7 vols. in 6, p. 8vo; Select Passages from George Eliot, Edin. and

Lond., 1879; Theophrastus Such, 1879. She translated Strauss's Life of Jesus, 1846. and Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity, 1853, and has contributed to the West. minster Review, etc.

"Romola is a marvellously able story of the revival of the taste and beauty and freedom of Hellenic manners and letters under Lorenzo di Medici and the scholars of his Court, side by side with the revival of Roman virtue, and more than the ancient austerity and piety, under the great Dominican, Savonarola. The period of history is one which of all others may well have engrossing interest for George Eliot."-(Lond.) Quart. Rev., Oct. 1860. See also Westm. Rev., April, 1859, Blackw. Mag., April, 1859, May, 1860; Edin. Rev., July, 1859; Brit. Quart. Rev., Oct. 1863, Oct. 1868; Atlantie Mon., Oct. 1866; Essays, by R. H. Hutton.

MRS. POYSER AND THE SQUIRE.

"Ah, now this I like," said Mr. Donnithorne, looking round at the damp temple of cleanliness (Mrs. Poyser's dairy) but keeping near the door. "I'm sure I should like my breakfast better if I knew the butter and cream came from this dairy. Thank you, that really is a pleasant sight. Unfortunately, my slight tendency to rheumatism makes me afraid of damp; I'll sit down in your comfortable kitchen. Ah, Poyser, how do you do? In the midst of business, I see, as usual. I've been looking at your wife's beautiful dairy,-the best manager in the parish, is she not?"

Mr. Poyser had just entered in shirtsleeves and open waistcoat, with a face a shade redder than usual from the exertion

of "pitching." As he stood-red, rotund, and radiant before the small wiry, cool old gentleman-he looked like a prize-apple by the side of a withered crab.

"Will you please to take this chair, sir?" he said, lifting his father's arm-chair forward a little; "you'll find it easy."

"No, thank you, I never sit in easychairs," said the old gentleman, seating himself on a small chair near the door. "Do you know, Mrs. Poyser,—sit down, pray, both of you,-I've been far from contented for some time with Mrs. Satchell's dairy management. I think she has not a good method, as you have."

"Indeed, sir, I can't speak to that," said Mrs. Poyser, in a hard voice, rolling and unrolling her knitting, and looking icily out of the window, as she continued to stand opposite the Squire. Poyser might sit down if he liked, she thought: she wasn't going to sit down, as if she'd give in to any such smooth-tongued palaver. Mr. Poyser, who looked and felt the reverse of icy, did sit down in his three-cornered chair.

"And now, Poyser, as Satchell is laid up,