Browning's intellectual eagerness was in part at least the result of his method of education. It was, as Professor Phelps observes, "the elective system pushed to its last possibility. His father, a well-to-do banker with a penchant for versifying and drawing, and his mother, a spirituelle woman of quick sympathies and refined musical sense, brought their son up on the theory that the office of education is to minister to the tastes and interests of a lad as these reveal themselves. Consequently, after fourteen Robert never went to school, save for a little Greek instruction at the University of London, but was taught at home by his parents and tutors.

The road was kept constantly cleared in front of his growing interests. Thus when he began to show an interest in chemistry, he was provided with a private laboratory in the house. The back garden, in turn, was early transformed into a menagerie where birds, animals, and reptiles could be observed at leisure, and the lad thus early began to build up a knowledge of natural history that later contributed jerboas, auks, tortoises, newts, and Oriental spiders to his poetry. Music, drawing, modeling, poetry and fiction, languages, sciences, history, and philosophy, each ministered to his cravings, and for relaxation he was taught to dance, box, fence, and ride. He always retained, by the way, a fondness for dancing and some of his most spirited poems are tributes to horses that he loved.

But no other subject ever interested him so much as men and women, what they are like, what they do, and why they do it. All sorts and conditions of people troop through his poetry, and he ranges up and down the centuries trying to see the world through the eyes of the most diverse, from Caliban, the primitive man, making God in the likeness of his own mean and superstitious nature, to Lazarus, feeling again for the earthly path with the blinding light of heaven in his eyes.

Catholic as were his early interests, from the very first he showed a predilection for the arts, as his own inevitable field for creative expression. At two years and three months he painted a cottage and some rocks which ". was thought a masterpiece," using a lead pencil and black-currant jam-juice; at twelve he was seeking a publisher for a little volume of poems; and at fourteen he was writing settings for songs. At seventeen, with the sympathetic approval of his father, he formally committed himself to poetry.

The long years of public neglect, changing gradually to partial and then general recognition, the poet's romantic attachment to a kindred poet, Elizabeth Barrett, "a soul of fire enclosed in a shell of pearl," their elopement and rapturous married life in Italy, his brave acceptance of her death, his generous mingling with his fellows, these all are twice-told tales.

Browning secured a hearing in America well in advance of his acceptance by England, and he has always had a host of admirers on this side of the water. This is because he is like us when we are running truest to form. Like us in his buoyancy, his energy, his democratic interest in folk, and his persistent optimism.

William Morris (1834-1896) did more than any other Englishman of his generation to heighten pleasure through beauty. Fancy yourself in a room papered in Morris designs, with drapes of Morris textiles at the windows and hand-woven rugs on the floor, seated before a cheerful fireplace of hand-wrought tiles, reading one of Morris's own dreamy tales in an illuminated edition from the Kelmscott Press. Morris was indeed a man of remarkable versatility and of abounding energy, poet, artist, designer, craftsman, manufacturer; and he turned this fine energy and resource into many channels for what his biographer, J. W. Mackail, has happily termed "the reintegration of human life."

It was this same ardent desire to restore and enrich living that led him at the age of forty-nine to embrace socialism. In the words of Mackail, "He found himself forced reluctantly to the conclusion that hitherto he had not gone to the root of the matter;

that, art being a function of life, sound art was impossible except when life was organized under sound conditions; that the tendency of what is called civilization since the great industrial revolution had been to dehumanize life; and that the only hope for the future was, if that were yet possible, to reconstitute society on a new basis.”

Stocky in build, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with rugged features, hair and beard tossing wavelike, and eyes of the sea's own depth, he looked like one of that band of roving vikings who, in The Earthly Paradise, spend a year on the fabled island of Atlantis, exchanging stories with the Greeks.

Morris was born in the confines of the old Epping Forest, and he spent much of his boyhood roving through this magic woodland, little changed since the medieval days, a wold where one half expects at any time to chance upon a knight, or yeoman from Robin Hood's band. It is this spirit of medieval enchantment that one finds in all of Morris's early verse.

In 1849 three boys, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Holman Hunt, aged respectively nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one, contributed to the annual free exhibition three canvases — “Isabella" (a banquet scene from Isabella and the Pot of Basil), "The Girlhood of Virgin Mary," and "Rienzi Vowing to Avenge His Brother's Death," which caused the London of art to catch its breath and then to break forth in a storm of protest. These three lads, rebels from the Royal Academy School, were members of the new Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood which had set itself no less a task than to overthrow the accepted canons of painting. For the traditional eighteenth century pseudo-classical conventions of idealized prettiness and insipid sentiment they substituted detailed and faithful imitation of nature and subjects of spiritual or dramatic significance. They accomplished their end, for, whatever fault may be found with the mannerisms of Pre-Raphaelite art, it broke up traditionalism.

To the short-lived magazine which the Brotherhood published, Rossetti contributed My Sister's Sleep, and The Blessed Damozel. The former, written when Rossetti was only nineteen, is the very embodiment of the Pre-Raphaelite creed. The refined notation of sound, light, and color, the dramatic economy, and the superb burst of idealism at the close bespeak the highest genius. The Blessed Damozel is prophetic of the sublimated phrasing and the languid sensuousness which denote all of Rossetti's later art, whether with pen or with brush.

In 1851 Rossetti became engaged to Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal, a tall, willowy young woman with a wealth of coppery hair, but with a tendency to consumption. Her delicate health and Rossetti's scantiness of means postponed the marriage until 1860, and this was followed by her death from an overdose of laudanum in less than two years. In an agony of grief Rossetti placed his unpublished poems, including the sonnets of The House of Life, in the coffin. There they remained for seven years. These sonnets, the most teasingly subtle expression of brooding, ultra-refined moods, record the history of the poet's love. Rossetti would have been a more normal man if this engagement had not been so protracted, but literature would have been the poorer by the most sublimated erotic poems in the language, hovering though they are on the verge of morbidity. Rossetti's poetry was made possible by the fusion of choice Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean blood. It is the quintessence of romance, compounded of the romance of the north and the romance of the south. The fine blue-grey eyes, the domed, Shakespearian forehead, and the full sensual underlip tell the whole story of the poet and of his art.

When Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1909) addressed François Villon as "Prince of sweet songs made out of tears and fire," he wrote his own epitaph. Last of the Victorian poets to cross the farther threshold of life, he had been the consistent arch-enemy of all that Victorianism conventionally implies. A passionate lover of liberty and justice, an unyielding rebel against the restraints that nature and society place upon

our humanity, he celebrated beauty and strength with a pagan recklessness wild as the winds and waves which he loved. Dionysus was his god and Aphrodite his goddess, and he joined their headlong votaries, scornfully defiant of those current deities who, as he felt, had despoiled life of youth and color and joy. Pay the price which a hostile fate requires, but let not its presageful shadow rob you of the moment. This defiance of accepted codes, of kings and priests, cost Swinburne the laureateship, to which his poetical gifts entitled him upon the death of Tennyson.

Yet he was an intense patriot, who believed that, underneath the conventions that seek to stifle it, the English spirit is essentially freedom-loving, and his last poems voice. his belief that England is, as of old, the safeguard of liberty.

In striking contrast to his characteristic defiance and restlessness, are the precious and infinitely tender poems of child-life, the pathetic hunger of age for the innocence and perennial purity and freshness of childhood.

No other English poet has approached Swinburne in the complexity and music of his verse and the command of forms from the simplest to the most intricate. He seems to have exhausted the possibilities in this respect, and free verse was the only alternative left to a new school which sought distinction.

Of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) his friend, W. E. Henley, has said it all in his oft-quoted sonnet:

"Thin-legged, thin-chested, slight unspeakably,

Neat-footed and weak-fingered: in his face

Lean, large-boned, curved of beak, and touched with race,
Bold-lipped, rich-tinted, mutable as the sea,
The brown eyes radiant with vivacity
There shines a brilliant and romantic grace,
A spirit intense and rare, with trace on trace
Of passion, impudence, and energy.
Valiant in velvet, light in ragged luck,
Most vain, most generous, sternly critical,
Buffoon and poet, lover and sensualist;
A deal of Ariel, just a streak of Puck,
Much Antony, of Hamlet most of all,

And something of the Shorter Catechist."

If ever a man had the right to pen An Apology for Idlers or to discuss life and death in terms of one another, that man was Stevenson, for he had learned how to turn fruitful idleness to richest account in after-periods of intense industry, and he played the sportsman's game of life with Death across the table for upwards of forty years.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

THE ROMANCE OF HISTORY

THE best historians of later times have been seduced from truth, not by their imagination, but by their reason. They far excel their predecessors in the art of deducing general principles from facts. But unhappily they have fallen into the error of distorting facts to suit general principles. They arrive at a theory from looking at some of the phenomena; and the remain

ing phenomena they strain or curtail to
suit the theory. For this purpose it is
not necessary that they should assert
what is absolutely false; for all questions
in morals and politics are questions of
comparison and degree. Any proposition
which does not involve a contradiction in
terms may by possibility be true; and if
all the circumstances which raise
ability in its favor be stated and enforced,
and those which lead to an opposite con-
clusion be omitted or lightly passed over,
it may appear to be demonstrated. In

prob