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walks and conversations they had to- | two years before he published the "Lay," gether, and after a visit to Keswick she but the irresistible charm of manner and writes, on returning to Grasmere: "Every warmth of heart which won the love of sight and every sound reminded me of every one who had the good fortune to Coleridge-dear, dear fellow, of his many meet him. talks to us by day and by night, of all dear A regret has been expressed that, inthings. I was melancholy and could not stead of a minute description of outward talk, but at last I eased my heart by weep- objects in this Scottish tour, Dorothy ing. O! how many, many reasons Wordsworth had not recorded the converhave I to be anxious for him.” sations between her brother and Coleridge, Within a year of Wordsworth's marriage but she had not in the slightest degree the be started with Dorothy and Coleridge, art in which Boswell excelled, and it was on a visit to Scotland, Mrs. Wordsworth natural that in keeping a journal never being unable to accompany them. The intended for publication she should do "Recollections of a Tour made in Scot- that which she felt herself the best quali land, A.D. 1803, by Dorothy Wordsworth," fied to do. The whole record of the six was published by Principal Shairp in weeks' tour is written with the utmost 1874, and is one of the most delightful simplicity. Throughout the volume there chbooks of the kind in the language. The is as little indication of literary effort as obstructions to Scottish travel in those in the paragraph with which Dorothy confen days were not trifling, but Dorothy was cludes her Recollections: " untroubled by them. Sometimes food was scarce, and so occasionally were beds. The inns were often dirty and comfortless; often, too, the travellers were drenched to the skin, and struggled on through difficulties unknown to tourists in our day. Samuel Rogers was in Scotland at the at time, and met Wordsworth, Coleridge, and The Scottish tour was made, as has: Dorothy "making looked very like a cart." a tour in a vehicle that been said, in 1803, when Miss Wordsworth chand Coleridge," he says, "Wordsworth was thirty-two years of age. In 1814 were entirely Wordsworth visited Scotland again, and occupied in talking about poetry, and the on this visit took with him his wife and whole care of looking out for cottages her sister, leaving Dorothy to keep house where they might get refreshment and at Rydal Mount, the beautiful home to pass the night, poor horse fed and littered, devolved upon year. as well as of seeing their which they had removed in the previous BMiss Wordsworth. She was a most delightful person ple-minded, and so modest!" - so full of talent, so sim

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The next fact that broke the even tenor of Dorothy's life was a journey on the Continent in 1820 with her brother and

"It

In the third week of the tour Coleridge his wife. The two women both kept sixth and last week of the excursion they poems which memorialized the tour. weather in an open carriage," and in the them on his return in writing the series of visited Walter Scott at Lasswade, and is hard to say," says Professor Knight, afterwards met him at Melrose on his way "whether the jottings taken at the time to the assizes at Jedburgh in his character by his wife or the extended journal afterof sheriff of Selkirk, and to that town wards written out by his sister is the more they accompanied him. Then when the admirable, both as a record of travel and business of the assizes was over Scott as a commentary on the poet's work." travelled with the Wordsworths in their Crabb Robinson, a highly accomplished house of which he had not some story to worths, accompanied them. He also kept to Hawick, and scarcely passed a man and a warm friend of the Wordsby favor of his name one might be hos- when he had felt so humble as in reading tell. "I believe," Dorothy writes, "that a diary, and writes that he did not know pitably entertained throughout all the Mrs. Wordsworth's journal - it was

borders of

Scotland;

" and she adds,

superior to his own. He must also hav

SO

"We wish we could have gone with Mr. been much struck with Dorothy's, for he Scott into some of the remote dales of advised her to publish it, but she replied, he can find a home and a hearty welcome." this country, where in almost every house with her usual self-abnegation, that her leave to her niece "a neatly penned memade Scott thus welcome, for this was morial of those few interesting months of

object was not to make a book, but to

When

our lives." There was a time, however, | for a short while, but never set my heart when Miss Wordsworth did think of pub- upon anything which is to be accomlishing her tour in Scotland, and the poet plished three months hence, and have no Rogers was consulted about it. "The satisfaction whatever in schemes. fact is" her brother wrote in 1822, "she one has lived almost sixty years one is was so much gratified by her tour in satisfied with present enjoyment, and Switzerland that she has a strong wish to thankful for it, without daring to count on add to her knowledge of that country, and what is to be done six months hence." to extend her ramble to some part of Italy. As her own little fortune is not sufficient to justify a step of this kind, she has no hope of revisiting those countries unless an adequate sum could be procured through the means of this MS." Rogers thought highly of the "Recollections," and Dorothy wrote to him expressing a hope that the book might produce £200, "a sum," she says, "which would effectually aid me in accomplishing the ramble I so much, and I hope not unwisely, wish for." The wish was never fulfilled, and seventy years passed away before the volume was published by Mr. Shairp.

In September, 1822, Dorothy made a second tour in Scotland with Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, Joanna Hutchinson. The excursion lasted seven weeks, of which three were spent in Edinburgh. Still harping on the Italian journey, Dorothy wrote to Crabb Robinson, three years later, of a scheme for which "all their savings must be heaped up - no less than spending a whole winter in Italy, and a whole summer in moving about from place to place in Switzerland and elsewhere.' This project was abandoned, and Miss Wordsworth's next tour was in England, and later on she visited the Isle of Man with her nephew. As usual, she wrote a journal on the occasion, which if not otherwise remarkable, shows that in approaching old age the faculty of enjoyment was undiminished. This was to be her last pleasure-taking excursion. In 1829 she was keeping house for her nephew, John Wordsworth, then a curate at Whitwick, near Ashby, and there, for the first time in her life, she was taken seriously ill.

She recovered slowly, and on her return, by easy stages, to Rydal, had a second attack. Henceforth Dorothy Wordsworth's life was that of an invalid, although for some time she did not altogether give up the hope of restoration to health. Writing to Charles and Mary Lamb, she says, "Wishes I do now and then indulge of at least revisiting Switzerland, and again crossing the Alps, and even strolling on to Rome. But there is a great change in my feelings respecting plans for the future. If we make any, entertain them as an amusement, perhaps,

Dorothy's health was a constant grief to her brother. "Her state," he wrote, "weighs incessantly upon every thought of my heart." And in another letter, referring to Coleridge, he says, " He and my beloved sister are the two beings to whom my intellect.is most indebted, and they are now proceeding, as it were, pari passu along the path of sickness - I will not say towards the grave; but I trust towards a blessed immortality."

Many a year passed away before the end came, for Miss Wordsworth survived her brother, but they were years of sorrow for those who loved her, and especially for him to whom through the glad days of early and later manhood she had proved a second self. Not long before he died, Mrs. Wordsworth said that almost the only enjoyment her husband seemed to feel was in his attendance on his sister, and that her death would be to him a sad calamity.

In 1805 Wordsworth wrote some beautiful lines addressed "To a young lady who had been reproached for taking long walks in the country." His biographer states that they were meant for his sister. If so, the poetical license in the verses is considerable, for Dorothy was thirty-four, and had little prospect of showing, as a wife and mother,

how divine a thing A woman may be made. And unfortunately the prophecy of a serene old age, "lovely as a Lapland night," was not his sister's lot. The long walks for which she had been reproached were one cause, it is thought, of the comparatively early failure of mind and body. When her brother was dying, Miss Words. worth heard of his condition with composure, and after his death, upon being carried past the door where the body lay, she was heard to say, "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?" She survived the poet nearly five years, and died at Rydal Mount in Jan. uary, 1855, at the age of eighty three. "And now," to quote Mr. Shairp's words, "beside her brother and his wife, and others of that household, she rests in the green Grasmere churchyard with the clear waters of Rotha murmuring by."

JOHN DENNIS.

3

VII. HOW A RUSSIAN OFFICER RODE TO THE

EXPOSITION,

VIII. STAMPING OUT PROTESTANTISM IN RUSSIA, Nineteenth Century,

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THE TEACHING OF

TURE.*

From Macmillan's Magazine. Admirable words, worthy of the largeENGLISH LITERA-minded and large-hearted scholar who inspired, if he did not actually frame them; and we can well understand how they must have brought light and inspiration to many a schoolmaster and student, who had never entertained the idea of Chaucer and Bacon as possible factors in education, though it had seemed the most obvious thing in the world to study the masterpieces of Schiller, Dante, or Molière. At the time we are speaking of, the average schoolmaster would have scouted the idea of an English classic becoming a text-book in his school. He might indeed give out a canto of "Marmion" to be learned by heart as a holiday task, but that was for a mere exercise of memory, or to keep the lad from being too noisy on a wet

THE study of English literature in our schools and colleges on a scale proportionate to its importance is of comparatively recent date. I suppose we should not be far wrong in fixing that date at about thirty years back. Up to that time, although the colleges in London and other great centres could boast distinguished professors of the subject, it had hardly been recognized, even in the higher forms of schools at all. School histories of England, in an appendix to the successive chapters, may have furnished the names of the great authors in prose and verse who adorned each reign, with a list of their more important works, but that was all. To whom the credit is due of leading the movement day. I remember how Dr. Arnold, in one which has brought about the remarkable change in this respect, it might be difficult to say. But there is no doubt that the movement received a great impetus about the time just mentioned by the publication, through the Clarendon Press at Oxford, of a series of selected works of the great English classics, thoroughly edited and annotated, under the general direction of the late Professor Brewer, of King's College. Single plays of Shakespeare, separate portions of the " Canterbury Tales," selected poems of Dryden, and so forth, were one by one issued, under the care of the editors best qualified for the task, and at a price that made them available for use in all the higher class schools and colleges in the country. "The authors and works selected," so ran the prospectus of the series, "are such as will best serve to illustrate English literature in its historical aspect. As the eye of history,' without which history cannot be understood, the literature of a nation is the clearest and most intelligible record of its

life. Its thoughts and its emotions, its
graver and its less serious modes, its
progress or its degeneracy, are told by its
best authors in their best words. This
view of the subject will suggest the safest
rules for the study of it."

of his letters, expresses an ardent wish that he might have the opportunity of studying a play of Shakespeare with his sixth form, on the same scale of attention and precision as they studied a book of Thucydides! But this was but an aspiration, and the times were not ripe for a change, even if the remorseless limits of years and months admitted of any diminution of the space allotted to Latin and Greek.

I do not at all say that the prejudice of the average teacher against the introduction of English writers into the curriculum of his school was altogether unworthy, and to be laughed at. It had its root in a true conviction that nothing was worth teaching that did not involve some labor and trouble on the part of the learner-that did not awake and exercise in him some new powers - that was not, in a word, a discipline. It was this feeling that was sound and worthy of all respect in the prejudice against English literature as an element in education. The picture of Addison, or Pope in a boy's hands connected itself with that of a half-hour of idleness harmless perhaps, but still idleness spent in an armchair by the fire or on a sunny lawn, a half-hour withdrawn from more serious and profitable study. And if any one, reading these suppressed

• An address delivered at University College, Bris- thoughts of the teacher, were to retort that tol, at the opening of the session 1889-1890.

after all Addison and Pope might be as