our Transatlantic cousins, we should do well to consider whether their character be not our own character developed by different arran stances. I am far indeed from wishing that those aronmushed Frenchmen, who are our sincere friends, should be our fineres. I am thankful for their reproofs. Nevertheless I am them to the phrase astuce sanguinaire; and I am persuaded that ja vila e flection, admit that the instances which you have cited as mes dear sis that expression. You mention Clive and Nelson CUTE VIS nemaT on some occasions astucieur to a most culpable decret Bis 1e wins not sanguinary, and was never, as far as i am aware sortant të p 80. I do not believe that he was ever contemned in the shendor blood, except on the field of battle. As to Neusta ZADE under the despotic influence of an ababdiced woman Vice bar and blandishments had completely bewitched him be di tings VIEL no Englishman ever mentions without stern and stame madness of guilty love, in which a man forgets fury, amour and compassion, ought not to be called astuce, sarpito re

other day, a charming portrait of Laiv Hamino.1 st

were mine, I would put under it the lines of ArONS—

"La gran beltà ch'al gran Simmer Anglate
Macchiò la chiara fama e as ingen

With your remarks on Indian affairs I can by or means a is perfectly true that, in the first transports of me not and br excited by the murdering, the mutilating, the timing of vna mi babes, there was, in this country, such a cry for revenge and ZA ST been heard before. But I cannot help thinking that or vindemoss had more affinity with humanity than with ity: and the winter at me is, not that justice and moderation should have been, firing wine time, forgotten, but that they should so soon have regained the mandency. As to the annexations of which you speak there we about which I am in some doubt, that of Sarvades of There are two which I think perfectly justifiable and with o have taken place much earlier, that of Berar and that of are, I assure you, under an error if you imagine that in annem Oude, the Indian Government deviated from the maxims of De lesley and of Lord William Bentinck. The antenation of Únie va Lord Wellesley's favourite scheme. From my own very intimate knowledge of Lord William Bentinck, I can attest that be locked & the Court of Lucknow with utter loathing. He justly thought in the graceful to England to tolerate and to support a frightful megvere ment, uniting all that is worst in tyranny and a.. the ivm 2 anarchy; and he considered the question of annexation kimply as a question of prudence and of time.

'One word more. I must have explained myself very if I appeared to say that, in my opinion, no dominion kanded of injanse could be of long duration. What I meant was that it was a great erz to attribute to Machiavelian arts the continued progress of a great society in prosperity and power. As to tyranny such as that which the Italians, eighteen hundred years ago, exercised over the neign

bouring nations, such as that which the Spaniards exercised over the New World, such as we too long exercised over the Irish, I do believe that such tyranny is a curse to the ruler as well as to the ruled. The liberty and happiness of Italy were destroyed by the means which she employed to oppress the provinces. The degradation of Spain was the effect of her colonial system. We have been severely punished, God knows, for our injustice to Ireland; and though we have repented of our fault, the punishment, I am afraid, is not yet over.

'Pardon the length at which I have trespassed on your attention, and believe me ever, my dear Sir, your faithful servant,

'MACAULAY.'

'I confidently reckon on the pleasure of seeing you whenever you revisit England. The pleasure of my visits to France would be doubled if I knew your language as well as you know ours.'

We agree with Lord Macaulay that this hasty imputation on the character of English rulers is as untrue as it is fantastical; though Lord Macaulay seems to us to have somewhat exaggerated and misapprehended the nature of the charge, which is of a much less sweeping character. We are convinced that M. de Circourt never seriously maintained the opinion that the greatness of the British Empire was due to Machiavelism and crime. The whole tenor of his writings and his mind shows that he regarded England as the great bulwark not only of civilisation but of freedom. It needed not Lord Macaulay's eloquence to convince him of that, although he might trace the vestiges of Norman ferocity in some passages of our history. But this correspondence is an interesting example of the relations which may spring up between two accomplished men of letters, united by no ties of personal friendship; for we believe they never met, and the hope expressed by Lord Macaulay in the postscript to his last letter was frustrated by his own death. The British peer had the best of the argument in his patriotic protest against M. de Circourt's exaggerated expressions; but the French critic might have retorted on Lord Macaulay that his own writings are by no means free from rhetorical expressions which are in excess of his own meaning and of the justice of the case. Years drew on. The society and the politics of the Second Empire alienated the best society of Paris, and M. and Madame de Circourt withdrew more and more, owing in part to her failing health, to the cottage she had created and adorned in the pleasant village of La Celle St. Cloud, about four miles from Versailles. Their shrubbery abutted on one of the Emperor's parks. They preserved his pheasants. LouisNapoleon, with that good breeding which never forsook him

in private life, sent them word by a friend that he hoped they should be good neighbours, and proposed a friendly exchange of a small piece of ground, while he gave them a key of his park. In 1863 Madame de Circourt died from the effects of her cruel accident, and her husband retired more than ever from the world. The remaining years of his life were devoted exclusively to his studies, to his correspondence with intimate friends, and to literary works not destined to see the light of day. With all his enormous stores of knowledge M. de Circourt was not a brilliant or a successful writer. He never acquired what the French regard, not perhaps unreasonably, as the most essential of literary gifts a style. Careless of the form in which he cast his thoughts, he preserved the substance of whatever interested him. The interest of the subject sufficed for himself, but he sometimes forgot that it might become tedious to others.

The solitude of his latter years was cheered by the affection of his brothers, and by the intimacy which existed between him and the excellent Countess Affry and her daughter, the Duchess Colonna-Castiglione, who has left to us in sculpture no mean proofs of her genius as an artist. Their house at

Friburg, in Switzerland, became to him a second home. But the Duchess Colonna was also destined to the premature close of a life of singular promise, and one of the last painful duties M. de Circourt had to perform was to close the eyes of that charming and accomplished woman on the shores of Castellamare. He returned to France profoundly saddened by this melancholy event; and in the course of the following winter, during one of the walks which he never ceased to take with unremitting activity, he was stricken with apoplexy, and shortly afterwards expired on November 15, 1879, in the seventyeighth year of his age. None knew the value of his heart and of his intellect so well as those with whom he had maintained a lifelong correspondence and intimacy-such as the venerable Cardinal Archbishop of Rouen, Monseigneur de Bonnechose, Arthur Stanley, the late Dean of Westminster, and Mr. Winthrop, the worthy descendant of the first Governor of Massachusetts. To these names a multitude of others might be added; for it was the privilege and the joy of Circourt's life to have possessed the friendship of the best and noblest men of the age he lived in, and in the light of their fame his own memory will not be wholly eclipsed or extinguished.

ART. VII.—1. Ballads and other Poems. By ALFRED TENNYSON. London: 1880.

2. The Works of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. London: 1881.

To all admirers of Mr. Tennyson's genius his last volume should be one of singular interest; and this for two reasons. It is interesting, in the first place, on account of its own merits; but it is interesting also in a much wider way. It not only claims our best attention for itself, but it turns our attention even more forcibly to its author. It throws a new light on his whole position and history, and at once helps and incites us to reconsider them. The poems comprised in it are of unequal merit and importance; but their strength and weakness in this way are both alike instructive. By-andby we shall speak of them more in detail. It will be enough at present to make a brief allusion to one of them in which he has broken on the world with a new strength and splendour; in the poem of Rizpah he has achieved a second reputation. Of this astonishing production it has been said, that were all the rest of the author's works destroyed, this alone would at once place him amongst the first of the world's poets. Such was the verdict pronounced by Mr. Swinburne. It has all his characteristic generosity, and not much of his characteristic exaggeration.

6

Now to many men, whose opinions are worth considering, an event of this kind must have been quite out of their calculations. It has been thought by many that, for a number of years past, Mr. Tennyson's powers have been more or less declining; and the decline they date probably from the publication of Enoch Arden.' With this view of the matter we do not ourselves agree, but we by no means hold it groundless. We hold, on the contrary, that it embodies an important truth, but a truth apprehended in a false and confused way. It is this confusion, we think, that the present volume will dissipate; in what manner we shall endeavour to show presently.

Of many men of genius it may be said truly that their powers declined towards the latter years of their lives, and in some cases altogether left them. Not to go far afield, we need think but of Scott and Southey, or of Swift, who expired a driveller and a show.' Here we have instances of a certain decline of powers, which, in a larger or less degree, is no unusual thing; and when it has been said of a genius that his powers showed signs of failing him, it has been meant

generally, and probably meant truly, that a certain change had taken place in his brain. There are other cases, however, in which similar signs occur, but the cause to which they are due is altogether different. It is external, it is not internal. No change is involved in the brain of the man in question. His powers may still exist in all their earlier vigour. What does not exist as it once did is the earlier stimulus to use them. The powers of some men, for instance, have been mainly roused by poverty, those of others by ambition; and with the achievement either of fame or riches the powers have not decayed, they have only been employed languidly. Mr. Tennyson's case, we conceive, is analogous in one way to these. We do not mean

that either fame or wealth has affected in any degree the exercise of his genius, but that the cause that has affected it is equally external. It is not in him, it is without him. His last volume must convince us that his vigour is unimpaired. His sight is not dim, nor his bodily strength abated. We may compare him to a mirror reflecting the sky's light on us, which was once dazzling, but which has slowly been growing dimmer; and the cause we shall find to be not that the mirror is tarnished, but one very different-that the sun is sinking.

We have not chosen this last image at random. The days have long gone by since the man of genius was looked upon as a kind of mysterious aerolite fallen to earth from heaven, and connected with his surroundings in only an accidental way. He is recognised now as the special outcome of his age; and he is conditioned by its conditions, even while he assists to change them. This remark will apply to all genius, but we are speaking now with a special view to the poet's. The poet is, as it were, at once a mirror and a burning-glass. He receives the light and the images that are round him; he intensifies the one, and he reduces the other to order: but the spectrum of this reflected world still depends on the actual world it reflects. This is true even of those poets who are said to be most original. The word original indeed, in this connexion, has been a source of great confusion, and it still serves to perpetuate an entirely false conception. It is supposed commonly to be a word of the highest praise when applied to a poet's genius, and the judgment conveyed by it seems to amount to this that the poet's chief ideas spring from himself alone, and that he has not acquired or chosen them from any external Now the truth is, that could this be said with accuracy of any ideas at all, it could be said not of the greatest, but only of the most contemptible; and if we use the word in question with the meaning above referred to, we shall find

source.

VOL. CLIX. NO. CCCXVI.

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