THE

MICHIGAN

OCNERAL LILANKY

University of

LITERARY WORLD

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The Literary World.

VOL. XIII. BOSTON, JULY 29, 1882.

CONTENTS.

REVIEWS.

ABOUT SOME MODERN AUTHORS

WILLIAM RUFUS AND HENRY THE FIRST.

THE RED MAN AND THE WHITE

No. 15.

MRS. OLIPHANT'S LITERARY HISTORY OF ENGLAND
LECKY'S ENGLAND

DR. PERRY'S INDRA IN THE RIG-VEDA. John Henry

Wright

THESE

243

244
245

246

247

247

252

252
252

.

ten by Mr. Shepard himself touching Rus-spectacles of David Malral, a Scotchman kin's benevolent eccentricities; then one of who visited America in 1863, and who was Ruskin's letters illustrating how bitter he taken by James T. Fields to hear one of the can be with his pen; then a couple of pages genial Doctor's lectures at the Harvard on his worship of Carlyle; and, finally, an Medical School-"a plain little man," the apposite quotation from Mr. George W. Scotchman describes him, "in conversation Smalley, the London correspondent of the animated, and cordial, sharp, too, tak243 New York Tribune. ing the word out of one's mouth." On this same occasion Mr. Malral saw Agassiz, “a man who, but for his dark, keen eyes, would look more like a jovial English squire than a devotee of science;" and beside him was "a man of strangely different build — a gaunt, long-limbed man- dressed in a highcollared surtout, his piquant New England face peering down over the old-fashioned black kerchief that swathed his long, thin neck." This was Emerson. Walt Whitman is photographed in the days twenty years ago, when he went about in a rollaway collar, bared and hairy breast, a sailor's neck-handkerchief, a close-fitting monkey-jacket, and a big black slouch hat; and the description is supplemented by M. D. Conway's account of a visit to him, first published in 1865 in the Fortnightly Review. Swinburne is shown sitting at Browning's feet, and Oscar Wilde in his Byronic collar and placid smile.

253

The little which Mr. Shepard has to say about Tennyson illustrates how skillfully and successfully the Poet Laureate has kept 247 himself out of public observation, how effectively he has eluded even newspaper 252 reporters and interviewers. Tennyson figures dimly in R. H. Horne's Spirit of the 252 Age (1844), and is a baffling subject in Will253 iam Howitt's Homes and Haunts of the Poets (1847). Fanny Kemble alludes briefly 253 in her Records of a Girlhood to an evening spent with him in 1832, and twenty-two 253 years later Hawthorne just grazes him in the rooms of the Manchester Exhibition, as stated in his Note-Books. Caroline Fox, too, has a reference to him in her recently published Memories. But this is about all. 249 From a collection of current newspaper paragraphs, however, Mr. Shepard constructs this picture of the man, which probably has some truth in it, and which we insert here for what it is worth:

253

253
254
254

254

Edgar Fawcett

ABOUT SOME MODERN AUTHORS.* HESE personal sketches of noted modern English and American authors form the second volume in Mr. "William Shepard's" series upon "The Literary Life," of which the first volume, Authors and Authorship, was reviewed on p. 25 of our present volume. The book supplies many of those particulars about the appearance, home, family, domestic habits, literary

methods, etc., etc., of living or lately living authors which a considerable portion of the reading public is always curious to learn. Of the living there appear Ruskin, Cardinal Newman, Tennyson, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Whitman, Swinburne, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Browning; of the lately living, Carlyle, George Eliot, Emerson, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Bayard Taylor, Mrs. Browning, Dickens, and Thackeray. A concluding chapter groups together a number of younger writers - William Black, Matthew Arnold, William Morris, Jean Ingelow, Owen Meredith, and "Ouida." The book does not profess to be one of much original writing; it is largely a compilation of descriptions already in type. It brings together various accounts and cements them

Of the sketches of authors not living, those Tennyson's manner [we are told] has a brusque- of Carlyle and Dickens are the amplest, but ness and bluntness about it which is at first neither in their cases nor in those of Emerrather startling to one who has only known him through his books. He utters his opinions in a son, George Eliot, Hawthorne, Bryant, or plain, straightforward way, choosing the homeli- Bayard Taylor is there much with which est Saxon words and rarely rising to anything students of modern literature are not famillike the heroic strain. His disregard of the conventionalities of life is, however, thoroughly nat- iar. The book is a very tasteful one outural and unaffected.... He is an inveterate wardly, and very readable for all who have smoker. . . . A brother poet who spent a week Regalias, and Cabanas have no charm for him. notabilities named. with him at his country-seat says that Partagas, yet to make the personal acquaintance of the He prefers a pipe, and of all pipes in the world the common clay pipe is his choice. His den is at the top of the house. When he sits down to work in the morning a huge tobacco-jar, big enough for an ancestral urn, is at his feet, to gether with a box full of white clay pipes. Fill- HESE two solid octavos, respectively breaks it in twain, and throws the fragments into ing one of these, he smokes until it is empty, of 624 and 732 pages, furnish an exanother box, prepared for their reception. Then ample of the laborious and exhaustive he pulls out a fresh pipe, fills it, smokes it, and method with which English specialists are destroys it as before. He will not smoke a pipe the second time.... His chief delight is not in now rewriting English history, chapter by communion with his fellows. Rather is it to chapter. And what a satisfaction it is to lounge at the window of his study, surrounded by a few choice books of favorite authors, and in full view of the magnificent island scenery with the gray line of undulating hills and the streak of silver sea in the distance.

The picture of Cardinal Newman consists

merely of an excerpt from Principal Shairp's
essay on Keble, and is hardly to the point.
For Whittier there is but a single page, and

WILLIAM RUFUS AND HENRY THE
FIRST.*

THE

open a work which is so thoroughly equipped with every convenience either for perusal or for consultation, and which shows throughout such evidences not only of scholarly investigation, but of literary finish! Each volume is provided with an extended analytical table of contents, each topic in each

into one. But it fulfills its object accept half of that is a "vignette" taken by Fred. chapter having a line to itself, and the dates

ably, and presents a really large amount of information possessing many elements of interest.

Taking Ruskin, the first of Mr. Shepard's living subjects, as an example of his method, we find at the outset two descriptions of his

personal appearance extracted from recent articles in Lippincott's Magazine and Harper's Monthly. Then follows a page writ

being entered in the margin; this matter erika Bremer more than thirty years ago, alone aggregating some sixty pages in the when the good Quaker Poet had "a figure two volumes. Each volume has also sevslender and tall, a beautiful head with re-eral pages of careful additions and correcfined features, black eyes full of fire, dark tions, and more than a third of volume sec

complexion, a fine smile, and lively but very

nervous manner." Some of these physical
traits remain. Lowell also is seen as
sketched by Miss Bremer, but again, more
recently, by Justin McCarthy, who claims

ond is occupied with elaborate historical

notes and a minute index. At least six maps in colors are bound in with the text,

The Reign of William Rufus and the Accession of

Pen Pictures of Modern Authors. Edited by William that there is "something very English-looK Henry the First. By Edward A. Freeman. Two vol

Shepard. G. P. Putnam's Sons. $1.25.

ing" in him. Hoimes we see through the

umes.

Oxford: The Clarendon Press. $8.00.

but we observe no list of them, an omission test the theories; and as no historian sur- der VI gave the Spanish and Portuguese which is certainly a defect.

passes him in pains and thoroughness of
research, so few equal him in clearness and
beauty of style.

monarchs all the lands their seamen might discover, to the great disgust of Francis I, who bluntly said he should like "to see the clause in Adam's will which entitled his brothers of Castile and Portugal to divide the New World between them."

William Rufus and Henry the First were two English monarchs of the Norman line whose reigns were joined precisely at the We should find it difficult to say which of commencement of the 12th century. The the seven long chapters into which the presNorman Conquest had brought to an end ent two volumes are cast supplies the more the long Saxon rule of England, and Will- fascinating reading-whether the account Spain was ever a bloodhound on the track iam the Conqueror had laid with a firm but of William's early days, including the por- of the Indian, and pursued him without not always considerate hand the foundations trait of the man; or the spirited narrative of mercy. With the exception of Isabella, and of the new order. William II, the Con- his early wars in Normandy and Scotland; a few honest priests, who strove hard to queror's second son, named Rufus from the or the description of the famous Anselm, save the race, the whole Spanish treatment color of his hair, succeeded his father in whom William introduced to the archbish- of the Indians is a disgrace to humanity. 1087; died, as has been believed, by a hunt-opric of Canterbury, and whose history is ing accident in the New Forest, in 1100, and treated with great fullness and independence was succeeded in his turn by his youngest of judgment; or the later wars in Northumbrother, Henry I. Two brief passages from Dr. Freeman's work touching the death of William and the accession of Henry take us at once to the very heart of the work, and exemplify its spirit:

And this, too, in the name of religion. After Cortez had slain a large number of Indians in his first encounter at Tabasco, berland, Wales, and France; or the incom- he held high mass and named the bloody ing of Henry and the invasion of Robert spot "St. Mary of Victory." Las Casas Bellême. Wherever these books are opened dryly says that "this was the first preaching they disclose a fresh and animated interior; of the gospel by Cortes in New Spain." a scene set with scrupulous fidelity to the The same author writes that the Spaniards He [William] now mounted his horse and truth; groups of famous men whose names once actually hanged thirteen Indians "in rode into a wooded part of the forest to seek are for all time; and events which had honor and reverence of Christ our Lord his sport, the sport of those to whom the sufferings of the wearied, wounded, weeping beast greatly to do with shaping the civilization of and his twelve apostles." Columbus, in are a source of joy. Count Henry, the King's the West to its present issues. It is trite 1488, writes to Ferdinand that, "in the brother, William of Brateuil, and other nobles to call such works monuments, but monu- name of the Sacred Trinity," he thinks so many slaves can be supplied to the Spanish markets. A town in Cuba, where the Spaniards had massacred all the natives, was named "St. Mary of the True Peace," and

went forth to the hunt, and were scattered about

towards different points. The King and the
Lord of Poix kept together, with a few compan-
ions, some say; others say that they two only
kept together. The sun was sinking towards the
west when an arrow struck the King; he fell,
and his reign and life were ended. This is all
that we can say with any positive certainty.
That the arrow came from the bow of Walter
Tirel is a feature common to nearly every
account; but all the details differ.
In one
highly picturesque version... Walter fled at
once the King fell. He thrice cried for the
Lord's body. But there was none to give it to
him; the place was a wilderness far from any
church. But a hunter took herbs and flowers
and made the King eat, deeming this to be a
communion. Such a strange kind of figure of
the most solemn act of Christian worship was

not unknown.

On the day of the Red King's fall Count Henry was hunting in the New Forest, but not in the same immediate part of it as his brother. The tale ran that the string of his bow broke, that he went to the house of a churl to get wherewithal to mend it. While the bowstring is mending, an old woman of the house asks one of the Count's companions who his master was.

He answers that he is Henry, brother of the King of the land. She tells them that she knows by augury that the King's brother shall soon be King himself, and bids them remember her words. Henry turns again to his sport, but, as

he draws near to the wood, men meet him, one, two, three, then nine and ten, telling him of the King's death.

The History of the Norman Conquest has already been written by Dr. Freeman in a series of five volumes, with a sixth containing an index; of which five volumes the first treats of preliminaries as far as to the election of Edward the Confessor; volume the

ments they are in the truest sense of the
word.

THE RED MAN AND THE WHITE.*

DR. ELLIS is well known as a rare mine

of historical lore, especially in New
England affairs, and this book will add to
his reputation, not only because of its
wealth of detail, but through its broad, ro-
bust, judicial, plain-spoken and statesmanlike
analysis of the ever vexed and distressing
Indian problem. The basis of the book was
a course of twelve lectures before the Lowell
Institute, as its present form clearly shows.
The style is easy, and runs sometimes into
rare, keen wit, as when the author says of
the origin of the Indians:

haps be able to tell whence they came.
When the Indians are all gone, we may per-

Dr. Ellis's plan leads him to a general
survey of the treatment of North American
Indians by the European nations who med-

its armorial shield bears a dove with the

olive branch, a rainbow, and a cross! What wonder that Columbus writes, twelve years after his great discovery, that "six parts out of seven of the natives are dead, all through ill-treatment and inhumanity."

The French came in contact with the In

dians about a century after the Spaniards, and their behavior toward the red man was vastly better. A Frenchman could actually fraternize with an Indian, and lie in his miserable, squalid hut, as the Englishman never would. The French Jesuit, above all, was tender and patient toward the wild man amid personal discomfort and self-sacrifice which form one of the most pathetic pages

of missionary history. Dr. Ellis's tribute to the French Jesuits in Canada is generous and just. Even our own apostle, John Eliot, hardly shows better, if as well.

dled with them. When Columbus discovered
America, he fancied he had struck the Indies,
and on his last voyage wrote to Ferdinand
and Isabella that he was within nineteen The eleven chapters of Dr. Ellis's book
days' land journey of the Ganges. Hence
the name given to our aborigines. The
Spaniards and the Puritans called them "
"the
heathen," and that very phrase colored their
after treatment and assertion of authority
over them. The French called them "
ages," and, upon the whole, made the best
masters of any. The Spaniards searched

sav

contain so much rare Indian history that it
is hard to know exactly where to cull. "The
Indians," he "are a people with a his-
says,
tory, but without an historian.” He ad-
vances the curious statement that two hun-
dred
years ago there were as many below as
above the Indian in the social scale, and,
adduces the Scotch Highlanders for ex-

second of Edward the Confessor's reign; for gold, the French for furs, while the ample. He shows how the Indian felt himEnglish planted corn. But the planting

the third of the reign of Harold; the fourth

self a part of nature, and therefore not averse

of William the Conqueror; and the fifth of cleared the wilds to civilization, and there. to dirt, wild beasts, raw flesh, heat and cold,

the "Effects." The new work goes on

fore the English blood alone this day con

or even the pangs of the winter famine.

where the old left off, and the old is simply trols the northern continent. Pope Alexan-/"The trails through the deep forest were

one of the ablest and most important of historical productions in the English language.

The Red Man and the White. Man in North America,

Dr. Freeman has his theories, but he never from its Discovery to the Present Time. By George E. fails to send the reader to his authorities to Ellis. Little, Brown & Co. $3.50.

common to him and the beast. The deer and the buffalo made his turnpikes.”

In the matter of our treatment of the Indian Dr. Ellis is very explicit. The Puritan

started out with a wish to evangelize the Indian; but he very soon found his stomach too sensitive to Indian sordidness, and, after King Philip's war and its massacres, he came not only to loathe, but to hate, a redface. This temper maintains itself still at the West. We converted a few, and the rest have steadily perished at our touch. As to the Indian policy of our Government, after frankly saying that full investigation has greatly modified his former impressions,

the author continues:

Certainly I feel warranted in making the emphatic assertion that there is no evidence that our Government is justly chargeable, at any period, with intentional fraud, or with heedless indifference to its responsibilities in this matter.

He says that the Indians have cost us already some $700,000,000, and more bills are to come in; and that, in his wild state, it requires seven square miles to support an ordinary Indian family.

Dr. Ellis's history of the future of the Indians is a very definite one, well backed by authorities, yet sure to be much discussed, and perhaps resisted. However the country decides the matter, this book will give great help in reaching a right judgment.

criticism, in fiction, and, to the extent of her the scope and the limitations of Mrs. Oli-
ability, to indicate those which have occurred in phant's survey, her sense of proportion and
history and philosophy-than to undertake an
absolute commentary upon every individual relation, and her attraction towards some
writer. She is prepared to be told that she has obscure names which one would hardly ex-
passed too lightly over some important names;
and if some lesser ones have escaped her alto pect to find in such a general review. Meas-
gether, to receive with humility any strictures ured by the amount of space enjoyed, Cow-
which may be pronounced upon her on this ac per and Scott are her heroes. Burns and
count. Her aim has been to set forth the
remarkable outburst of new and noble genius by Wordsworth stand next. Byron, Shelley,
which the end of the last century and the begin- and Coleridge follow closely. The Edin-
ning of our own was distinguished, and made into burgh "Critics" have an important place;
a great and individual age in literature. It is
hard to cut the line clear across all those inter- the chapter on Maria Edgeworth, Jane Aus-
twinings of human life and influence by which ten, and Susan Ferrier, is particularly good.
one generation links itself to another; and con- To each chapter are appended brief tabular
sequently the story will be found to overlap the
boundaries on both sides, now going too far
back, now reaching too far forward.
Shielded by this profession of her purpose, biographical dates and particulars. There
Mrs. Oliphant's work is certainly to be
judged on its positive rather than its nega-
tive side.

We believe we cannot better satisfy the reader's desire to know the exact character

statements showing the principal writings of each of the authors named, with the leading

is a good index to the whole work at the end of the third volume, but the table of contents should have gone into much greater detail.

Mrs. Oliphant's work is more truly a litof the three volumes than by proceeding to erary history than a literary criticism. She give in compact form a complete analysis of includes the leading points and lines in the their contents, volume by volume, chapter lives of her authors, with accounts and esby chapter, and topic by topic, with the dis- timates of their several productions. The tribution of pages. The subject is so fully dictates of her conscience are never hushed within the range covered by the Literary by her admiration for genius. Thus, com World, that such a use of our space is cer-paring Coleridge and Southey, Coleridge and Wordsworth, with Shelley and Byron, she says:

MRS. OLIPHANT'S LITERARY HISTORY tainly a wise expenditure:
OF ENGLAND.*

IT

T would be easy to find fault with this work for what it is not, and for what it does not do; but it is quite as easy, and we believe better, to praise it for what it is and for what it does do. We prefer to take it in the latter way, and so taken we must think it performs a useful service and performs it well. English literature, as it flows out of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, is not a single stream, confined to a single and well-defined channel, easily and precisely to be followed; it is a mighty system, like the system of the Amazons, having, it is true, a general central volume and direction which can be pointed out and traversed, but also fed by a hundred branches, which in turn spring from a thousand sources, making it impossible, absolutely impossible, for the explorer to do more than ascend or descend the main current, with passing glances only at its tributaries. As Mrs. Oliphant says in her preface:

The subject is a great one, and so manifold in its details that it is impossible not to have made omissions in various quarters; and especially in those on which she can pretend to least knowledge, in the graver literature of Science and Philosophy. It was intended originally that the work should extend farther, and come down to the elder figures even of our own times, the poets who are now regnant in England, and the many eminent writers who have but just departed; but the period before our own, which has formed them and us, and which reaches into our own by so many survivals, was found too rich and ample to allow of further additions. The aim of the author has been throughout rather to give, as fully as she was able, a history of the new departures, in poetry above all, in

The Literary History of England in the End of the Eighteenth and Beginning of the Nineteenth Century. By Mrs. Oliphant. In three vols. Macmillan & Co. $3.00.

INTRODUCTORY
Chap. I. "Cowper'

Volume I.

II. "Burns"
III. "Literature in Scotland before Burns.".
(Mackenzie, Dr. Blacklock, etc.)

Pages.

IV. "George Crabbe
V. "The Coteries before Wordsworth -the
'Swan of Litchfield.'" — (Erastus Dar-
win and Anna Seward)

VI. "The New Brotherhood."-(The Lake Poets,
Joseph Cottle, Coleridge, Southey, and
Wordsworth)

VII. "The Lyrical Ballads."-(Wordsworth and
Coleridge)

12

58

What a wonderful difference between that frugal and poor brotherhood, pure, honourable, and unknown, in all their flush of youthful ardours 13 and high thought, and this other two, perhaps more splendidly endowed, richer, of higher fortunes, and far more unhappy!

28

18

32

VIII. "Robert Southey-Walter Savage Landor." 54

Chap. I.
II.

-(Kirke White and Caroline Bowles)
Volume II.

"Charles Lamb - Thomas De Quincey"
"The Critics." - (Gifford, George Canning
and the Anti-Facobin, John Hookham
Frere, the Edinburgh Review, Jef-
frey, the Quarterly Review, Blackwood's
Magazine, Brougham, John Wilson and
Noctes Ambrosiana, Lockhart, and
Hogg

III.

Scott. (John Leyden)

IV. "Thomas Campbell: and the Lesser Lights
in Scotland. - (Grahame)
V. "London: the Lower Circle -- the Cockney
School."" (Godwin, Shelley, John Wol-
cot, Holcroft, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs.
Inchbald, Jane Porter, Mrs. Radcliffe,
Blake, Hazlitt, Leigh Hunt, Cary, and
Procter)
VI. "The Country." (Joanna Baillie, Mrs. Bar-
bauld, Roscoe, John Foster, Montgomery,
Cobbett, Beckford, Hope, Isaac Disraeli,
Mrs. Hemans, Bishop Heber, Miss Mit-
ford, Milman, Barton, Elliot, Clare, and
Bloomfield).

44

29

50

70

20

98

57

36

42

V. "Moore Monk Lewis the Smiths, etc.-
Peacock-Theodore Hook-John Galt."
(Allan Cunningham).
VI. "Maria Edgeworth-Jane Austen - Susan
Ferrier"
VII. "Literature in Ireland."-(Sheridan, Shields,
Knowles, Mary Tighe, Maturin, Wolfe,
Croly, Maginn, "Father Prout," Lady
Morgan, and Gerald Griffin)
VIII. "The Historians and Philosophers: Henry
Hallam, John Lingard-Jeremy Ben-
tham, James Mackintosh, James Mill."-
(Mitford, Dr. McCrie, Malthus, and "The
Utilitarian Theory," by C. F. Oliphant). 70
Theologians."-(Paley, the Evangelicals,
the Clapham Sect, Wilberforce, Milner,
Simeon, Robert Hall, Chalmers, Irving). 36
The foregoing analysis discloses at once

IX.

Wolfe's "Lines on the Burial of Sir John Moore" she finely and justly ranks as

among the most remarkable instances on record of real poetic life, in distinction from the hundred fictitious and ephemeral lives which flutter and die, and leave no trace behind. How many volumes, nay libraries, have dropped easily into oblivion, while these half dozen stanzas have lived and lasted!

In the chapter on Scott, after alluding to his enrichment of his country's fame, she pleasantly adds:

This has been one of the unhappy particulars in the fate of Ireland, with which misgovernment has had nothing to do. She has had no Burns and no Scott. Her beautiful scenery has never been populated with noble and gentle human beings claiming the interest of the world. Her genius has wasted itself in wild verses, in the records of wild pranks and jokes.

Wordsworth is thus introduced:

A young pair from the north country, brother and sister, he a young man of serious mind and aspect, she a delicate spirit, a sort of poetical Ariel; both of them overflowing with poetry and enthusiasm, had come to the neighbourhood some time before. They were orphans and had been long separated; and the pleasure of setting up a sort of home together, enhanced by the still greater pleasure that each was to each the most congenial companion, filled their lives. Their means were as humble as those of the other young poets with whom they had not as yet been brought in contact, but more certain. Wordsworth had produced scarcely anything and earned nothing but he had inherited from a friend a little fortune, £900, upon the interest of which he felt himself passing rich. And Dorothy had a hundred pounds of her own. What was wanted more to be happy?

There are marks of hasty writing in some of Mrs. Oliphant's pages; she has written