Is born to the old mother in the east ;

The chain which binds her safely to the world
Is lengthened by a new and stronger link,
That will not snap though strained by Anarchy.
Heed not the idle tongues that croak in mud,
The bat-like seers who fly in dusk and gloom,
Sending their shadows where they dare not
go.

Your hands a little higher, till they thrust Beyond the earthly clouds that cling to us, Rest not beneath the shade cast by their wings, Above the empty schemes, until they clasped For danger lies in darkness. Seek the light,The hand of God, and held fast, braving all."

THE WRONGS OF SAVAGE RACES.-It has brought into close contact with the evils civtaken a good many generations for the Euro-ilization has already spread all round the pean races to discover that men of a different coast, and we are debating what sort of procolor have an equal right to be treated with tection we must offer them against ourselves. justice. We have improved off the face of Now the negro is not, like the red man of the earth the aboriginal inhabitants of Aus- America or the fragile Polynesian, easily detralia and New Zealand. The red man is dis- stroyed. But he can be degraded and bruappearing from the forest and the prairie like talized with drink, for it will, we think, be the bisons, the Hottentots and Caffres of the admitted that a drunken savage. -even if he Cape have been decimated by imported small- be on occasion a devourer of his enemies—is pox and cheap alcohol. If the Otaheitans more repulsive than a sober one. A taste for have gained in civilization, they have paid alcohol is acquired with lightning speed, and heavily for it at the expense of their vitality, the dull brain of the African is unable to see which "a new band of fevers" brought from any evil in the widest divergence from the Europe has steadily lowered. Wherever civ-paths of sobriety. The English South African ilized man has come into contact with savage Company has undertaken to regulate the traffic races the latter have gone to the wall. There in intoxicating liquors within the territories are forces working behind progress that must under their influence, and to prevent their sale be understood and obeyed, or else, woe to to the natives. We are sure the obligation those who ignore and disregard them, for required by the charter licensing them will be ignorance is death. Even some diseases that strictly adhered to, though we fear that slowly civilized man treats as trifling become danger- but surely, in spite of strenuous efforts, a taste ous and often deadly when conveyed amongst for the excitement produced by alcohol will a barbarous and primitive people. We have, follow our footsteps. The Mohammedan therefore, if we are candid, to confess to the slave-hunters, whatever their cruelties may be, infliction of innumerable wrongs on the savage eschew spirits themselves, and never import nations and tribes whom we have met in our them amongst the few bales of goods in which colonizing efforts. The expansion of England they traffic with those negro tribes too powerhas meant the destruction of the weak races ful to be exploited for the slave marts. The unable to bear inoculation with the blessings Soudanese are devout followers of Islam, and of civilization. Missionaries may have often in fermented liquors they see perdition. Wheracted as an anodyne, but it is at least ques-ever the Arab blood is found, the Mussulman tionable whether their teachings have always is sober, at all events. But it is different with compensated for the evils of poisonous spirits and cheap firearms that everywhere have followed the pioneers of new colonies. But we are at last beginning to recognize the truth, and a dormant conscience is awakening. African races in the heart of the Dark Continent -in number many millions-will soon be

the negro. For many years the African native has been "between the devil and the deep sea.' On one side the Christian trader has offered cheap and poisonous spirits, on the other he has been kidnapped by well-armed African man-hunters.

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And I catch the first fine preludes of the lark; O foolish heart, beware!

From Macmillan's Magazine. TWENTY YEARS OF POLITICAL SATIRE.

THOUGH it may seem a rather cowardly thing for a critic to say, I am myself much inclined to doubt whether any very satisfactory result comes of attempts to decide why this or that literary product came at that or this time. The theory of the product of the circumstances was a very pretty and ingenious toy, which, like many toys in literature, in philosophy, and in other departments of toy-making, amused the town for a time, but has now had its day. Of course we can see in general why certain times the time when Greece became from an insignificant collection of petty states the most formida. ble power in the Mediterranean, the time of the completest and most unchallenged Roman domination, the time when the Dark blossomed into the Middle Ages, the time of the Reformation and the discovery of America, the time of the French Revolution should all have been fertile in literature. As a man is most inclined to perpetrate literature when he is excited, so is a world. But when you come down to minor matters I doubt very much whether any such explanation is possible. I could make twenty very pretty ones for the singular development of political and semi-political satire during the last twenty years of the eighteenth century in England; but I should be the first to admit that one was no better than another, and that any twenty-first was likely to be as good, or at least as sufficient, as the whole of them. The popularity and novelty of the swinging easy measures, the audacious and lively parody of Anstey's "Bath Guide," the fact of the coincidence of the palmy days of the English public school and university system, as regards its culiar style of scholarship, with the period when public school and university men had most direct, immediate, and easy entrance into politics, the keenness of political disputes, which till the Revolution itself broke out turned upon no vital question but were all the keener, the general curiosity and partial annoyance caused by the supremacy of Pitt at so early an age, the absence of any passionate or absorbing school of literature to divert

pe

literary talent from mere sport — these and a dozen other things may be detected by any tolerably acute observer, and justified by any tolerably diligent student. It

is sufficient for me to indicate them in passing.

The fact, however, of the existence of a peculiar kind of political and semipolitical verse at this time-a kind rather imitated than continued since, and quite different from the political satire of a hundred years earlier, at the head of which towers "Absalom and Achitophel," from the still earlier form of Butler, and from the later and quite recent work of Churchill-is indisputable; and it is equally indisputable that it produced some of the most amusing stuff to be found anywhere in English literature. Its crowning achievement, the inimitable though constantly imitated "Poetry of the AntiJacobin," has just been re-edited by Mr. Henry Morley. Mr. Morley's indefatigable industry in selecting and editing much of the best work of English authors in cheap, easily accessible, and sometimes by no means uncomely forms, cannot be too gratefully acknowledged by any person of taste. But the gratitude must be mixed with pain at several literary tricks of Mr. Morley's, notably that interlarding his text with portions of biographical and critical matter, instead of abiding by the only orthodox and catholic plan of preserving the integrity of the text and keeping introduction and notes to themselves. In the same volume Mr. Morley has included (chiefly it would appear for the reason that George Ellis was a contributor to both books) a very few specimens of "The Rolliad," a production on the other side of politics much earlier and less finished, but, allowing for the absence of two such wits as Canning and Frere, not so much less amusing. As his concern was with the work of the trio exclusively, he has also given "The Microcosm" and other non-political matter. My aim being different, the subjects of this paper will be "The Rolliad," with its dependent "Political Eclogues," "Probationary Odes," and "Political Miscellanies at one end,

* Parodies and Burlesques by Canning, Ellis, and Frere. Edited by H. Morley. London, 1890.

and the "Poetry of the Anti-Jacobin" at | form of "The Rolliad" is one of its prin the other, with, between them, the exceed- cipal charms. The subjects are tolerably ingly diverting work of Peter Pindar.