from their afflictions. When going away they hang their bandages, sad fluttering rags, on the tree beside the well. Perhaps it may be likened to the tree Ygdrasil, with root fixed in heaven, or to some it may appear like to that whose time-tossed branches Æneas saw in the porch of Avernus :

Ulmus opaca, ingens, quam sedem Somnia volgo

Vana tenere ferunt, foliisque sub omnibus haerent.

There would have been no railways in Ireland for the Irish,' but they are cheerfully accepted as part of an imperfect scheme of existence. A journey to any place has the merit of giving an excuse for merry-making, and soft-skinned and thin-skinned folk have to travel first or second class. There are many skinfuls of whisky in the third-class carriages, and indeed a man needs something to cheer him when seated on a narrow cushionless ledge against a hard wooden wall. The Englishman by perseverance has made the railway companies see to his comfort; we never persist in making ourselves unpleasant. No magistrates outside this country would have been so right-minded as those who refused to punish a local farmer for pitching out of window a man who objected to smoking, and gaily proceeded to fine the complainant for leaving a train when in motion.

Generation after generation of English people have considered Ireland as a necessary evil, a thorn in the flesh, inserted by Providence for its own good ends. The very bagmen at the country hotels feel and show that it is an inferior country to which they are selling superior articles. It would be interesting to trace the feeling with which Ireland is mentioned in English literature before the present century. The burden of complaint, the 'Quousque tandem, Catilina, abutere patientia nostra ?' may be noticed through the Elizabethan dramatists, though, indeed, Shakespeare is more generous. His honest insular hatred spent itself on the French and weasel Scots; his love was for Italy, and to Ireland he gave neither praise nor blame. Yet we feel, especially we who live in the South, that there is no man in England, unless he be an umbrella-maker or waterproof-maker, but has reason every week to thank a careful Heaven that placed Ireland to defend England from the Atlantic. It is a national boast with Englishmen that in their climate a man can spend more days out of doors than anywhere else. They are blind to the reason. In this matter, as in some others, Ireland is England's whipping-boy. Were not this deluged island at hand to take the

moisture out of the Atlantic rain-clouds, England would be drenched with rain. The farmers would have even more pessimistic ideas on the advantage of sowing wheat, and cricket would not be the national game. Cricketers feel a little anxiety for the morrow's game when they read in the evening paper that the barometer is falling fast at Valentia; but on that morrow most of Ireland will be blotted out by the dark rain, and farmers, athletes, sportsmen foiled once again. Only so much rain as Munster, Connaught, and Leinster cannot manage between them -and their capacity is enormous and sorely tried-will pass on to England, the spoilt darling of fortune. Observe how cunningly Ireland is placed at right angles to the path of the wet southwesters-she protects England like an umbrella held to front the wind.

ERNEST ENSOR.

IZAAK WALTON'S LIFE OF DONNE.

AN APOLOGY.

SINCE the death of Matthew Arnold there has been no literary critic to whose appearances in print the majority of educated people look forward with such assurance of satisfaction as to those of Mr. Leslie Stephen. His essays are always first-hand studies, giving the result of reading and reflection, and an insight which 'looks quite through the deeds of men,' while they are written in a style as sinewy as the thought, with no preciosity of phrase and no word to spare. If they are sometimes disappointing, it is because he sometimes elects to treat of people who interest him only on some particular side, while the rest of their character or achievement finds him cold or hostile. Such a person evidently is Donne, the famous Dean of St. Paul's, whom Mr. Stephen has lately discussed in a very brilliant article in the 'National Review,' taking occasion by Mr. Gosse's 'Life and Letters.' Donne was a puzzle, and therefore attractive to the psychologist, but he was also a poet and a preacher; and those people who value him in either of these aspects are not likely to rise from the perusal of Mr. Stephen's paper in a very contented frame of mind. It is, however, only incidentally about Donne that I wish to speak in this humble remonstrance; the brief I have taken up is not on his behalf, but on behalf of his biographer Izaak Walton. If I speak of Donne it will be as the facts of his life form the material of Walton's biography.

After a dubious compliment to Walton's life of Donne as a prose idyl like 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' 'a charming narrative in which we have as little to do with the reality of Donne as with the reality of Dr. Primrose,' Mr. Stephen puts his case against the book in a sentence: There are two objections to the life if taken as a record of facts. The first is that the facts are all wrong, and the second that the portraiture is palpably false.' The judgment could not be more severe, and if Mr. Stephen were treating directly of Walton it would have great weight, for it would then mean that he had investigated the question of Walton s trustworthiness for himself. As it is, I incline to think he has not

done so, from the palpably false portraiture of the sentence which follows: As we read we imagine Walton gazing reverently from his seat at the dean in the pulpit, dazzled by a vast learning and a majestic flow of elaborate rhetoric, which seemed to the worthy tradesman to come as from an "angel in the clouds," and offering a posthumous homage as sincere and touching as that which, no doubt, engaged the condescending kindness of the great man in life.' That sentence contains a radically false view of Walton's character and capabilities, and the relations of the two men to each other. To begin with, Mr. Stephen has not, perhaps, been aware that the phrase 'an angel in the clouds' is not Walton's own, but a quotation from one of Donne's poems, and is employed by Walton to express, not the preacher's relation to his flock, but the heavenly authority of his message. If that is recognised, the phrase, though it remains exaggerated, ceases to be ridiculous. Then, as for the 'worthy tradesman.' Undoubtedly Walton is often spoken of as 'worthy' by his friends, and undoubtedly he had been a 'tradesman,' but his capability of appreciating Donne is not, for all that, adequately summed up in the compound phrase; any more than the secret of the charm of the Compleat Angler' is conveyed in Mr. Gosse's title of the 'immortal piscatory linendraper.' 2 Walton's marriage register declares him to have been an ironmonger. He was a freeman of the Ironmongers' Company, of which Donne's father had once been warden; and this fact may have implied a certain freemasonry in their relations. It is more important to insist that Walton was a man of education. His handwriting is beautiful and scholarlike, and his composition (as that of Shakespeare, who was also of yeoman descent and Country schooling) might put to the blush a good deal for which a university has been answerable. He was a poet, and a friend of poets. A better proof that he was not a worthy tradesman' in Mr. Stephen's unworthy sense is afforded by his friendship with country gentlemen of the stamp of Charles Cotton, who are not the least sensitive of men to distinctions of class, and who are not professionally obliged to meekness like the clergy, though even the Bishops of Winchester are not in the habit of offering free quarters in Farnham Castle to worthy tradesmen. A remark of Cotton's may be

Preaching the Word so, as showed his own heart was possessed by those very thoughts and joys that he laboured to distil into others; a preacher in earnest always preaching to himself, like an Angel from a cloud but in none.' 2 Gosse's Life of Donne, ii. 253.

quoted as sufficient once for all to free Walton's character from any suspicion of servility: 'My father Walton will be seen twice in no man's company he does not like, and likes none but such as he believes to be very honest men, which is one of the best arguments, or at least, of the best testimonies I have, that I either am or that he thinks me one of those, seeing I have not yet found him weary of me.' Donne became Vicar of St. Dunstan's, the parish in which Walton lived, in 1624, and assuming, as we may,' that they became acquainted at that date, there were still seven years remaining before Donne's death, in which Walton would have had opportunities of studying his vicar from other points of view than from below the pulpit; and, indeed, their intimacy is proved by his receiving one of Donne's memorial seals, and by his presence at Donne's bedside when he breathed his last. I plead, therefore, that Walton was a person capable of painting Donne's portrait, and with ample opportunities of studying his subject.

In the next place I will endeavour to show that the likeness is a good one; in other words that the salient facts are all right, and the character accurately drawn. In order to this, it will be convenient to desert Mr. Stephen for the moment, and turn to Mr. Gosse on whom he has relied, so as to examine any charges Donne's most recent biographer has to make against his predecessor. In the days of Walton,' says Mr. Gosse, of course what we now call conscientious biography was unknown.' Again he says, Walton's life is 'too rose-coloured and too inexact for scientific uses.' 3 And again, the inaccuracies are so many, that it is beyond the power of mere annotation to remove them.' I cannot think that by conscientious biography' Mr. Gosse means what I should mean by that expression, and I do not know what the 'scientific uses' of a biography may be, so that I will not attempt any discussion on this part of his indictment; but in regard to his other charges a direct issue can be joined. I will, therefore, make a summary of the inaccuracies Mr. Gosse has pointed out in Walton, to see if they indeed transcend the power of annotation to correct, and then I will examine the question of rose-colour.'

1. In his account of Donne's marriage and consequent dismissal

Mr. Gosse, for reasons which he does not give, 'conjectures' that Walton did not enjoy the Dean's intimacy till 1629 or 1630 (Pref. p. xii).

2 Other recipients were Sir Henry Wotton, the Bishops of Norwich, Salisbury and Chichester, and George Herbert.

* Pref. p. viii.