and would you have it said hereafter by those who read them, "Pisistratus was less wise than Solon ?"

Pisistratus.

It must be said; for none among men hath enjoyed so high a character as you, in wisdom and integrity.

Solon.

Either you lie now, Pisistratus, or you lied when you abolished my institutions.

Pisistratus.

They exist, and shall exist, I swear to you.

Solon.

Yes, they exist like the letters in a burnt paper, which are looked down on from curiosity, and just legible, while the last of the consuming fire is remaining, but they crumble at a touch, and indeed fly before it, weightless and incoherent.

Do you desire, Pisistratus, that your family shall inherit your anxieties? If you really feel none yourself, which you never will persuade me, nor (I think) attempt it, still you may be much happier, much more secure and tranquil, by ceasing to possess what you have acquired of late, provided you cease early; for long possession of any property makes us anxious to retain it, and insensible, if not to the cares it brings with it, at least to the real cause of them. Tyrants will never be persuaded that their alarms and sorrows, their perplexity and melancholy, are the product of tyranny: they will not attribute a tittle of them to their own obstinacy and perverseness, but look for it all in another's. They would move everything and be moved by nothing: and yet lighter things move them than any other particle of mankind.

Pisistratus.

You are talking, Solon, of mere fools.

Solon.

The worst of fools, Pisistratus, are those who once had wisdom. Not to possess what is good is a misfortune; to throw it away is a folly; but to change what we know hath served us, and would serve us still, for what never has and never can, for what on the contrary hath always been pernicious to the holder, is the action of an incorrigible idiot. Observations on arbitrary power can never be made usefully to its possessors. There is not a foot-page among them at the bath whose converse on this subject is not more reasonable than mine would be. I could adduce no argument which he would not controvert, by the magical words "practical things" and "present times": a shrug of the shoulder would overset all that my meditations have taught me in half a century of laborious inquiry and intense thought. 66 These are theories,"

he would tell his master, "fit for Attica before the olive was sown among us. Old men must always have their way. Will their own grey beards never teach them that time changes things?

One fortune hath ever befallen those whom the indignant gods have cursed with despotical power; to feed upon falsehood, to loath and sicken at truth, to avoid the friendly, to discard the wise, to suspect the honest, and to abominate the brave. Like grubs in rotten kernels, they coil up for safety in dark hollowness, and see nothing but death in bursting from it. Although they place violence in the highest rank of dignities and virtues, and draw closely round their bodies those whose valour, from the centre to the extremities, should animate the state, yet they associate the most intimately with singers, with buffoons, with tellers of tales, with prodigies of eating and drinking, with mountebanks, with

diviners. These captivate and enthrall their enfeebled and abject spirits; and the first cry that rouses them from their torpor is the cry that demands their blood. Then would it appear by their countenances, that all they had scattered among thousands, had come secretly back again to its vast repository, and was issuing forth from every limb and feature, from every pore, from every hair upon their heads.

What is man at last, O Pisistratus, when he is all he hath ever wished to be! the fortunate, the powerful, the supreme! Life in its fairest form (such he considers it) comes only to flatter and deceive him. Disappointments take their turn, and harass him; weakness and maladies cast him down; pleasures catch him again when he rises from them, to misguide and blind and carry him away; ambition struggles with those pleasures, and only in struggling with them seems to be his friend; they mar one another, and distract him; enemies encompass him; associates desert him; rivalries thwart, persecutions haunt him; another's thoughts molest and injure him; his own do worse than join with them: and yet he shudders and shrinks back at nothing so much as the creaking of that door by which alone there is any

escape.

Pisistratus! O Pisistratus! do we tire out the patience of mankind, do we prey upon our hearts, for this? Does Nature crave it? Does Wisdom dictate it? Can Power avert it? Descend then from a precipice it is difficult to stand, it is impossible to repose on. Take the arm that would lead you and support you back, and restore you to your friends and country. He who places himself far above them is (any child might tell you) far from them. What on earth can be imagined so horrible and disheartening as to live without ever seeing one creature of the same species! Being a tyrant or despot, you are in this calamity. Imprisonment in a dungeon could not reduce you to it: false friends have done that for you which enemies could but attempt. If such is the harvest of their zeal, when they are unsated and alert, what is that which remains to be gathered in by you, when they are full and weary? Bitterness; the bitterness of infamy! And how will you quench it? By swallowing the gall of self-reproach!

Let me put to you a few questions, near to the point: you will answer them, I am confident, easily and affably. Pisistratus, have you not felt yourself the happier, when in the fulness of your heart, you have made a large offering to the gods?

Piously, virtuously, and reasonably said, my friend. The gods did not indeed want your sacrifice: they, who give everything, can want nothing. The Athenians do want a sacrifice from you: they have an urgent necessity of something; the necessity of that very thing which you have taken from them, and which can cost you nothing to replace. You have always been happier, you confess, in giving to the gods what you could have yourself used in your own house: believe me, you will not be the less so in giving back to your fellowcitizens what you have taken out of theirs and what you very

well know they will seize when they can, together with your property and life. You have been taught, you tell me, that sacrifice to the gods is a duty; be it so; but who taught you it? Was it a wiser man than you or I? Or was it at a time of life when your reason was more mature than at present, or your interests better understood? No good man ever gave anything without being the more happy for it, unless to the undeserving, nor ever took anything away without being the less so. But here is anxiety and suspicion, a fear of the strong, a subjection to the weak; here is fawning, in order to be fawned on again, as among suckling whelps half awake. He alone is the master of his fellow-men who can instruct and improve them; while he who makes the people another thing from what it was, is master of that other thing, but not of the people. And supposing we could direct the city exactly as we would, is our greatness to be founded on this? A ditcher may do greater things: he may turn a torrent (a thing even more turbid and more precipitate) by his ditch. A sudden increase of power, like a sudden increase of blood, gives pleasure; but the new excitement being once gratified, the pleasure ceases.

I do not imagine the children of the powerful to be at any time more contented than the children of others, although I concede that the powerful themselves may be for some moments, paying however very dearly for those moments, by more in quantity and in value. Give a stranger, who has rendered you no service, four talents: the suddenness of the gift surprises and delights him. Take them away again, saying, "Excuse me; I intended them for your brother; yet, not wholly to disappoint you, I give you two." What think you; do you augment or diminish that man's store of happiness?

Pisistratus.

It must depend on his temper and character: but I think in nearly all instances you would diminish it.

Solon.

Certainly. When we cannot have what we expect, we are dissatisfied; and what we have ceases to afford us pleasure. We are like infants; deprive them of one toy, and they push the rest away, or break them, and turn their faces from you, crying inconsolably.

If you desire an increase of happiness, do not look for it, O Pisistratus, in an increase of power. Follow the laws of niture on the earth. Spread the seeds of it far and wide: your crop shall be in proportion to your industry and liberality. What you concentrate in yourself, you stifle; you propagate what you communicate.

Elizabeth Barrett, the best of English poetesses, known afterwards as a poet's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, published in 1826, when her age was but seventeen, "An Essay on Mind," and other poems. In the following year, 1827, Alfred Tennyson, aged only eighteen, produced also his first verse in a little volume of "Poems by two Brothers," Alfred and Charles. In 1827 Mr. Edward Lytton Bulwer-who became Sir Edward Lytton Bulwer in 1838, Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton in 1844, and Lord Lytton in 1866-made his first success as the author of a novel entitled "Pelham." There followed "The Disowned" in 1828, "Devereux" in 1829, "Eugene Aram" in 1832, "Godolphin" in 1833, "Rienzi" in 1835, and forty or fifty other works during a period of rare intellectual activity that ended only with his life in January, 1872. In 1834 Captain Frederick

Marryat, who died in 1848, began his career as a writer of novels, illustrating with genial fidelity and an unstrained sense of fun the humour and romance of life among the sailors. His novels of that year were Peter Simple" and "Jacob Faithful," two of his best stories, perhaps his best two. Robert Browning, in the next year, 1835, at the age of twenty-three, produced "Paracelsus;" and Charles Dickens's "Sketches by Boz," which laid the foundation of another brilliant career, were then appearing. They were published as a volume in 1836, when Captain Marryat fully maintained his early success with " Japhet in Search of a Father." In 1837 appeared Charles Dickens's "Pickwick," and Thomas Carlyle's book on "The French Revolution." The four volumes of Henry Hallam's "Literature of Europe in the 15th, 16th, and 17th Centuries" appeared during the years 1837-9; a valuable book if all its criticism upon poets and their works be left unread. In 1838 Thomas Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus," which had been published as detached papers by Fraser's Magazine in 1833, at last appeared as a volume; and Charles Dickens produced "Oliver Twist," following that up with "Nicholas Nickleby" in the following year, and "Master Humphrey's Clock" in 1840. In 1840 William Makepeace Thackeray, aged twenty-nine, published his "Paris Sketch Book," and John Forster, aged twenty-eight, his "Statesmen of the Commonwealth," a work of which one part was afterwards developed into a larger "Life of Sir John Eliot." Thomas Babington Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome" were published in 1842; and Douglas Jerrold, who used keen wit and a lively fancy vigorously in aid of every sound movement of social reform, had taken his place at this time among leaders of thought. It was he who first and most resolutely gave practical direction and the dignity of worthy purpose to the wit of "Punch," which was established in 1841, and had Jerrold among its earliest contributors. Macaulay's "Lays of Ancient Rome" appeared in 1842; and in that year Mr. Browning first began to produce, under the title "Bells and Pomegranates," a series of shilling double-columned parts, published at intervals, with a complete work or more than one

usually a play-in each. In 1842 he thus published "Pippa Passes," "King Victor and King Charles," and "Dramatic Lyrics;" in 1843 two plays, "A Blot on the 'Scutcheon" and "The Return of the Druses;" in 1844, "Colombe's Birthday;" in 1845, "Dramatic Romances and Lyrics;" in 1846, "Luria" and "A Soul's Tragedy." Mr. Matthew Arnold's prize poem on "Cromwell" was published in 1843, when its author's age was twenty-one; and in 1845 Thomas Carlyle published "Cromwell's Letters and Speeches." Charles Dickens was at this time publishing an annual Christmas story in aid of goodwill among men ; "The Christmas Carol" in 1843, and then in successive years 66 The Cricket on the Hearth," "The Chimes," "The Battle of Life," "The Haunted Man." Two of the best biographies of our time were published in 1844 and 1848; in 1844, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley's "Life of Thomas Arnold," and in 1848 John Forster's "Life of Goldsmith." The last-named year was that in which Lord Macaulay produced the first two volumes of

his "History of England from the Accession of James II.," which obtained wonderful popularity. Its clear picturesque style keeps it from losing ground in general estimation. In 1847 Charlotte Brontë's public career began with her novel of "Jane Eyre," followed in 1849 by "Shirley," and in 1853 by "Villette," permanent additions to our best literature of fiction. Again a woman of genius, Mrs. Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, began a series of novels with "Mary Barton" in 1848. That also was the year in which William Makepeace Thackeray made known the full power of his genius in "Vanity Fair." It was the year of a new revolutionary movement, and marked the beginning of another stage of progress. The form of its energy has already been indicated in the volume of this Library containing "Illustrations of English Religion.' The year's books in England abundantly illustrated the vigour of the time. In the same year with Thackeray's "Vanity Fair" appeared Dickens's "Dombey and Son," from which we have quoted in another volume of this Library the story of the death of Little Paul.

In "Vanity Fair" Thackeray framed a novel upon a design of which the suggestion came in part from the study of Fielding. As Fielding took a broad canvas and painted in "Tom Jones," his picture of the world; with frank honesty under all failings, generosity of nature and trust in others as a result of his own trustworthiness, in Tom Jones, and the opposite qualities in Blifil, as the two poles about which human life is turning; so Thackeray, in his mimic world, has at its opposite poles his principles of good and evil. The salt of the earth he finds in the simplicity of innocence, in the sincerity of childlike hearts. On the one side he sets Amelia and Major Dobbin, on the other Lord Steyne, Becky Sharp, and all the scheming worldliness of which she is the type. The quiet humour, the keen play of satire over vanities and vices of the Fair, gave to the satirist high credit as a cynic among many who, considering themselves men of the world, would be scandalised at the assertion that this author, who delivered all his hits with such neatness and self-possession, was, in his own way, teaching the worldly that the pure in heart see God, and that, in Christ's sense, to become as little children was the way up to the highest life. Major Dobbin palled upon some tastes; but when Thackeray taught afterwards the same lesson of life through his Colonel Newcome, the vigour of the new sketch made itself felt. The lesson is unchanged. The true life in all Thackeray's writings is painted as simple and innocent, and from first to last his genius was spent in kindly battle against worldliness and insincerity."

Since 1843 John Ruskin had been in the company of writers who touched the essentials of life. His "Modern Painters" was followed in 1849 by the "Seven Lamps of Architecture," and by the "Stones of Venice" in 1853.

In 1850 William Wordsworth died, and Alfred Tennyson succeeded him as Poet Laureate. In the

1 Pages 422-426.

A characteristic piece of Thackeray's writing, his "Roundabout Paper" upon Thomas Hood, will be found in another volume of this Library, "Shorter Prose Works," pages 422-425.

same year appeared Tennyson's "In Memoriam," and Robert Browning's "Christmas Eve and Easter Day." Thackeray's "Esmond" was published in 1852; the year also of Mrs. Gaskell's "Cranford" and "Ruth." All Mrs. Gaskell's stories dealt with the sympathies and duties of our common daily life. In "Cranford," humour and pathos are daintily blended in a picture of the noble life that may be lived where all seems little to the careless looker-on. The short career of Charlotte Brontë ended with her death in 1855. But a year afterwards, in 1856, the woman who rose above all women in lyric power, Mrs. Browning, published a novel in verse, "Aurora Leigh," a poem that sounded the depths of life; and, two years later, the woman who rose above all women, and perhaps also all men, in prose fiction, under the assumed name of "George Eliot" began her career with three stories entitled "Scenes of Clerical Life." In

AURORA LEIGH

the heroine who tells her story is a poetess, daughter of an Italian mother by an English father. Motherless when four years old, bred in Italy among the mountains by her father, who taught her his own knowledge part of it love and grief-she was orphaned at thirteen by her father's death. Then she was brought to England, caged in the country home of her father's sister, a quiet maiden aunt with no enthusiasms and a dislike for the Italian marriage that had robbed her of her brother.

And thus my father's sister was to me
My mother's hater. From that day, she did
Her duty to me (I appreciate it

In her own word as spoken to herself),
Her duty, in large measure, well pressed out,
But measured always. She was generous, bland,
More courteous than was tender, gave me still
The first place, -as if fearful that God's saints
Would look down suddenly and say, "Herein
You missed a point, I think, through lack of love."
Alas, a mother never is afraid

Of speaking angerly to any child,

Since love, she knows, is justified of love.

In this English home Aurora Leigh grew into womanhood, was poetess and type of the ideal in our world. Her cousin, Romney Leigh, early master of Leigh Hall, visited her often. He fixed his mind upon the actual, and with a deep sense of the thousand evils to be conquered in the world, applied his whole mind to the practical battle against such of these as he could hope to touch.

We came so close, we saw our differences
Too intimately. Always Romney Leigh
Was looking for the worms, I for the gods.
A god-like nature his; the gods look down,
Incurious of themselves; and certainly
"Tis well I should remember how, those days,
I was a worm too, and he looked on me.

3 See, in this Library, "Illustrations of English Religion," pages 428-432.

There was love between them, but when Romney spoke his heart, there was blended with his love a kindly toleration of Aurora's aspirations. They were slight to him beside the immediate pressing need of this and that reform. Aurora turned from love so offered, and the story then arises: about her, seeking her ends in the world as a poetess through trial and sorrow, winning empty fame; about him, seeking his ends in the world as an active combatant against the ill he sees. Neither attains. The whole poem is planned to teach what is taught also again and again in the poetry of Robert Browning, that the thinker and the worker must unite their force; that the far sight of the idealist and the near sight of the realist are both needed for the progress of the world. We need the union of both. Also

We want more quiet in our works,

More knowledge of the bounds in which we work;
More knowledge that each individual man
Remains an Adam to the general race,
Constrained to see, like Adam, that he keep
His personal state's condition honestly,

Or vain all thoughts of his to help the world,
Which still must be developed from its one
If bettered in its many. We, indeed,
Who think to lay it out new like a park,
We take a work on us which is not man's;
For God alone sits far enough above
To speculate so largely. None of us

(Not Romney Leigh) is mad enough to say,
We'll have a grove of oaks upon that slope,
And sink the need of acorns.

At last came the needed union. Aurora had learnt her lesson, Romney his. Blinded by an act of ingratitude in ignorant men for whom he had made his ancestral house a home, Romney Leigh found his way to Aurora, and their minds were tuned to perfect harmony.

And then calm, equal, smooth with weights of joy,
His voice rose, as some chief musician's song
Amid the old Jewish Temple's Selah-pause,
And bade me mark how we two met at last
Upon this moon-bathed promontory of earth,
To give up much on each side, then take all.
"Beloved," it sang, we must be here to work;
And men who work can only work for men,
And, not to work in vain, must comprehend
Humanity, and so work humanly,
And raise men's bodies still by raising souls,
As God did, first."

"But stand upon the earth,"
I said, "to raise them (this is human too:
There's nothing high which has not first been low;
My humbleness, said One, has made me great!),
As God did, last,"

"And work all silently,
And simply," he returned, "as God does all;
Distort our nature never, for our work,

Nor count our right hands stronger for being hoofs.
The man most man, with tenderest human hands,
Works best for men-as God in Nazareth."

He paused upon the word, and then resumed; "Fewer programmes; we who have no prescience.

Fewer systems; we who are held, and do not hold,
Less mapping out of masses, to be saved,
By nations or by sexes. Fourier's void,
And Comte is dwarfed, and Cabet, puerile.
Subsists no law of life outside of life:

No perfect manners without Christian souls;
The Christ himself had been no Lawgiver,
Unless He had given the life, too, with the law.

I echoed thoughtfully-"The man, most man
Works best for man: and, if most man indeed,
He gets his manhood plainest from his soul;
While, obviously, this stringent soul itself
Obeys our old rules of development;
The spirit ever witnessing in ours,
And love, the soul of souls within the soul,
Evolving it sublimely. First, God's love."

preceding chapter of this volume has shown Prince Arthur associated with the grace of God in Spenser's "Faerie Queene." And now, in accordance with the spirit of the time, King Arthur is in a poem fashioned also as an allegory. He is the king within the breast; his authority is the authority of Conscience.

THE IDYLLS OF THE KING

represent Guinevere, "fairest of all flesh on earth," as herself the flesh. Her falling away from Arthur is the falling away of the flesh from the higher spiritual life. Before Arthur came, there ruled in "this isle "the "Purple Island" Phineas Fletcher called it-many a petty king, uncontrolled passions and desires; the heathen host swarmed over seas. There spread spiritual darkness,

And so there grew great tracts of wilderness, Wherein the beast was ever more and more, But man was less and less, till Arthur came.

When Leodogran heard of Arthur newly crowned,

Though not without an uproar made by those
Who cried "He is not Uther's son!" the king
Sent to him, saying, "Arise and help us thou!
For here between the man and beast we die."

The coming of Arthur was as the coming of the wisdom from above. The character of the blameless king is the character of the wisdom from above, as painted by James in his epistle. "If ye have bitter envying and strife in your hearts, glory not, and lie not against the truth. This wisdom descendeth not from above, but is earthly, sensual, devilish. For where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work. But the wisdom that is from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, and easy to be intreated, full of mercy and good fruits, without partiality, and without hypocrisy."

The barons cried, indeed, "Who is he, that he should rule us?"

"This is the son of Gorloïs, not the king; This is the son of Anton, not the king."

Upon which the comment may be in quotation of a passage from a book by a leader in modern philosophy, Professor Bain's treatise on "The Emotions and the Will."

A variety of foundations have been assigned for the exercise of this compelling authority; in other words there are many contending moral theories. The will of the Deity, propriety, right reason, the fitness of kings, the decision of the civil magistrate, self-interest, the unreasoning dictates of a special faculty called the moral sense or conscience, utility, or the common good of mankind, have been severally assigned as determining what is to be authoritatively enjoined or forbidden; in other words, right or wrong.

I have purposely deferred the consideration of conscience as a distinct attribute or faculty, from a conviction that this portion of our constitution is moulded upon external authority as its type. . . It is purely by means of

the discipline exercised in each society over its members, and by the habitual ascription of praise to some actions, and blame to others, that the code of the society is stamped on the individual mind, and gives birth to a conscience corresponding. ... I may next remark upon the sense of duty in the abstract. Just as in the love of money for its own sake, one may come to form a habit of acting in a particular way, although the special impulses that were the original moving causes no longer recur to the mind. This does not prove that there exists a primitive sentiment of duty in the abstract, any more than the conduct of the miser proves that we are born with the love of gold in the abstract It is the tendency of associations to erect new centres of force, detached from the particulars that originally gave them meaning; which new creations will sometimes assemble round themselves a more powerful body of sentiment than could be inspired by any one of the constituent realities. Nothing that money could purchase affects the mind of the money-getter so strongly as the arithmetical numeration of his gains. So it is with the habitual sentiment of duty in a certain class of minds, and with the great abstractions of truth, justice, purity, and the like. These cannot be proved to be primordial sentiments.

"This is the son of Gorloïs, not—the king;
This is the son of Anton, not-the king."

I should not omit to add that any of the proposed theories of the origin of conscience may be accepted without changing in any way its character and its authority. However it comes, we have a "compelling authority," called conscience, within, that points to the highest right we are at any stage of life capable of knowing, and to which when we do well we submit ourselves.

Arthur, passing to battle, felt the yearning of the spirit to be joined to the flesh ;

Agonies of the life,

Desiring to be join'd with Guinevere;
And thinking as he rode, her father said

That there between the man and beast they die.

Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts
Up to my throne, and side by side with me?
What happiness to reign a lonely king,
Vext-0 ye stars that shudder over me,
O earth that soundest hollow under me,

Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be join'd
To her that is the fairest under heaven,
I seem as nothing in the mighty world,
And cannot will my will, nor work my work
Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm
Victor and lord. But were I join'd with her,
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it live.

When Queen Bellicent describes the crowning of Arthur, she describes the moment in any life when the resolve is made that every passion and desire shall bow to Conscience. The three queens at the crowning are Faith, Hope, and Charity; the Lady of the Lake is the Church. When Bellicent tells of the first coming of Arthur to herself, she gives a little picture of the first coming of Conscience to an innocent child :