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admirable thoroughness. The résumés are made with care and knowledge, and certainly provide the Wagners of literary study with something comfortably definite to carry home in their note-books; but it is a nice question whether the nature of the splendid October Eclogue, for instance, of 'The Shepherd's Calendar' is more fully conveyed to the reader by the dry information that it 'treats of the poetic art, which Cuddie praises as a divine gift, complaining, however, that it is no longer valued as of old, and especially lacks powerful patrons, than if the same number of words had been devoted to at least a hint of its impetuous eloquence, glowing imagery, and ringing verse. In such cases, however, the defect is only negative; and the merit of what is offered is, so far as it goes, unexceptionable. But we cannot acquit the historian of singular obtuseness or insufficiency in the passing judgments levelled at the minor stars whose 'contents' were not thought to merit tabulation. Donne is disposed of by the information that he is 'tumid and artificial.'

'He may be counted the last of the Euphuists. ... His poems include, besides sacred ones, others that are extremely worldly. Of similar literary character were Richard Crashaw . . and Richard Lovelace.'

The obvious could not be more bluntly stated, nor the essential more completely missed. It is needless to multiply examples of this kind of conscientious futility. They culminate in the paragraph devoted to Bacon, who appears to owe his admission to this History chiefly to his being an indispensable party in the great ShakespeareBacon controversy, to which two large pages are devoted; his literary character is summed up in the single sentence, in all his works he appears very clever, but also very dry.'

It remains to notice, finally, the great collaborative enterprise of the Cambridge Press, the Elizabethan section of which, planned with imposing breadth, is now complete. Many schools of training are represented among the authors. The philological scholarship of America and Germany, the more insistently literary and philosophic criticism of Oxford, the private erudition of Vol. 216.-No. 431. 2 c

the detached men of letters, are seen at work, side by side, upon the same kind of problem; and the spectacle is full of interest to the student of the varieties of scholarly mind and method. Cambridge, the nurse of so many of the makers of Elizabethan literature, is more slightly represented among those who record it. Of the twenty-eight chapters on the drama, for instance, only six are the work of Cambridge men. But one of her representatives is the editor-in-chief, a host in himself.

Dr Ward is an historian as well as a man of letters; and the scheme of these volumes is generously comprehensive in regard to the social relations and appurtenances of literature. If any animus is to be found in them it is certainly not that of the rigidly literary scholarship which distinguishes severely between literature and writing, as Johnson distinguished between conversation and talk. Whatever the Elizabethans wrote-herbals, books of sport, manuals of devotion or of husbandry, or state papersis all relevant; and the chapters describing these biblia abiblia are among the freshest and most useful of all. They help us little to understand the rare Elizabethans who created living drama or song; but they throw a vivid light upon the common Elizabethan who thronged the theatre, or tabooed it, who spent his last pence upon a ballad, or let hungry genius starve because he preferred a sermon or a bearbaiting to all these things. In a word the literary milieu, the audience and the public, while nowhere portrayed de parti pris in M. Jusserand's sense, is put before us in a series of detached but minutely accurate studies, from which a very luminous if still incomplete picture can be educed. The chapters on the Theatres (VI, 10), on the Book-trade (IV, 18), and the Libraries (IV, 19) are examples of such studies, the first summing up a mass of recent discussion and research. A higher place, however, belongs to the chapters (IV, 16; VII, 16) in which Prof. Routh of Toronto handles the 'Popular Literature' of satires, broadsides, pamphlets, tales. In this somewhat sordid, but picturesque and animated domain, the literature and the life of Elizabethan London beat close and vitally together; literary and social analysis have to go hand in hand, to fertilise and to supplement one another. No one, to our knowledge, has brought to these tangled and intricate underwoods of the

great Elizabethan forest a union of imaginative insight and scientific grip comparable to that displayed in these chapters.

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But the supreme interest of Elizabethan literature lies, after all, in its galaxy of great writers. Of their lives, indeed, only fragments are, for the most part, known to us. Their works are their only monuments. For the refined interpenetration of criticism and biography, in Sainte-Beuve's sense, there is rarely an opening. None the less, the temper which he first brought into literary portraiture is perceptible in several of the studies, especially of the more evasive and enigmatic figures. Among others, Mr A. Symons's Middleton and Rowley' and Prof. Vaughan's 'Webster and Tourneur' belong to the highest rank of penetrating criticism and luminous exposition, widely as the writers differ in mental habit and point of view. And many other sections are marked by a scholarship at once sober and refined, which weighs discriminatingly the accretions of phrase and attribute that have gathered about most Elizabethan names during half-a-century of discussion not always on this side of idolatry. Excellent in this way are Prof. Gregory Smith's judicious handling of Marlowe, a conspicuous sufferer from that process; and Prof. Neilson's analysis of the 'decadence' of Ford. In the case of the greatest of Elizabethans a rare combination of all these qualities was called for. Prof. Saintsbury's> Shakespeare chapters are a tissue of lively and acute judgments, but they resemble rather a critical review of the works than a constructive appreciation; and the criticisms, always flavoured with personality and instinct with conviction, are often too purely individual to find a place quite fitly in a work intended to represent, as far as may be, the critical and scholarly mind of this generation of Englishmen. But we would not close upon a note of disparagement; and it is hardly a slur upon the most prolific literary worker among the English scholars of our time, to suggest that his gifts fit him better to guide the chariot than to draw in the team, though the reins were handled by 'Nous' himself.

C. H. HERFORD.

Art. 4.-CAVOUR AND THE MAKING OF ITALY.

1. The Life and Times of Cavour. By W. R. Thayer. Two vols. London: Constable, 1911.

2. The Dawn of Italian Independence. By W. R. Thayer. Two vols. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1893. 3. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic. Garibaldi and the Thousand. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy. By G. M. Trevelyan. London: Longmans, 1907-11. 4. Cavour. By Countess E. Martinengo-Cesaresco. London: Macmillan, 1898.

5. A History of Italian Unity. By Bolton King. Two vols. London: Nisbet, 1899.

6. Historical Essays and Studies. By Lord Acton. London: Macmillan, 1907.

7. Il Resorgimento Italiano. Conferenze. By Costanzo Rinaudo. Two vols. Turin: Olivero, 1910.

AMID a chorus of congratulation Italy celebrated, during the past year, the Jubilee of her resurrection as a united nation. The sympathetic good-will evoked by this event is entirely intelligible. No other political movement of the nineteenth century touched the imagination of mankind in the same degree as the Italian Risorgimento. Owing partly, perhaps, to the romantic halo which hovers over everything Italian, partly to the heroic stature of the leading actors in the immediate drama, partly to the rising sentiment of nationality in Europe at large, the prolonged struggles of the Italian peoples for the attainment of independence and unity were watched with unusual sympathy in many a foreign land; but nowhere, it is safe to say, with so much enthusiasm as in our own country. The prevailing sentiment in England is faithfully reflected by Mr Lecky, a typical writer of the Victorian era:

"The mingled associations of a glorious past and of a noble present, the genuine and disinterested enthusiasm that so visibly pervaded the great mass of the Italian people, the genius of Cavour, the romantic character and career of Garibaldi, and the inexpressible charm and loveliness of the land which was now rising into the dignity of nationhood, all contributed to make the Italian movement unlike any other of our time. It was the one moment of nineteenth

century history when politics assumed something of the character of poetry.' (Democracy and Liberty,' i, 407, 408.)

In regard to the celebrations of 1911 there is one question which may not unreasonably be asked, and which it may be well, therefore, to anticipate. Were they not somewhat premature? Would not 1921 have been a more appropriate date? It is true that it was on February 18, 1861, that a parliament, for the first time representative of all parts of Italy except Venice and Rome, assembled at Turin. Then for the first time was Victor Emmanuel proclaimed, by the grace of God and by the will of the nation, King of Italy. But the work was still woefully incomplete. In the web of Italian unity there were still two gaping rents. The Austrians were still in Venetia; the French troops were still protecting the remnant of the Temporal Power in Rome. To the quick imagination of the Italian peoples, but lately emancipated from foreign yokes, and still more lately united, the Temporal Power seemed like a spearpoint embedded in a living body. Garibaldi and Mazzini, flouting all the worldly wisdom of the diplomatists, were eager to make an immediate assault upon Rome. Even Cavour was moved to declare that 'without Rome for a capital Italy can never be firmly united.' Not, however, until 1870 was the Tricolour hoisted on the palace of the Capitol; and not until June 2, 1871, did Victor Emmanuel, accepting the verdict of a plébiscite all but unanimous, make his triumphal entry into Rome.

Must we then conclude that the Italian Government have been precipitate in celebrating the Jubilee of Unification in 1911? On the contrary, it may be taken as certain that history will endorse a decision due, perhaps, rather to the promptings of political instinct than to the considered judgment of the publicists. In three ways the year 1861 will be for ever memorable in the history of the Italian Risorgimento. It witnessed, as we have said, the meeting of the first truly Italian parliament; it marked the consummation of the romantic career of Garibaldi, the recognition of his distinctive contribution to the work of unification; above all, it was darkened by the irreparable loss of him who, without disparagement of others, must be regarded as the master-builder of the edifice of Italian unity. His countrymen of to

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