when a voice utters it as the immediate symbol proposed by the brain. These values Browning incessantly captures for the written word; if a quotation is desired it might be any of a hundred, and may be this:

'But he looked upon the city, every side,

Far and wide,

All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,

All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts and then,

All the men!'

it

'All the men!' It is not a line in a written poem; is a remark, suddenly dropped to us by an urgent and present imagination, to which the listener reacts as instinctively as to an unexpected voice. And here is another, sharper and finer in its subdued sadness:

'Was it something said,

Something done,

Vexed him? was it touch of hand,

Turn of head?

Strange! that very way

Love begun :

I as little understand

Love's decay.'

A direct association, not a transmitted portrayal of passion and beauty-this is what we seem to find; and it holds us till we may likely be surprised to see how acute a divergence of mind and temperament has been altogether forgotten. Browning, in many articles of his creed, and not those which he would have felt to be least important, is very remote from us now. Yet of the poetry of the nineteenth century there is none which has had more continuous power over new generations, and certainly none which appeals to nearly so great a diversity of spirit. Lovers of Browning are of no definite sort or complexion, and they do not, perhaps, always love each other. But they have all discovered, and they perpetually renew the discovery, that the mind can pour itself into the endless variety of these poems, sure of finding support and comprehension and fulfilment.

PERCY LUBBOCK.

Art. 8. — TWO SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MEN OF ACTION.

1. The Life of James. First Duke of Ormonde (1610-1688) By Lady Burghclere. Two vols. London: Murray, 1912.

2. The Life of Edward Mountagu, First Earl of Sandwich (1625-1672). By F. R. Harris. Two vols. London: Murray, 1912.

THE discovery of proper subjects for historical biography, like the discovery of new material for the biographies themselves, has become, in this crowded age of competi tion, no inconsiderable achievement. Obscure persons are celebrated in despite of their obscurity, vicious persons on account of their vices; a career suitable for treatment in an essay is accorded a full-bottomed life; a life is magnified into a discursive and unmethodical description of a period; and the praises of a really eminent man are sung in so many tongues and with such singular variations that it is impossible for the ordinary reader to know easily where to direct his attention or what opinion to receive when he has done so. Lady Burghclere and Mr Harris have neither removed landmarks nor darkened counsel. Ormonde and Sandwich are both distinguished and honourable men; and while the former suffers from a biography of too great dimensions, the latter has never secured any adequate biography at all. The work, now that it has been taken in hand, has been executed with all the accuracy, diligence, impartiality and understanding of which the very names of the sponsors-Mr H. W. C. Davis in the one case, Prof. Firth and Mr Herbert Fisher in the other-are in themselves a guarantee.

No one could read through a chapter of Mr Harris's book without becoming sensible of the competence of the treatment. The style is firm, terse and lucid; the facts are marshalled with admirable discrimination; nothing superfluous intrudes, nothing essential is forgotten. The Hinchingbrooke Manuscripts-or rather those of them which relate to the first Lord Sandwich, for there is a promise of good things yet to come-have met with a worthy student; and the result has been the production of a life which reads like a first-class state-paper. But

this, which is its strength, is also its weakness. The artist, appointed to the task and painting to order, has given indeed all he had to give, but has not been able to give that which he had not the subtle indefinable affection which comes to a man with the choice of his own subject. Hence the biography is lacking in psychological interest. The most obvious evidence of this is the author's omission to discuss Sandwich's religious opinions in the course of the concluding sketch of his character. Mr Harris, indeed, is too careful a worker not just to have mentioned Sandwich's creed on an earlier page of his book; but he is content to leave it at that. Yet, of all the curiosities about a man, the curiosity about his beliefs, or, if we like it-for it comes to the same thing-about his criticism of life, is the most profound. To be content to pass it by as a thing indifferent is to leave the riddle of the microcosm not only unsolved but unexamined. Doubtless Sandwich was every way a man of great reserves; doubtless in the life of a man of action we must look rather for peril and adventure and the keen clash of arms than for subtle developments of thought and character. But in the patron of Pepys and the friend of Evelyn, in this 'true nobleman,' as the latter calls him, this 'ornament to the Court and Prince,'' one of the best accomplished persons, not only of this nation but of any other,' in this man 'learned in sea affairs, in politics, in mathematics and in music,' who was of so 'sweet and obliging a temper, sober, chaste, very ingenious,' there must have been some deep chord of feeling which Mr Harris has never caught and the absence of which makes his portrait, for all its excellence of technique, a trifle lifeless.

Lady Burghclere has the quality which Mr Harris lacks. It would be a mean soul indeed which was insensible to the charm of Ormonde's personality; but his new biographer gathers all the rosebuds with a woman's tenderness and care. The influences that played upon his character in old age as well as in youth, that warmed and strengthened it and pressed it on towards its high emprise, are not neglected. Hers is more really what all biography ought to be, a tale that is told. But in other respects she is hardly Mr Harris's equal. Her style is not so crisp; she uses a broader canvas; and her execution sometimes Vol. 217.-No. 433.

21

fails through its very thoroughness. It is not everyone who will see the wood for the trees in that background of boggy Irish forest which Ormonde traversed, scattering all evil customs everywhere.' A bolder, more epigrammatic, less finished treatment might have attained a better result. Gibbon says that an author is the best critic of his own work, because he alone appreciates the difficulties of his undertaking. Lady Burghclere has found a way through the vast mass of material bearing upon her subject, of which the Carte MSS in the Bodleian and Lord Ormonde's private papers are the most important items; she knows, as we do not, the terrors of the road. But there will nevertheless be those who think that Dr Johnson's advice, which she rejects, was sound enough; and that the life of Ormonde should be written in two duodecimo volumes.

One other trifling criticism may be allowed. There is a difficulty, with which every writer of a line of prose is familiar, in avoiding the use of proper names without impinging upon the grammatical use of pronouns. Lady Burghclere frequently obviates this inconvenience by substituting at will Ormonde's name-James Butler-for his title. The practice is surely no more defensible on the printed page than in social intercourse. To speak indiscriminately of Lord Halsbury and Sir Hardinge Giffard, of Lord Loreburn and Sir Robert Reid, is to upset all existing conventions. The only time when a man's ordinary style can be rightly exchanged for his proper name is when we wish to strip him of all that fortune and merit have conferred, and set him as naked beside his fellow-men as when Nature sent him into the world or when Death will carry him out. Charles Stuart' and 'Louis Capet' were not the commodious devices of literary polish, but a recognition of the fact that for these two men the fashion of the world had for ever passed away. Ormonde can well afford to be stripped bare of every fortuitous advantage, but we ought not to be habitually invited to look at him as he will appear when the judgment is set and the books are opened.

James Butler-for James Butler he was born-came into the world in 1610. The last of Elizabeth's ministers still governed the state in the name of her successor; and

the head of the House of Ormonde was such an Irishman as the Tudors had more often looked for than found. Staunch, out-spoken and efficient, the tenth Earl of Ormonde left a name in Irish history which his greatnephew was proud to recall; and stories of Black Tom' were doubtless the child's first lessons in hero-worship. The boy was only six years old when the family was faced with a divided succession. The title passed to his grandfather; great part of the estates, by virtue of the disingenuous arbitration of King James, to an adventurer, Sir Richard Preston, who had married his great-uncle's daughter. Fortune drew one outrageous arrow after another from her quiver. His grandfather was imprisoned for refusing to accept the King's award; his father was drowned; he himself, by means of a lawyer's quibble, was abstracted from the influence of his largehearted Roman Catholic mother and transferred to the care of Archbishop Abbot. Circumstance had made him a Protestant; temperament marked him out for an Anglican. What he would have become if the learned and dogmatic Laud had had the handling of him, instead of the sporting Abbot, is an interesting but an idle subject of speculation. As it was, he grew up a gentleman of admirable good-sense but no scholar. To all the proper accomplishments of a complete courtier he added all the advantages of appearance. It is not surprising that he stood in high favour with the elegant young ladies of the day, amongst whom was reckoned his young cousin, Lady Elizabeth Preston. Family interest clearly required that they should marry and re-unite the family title with the family estates. They themselves were not averse from doing so. But Lord Holland, the lady's guardian, was obdurate; and, in the course of the secret wooing, the intermediary-his daughter, Lady Isabella Rich-lost her honour at Ormonde's hands. It is a singularly ugly blemish on an otherwise stainless shield. Years afterwards, a letter, carelessly slipped into the wrong envelope, revealed to Lady Ormonde the liaison between her husband and her friend. And if there be any treasury of merit, whence a noble wife may pay the debt of an erring husband, her transcendent generosity towards the woman, who had so deeply wronged her, will surely efface the memory of her lover's sin.