republication of Natural Religion, is in a measure, if we may say so without irreverence, applicable to such works as these; they are a republication, fragmentary indeed, and not without alloy, but in an independent form, of conventional truths. Matthew Arnold has said of Butler's Analogy,' that, whatever may be thought of its philosophy, its perusal is a valuable exercise for the mind. We are tempted to make a similar remark about Chesterfield's writings. They are not, indeed, likely to be of benefit in the sense intended by Matthew Arnold. They will not, that is to say, discipline our reasoning faculties, or tend to form habits of close concentration; but they will be of benefit to us as communion with men of superior intellect and temper is of benefit. The charm of Chesterfield lies in his sincerity and truthfulness, in his refined good sense, in his exquisite perception of the becoming, finding expression in seriousness most happily tempered by gaiety. Of no man could it be more truly said that he had cleared his mind of cant. A writer more absolutely devoid of pretentiousness or affectation cannot be found. Of moral and intellectual frippery he has nothing. Sophistry and paradox are his abhorrence. All he has written bears, indeed, the reflection of a character which is of all characters perhaps the rarest the character of one'—it was what Voltaire said of him-'who had never been in any way either a charlatan or a dupe of charlatans.' He is one of the very few writers who never wears a mask, and in whose accent no falsetto note can ever be detected. In his fearless intellectual honesty he reminds us of Swift, in his pellucid moral candour he reminds us of Montaigne. To contemplate life, not as it presents itself under the glamour or the gloom of illusion and prejudice, as it presents itself to the enthusiast or the cynic, but as it really is; to regard ignorance as misfortune and vice as evil, but the false assumption of wisdom and virtue as something far worse; to be or to strive to be what pride would have us seem, and to live worthily within the limits severally prescribed by nature and fortune-all this will the study of Chesterfield's philosophy tend to impress on us. Nor is it in his judgments only on life and on life's important concerns that this sincerity, this pure sincerity, is conspicuous. It is equally apparent in all that concerns himself, in his frank admissions, in his letters to his son, of his own follies and short-comings, in the unaffected modesty with which he has spoken of his own writings, and in the remarkable illustration afforded by those writings themselves of the conscientiousness with which he carried out his own precept, that whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well.' It is difficult difficult to believe that these compositions, finished as they almost all of them are to the finger-nail, were intended for no eyes but those of his son and his son's tutor. And yet such, as we learn from the letters themselves, was the case. In In Chesterfield is united as in no other English writer is united, in equal measure, at least, so much of what is best in the intellectual temper of the French and in the intellectual temper of the English. He has much of the sterling good-sense of Johnson, and if we penetrate below the surface, much also of Johnson's seriousness and solidity. He resembles Swift, not merely in his intolerance of sophistry and dishonesty in all that pertains to sentiment and principle, but in his shrewd and homely mother-wit, and in his keen clear insight into positive as distinguished from transcendental truth. Franklin himself is not more purely practical, or Paley more purely utilitarian. But it was not these qualities which led St. Beuve to speak of him as the Rochefoucauld of England, nor is it these qualities which give him his peculiar place among English authors. It still remains, that in spite of so much which is characteristic of the English genius and the English temper, the impression he makes on us is that he is one of the most un-English of English authors. Nor is this strange. What strikes us in a building is not the foundation but the superstructure. Chesterfield it is the foundation, and the foundation only, which is English, but the superstructure is French. Or, to employ his own happy illustration, what is English in him stands in the same relation to what is French, as the Tuscan order in Architecture stands to the Doric, Ionian, and Corinthian orders; as unadorned solidity stands to the charm in contrast of attractive ornament. We admire in him what we admire in La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, what we admire in Voltaire, what we admire, in fine, in the literature most characteristic of the Grand Siècle. But, if we look a little more closely, we cannot fail to be struck with the manner in which English characteristics in Chesterfield tempered the French. His solid good-sense never deserts him: he is at bottom serious, at bottom earnest. Thus, nice and delicate as his faculty of discrimination is, it never, as is so often the case with La Bruyère, refines itself into over-niceness and over-subtilty, and never, as is habitually the case with La Rochefoucauld, fritters itself away in brilliant falsehoods or brilliant half-truths. If he has much in common with Voltaire, he has nothing of Voltaire's recklessness, nothing of his shallow drollery, nothing of his mere frivolity. The style of Chesterfield is the exact reflection of himself. It is the finished expression not of rhetorical culture, but of the culture culture by which all that constitutes character is moulded. It is the unlaboured result of labour; the spontaneous product of a peculiar soil which had been assiduously cultivated during half a lifetime. Absolutely unaffected, simply original and without mannerisms of any kind, it is a style which no mechanical skill could have attained and which no mechanical skill can copy. It is not merely that it is distinguished by 'those careless inimitable graces,' which Gibbon in describing Hume's style speaks of himself as 'contemplating with admiring despair,' but that it has the indefinable charm, the incommunicable timbre of the perfect, of the essential aristocratic, of the aristocrat, it must now be added, of the old school. Its secret was no doubt partly learned in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germains and from intimate sympathetic communion with men and writers who, whether living or dead, whether in ancient Italy or modern England and France, belonged like himself either by birth or association to the Optimates. We know no writings from the pen of mere men of letters in which the note of Chesterfield is for a moment discernible. But as soon as we turn to the Epistles of Cicero and the Younger Pliny, to the letters and essays of Temple and Bolingbroke, to the writings of La Bruyère and La Rochefoucauld, we recognize at once the same tone and accent. We appear indeed to discern his models, but the resemblance, as we soon perceive, is not the resemblance of imitation, it is the resemblance of kinship. In two respects the diction of Chesterfield is especially noticeable. We refer to its exquisite finish, and to its scrupulous purity. It is the perfection of the epistolary style, flexibly adapting itself with the utmost ease and propriety, to what in varying tones is expressed or suggested, now neat, pointed, epigrammatic, now gracefully diffuse, now rising to dignity, but always natural and always easy. Though he abhorred pedantry, Cicero and Pollio themselves were not more scrupulous purists in Latinity than Chesterfield in the use of English. He had all that punctilious regard for the nicest accuracy of expression, which made Cicero at the most critical moment of his life almost as anxious about the correct employment of a preposition and a verb, as about the movements of Pompey. An ungrammatical sentence, a loose or ambiguous expression, a word unauthorized by polite usage, or if coined, coined improperly, a vulgarism or solecism indeed in any form, he regarded as little less than a crime in a writer. If it should be proposed to select the two authors, who in point of mere purity of diction stand out most conspicuous in our prose literature, it would, we think, be pretty safe to name Macaulay for the one, and Chester field for the other. We do not say that he is entirely free from blemishes, 'quas aut incuria fudit Aut humana parum cavit natura,' but we do say that he has fewer of them, with the exception of Macaulay, than any other English classic. That of a man so truly remarkable for if as a statesman Chesterfield played a subordinate he played a singularly interesting part-there should be no standard biography, that of writings which have so just a claim to be considered classicalthere should be no standard edition accessible, is not creditable to his countrymen. It is surely high time for both these defects to be supplied. The dull compilation of Maty, which is the only biography worth mentioning in existence, ought long ago to have been superseded. Lord Stanhope's edition of the works is now so costly, that it is not merely beyond the reach of most private individuals, but of most public libraries. We are glad to see an announcement that the Clarendon Press is about to issue a volume of Selections from Chesterfield,' and we are still more pleased to notice that the editor of the volume is the learned editor of Boswell's Life of Johnson.' For we accept the omen. No living scholar could be more competent to supply the desideratum to which we have referred, and we trust that Dr. Birkbeck Hill will see his way to laying the readers of Chesterfield under as great an obligation as he has laid the readers of Boswell. Johnson has said that all writers, who wish to acquire the art of being familiar without being coarse, and elegant without being ostentatious in style, should give their days and nights to the volumes of Addison. We are none of us likely to give our days and nights either to the volumes of Addison or to the volumes of Chesterfield. And yet in times like the present we shall do well to turn occasionally to the writings of Chesterfield, and for other purposes than the acquisition of style. In an age distinguished beyond all precedent by recklessness, charlatanry, and vulgarity, nothing can be more salutary than communion with a mind and genius of the temper of his. We need the corrective the educational corrective of his refined good-sense, his measure, his sobriety, his sincerity, his truthfulness, his instinctive application of aristocratic standards in attainment, of aristocratic touchstones in criticism. We need more, and he has more to teach us. We need reminding that life is success or failure, not in proportion to the extent of what it achieves in part, and in accidents, but in proportion to what it becomes in essence, and in proportion to its symmetry. ART. ART. II.-Die Begründung des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I. Von Heinrich von Sybel. Vols. 1-5. Munich and Leipzig, 1889-90. T I would be difficult to overrate the importance of the work lies before us. The creation of a united Germany and of a united Italy are the two most striking political phenomena of our age. The history of the second of these two events, so rich in picturesque detail, in heroic self-sacrifice, in consummate statesmanship, still remains to be written. Germany has found a worthy narrator of her struggles. The first historian of his country, and perhaps since the death of Ranke the first in Europe, has given us within twenty years of its completion a history of the events which placed Prussia instead of Austria at the head of Germany, transferred the leadership of the Confederation from a Catholic and Conservative to a Protestant and Progressive Power, and set the crown of Charlemagne on the brows of a successor of Frederick the Great. The Prussian Government, with a wisdom and generosity which might well be imitated in our own country, has done everything in its power to further the task of the historian. The archives of the State and the correspondence of the Foreign Office have been opened to him without reserve. The minutes of ministers, the reports of ambassadors, the records of Conferences, telegrams and communications of all kinds, the notes and despatches of the representatives of foreign Powers, Parliamentary discussions, cuttings from newspapers, have been laid before him, arranged in a well-ordered series of several hundred volumes. Further information has been supplied by the acts of the ministry of State and of the military staff, as well as by oral communications with the actors in the events themselves. The archives of Hanover, Hesse, and Nassau, powers which were generally opposed to Prussian policy, have supplied useful corrections. The writer has been able to follow the history of these momentous years from day to day and from hour to hour in sources whose fidelity cannot be disputed. The result is, that many most important matters are now described for the first time, or are placed in a new light. This very fulness of information places the critic at a disadvantage; he cannot claim access to the same wealth of material. It may supposed that Sybel would not have been allowed these exceptional privileges, unless it had been known that his verdict was likely to prove favourable to the Emperor and his minister. The volumes are penetrated throughout by a Prussian spirit. Bismarck makes no mistakes, and his opponents are seldom, if be |