turies that passed before the rejection of the papal power. This is exactly what Stubbs has done for us in his Historical Appendix to the Report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission, and still more fully and accessibly in his 'Lectures on the Study of Medieval and Modern History' (third ed., 1900, pp. 341-51). In breadth of view and sense of proportion and historical insight, his treatment of the subject far transcends anything that even Maitland has written upon it. He tells us that the law of the Anglo-Saxon Church was largely customary, but not entirely so, because the earliest missionaries brought with them, besides the Scriptures and books of ritual, canons of early councils, and possibly one of those ancient collections of canons and prescriptions which formed the germ of the Corpus Juris Canonici. To these must be added canons of councils under Saxon Archbishops of Canterbury and York. Moreover the English Church was constantly drawing in elements of novelty and of growth which . . . became part of its constitution by reason of its organic connexion with foreign churches' ('Hist. App.,' p. 22). The Church courts were combined with the secular courts; and the procedure was customary and primitive, and alike in both jurisdictions.

With the Conquest came changes; and before the end of William's reign nearly all the sees were filled with foreign bishops, most of them lawyers learned in Roman procedure, to whom all that was national and insular in the Church law of England was entirely strange. The court of the bishop was separated from that of the sheriff; and Church law was not formally, but was really, romanised. Canon Law was developing on the Continent; and Gratian's Decretum was published in the middle of the twelfth century, followed in 1230 by the Decretals. Church lawyers-bishops, archdeacons and chancellors—were ordinarily educated at one of the great continental universities, e.g. Bologna or Paris, where they were trained in Roman Canon Law, not in English customary law. Roman Canon Law was also taught in the English universities. Appeals to Rome from English Church courts and the supersession of those courts by special delegacies from the Holy See, despite all efforts to restrain them, became a settled institution; and of course

in the papal courts the papal law held sway. 'The declaration of the law still remained chiefly in the mouth of the judge, who declared it out of his own knowledge and experience, without reference to an authoritative text. He was supposed to be educated in the legal system of the Church, of which the collections of canons were manuals but not codes of statutes; if he erred, his error could be corrected at Rome if the suitor were able to reach the supreme court of church judicature there' (Hist. App.,' p. 25).

Thus, as Stubbs tells the story, three governing facts seem to stand out; first, that the origin of English Church law was chiefly insular; secondly, that the influence of Rome in modifying and developing it was great, inevitable and progressive, and came through several distinct channels; thirdly, that there never was any express or formal adoption of the Roman Canon Law, but that it was accepted as part and parcel of the Papal Supremacy, with the limitations which almost always accompanied the recognition of that supremacy in England.

LEWIS T. DIBDIN.

Art. 7.-ROBERT BROWNING.

The Works of Robert Browning. Edited by F. G. Kenyon. Centenary edition. Ten volumes. London: Smith,

Elder and Co., 1912.

.

It is a hundred years since Browning was born, but less than half that time since his work began to find a place, create an influence, become a familiar and treasured possession, in the English mind. If we would review the meaning which it now has for us, it is obvious that the centenary of his birth is an altogether arbitrary moment to choose for the task. A completed century does indeed carry with it, by a long habit of association, a sort of moral meaning, of which we reasonably forget that it springs from nothing more moral than a mere system of notation; but our date, though it has thus a relation to Browning's biography, has none to the history of his work or his influence, the beginning of which can be fixed at no definite point. Yet the custom of considering a man's work on such an occasion has a certain convenience which is none the worse for being no more than practical. Although of Browning at any rate-who at fifty-five could still throw his challenge to the British public with no assurance that it would like him yet'-it cannot be said that his poetry has rested long enough in British memories for its place and quality to be now matters adjudged, there has been, even in his case, time for the evaporation of many misconceptions from which no critical sense (not to speak of the merely British) can free itself without help from time. Uncritical blame, unreasonable objections, dispose of themselves readily enough; but even the more baffling obscurations of praise-praise rightly addressed but spreading too wide, concealing its object, praise which bewildered by eddying altogether away from the mark, in some quite other direction-may well have been dispersed by now. It is certainly not for their much indebted successors to disparage the first of the faithful, the earliest tenders of the shrine, who indeed reacted in their own sense no more freely than was needed to put an end to neglect and repel prejudice. They produced a body of criticism and annotation which must help later critics at all points,

and not least where they least feel able to subscribe to it. At the same time, if Browning's centenary is a convenient moment at which to speak of his poetry, it is so because conditions, as they say of the weather, may be held to be now normal. Browning may be attacked or praised, but in either case the gusto born of the consciousness that we are opposing here a coterie, there the world at large, has long ceased to flutter the nerves of criticism. 'Pippa Passes,' 'Men and Women,' 'The Ring and the Book,' now belong to us all; and we may read them more simply at least, if not more searchingly, than was once possible. At any rate it is quite certain that we do read them, and that there will be a ready welcome for the new and handsome edition which is being issued under the superintendence of Mr F. G. Kenyon. The aspect of these volumes is as admirable as the tact which has gone to the making of the illustrative and biographical notes, few but fit, with which each is introduced. Our view of Browning has changed its angle in the twenty and more years since his death; but it has never shifted away from him, and we may try to summarise what we see.

The change of angle has, in the first place, certainly seemed to show us that Browning, 'ever a fighter' as he declared himself, was involved by fate in a more insidious conflict than he perceived, and that all unawares he failed to make good his position in it. The battle of life, as enacted on the surface, was a straightforward engagement enough; and indeed, to turn from the clash and clatter of the exhortations, the renunciations, the defiances voiced in so many of his poems, to the extraordinary felicity of his actual circumstances from first to last, is to feel that the vigorous rain of blows misses its echo on the defences of the adversary, for the sufficient reason that the adversary has never presented himself. Browning was armed and eager, but it so happened that there were no giants in his path to slay. Privation, or what to his simple demands would have been privation, never came near him. No necessity, no disability, not even any selfcontradiction of his own temperament, interfered with his life-long dedication to his proper work; the pang of expression thwarted, for whatever reason, seems to have been quite unknown to him. He knew great sorrow, but

not the cruelties of sorrow bitter and unnatural. Within and without, his life was one of the most singularly fortunate that genius can ever have known. This must be insisted on, not in the least for the disparagement of his spirit and courage-for in spite of a little unnecessary bluster and a few protestations that might have been taken for granted, these had a soundness and sanity which disaster could only have tempered more finelybut in order to emphasise the point that his destiny might seem to have drawn aside and held back on purpose to give him room for a complete realisation of himself. Moreover, he was not of those who need pressure from without, some stricter schooling than uninterrupted liberty and felicity, to evoke the best of their mind and strength. His was a strength that could do no less than exercise itself to the full, a mind which, so far as concerned activity, was its own discipline. And besides, it is to be remarked that one dangerous indulgence was withheld until long past the time when it might have been a danger; and that was such a favouring audience as, for example, counted for so much in Tennyson's later development. Browning's originality flowed from the very first in such deeply-cut lines that indulgence of this kind would probably indeed never have affected him to his hurt; but the want of it may be noted as yet a further chance in favour of a serene unhampered use of his gift. Browning, if any poet who ever lived, could be himself.

And yet, for all that, one needs only to re-read his work, only to feel its matchless energy, its various power, its swift and sudden beauty, close in upon the mind and call out with undiminished keenness the old responses; no less unmistakable, in the end, than its power and virtue is the sense that it has not in fact developed in harmony with itself. There was an undertow the effect of which can be discerned here and there throughout his work, and which finally mastered and redirected the conflicting impulse that was surely more thoroughly and originally his own. Browning had little to fear from any confessed hostility of fate; but fate had planned a more ingenious device than an open attack. This prodigal, restless, inquisitive mind, passionately awake, instantly appreciative of the gifts of life, was thrown into a time when appreciation, curiosity, creative energy, could indeed find