as the elected candidate of universal suffrage. This contradiction will cause his downfall. I shall not live to see it; but remember my words, "This Bonaparte has built nothing that will

last.' A few weeks later I heard the

same prophecy at Buckingham Palace from the lips of Prince Albert, and it struck me as remarkable that the two political antipodes, the Conservative Prince Metternich and the Liberal Prince Albert, should agree almost to the letter in their estimate of Napoleon III. 'He is no philosopher, said Prince Albert, or he would have understood that no sovereign can owe his crown at once to hereditary succession and universal suffrage. This contradiction is bound to be the ruin, I don't say of himself personallyperhaps he is destined to die an Emperor in his bed-but of his system, his dynasty. He has built nothing lasting; he is only a meteor-no fixed

star.'

The British constitution Metternich characterised as a whistparty à trois-the House of Commons, with "public opinion" as dummy," playing against the Orown and the House of Lords. "I at least," said Metternich, "have invariably preferred to play with the dummy." The Prince remarked upon the decay of English statesmanship in his time, and only made an exception in favour of Disraeli, when contrasting the British Ministers of the day with those of his youth.

The Schleswig-Holstein dispute afforded Count Vitzthum an opportunity of showing his diplomatic energy and ability; and and ability; and there can be little question but that his counsels exercised very considerable influence upon both public and political opinion in this country. His representations to Lord Russell certainly did not a little to check the Liberal

Government from drifting into war; his interviews with Lord Derby prevented the Opposition from pressing upon the Government the doubtful justice of maintaining neutrality; and his combat with Lord Robert Cecil in the newspapers considerably counteracted the impression which the latter's fiery and chivalrous articles shall not stir up again the feelings were calculated to produce. We which were called forth during the discussion of this questio vexata, by going through the interesting account which Count Vitzthum gives of the progress of the GermanDanish difficulty. To us at the present day, it will be sufficient to note that the practical question which Count Vitzthum put to Lord Derby in January 1864"What can it matter to England whether Denmark keeps the Duchies or not?"-has already been responded to.

'Juvenilia '1 forms an attractive object to the eye as it lies on our "Saloon" table, and the announcement on the cover that it is by Vernon Lee is a guarantee that its contents will at least in some respects correspond with its outward seeming. The title, which needs explanation, is duly made intelligible in the introduction, and refers, as we are there told, to those aesthetic delights which formed the all-absorbing pursuits of the younger days of Vernon Lee and Carlo, to whom the essays are addressed. An allegorical figure on the floor of Siena Cathedral, of a boy holding a hawk on his wrist, is accepted as the symbolical text of the work, and Carlo is warned that his hawk-flying days have passed away, and that the time has come

when he, like the authoress, must look the sterner duties of life in the face. Much that she has to say on this point is true, but the question suggests itself whether it was necessary to repeat what has so often been urged on this muchtaught generation. No one will gainsay the truth of her remarks when she writes

"Do what we will, devote ourselves exclusively to the pleasant and certain things of this life, shut our eyes and ears resolutely to the unpleasant and uncertain, we shall be made, none the less, to take part in the movement that alters the world. Help it to alter we must, in so far as each of us represents a class, a nationality, a tendency-nay, as each of us eats a certain amount of food, and occupies a certain amount of standing-room. For the whole of all things is ever moving, changing place and form; and we, its infinitesimal atoms, are determining its movements. The question therefore is, in which direction shall our grain of dust's weight be thrown."

We have on so many occasions had this sort of thing dinned into our ears from the pulpits of popular divines that it begins to pall upon us, and we fear that we fail to receive it with the meek attention with which we hope, for Vernon Lee's sake, that Carlo listened to it.

But having administered this tonic to her pupil, the authoress removes all the bitter taste of her dose by a perfect deluge of the currant-wine of æstheticism. In her opening essay she discusses the value of association in art; and in an "eruption of philosophical and historical Hegelian verbiage," to use her own simple language, she first sets up a theory of straw, and then demolishes it in the most approved fashion. Her ideas, though neither new nor striking,

come fast and furious, and are mainly noticeable for their want of logical sequence and their lack of consistency. She appears to have approached her task without any fixed and definite views on the subjects of which she treats, but to have been led on as her fancy moved her at the moment, and, as we cannot help thinking, in accordance with the requirements for the production of certain cherished phrases and similes. Her account of the way in which "association took possession of her soul on board a Rhine steamer is so thoroughly descriptive of the forces at work in moulding her views generally, that we cannot forbear to quote it:

Not

"But while such were my reasoned ideas, I gradually became aware of the presence within me of something different, diffusing itself and permeating my consciousness. exactly an idea, nor yet a set of impressions, something impossible to define, because definition is not made for vagueness; first within myself, warming me like a cordial into vague pleasure, then afterwards surrounding me from outside, an all-encompassing medium in which the soul floated in languid enjoyment-pleasurablegiven out by a few embers when we ness slowly produced (as heat is slowly blow upon them) by the sense that this was the Rhineland."

*

Most people would have expressed all that is essential in this lengthy sentence in a tithe of the words here employed, and, let us hope, with a more strict regard for the rules of grammar. But the association of which this vague something was the inward and spiritual sign, was, after all, only evoked by the recollection of the stories of family history told her when a child by her German

nursery-maid. And prosaic enough they seem to have been, but yet they were enough to make the authoress " excited, pleased, scarce knowing at what; and," she adds, "whenever the boats came alongside the steamer and the cry arose 'Boppard,' or 'Kaub,' or 'Lorch,' the effect was as if I caught distant notes of some once cherished tune, thrilling me faintly, but surely."

To attempt to follow Vernon Lee in her definition of association in art is beyond our powers, for it varies with almost every other page. We will only say that she assures us that but for it "C we should care to see only the things we can eat," and that its action is like "that of the wave which brings to the nucleus of solid earth all the floating things that can make soil." Definition is not her strong point, and if we were asked to say what is, we should be inclined to give the palm to her wealth of words. Her power of heaping up adjectives is extraordinary. The setting sun she describes as "emerging, round, immense, rayless, golden," the moon as "big, round, white, bright;" and in the same way most of her substantives are buried beneath a pile of adjectives.

Association also is the subject of her second essay, "Botticelli at the villa Lemmi." It seems that some few years ago two frescoes by Botticelli were discovered beneath the plaster of the walls of this villa, and that the French Government, desiring to save them from destruction, bought them from the owner and transported them to the walls of the Louvre. This action has aroused Vernon Lee's wrath. She would, she says, rather see a work of art moulder into dust in the spot where it was originally placed, whether in farm

house or cathedral, than have it preserved in a "kind of artificial stony Arabia of vacuity and ugliness," or in other words, a picturegallery. We do not do Vernon Lee the injustice of believing that this is her real idea of picturegalleries, but for the moment it suited her purpose to draw a strong contrast between the pastoral beauty of the villa Lemmi and picture-galleries, and so she called them " artificial, stony Arabias, just as a little further on she finds it convenient to say that a work of art preserved in a collection becomes "a useless, utterly inorganic, unassimilated piece of grandeur." All this gives a sense of insincerity to Vernon Lee's essays. We do not mean that she has any deliberate intention to deceive, but only that she has, as regards art, the same mind that Mr Gladstone has towards politics. She can persuade herself for the moment into any belief, and she fondly hopes that her readers, like herself, have forgotten all that has gone before, and will, with equal ease, forget what she is then writing. Like Mr Gladstone also, she declaims most fiercely against those who in some way or other have, however slightly, interfered with her personal importance; and thus all this outburst of anger against the French Government, and this contempt for picture-galleries and museums, appear to have been aroused by annoyance at feeling that she can no longer talk in a superior way to the common herd of Italian tourists dependent only on their guide-books, of "the Botticellis at the villa Lemmi."

We regret all this the more because the authoress is so evidently capable of better, truer, and simpler work. Her description of

the villa Lemmi and its surroundings is excellent, and brings before our eyes with almost startling vividness the courtyards, dryinggrounds, and cloisters of the old white house with its belvedere tower, and the olive-covered slopes of the valley beyond. We can almost forgive her outburst against picture-galleries for the necessity it has imposed upon her of giving us a carefully drawn sketch of an Italian landscape. In the same

way her description of the town of Burano in the second volume is exceedingly graphic, and reproduces picturesquely and with much realistic power the life and bustle of a small Italian town en fête.

But unfortunately these artistic touches merely serve as interludes between the expression of her views on the many subjects on which she has chosen to instruct Carlo. We do not know whether Carlo is a student of Shakespeare. If he is not, we should strongly recommend him to receive his instructress's opinion of the poet with caution. If he is, he will probably have learnt for himself that, Vernon Lee notwithstanding, Shakespeare's plays were written for great actors, that they are masterly portrayals of life, and that they are full of careful and truthful delineations of character. The two hundred and seventy or eighty years which separate us from the days of Shakespeare, seem to represent to the authoress a gulf so wide as to cut us off completely from the poet and his works.

"I do not believe," she says, "that Hamlet, such as Shakespeare wrote him (as distinguished from Hamlet such as we read him), is as realistic ally conceived, as realistically carried out, as Schiller's Don Carlos, much less as Goethe's Tasso; nor are Romeo and Juliet realised like Faust and

Gretchen, Egmont and Clärchen, Max and Thekla.”

All this shows an extraordinary ignorance, over which, if Vernon Lee had been wise, she would have drawn a veil. Hamlet, as Shakespeare wrote him and we read him, is a character for all time, and is as thoroughly realistic as anything that ever was penned. But on every subject connected with Shakespeare and his contemporaries, she shows so curious a want of knowledge that we are almost tempted to believe that she has never read a line written by them. Otherwise we should not expect her to say—

"All the literature of the past ages gives us, in some extraordinary blindness of the humanly possible, in some astonishing change of character or inconceivable obtuseness, the equivalent of that want of perception of what is and what is not, which makes the child try to sweep the moon out of the sky with a broom. Thus Oliver, in 'As You Like It,' could not have suddenly turned from an utter scoundrel into a fit husband for Celia; nor could Olivia, in 'Twelfth Night,' have instantly married off an unknown brother of the person she was in love with, on discovering that person to be a woman. Such things are impossible, due to absolute carelessness, want of habit of realising situations; they are as utterly silly and childish as to stick three rosebuds and a box sprig into the ground and call the arrangement a garden."

After this we need not be surprised to find that she can suggest no better definition of the Shakespearian drama than "the exposition of some interesting action, spiced and garnished with every sort of extraneous thing, with high lyrism, buffoonery, wit, poetic fancy, obscenity, philosophy, and fashionWhat she means able euphuism.' by this last expression we don't know, and it is unnecessary to

inquire. A lady who can describe Macbeth, Claudius, and the usurper in 'The Tempest' as mere kings of clubs, not very much more individual than those on the playing cards," is beyond criticism. It is plain that under the influence of certain writers Vernon Lee has clothed herself with an individuality which is not her own. When she writes naturally, she writes delightfully; but when she struts about in a foreign garb which ill becomes her, we feel inclined to shut up the book, as we now do.

1

It would be vain any longer to contest the supreme position of Mr Rider Haggard 1 as the novelist of the day. Saul has slain his thousands, and David his tens of thousands. The lists of Messrs Mudie, and of the publishers, establish his supremacy beyond doubt; and we have nothing to do but allow that the place of Scott, of Dickens, of Thackeray, of Hugh Conway (oh, wonderful conjunction!) is now filled by the creator of 'She.' He is at least a more worthy monarch than his immediate predecessor, which is something but how shall we attempt to whisper to such a potentate our humble opinion of productions which all the world has crowned Our beloved coadjutor in these pursuits, Mr Andrew Lang-who, though he occasionally lifts his warlike and fine-pointed spear to give us a (let us hope) not unfriendly prick, we have always delighted to honour-has lately declared his confidence in the power of criticism: we can scarcely say that we are of his opinion. Some fine spirits indeed may take it to heart, especially if the common voice agrees with that of the critic,

and it is apparent that the composition remarked upon has not the success of its predecessors; but it must be a very fine and impartial spirit indeed which will accept the small voice of an anonymous personage seated in a mysterious chamber, as of more weight than the cheers of the crowd. We do not

hope for any such success, and we have already let loose our opinion as to what Mr Rider Haggard can and cannot do. His present work shows this, we think, with unusual distinctness. He can write admirable descriptions of the wildest adventures of travel, most animated battle-scenes of a wild kind, and fine sketches of scenery of a similar description. His invention of savage difficulties and wonders in the way which leads to his goal is inexhaustible, and in most cases, with now and then a divergence into the grotesque, almost credible, and very exciting and entertaining. But we could wish that our guide never got there. He must, no doubt, in the exigencies of storymaking, and to fulfil the requirements of the vulgar-by whom probably the introduction of a lovestory may be supposed desirablereach something like a conclusion, and construct something like a plot. But it is a great pity that a talent so admirably adapted for the conduct of adventure should be drawn away into illegitimate channels, and forced to invent impassioned beauties of the most stagey description, because of an imaginary necessity. And we must here be allowed to point out to Mr Rider Haggard that there was no love, nor any beautiful heroine, in 'King Solomon's Mines,'

where he got on admirably with

VOL. CXLII.-NO. DCCCLXII.