dramatic eclipse, he teaches an impressive moral lesson. He was born several centuries too late, and developed his talents in an uncongenial atmosphere. He has the intellect and the selfish shrewdness of a medieval Italian. As an aspirant in English statesmanship, although with somewhat less cynicism he might have been so far successful, he is foredoomed to failure. His cold and calculating temperament could never have stirred popular enthusiasm, or awakened emotional sentiment by soul-moving speeches. The clever politician par excellence prematurely overreaches himself, and his collapse is as complete as his rise might have been rapid. Yet he was so clever that up to the very last the sharp Baron Levy is inclined to back him. It is refreshing to turn from the brooding Randal to the bluff Richard Avenel. The sprightly, the smart, the cleanshaven Dick suggests the broad field of democratic electioneering in America. He comes home to the old country, full of the caucus and claptrap. Though he comes forward as a self-made man of the people, he is out of touch on the platform with the British masses, who, after all, and fortunately, in more senses than one, are essentially conservative. Even his supporters are painfully conscious that in the unbridled flow of his abusively personal rhetoric their champion has laid himself terribly open. The Avenels may have the electorate with them in the future, but when Lord Lytton wrote 'My Novel,' they were some generations in advance of the age.

Dickens, in his capacity of reporter, had witnessed many contested elections; but the contest at Eatanswill in Pickwick' is appropriately burlesqued.

There

is a capital touch, though, where Sam amuses his master with a reminiscence of his father's electioneering engagements. We know, Mr Weller, says the chairman of committee, that you are a capital coachman, and can do what you like with your team. Now, if you should have an accident at such an awkward corner, &c. Strangely enough, at that very corner the coach-load of expected voters are upset: all are knocked out of time, and one gentleman is missing-at least there was a hat, the wearer of which was never accounted for. And Sam, with a look of inexpressible slyness, remarks on the singular coincidence by which a providential catastrophe brought his father a contingent tip. Two good elections are brought in by Thackeray, though rather in the way of illustrating individual character. Nothing can be more delightfully facetious than the attitude and the magnificent oratory of Fred Bayham, when the gallant old colonel, armed with the silver-headed bamboo, goes down to fight his nephew Barnes at Newcome. And the bitter humiliations to which the baronet had to submit, shows the value attached at all times to a seat in Parliament by men whose social positions should apparently make them independent of it. The Whipham election in 'Philip' is made artistically dramatic by the breakdown of the old peer's chariot and the discovery of the missing will. But the immediate cause of the accident is a pretty example of the personalities in which combatants freely indulged. The unpopular candidate has the misfortune to have a dash of the tarbrush in his complexion. Accordingly Philip Firmin, who invariably is glorified for the rough chivalry

of his nature, draws the enemy in the character of a nigger, asking, "Am I not a man and a brother?" and the effigy is paraded in a donkey-cart driven by a sweep, amid the tumultuous applause of the mob. It was hitting a man who was virtually defenceless, for Mr Woolcombe had no gift of speech. But sometimes those rough personalities were mistakes in strategy, when the man assailed was able and ready to hit back. Perhaps the best of Trollope's election fights is that which came off at Barchester, when the harddrinking contractor and ex-navvy, Sir Roger Scatcherd, was pitted against the spick - and - span Mr Moffat. Moffat was no more of an orator than Woolcombe. Even with the prompting of the eloquent George De Courcy, he cannot disentangle his ideas, nor utter two consecutive sentences. Scatcherd, on the other hand, is all there he knows nothing of bashfulness, and has the courage of his vices. They flaunt a canvas before his eyes, showing a navvy leaning on a spade and holding up a spirit-bottle. The democratic Demosthenes makes a snatch at the weapon, turning it against those who forged it, and to his own advantage. He is prompt to explain. He made his money by hard and honest work; he had earned the right to take a glass when he liked it, and he was always happy to share the glass with a friend. So popular a sentiment was cheered to the echo, and the election would have been over as when Delamere was wounded at Yatton- could the mob have been polled.

We wish, by the way, that some one would give us a good picture of contemporary Scotch electioneering, with the terrible

66

heckling to which the unfortunate candidates are subjected who go in for competitive examinations in home and foreign politics. No one could have done it better than Aytoun, who told the memorable story of the Dreepdaily election with inimitable humour and no little truth. With the social and local sketches, but slightly caricatured and burlesqued, it is a brilliant satire on the Whig cliques" prompted from the Parliament House, which, modelled in many respects on the American caucus, were at that time supposed to pull the party strings. Readers of the 'Tales from Blackwood' will remember how the immortal Mr Dunshunner, having dissipated the gains he had got from his Glenmutchkin Railway-Aytoun's names are quite as suggestive as Thackeray's was prompted by his fidus Achates, Bob M'Corkindale, to seek parliamentary immunity from debts and duns at the hands of the immaculate Dreepdaily electors.

How he finds the constituency, from the Provost downwards, terrorised by "the clique," as potent and as dreaded as the Suabian Vehm-gericht of the middle ages. How he makes acquaintance, through Toddy Tam, with the secret triumvirate of chiefs, and holds council in a cellar over the all-important questions of the currency and the application of gold. And how, after having given solid and satisfactory pledges, in bullion and bank paper, for his sound Revolution principles, the clique and the candidate are sold alike by the unseasonable revelations of their subterraneous understanding.

We have been tempted to linger over that Homeric electioneering warfare, for we shall never look upon the like again. But we

must pass on to the political fiction of Lord Beaconsfield, which has not only a retrospective interest, but permanent historical value. He professed his impartiality in the preface to 'Sybil'; and although he soon attached himself definitely to the Conservative party, we are struck everywhere by the sagacious foresight and the independent judgment of the man who set himself to educate the Tories. Many of his epithets and epigrams will be immortal. To select one or two at random, there is "the Venetian oligarchy" of the Whig magnates; and the party-cries of the whips and wire-pullers, such as "Our Young Queen and our Old Constitution," or Tadpole's summing up of a forthcoming political programme as 'Whig measures and Tory Ministers." No novelist has rendered with greater spirit or fidelity the gossip of the hungry waiters upon Providence, while critical divisions were impending or offices and places were being distributed. His lifelike characters, though satirised caricatured, may generally be identified with actual personalities. There was no mistaking Rigby, whom Lord Monmouth (the Marquis of Hertford) appreciated as sure to be useful and bought at his own valuation. Rigby, who was a self-respecting parasite, had rude tact with a rough-and-ready speech, and could always be counted on for a slashing article. But he was held hard and fast, by his interests and prejudices, in the well-worn grooves, and was left behind by rising politicians like Coningsby. Disraeli's sympathies were with the rising Young England school, though he mistrusted and gently ridiculed their sentimental extravagances. As

or

patriot and politician, his leanings were distinctly aristocratic. An impecunious adventurer himself, he had his high and generous ambitions from the first, and had no sympathy with the fortuneseeking crawlers and grubbers, such as the Tapers and the Tadpoles. He dwells upon the beneficial influence of the great nobles, when they had ability as well as wealth, and could use both on occasions. Lord Eskdale, the Sybarite and voluptuary, could be a Spartan when it pleased him. The Duke of St James, under the influence of a genuine passion, rouses himself to make a brilliant maiden speech. Lord Monmouth, the mighty borough-monger, had cast his responsibilities upon Mr Rigby; but when his political ascendancy was threatened by the revolutionary Reform Bill, he quits his Parisian Capua to keep open house in northern England. He would fain have inspired the Ministers whose political futures were at stake, like his own, with his own magnificent audacity. Above all, it is curious to see Disraeli sketching Peel, and doing generous justice to the gifts and good qualities of the "great renegade," whom he was afterwards to assail with unmeasured invective.

'Coningsby' is the most sparkling of his political novels, but 'Sybil' is more serious, more pathetic, and more picturesque. He wrote the book when untrammelled by the ties and responsibilities of office as an advanced and democratic Conservative. With the dark shadows and lurid lights of a Rembrandt, he has delineated the condition of England in the reaction after the war, with its inflated prices and the artificial prosperity which had enriched a few at the cost of the many.

Class

was arrayed against class; distress, destitution, discontent, disturbances might have been the mottoes of the country that had emerged victorious from the twenty years' war. He has flashed light into the darkest corners, and probed the sores with unsparing touch. Reform of some kind had become inevitable as the alternative to revolution, for despair was making men reckless. It was only the tact and prompt resolution of Lord Althorpe hastening to act and assume responsibility without consultation with his colleagues which averted armed insurrection at Birmingham. With all the difficult social problems of the present day, with our troubles with aggressive unions and their strikes, with the heads of families crying for bread while they revolt against reasonable wages, we may be thankful that things have changed so much for the better. Nowadays we are glad to believe that the extremity of misery is only to be found in the overcrowded warrens and rookeries of great cities; and even these are within reach of relief. Take Disraeli's picture of the rural town of Marney, depending on the wealthy peer who took his title from it.

"Those wretched tenements seldom consisted of more than two rooms, in one of which the whole family, however numerous, were obliged to sleep, without distinction of age or sex or suffering. With the water streaming down the walls, the light distinguished through the roof, with no hearth even in winter, the virtuous mother in the sacred pangs of childbirth gives forth another victim to our thoughtless civilisation. These swarming walls had neither windows nor doors sufficient to keep out the weather, or admit the sun, or supply the means of ventilation; the humid and putrid roof of thatch exhaling malaria

like all other decaying vegetable matter. The dwelling-rooms were neither boarded nor paved...; the hovels were in many instances not provided with the commonest conveniences of the rudest police; contiguous to every door might be observed the dung-heap, on which every kind of filth was accumulated, so that when the poor man opened his narrow habitation in the hope of refreshing it, he was met with a mixture of gases from reeking dunghills."

The agricultural labourer, when lucky enough to be in tolerably regular employment, was supposed to be contented and bring up his children creditably on eight shillings a-week. In Dorset and some of the south-western counties, by the way, the labourer's pittance was considerably lower. There were many parishes with povertystricken clergymen and no resident gentry; and the price of bread was still abnormally high. As to the artisans, the mill-hands, and the miners, now that the Continental industrials were bestirring themselves again, the supply was far in excess of the demand. Consequently the answer to complaints was a threat of summary dismissal. In 'Sybil' there is a terrible picture of the truck system, shamelessly abused in spite of legislation, and relentlessly taxing the trifling pay. The overtasked working folk, always on the verge of starvation, drew usurious bills on the wages that ran for five weeks in arrear, and then they were largely paid in kind.

or cheese?' 'Cheese at tenpence a pound,' says he, 'which I buy for my servant at sixpence! Never mind,' says he, for he is a thorough Christian, 'I'll take the tommy as I find it.'

So with the miners, complain

ing of the " "butties or middlemen. "Theirs are deeds of darkness, surely; for many's the morn we work for nothing, by one excuse or another; and many's the good stint that they under-measure. And many's the cup of their ale that you must drink before they give you any work." No wonder that such outrages as were subsequently organised by the Sheffield unions were common then from individual impulse, without any criminal organisation at all. In ill-lighted streets, with no adequate police force, they might be perpetrated with comparative impunity. Even if the culprit was detected, he had the satisfaction of vengeance, and the prison or the penal settlement could hardly be a change for the worse, from the hovel in which he shivered and starved. Nothing was more easy or much safer than setting a match to a rick in the dark. The suspicion of informing would have been as dangerous as in the Clare or Kerry of the Land Leaguers. When Egremont, the brother of the landlord, said something about an act of incendiarism to the labourer to whom he handed his horse, the sullen expression on the man's stolid face struck him as a painfully significant symptom. It is difficult to realise now the dangerous elements with which the Duke of Wellington had to deal, when the metropolitan Chartists were gathering in their masses to present the great national peti

tion.

For brutal ignorance and pitiful suffering, with a well

VOL. CXLIX.-NO. DCCCCVI.

founded conviction of reducible wrongs, had been unscrupulously exploité by agitators and demagogues.

Trollope has been underrated, or at least insufficiently appreciated, as a political novelist. Without the poetry and eloquence of Lord Lytton, with no pretensions to the political genius of Disraeli, he is perhaps more realistic than either, and his political portraiture is unrivalled in its way. He is a Teniers, rather than a Vandyck or a Rembrandt. He did not go

We know

in for the ideal, but drew his men, like the masters of the domestic Dutch school, as he saw or fancied he saw them. And by carrying his characters forward from tale to tale, he gave himself ample elbowroom on his canvas, like Balzac. We have had from his own lips confirmation of our opinion, that 'The Last Chronicle of Barset,' notwithstanding its unlucky and irritating interludes, is the most perfect of his books. But we know more than one keen politician who has read his political novels again and again, by way of refreshment from hard work, always finding fresh interest in them. that in 'The Warden' and 'Barchester Towers,' which were really the creation of a singularly intelligent imagination, he wound himself so into the inner life of a cathedral close, as to defy the criticism of canons and prebends. Of course, he wrote of politics more from outer knowledge than mere imaginative instinct. Thus in 'Phineas Redux,' he takes us into The Cosmopolitan-we forget if he gives the club in Charles Street its actual name or not—and makes us listen to the midnight gossip of its distinguished casuals. But with slight apology, he has the superb audacity to usher us

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