The point in dispute may be a matter of indifference, no doubt; though we ought to recollect this, that such points very seldom are; and vestments and ceremonies certainly are not. But the independence, originality, idiosyncrasy of each individual is not a matter of indifference; and inability to perceive and appreciate this quality is usually found among that order of minds of which Mr. Dickens has placed the keynote in the mouth of Mr. Peter Magnus. Wherever these are herded together, and uncontrolled by any higher influences, this spirit of petty intolerance is sure to break out. In country towns it is usually very prevalent, where anything which transgresses the established customs, habits, or opinions of the dominant society is regarded with suspicion and contempt. It is very prevalent indeed in schools, where a new boy with any sort of peculiarity about him in dress, manner, speech, or character, is hunted to death. "Look an our French cousin be nat off a the first burst," says Dickon Osbaldestone to Will, when Frank makes his first appearance in the hunting field. "Like enow," is the response; "he's got a queer outlandish binding on's castor." Here is the spirit of red-tie-ism in full luxuriance; and it comes from the lips of one who was only an overgrown schoolboy. But even among men of sense and in good society there is a great deal too much of it; and in clubs and coteries individuals are often blamed or ridiculed for conduct in which there is nothing to provoke animadversion except its being different from that of other people.

It is possible, indeed, that the ebullition of red-tie-ism which took place in the Oxford Theatre may have been treated too seriously. We don't mean the uproar-that was disgraceful; but the immediate cause of it. Commemoration is the academic carnival, and the undergraduates have always been accustomed to single out individuals for attack who presented anything conspicuous or unusual in their personal appearance. It may be that they would entirely disclaim having

been actuated by any such spirit as forms the subject of this article; and that it was time and place only which the gentleman in the red tie had to thank for his reception. Let this plea for the undergraduates be taken for what it is worth. But what they did in fun, if it was fun, is an excellent illustration of what many other people do in earnest ; while the conduct of the obnoxious person in refusing to bend before the storm was what only too few have the moral courage to imitate. The older the world grows, the more does a tendency become visible to think that nothing which is attacked is defensible -or at least worth the trouble of defending. A red tie offends one mob: take it off. A pigeon match offends another shut up the traps. A surplice offends a third on with your Geneva. Property is disgusting to a fourth: chop it to mincemeat. A church is hateful to a fifth down with it to the dust. A lord hurts the feelings of a sixth : throw him to the wolves. Now mind, we are not here blaming people for not liking any one of these things. Pigeonshooting, ritualism, property, established churches, hereditary legislators, gentlemanly manners, are all of them, no doubt, characteristics of an imperfect state of existence. What we complain of is that people who like them all are ready to concede them all sooner than resist a row. And these are they who blame the man in the red tie for not going out of the theatre as, soon as the mob attacked him. As a mere matter of private opinion, the writer of this article detests the principles of which the red tie is emblematic, quite as strongly, at least, as any one can detest pigeon-shooting. But to surrender either of them to mere sibilation is worse than the worst evil which men attribute to either of them. If it is cowardly to shoot pigeons, it is more cowardly not to shoot them for fear only of popular abuse. If Communism means chaos, those who preach submission to the strongest lungs are not very likely to be useful in preserving order.

It ought not to be necessary to caution the readers of this article against seeing in the foregoing remarks anything inconsistent with the fullest recognition of the authority of public opinion. But for fear they should be so misconstrued, we hasten to say that the claims to our consideration possessed by minorities and individuals are of very various degrees. We may not be able to draw the exact line at which mere rebels or rioters pass into the more respectable phase of belligerents. But we know it to exist. And so, of course, there are numerous instances where the opposition of the majority is opposition to follies which the common sense of mankind has finally condemned the lingering remnants of exploded superstition, or the nonsensical crotchets of silly individuals. Society may stamp out these by any means which it likes short of physical force, and may, without impropriety, decline further debate about them. Clamour

then becomes for once a legitimate weapon, like the cries of "divide" in the House of Commons when a condemned bore insists on talking after the debate has been exhausted. But there are practices, institutions, habits in the world to which, however much we ourselves may disapprove of them, we are bound, we say, to accord belligerent rights; that is to say, to require them to be beaten on their merits before we finally enrol them in that class of evils which to name only is to damn. As long as they can keep the field, hold their own with any respectable proportion of the respectable classes, and show a decent probability of making a fair fight for their existence, so long is any deference to mere ignorant abuse of them both erroneous and ignominious.

It has recently been stated by a noble man, whose powerful intellect and independent character are recognized by men of all parties and opinions, that nothing can be defended in Parliament which cannot be defended on the hustings. There is cruel common-sense in this remark, we are afraid. Yet the particular instance then under considera

tion is not, we think, the best possible illustration of its truth. We are not going to enter upon a discussion of the Purchase system. It is a complicated question, and requires a knowledge of details to be adequately handled. But for this very reason no intelligent discussion of it would be possible on the hustings. The audience who were to be its judges would absolutely know nothing of its practical operation. Of most other subjects likely to come before them they know something. On electoral systems, on Church establishments, on public education, they have some opinions, founded on some sort of knowledge; but on the Purchase system none at all. It is to them the merest red-tie; a crucial specimen indeed of that inflammatory commodity. The populace is under the impression that the Purchase system is, in one way or another, an aristocratic job, and for this reason it cannot be defended on the hustings. Now, granting everything else that is said against the Purchase system, an aristocratic job it is not. And it comes therefore to this, that a controversy which might, possibly, be still sustained by experience and reason, must be closed at once when it clashes with ignorance and prejudice. Of course this is not exactly what Lord Derby meant; because he himself thinks the system obnoxious both to popular passions and educated opinion too. But one could hardly be blamed for drawing from his speech this inference, that even by those who did not think this their colours should nevertheless be lowered on the grounds aforesaid.

If we are told that this is all very well, but that it's no use kicking against facts; that passion and prejudice will rule the world to the end, as they have done from the beginning, and that sympathies and antipathies laugh at premises and conclusions, we fold our arms tranquilly and say, Very good: only remember this, that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander too; and that on any other conditions you let in this doctrine, that might is right, and reduce the whole world under the absolute dominion of brute force.

THERE are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon in a broken woodland, with the deer asleep in the bracken, and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice, and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of the hall, the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear, but there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me, the record of a broken life, of a life "broken off," as he who lived it says of another, "with a ragged edge."

It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around, into the din and turmoil of cities and men, into the misery and degradation of "the East-end," that "London without London," as some one called it the other day; those mysterious Tower Hamlets that haunt the imagination of Mr. Ayrton's admirers. Few regions are more unknown; not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border which parts the City from this weltering mass of busy life, this million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous streets, broken only by ship-yard, or factory, or huge breweries, that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to Aldgate to the Essex marshes. And yet, setting aside the poetry of life which is everywhere, there is poetry enough in East London; poetry in the great river which washes it on the south, in the fretted tangle of cordage and mast that peeps over the roofs of Shadwell, or in the great hulls moored along the wharves of Wapping; poetry in the "Forest" that fringes it

to the east, in the few glades that remain of Epping and Hainault,-glades ringing with the shouts of schoolchildren out for their holiday, and half mad with delight at the sight of a flower or a butterfly: poetry of the present in the work and toil of these acres of dull bricks and mortar, where everybody, man, woman, and child, is a worker, this England without a "leisure class;" in the thud of the steam-engine, and the white trail of steam from the tall sugar refinery; in the blear eyes of the Spitalfields weaver, or the hungering faces of the group of labourers clustered from morning till night round the gates of the docks, and watching for the wind that brings the ships up the river: poetry in its past, in strange oldfashioned squares, in quaint gabled houses, in grey village churches, that have been caught and overlapped and lost, as it were, in the great human advance that has carried London forward from Whitechapel, its limit in the age of the Georges, to Stratford, its border in that of Victoria.

Stepney is a belated village of this sort; its grey old church of St. Dunstan, buried as it is now in the very heart of East London, stood hardly a century ago among the fields. All round it lie tracts of human life without a past; but memories cluster thickly round "Old Stepney," as the people call it with a certain fond reverence: memories of men like Erasmus and Colet, and the group of scholars in whom the Reformation began. It was to the country house of the Dean of St. Paul's, hard by the grey church, that Erasmus betook him when tired of the smoke and din of town. "I come to drink your fresh air, my Colet," he

writes, "to drink yet deeper of your rural peace." The fields and hedges through which Erasmus loved to ride remained within living memory; only forty years ago a Londoner took his Sunday outing along the field path which led past the London Hospital to the suburban village church of Stepney. But the fields through which the path led have their own church now, with its parish of dull straight streets of monotonous houses already marked with premature decay, and here and there alleys crowded with poverty and disease and crime. There is nothing marked about the district; its character and that of its people are of the commonest Eastend type. If we ask our readers to follow us to St. Philip's, it is simply because these dull streets and alleys were chosen by a brave and earnest man as the scene of his work among the poor.

It was here that Edward Denison settled in the autumn of 1867, in the second year of the great "East London Distress." In the October of 1869 he left England on the fatal voyage from which he was never to return. The collection of his letters which has been recently printed by Sir Baldwyn Leighton, has already attracted so much attention to the work which lay within the narrow bounds of those two years, that I may perhaps be pardoned for recalling my own memories of one whom it is hard to forget.

A few words are enough to tell the tale of his earlier years. Born in 1840, the son of a bishop, and nephew of the present Speaker of the House of Commons, Edward Denison passed from Eton to Christchurch (where the affection of his Oxford friends has commemorated itself, we believe, in a stained glass window in the cathedral), and was forced, after quitting the University, to spend some time in foreign travel by the delicacy of his health. His letters give an interesting picture of his mind during this pause in an active life, a pause which must have been especially distasteful to one whose whole bent lay from the first in the direction of practical energy. “I believe," he says, in his later days,

"that abstract political speculation is my métier;" but few minds were, in reality, less inclined to abstract speculation. From the very first one sees in him what one may venture to call the best kind of "Whig" mind, that peculiar temper of fairness and moderation which declines to push conclusions to extremes, extremes, and recoils instinctively when opinion is extended beyond its proper limit. His comment on Newman's "Apologia" marks his real intellectual temper with remarkable precision. "I left off reading Newman's 'Apologia' before I got to the end, tired of the ceaseless changes of the writer's mind, and vexed with his morbid scruples-perhaps, too, having got a little out of harmony myself with the feelings of the author, whereas I began by being in harmony with them. I don't quite know whether to esteem it a blessing or a curse; but whenever an opinion to which I am a recent convert, or which I do not hold with the entire force of my intellect, is forced too strongly on me, or driven home to its logical conclusion, or over-praised, or extended beyond its proper limits, I recoil instinctively, and begin to gravitate towards the other extreme, sure to be in turn repelled by it also." I dwell on this temper of his mind because it is this practical and moderate character of the man which gives such weight to the very sweeping conclusions on social subjects to which he was driven in his later days. A judgment which condemns the whole system of Poor Laws, for instance, falls with very different weight from the mere speculative theorist, and from a practical observer, whose mind is constitutionally averse from extreme conclusions.

Throughout, however, we see this intellectual moderation jostling with a moral fervour which feels restlessly about for a fitting sphere of action. "Real life," he writes from Madeira, "is not dinner-parties and small talk, nor even croquet and dancing." There is a touch of exaggeration in phrases like these which need not blind us to the depth and reality of the feeling which