to the earlier usages of the word as illustrated by numerous quotations in the New English Dictionary.'

It need not be said that a work of such enormous proportions cannot be infallible, and it would not be difficult to point out some erroneous statements and derivations, but on the whole the Dictionary is remarkably accurate and reliable down to the smallest detail. A discussion of minor points would be out of place here. But I wish to refer to two features of a more general import, in which a different arrangement seems advisable if ever a second edition of the great work should be contemplated.

First, I think all words that became obsolete during the Middle English period, from 1100 to 1500, might be excluded. If this had been done, much of the Middle English material at the disposal of the editors of the New English Dictionary' could have been used for compiling a large Middle English 'Dictionary' under a different editor, a work which certainly is a great desideratum, but will now in all probability remain unattempted for a long time to come.

Sir James Murray was certainly right in excluding the purely slang and dialect words. For the slang words there is The Slang Dictionary' (London 1864, second edition 1874), which requires to be issued in a new and completely revised form. The dialect words have been collected by Dr. Joseph Wright in his excellent and immensely useful ‘English 'Dialect Dictionary' in six volumes, which began to appear in 1896, twelve years after the first instalment of the New 'English Dictionary,' and, after steady and rapid progress, was finished in 1905.

Perhaps Sir James would have done better to exclude the merely technical words as well, though the technical meanings of ordinary words certainly could not be ignored. The technical material might then have been used for the compilation of a special Technical Dictionary' on an historical basis.

By excluding the obsolete Middle English and the merely technical words the editors of the New English Dictionary' would have saved much time and space, and the Dictionary would probably have been finished by now. But, on the other hand, the inclusion of these words is certainly a great advantage to the work, and vastly widens the scope of its

appeal. We can only be grateful to Sir James Murray for bravely taking upon himself the great additional labour which he knew would be entailed.

After thirty-five years' incessant toil the completion of the gigantic work can now be said to be within reach of the eye. With the publication on the 31st of March of the last section of Sh, which finishes volume 8, the Oxford Dictionary stands complete from A to Speech. And as T is already published as far as Trahysh, only the small remainders of S and T and the whole of letters U to Z remain to be done. We may therefore look forward to the completion of the work in some five or six years. Already the number of words recorded in the Dictionary is 328,319, while the number of illustrative quotations is 1,426,379.

Sir James Murray is now seventy-seven years old and still in full health; Dr. Bradley is sixty-eight, Dr. Craigie forty-six years of age. All lovers of the English language will sincerely wish that Sir James and his devoted helpers may live to see the completion of their great work. They have already earned for their immense labour, ungrudgingly given, and for the enormous amount of learning incorporated in this great Word-book, the thanks of the British nation and of all Englishspeakers and English-readers throughout the world.

J. HOOPS.

A FRENCH SATIRIST IN ENGLAND

Poésies d'Auguste Barbier: Iambes et Poèmes. Paris: A. Lemaire. 1898.

I bitory of poetry for are

T becomes more and more difficult to find a place in the

history of poetry for those writers who are by the development of events suddenly inspired to express their emotion, and who, when those events have passed by, find little or nothing left to say. The poetry of such men partakes of the nature of action; it is their share contributed to the energetic movement of their age. But, increasingly, we concentrate our attention on the poets who hold aloof from action, who write with equal indifference to their surroundings whether in a bower of roses or on a battlefield. We do so because these are the genuine and permanent artists, whose evolution is almost entirely unaffected by their conditions. Nevertheless, we have to take into consideration, also, the writers who are stung into lyrical expression by the vehemence of facts, such as Ebenezer Elliott by the Corn Law agitation, or Theodor Körner by the War of I iberation, or on a lower level Paul Déroulède by the events of 1870. It makes our general survey of the art imperfect if we ignore these poets, simply because they are difficult to fit into our scheme of æsthetics. Among such men of temporary genius, manifestly inspired by a certain succession of events, none is more curious than the poet of the Three Days' Revolution, the remarkable Auguste Barbier, who was lifted by the magnificence of his 'Iambes' to the highest apex of celebrity in 1830, and who died, completely forgotten, in 1882.

To comprehend the nature of Barbier's contribution to literature, we have to remind ourselves of the world upon which he made his violent and brief attack. A young man of five-and-twenty, hitherto unknown, he reeled on to the scene of Paris in a state of feverish exaltation, intoxicated with extravagant democracy, and waving a lighted torch in his hand. The wood of public opinion blazed at once, for it was absolutely ready for conflagration. The public seized

upon Barbier's first satires, on 'La Curée,' 'L'Idole,' and 'Popularité' in particular, because they expressed, in very fine verse, the sentiment of revolution which could not be smothered a moment longer. Joseph de Maistre had prophesied that there would surely be risings among the people, and the futility of Charles X. had gradually precipitated a change in France.

From the earliest days of 1830, it was evident to close observers that everything was tending towards a revolution in Paris. On the 3rd of January a new journal, 'Le 'National,' had begun to appear, under the editorship of Armand Carrel, and this at once became the organ of a new anti-royalist party; it was immensely read. Young Barbier and others of his kind were told in its columns that men must not be spared if France was to be free. Meanwhile the King stiffened himself to an absurd resistance; in March he responded in menacing language to the humble remonstrance of the Chamber, though presented by Guizot and Royer-Collard, and he prorogued Parliament for six months. Talleyrand advised the ministers to buy themselves estates in Switzerland, for their work in France was over. Charles X., supported by Polignac, refused all compromise, all argument with the Liberals; he was determined to be master in France; he said that what had cost his brother Louis XVI. his head had been his deplorable tendency to concession. He, for his part, if the people dared to be troublesome, would scourge them with scorpions. On the 26th of July his four famous ordinances were published in the Moniteur'; they abolished the liberty of the press, declared the Chamber dissolved, disfranchised three-quarters of the electors, and summoned the surviving fourth to choose a new Chamber.

That same evening an angry crowd gathered before the Palais Royal, and Polignac escaped from the midst of it on its march by leaping from his carriage and running like a hare. Next morning barricades began to rise in the streets, and at night blood began to flow. General Marmont, who had been given the command of Paris, wrote to the King, 'This has ceased to be a riot; it has become a revolution.' But Charles X., who was at St. Cloud, affected to observe nothing; while the tocsin rang, he dined at his usual hour, took his walk on the terrace, played with the Royal children till their bed-time,

329 and then settled to his game of whist. All night the sound of hammers and saws filled the air, and when morning broke on the 28th the tricolour was floating from all the spires, and the whole eastern section of Paris was in the hands of the insurgents. On the 29th, the Louvre, with Marmont in it, was captured by the people, who then entered the Tuileries without resistance. The Duke of Orleans put himself at the head of the populace, and Charles X. fled to Rambouillet, where he abdicated on the 2nd of August 1830. The briefest and one of the least bloody of revolutions was over.

When this revolution broke out, the news of it reached a young man of twenty-five, who was buried in the country, on an estate in the department of Seine-et-Marne. What he was doing there, or how he had been occupied up to that moment, does not seem to be recorded, for no biography of Auguste Barbier has ever been published. All we know is that he sought out General Jouanez, who was a resident of the same village, and gained permission to accompany him to Paris. Every violent and eager spirit was being drawn to the capital by the passion of change. The friends arrived on the 31st of July, to find Paris in all the chaos of civil war. They could not pass the barricades at Charenton, and so had to make a long round and get in by the Faubourg St. Antoine. They met wild troops of citizens shouting, and, in the midst of the turmoil a young man, 'en moustache et en habit bourgeois,' clasped Jouanez in his arms and shouted 'Mon Général, le peuple a 'été sublime!' Barbier left them folded in this enthusiastic embrace, and descended the steep and winding streets alone till he came out by the Arcade St. Jean on the Hôtel de Ville. There he had a shock of surprise, for the whole façade was riddled with shots, tricolour flags were waving from every window, and crowds of citizens, in the highest possible spirits, were entering and leaving the Hôtel like bees swarming in and out of a hive.

The sight of the very scene of the fiercest battle of democracy excited in Barbier a superhuman emotion. He gazed at it for a long time, and when at last he turned away it was with a beating heart and a tingling brain. He wandered along the quays, and the passion that was in him began to churn into music. There seems to be no record of his having previously indulged the ambition to be a poet, but 'La Curée '-which