dustry and means in manufacturing and commercial transactions, would be, to say the least, extremely imprudent. Not only would the state become at once despotic, but the citizens would be directly on the way to idiocy.

The present aspect of Socialism in all its branches, will be the subject of another communication.

A REVIEW OF THE RISE AND PROGRESS OF
ENGLISH LITERATURE.

TH

HE Literature of England is to us, of course, the most interesting, because it belongs as it were to ourselves-we are part of it, and can gather its wealth into the storehouses of our minds without effort and without the intervention of a medium. For there are comparatively few who can become so completely inoculated with a foreign language as to be able to appreciate the beauties of its literature as thoroughly as one to the “manor born;" and, therefore, by the majority the treasures of an alien tongue can be but indifferently comprehended through the assistance of a translation, which, if literal, must be bald, cold, and bizarre; while on the other hand, if an attempt is made to bring before the reader's mind the lingual beauties of the original, the result is a weakening of the idea, or the employment of words which, though beautiful and elegant, and conveying the intended meaning, yet are not the author's own, but rather, those which strike the translator as the best for his purpose.

For this reason I have chosen a ground often trodden perhaps, yet so rich in every growth of mental grandeur, beauty, and grace, as to be inexhaustible. Like the figures of a Like the figures of a kaleidoscope, the same coloring and the same forms, yet infinite in the variety of their combinations; like a garden of flowers in which, each day, one comes upon some blossom which had escaped discovery on the previous visit, so are the labors of those mighty minds which have enriched the fields of our research.

In studying the literature of a people we read as it were between the lines, the origin and growth of that people from their first, chaotic state, through barbarism and incipient civilization, up to the full refulgence of the intellectual light of the present day. National life is not counted by years, but by centuries; and since Macaulay's New Zealander of the future has appropriated London Bridge, we can take our stand in this present age, to contemplate

the past, upon the corner-stone of Westminster Abbey, and at the bidding of memory, as at the stroke of an enchanter's wand, what a weird and motley pageant will pass before us! What development of national character, mental and moral, from epoch to epoch! In this procession let us first regard the physical condition of man ; thence we can better deduce his mental status. And the difference of physical and social characteristics is as much due to climate, food, and occupation, as to light is due the proper coloring of each flower that blooms upon our upland meadows.

When the Aryan race spread itself from "India's coral strand" to "Greenland's icy mountains," those who pitched their tents beside the tideless sea, and watched their flocks amid the meads of sunny Italy, or beneath the softer skies of fair Provence, ere long grew as dreamy and indolent as the air they breathed, and since the teeming earth yielded spontaneously all luscious fruits, and cereals grew without requiring other cultivation than throwing the seed upon the ground, or other labor than the gathering of the grain, why should they slave or weary themselves? If in this second Eden all things came as it were at a wish, where was the necessity for exertion and energy?

Not so, however, those who, penetrating the frozen barriers of the Alpine range, found themselves hemmed in by ice and snow, or the alternative of water and black, oozy mud! To them it was given to do constant battle with nature in her rudest form and gloomiest aspect. The ocean was a foe to be always dreaded, watched, and provided against by those who reached its shores, and for the necessary means of preserving life by food, aside from the chase, they were obliged to coax old mother earth-what little of her they could call their own-with all the arts their limited development taught them. Can we wonder, then, if they left the forest primeval to fret the air with the moanings of its pines, and the arid soil to its crops of furze and weeds, save for the labor of their women, and betook themselves to the lives of hunters and fishers? Half-naked savages, clothed in the skins of the victims of their rude skill, and feeding upon the flesh, ofttimes raw and bloody, as it fell pierced by their arrows-such were the men, Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians, and Danes, who, from the fifth to the ninth century, made England their battle-ground, and laid the foundation of her present empire.

The period of the first settlement of the island is lost in the depths of the earliest ages. All that can be gathered of the Celts prove them to be members of the great Aryan family, but when or how they crossed the sea is unknown. As they were hunters and fishers and swineherds before, so they failed to find in the new country any suggestions for a higher mode of life; it was a wild.

and foggy land—what could these rude savages do to better it? Befogged in their intellectual development, how could they disperse the mists around them?

Poetry, art, love, and all the refinements of the times were for the vine-clad hills that swept down to the fair Southern sea, whose waves laved the shores with a soft and soothing rhythm. To the barbarian, gazing from his mud-hovel into the cloud-laden sky, who heard but the drip, drip, dripping of the rain all day upon the oaks and beeches, what message of peace and joyousness could the beating of the surging waves upon the rocks bring to him? What philosophy could recommend itself to his darkened mind? What system of ethics would he judge best to follow?

History tells us that about fifty years before our Saviour's birth the Romans invaded Britain, and found it governed or controlled for the most part by the priests or Druids. These men were wise above their fellows, and were possessed of some learning, and had established a curious and methodical system of teaching-by verse -a system at once advantageous in an age when writing was not a popular accomplishment-and pleasing, since it assisted the memory and captivated the fancy. They gave public instruction in the persuasive science of rhetoric, and by its varied agency and irresistible enchantment their fiercest passions could be soothed during peace, and stimulated and inflamed at the hour of peril. They had caught also a faint echo from the Greck colony at Marseilles. All this mental cultivation was destroyed by the Romans. During the next hundred years repeated inroads from the all-conquering eagles kept the country in a distracted state, but it was not till the fortieth year of the Christian era that the regular conquest of the island was begun by the Emperor Claudius. Some nameless follower of the Son of the Carpenter must have found his way, possibly in the army of the invader, to these distant shores, and planted the seed of the new doctrines upon them, for there were Christians here before the Romans took complete possession. Tradition tells that St. Paul himself preached the Gospel here between his first and second imprisonment in Rome.

A natural aversion towards their conquerors was at first difficult to be overcome in the islanders; but this dislike yielded gradually to the study of the new and polished language, the elegant models of composition and thought in which their literature abounded; and so it came to pass that the conquered people at last received the learning of the conquerors with wondering interest, and the Greek and Latin tongues became the vehicle of instruction, and prepared them in some degree for fully receiving the humanizing influence of the Christian dispensation; a dispensation which, whether accepted or rejected, would awaken the spirit of research

and stimulate their reason and intellectual energies. The philosophical principles of Aristotle and Cicero plainly and clearly guided their efforts. They learned to have a definite object of inquiry and to pursue it methodically. But with this cultivation. had also been instilled the enervating influence of its false philosophy; and thus it was that, the presence of the conquerors removed, the next invaders found the islanders a spiritless and easy prey.

Yet there were great names to stud the age like stars of the first magnitude in a moonless sky. Great, I mean, in another than the usual interpretation, such as St. Ninian, St. Patrick, Pelagius, and Celestius. The learned Bishop Dubricius had established two seminaries on the river Rye. Most of the educated Britons withdrew to the peaceful retirement of other lands when the fierce Vikings swooped down upon the country from the frozen North. Only a few remained to nurse the feeble spark of learning, and at the head of these we must place Gildas, the historian.

The Saxons were restless marauders, whose virtues, if they possessed any, had never been mellowed by the operation of science or the softer influence of the true religion; therefore they brought back confusion and intellectual obscurity in their train.

For as the life, so was the man. Exposure to wind and wave, following the animals of the chase over hill and through dale, he became a very son of Anak. Huge in body, cold in blood, with reddish flaxen hair and blue eyes; hearty eater and deep drinker, cold in temperament and slow to love-such in physical and mental development was the barbarian, the Saxon, to whom we owe the substratum of our intellectual existence. Every page of the old Sagas show us how they loved war and carnage, how obstinate and furious they were; their bravery but the unchaining of the butcher's instincts. As a sample of the table-talk of the day we read how the daughter of a Danish Jarl, seeing one of their heroes take his seat near her, repels him scornfully, telling him that he has failed to provide the wolves with hot meat, and that he has not seen for months the ravens croaking over carnage. In reply to this maidenly and gentle taunt, first seizing hold of her, he sings that he has marched with his "bloody sword and the raven has followed." "Furiously we fought and the fire passed over the dwellings of men; we slept in the blood of those who kept the gates." Let us hope that a devoir so glorious satisfied the soft-hearted girl, and that her lover was forgiven.

Grown wealthier in England we find the same natures grown worse, having passed from brutal action to brutal enjoyment. Stimulated by deep draughts of mead, ale, and spiced wines, and all the strong, coarse drinks they can procure, filling themselves with flesh, they resemble more the beasts they tend than human

beings; clumsy and absurd, when not dangerous because enraged. Shouting and capering about and revelling in the riot of the wildest orgies was the first need of the savage. "The human brute," says Taine, “gluts himself with sensation and noise." If, even in our day, beneath the elaborate crust of refinement and cultivation which our natures have accumulated in all these years, the volcanic fires of the ancestral barbarian spirit breaks forth at times, how must they have raged in those far-off ages when nature, debased and degraded, had it all her own wild way.

With the

A century and a half after the Saxon invasion missionaries from Rome came and straightway made converts. Yet it was difficult, and only a God-inspired religion could succeed. The milder influences of Christianity could only affect and overcome Saxon grossness by virtue of its inherent divine power, and the barbarian converted was, in many cases, a barbarian still; and so, to a certain extent, was his son. In the ballads and legends of these times there is but one revolting theme, a monograph of war and blood, revenge and rapine. Still, withal, there were noble dispositions, and out of the chaos a nobler people were to arise. Christian dispensation there was something like scholastic discipline developed, and we have the venerable Bede, Alcuin, John Scotus Erigena, and others, commentators and translators, compiling out of the Greek and Latin something to suit the new nation. The remains of the Roman settlers were reduced to slavery where they were not exterminated; for while on the continent the Germans of Gaul, Italy, and Spain became Roman to a certain extent, the Germans of England remained Germans still in language, in manners, and in thought. Seagirt as their land was isolated from danger of chance predatory incursions from near neighbors whom some petty spite might at any time change from friend to foe, they naturally turned their attention inward to themselves and their own best interests. The bonds which united them had a substratum of generous sentiment. They were independent and brave to a violent excess, but these very excesses were the extreme, unrestrained outcome of noble qualities, and promised a grand future for the young nation. They became simple and strong, faithful to their families and to their chiefs, firm and steadfast in friendship, courageous, and self-sacrificing. Every clan was a band of brothers ready each to do battle for the other, and above all for their leader. The songs and stories all turn on this feudal faithfulness. Gradually, too, we find the state of woman is elevated and respected. She is no longer a chattel. She can inherit, hold, and bequeath property, and takes henceforth her proper place in society as man's helpmeet and companion. Of the poetry of this age there are but few fragments left, yet from these we can easily judge of the strange and