Park after dusk. Of course Thornton Hunt was not infallible*. -we can only draw our own conclusions.

Now, there is not the slightest reason for casting the shadow of blame on poor Mrs. Shelley, whose genius Mr. Trelawny assuredly underrates, but when these things, and others related to them, have been over and over again tampered with in a half-hearted way, it is of the last importance that we should have the truth. Mr. Trelawny blurts it out; but it seems to us that so good a friend to the whole clan as he was should be protected in his late old age from the charge of cynical personality.

The other point in which our previous comments are as strongly and decisively confirmed as possible, is more important. In the previous paper, which we have ventured to recall to the reader's mind, it was strongly insisted that the cause of religion gained nothing by the half-sincere-or occasionally sincere attempts which have recently been made to show that Shelley was, towards the close of his life, any less a Pantheist than he was before. These attempts are for the most part a portion of the system of evasion, compromise, and general smoothing-over, which has been the accepted policy of late years. How this policy has happened to come into use is another question. But at the present moment our more serious publicism is absolutely rotten with it. However, we will first of all quote Mr. Trelawny's strong manly words upon this topic, and then repeat in another form our own comments on the former occasion. Hear Mr. Trelawny, then :

"The principal fault I have to find is that the Shelleyan writers, being Christians themselves, seem to think that a man of genius cannot be an atheist, and so they strain their own faculties to disprove what Shelley asserted from the earliest stage of his career to the last day of his life. He ignored all religions as superstitions. Some years ago, one of the most learned of the English bishops questioned me regarding Shelley; he expressed both admiration and astonishment at his learning and writings. I said to the bishop, 'You know he was an atheist.' He said, 'Yes.' I answered: 'It is the key and the distinguishing quality of all he wrote. Now that people are beginning to distinguish men by their works, and not creeds, the critics, to bring him into vogue, are trying to make out that Shelley was not an atheist, that he was rather a religious man. Would it be right in me, or any one who knew him, to aid or sanction such a fraud?' The bishop said: Certainly not, there is nothing righteous but truth.' And there our conversation ended.

"Certainly there were men of genius before the Christian era: there were men and nations not equalled even at the present day.

"A clergyman wrote in the visitors' book at the Mer de Glace, Chamouni, something to the following effect: No one can view this sublime scene and deny the existence of God.' Under which Shelley, using a Greek phrase, wrote, 'P. B. Shelley, atheist,' thereby proclaiming his opinion to all the world. And he never regretted having done this."

Now what is the real state of the case as to Shelley's writings? He called himself an Atheist and an Atheist he was, in the sense of always denying, not only the God of current Christianity, but the God of natural theology His repudiation of Paley stands distinctly upon record. But we must bear in mind that Shelley's was a mind of the most extraordinary fluctuative subtlety -a sort of living, working essence of poetry. To such a mind Theism, intellectually stated, was simply impossible. But equally impossible was the bare hard negativism of the Atheist, pure and simple. Drive Shelley into a corner from one direction, and he begins to talk about a "Spirit of the Universe," and assigns to this Spirit the functions of a boundless loving Power, which means to have good and justice brought about somehow. But ask him if he believes in a God, and his mind floats off into the vague again. He will sing in the beautiful Serchio lines of the "task He set to each," and you may take him for a Theist; but his words are words only-his true God is no more real, in

*For example, Mr. W. M. Rossetti, in his Memoir of Shelley, quotes at least one thing from Mr. Hunt which is simply incredible. Mr. Rossetti's book has only just reached us, but we cannot omit to say at once that his Memoir is admirably comprehensive, intelligent, and honest. The Notes, or rather the Emendations, raise inexhaustible questions, and must wait.

your sense, than the soul of music in the guitar of Miranda, or the breeze in the boughs of the tree "on the wind-swept Apennine," from which the slender shell of the guitar was made. Any person of poetic mould may find in his own consciousness the explanation, or at least the parallel of this. The difference, such as it is, between Shelley's later writings and his earlier is the result of the decline of the old Diderot-Godwin influence upon his mind, the increasing subtlety of his powers of expression, and perhaps of a little desire to find a modus vivendi with the best forms of religiousness which he happened to know. Mr. Trelawny rightly says that Shelley, in himself, was unbent and unbendable to the last, a man who would have no compromises; but after all, he was human, and must have had his moments of weariness and yearning-of which Mrs. Shelley, we can plainly see, made the most.

We may just notice with a word one other particular in which Mr. Trelawny confirms the judgments of this REVIEW in July, 1877-namely, that Mr. Hogg's is, out of sight, the most valuable picture of Shelley, broken as it is. In this judgment Mr. W. M. Rossetti and the Spectator seem to concur.

Leigh Hunt was not the sort of man to attract a viking like Trelawny, and he receives scant justice in these pages. But in those of Mr. Launcelot Cross he certainly gets full measure, heaped up, running over. Though Leigh Hunt's "London Journal" (1834-35) is his topic, he cannot avoid excursions, critical and personal, and he says some delicately true things about his author. It seems to us that there are volumes, painful volumes, in the bare fact that such a venture as Leigh Hunt's "London Journal" would nowadays be out of the question. Mr. Strahan is the only publisher who has ever managed to “run” periodical literature in anything like the same lines. In the Argosy and St. Paul's magazines we had some literature which relied mainly upon flavour and individual quality-qualité-for its success; but they carried much more sail than Leigh Hunt alone could hoist. Determination of the public mind just now lies chiefly in two directions; above a certain level of instruction, to science and research; below that level, to literary quackery and "sensation." To pass from some of our magazines to Landor, Hunt, Hazlitt, and Lamb, is to enter a new region. Taking it on one side, it is passing from Australian meat and Hamburg sherry to a feast of the gods-from the heat and crowd of a big hotel to "an ampler æther, a diviner air," where nothing heats or "stuffs," but all exhilarates and refreshes. Leigh Hunt's was not the strongest spirit of that Olympian group, but it was the most typical of our meaning; his writings were the quintessence of poetic humanism,-the sweetness dashed with humour; or, as the late Mortimer Collins might have put it, more suo, the honeyed wine of literature, with a dash of asperula odorata. It is a striking fact that a cheap weekly journal like his should have lived so long as it did in the Charles Knight days. His attempt to repeat the experiment twenty years later was a failure. Nor could he ever have carried on one literary scheme for very long. He never worked successfully against the grain; he was a frequent self-repeater (like all the best writers, without exception), and the whole bent of modern criticism was against him. Barry Cornwall rightly says that he began to speak ex cathedrá too early. None of his judgments are saugrenus; and his sagacity is as wonderful as his forbearance. But he set up in business on too small a capital, and was all his life running a race against that initial disadvantage, though with an imperfect consciousness of its existence. In his "Religion of the Heart," he lays it down, quite offhand, that the love of God (in the strong sense of the mystic) is an illusion; and in the same book, warmly recommending Mr. Herbert Spencer's "Social Statics," he remarks, quite at his ease, that he doesn't always agree with that writer: unmindful that "Social Statics" is a book like Spinoza's "Ethics"drop but a link and the whole chain is gone: and, appare itly, quite unimpressed by the power and grasp of Mr. Spencer's writings. On the whole, indeed, Leigh Hunt was too much" at ease in Zion "--but this criticism must not be carried too far for his was a marvellously apprehensive nature. Perhaps

Mr. Launcelot Cross speaks a little too depreciatingly of the "Religion of the Heart," though his estimate of the book is on the whole just. The volume is so little known that a passage or two from the service which it contains can scarcely be less than welcome here. In the following, the liturgical accent is exceedingly well preserved :

"1. It is good to prepare the thoughts in gentleness and silence for the consideration of duty.

"2. Silence as well as gentleness would seem beloved of God:

"3. For to the human sense,

"4. And like the mighty manifestation of a serene lesson,

"5. The skies, and the great spaces between the stars, are silent.

"6. Silent, too, for the most part, is earth:

"7. Save where gentle sounds vary the quiet of the country,

"8. And the fluctuating solitudes of the waters.

"9. Folly and passion are rebuked before it ;

"10. Peace loves it;

"11. And hearts are drawn by it together;

"12. Conscious of one service;

"13. And of one duty of sympathy.

"14. Violence is partial and transitory:

"15. Gentleness alone is universal and ever sure.

"16. It was said of old, under a partial law, and with a limited intention,

"17. But with a spirit beyond the intention, which emanated from the God-given wisdom in the heart,

"18. That there came a wind which rent the mountains, and brake the rocks in pieces before the Lord; but the Lord was not in the wind:

"19. And after the wind was an earthquake; but the Lord was not in the earthquake; "20. And after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.

"21. And after the fire a still small voice.

22. Such is the God-given voice of conscience in the heart."

Not less beautiful are these sentences, which, like the others, are "pointed " for recitation:

"4. Soft and silent are the habitual movements of nature;

"5. Loudly and violently as its beneficence may work, within small limits and in rare instances.

"6. Let me imitate the serene habit,

"7. And not take on my limited foresight the privilege of the stormy exception.

"12. Gentle and good is darkness:

"13. Beautiful with stars;

"14. Or working to some benefit of a different aspect, with clouds.

"15. God's ordinance of the rolling world takes away the light at bed-time, like a parent;

"16. Shall I not sleep calmly under its shadow ?

"17. May I drop as calmly into the sleep of death;

"18. And wake to an eternal morning."

Once only does Leigh Hunt's habitual sense of humour wholly desert him. It is in the "rubric" of the "Daily Service" of private worship, under the title "Aspiration in the Morning," where we find this quaint instruction:

"When the hour has arrived in the morning, at which the reader thinks it right for him (or her) to get up, he will repeat mentally and with his greatest attention (or aloud, if a companion is agreed with him in so doing), the following words. In the latter case the personal pronoun singular will be changed for the plural."

It is not a very "religious" picture-Mr. and Mrs. Caudle sitting bolt upright in bed, night-capped, reciting aloud, on a cold morning, "It is now time for us to arise;" the maid tapping at the door in the middle of the "Aspiration," with "Please, m'm, here's the hot water!" But the man who could write like this should neither be forgotten nor depreciated.

THE HISTORY AND DOCTRINES OF "This is a well-written. sensible, and, as it appears 18. in impartak mammoon of the very remarkable movement which begin doent the year 1999 ind vs Ennected with, though by no means originated by the preaching f the enzi Bivari Iving. It is written by an Engisa hergyman, formerly fellow and minor of New College, from the High Chen standpoint in the first vime he mess the history of the movement, fem is tummencement to the present time, and in the second gives a statement of the Irvingte icemas, bavi som uncrizei cuments. It is not a little remarkable that the Tora ne vement it fri and this in Lenden began about the same time. Each was a reaction kriinst Calvinism, and there can be little à cặt that the Linda movement eventually bit the infrence of the Oxford one in TIR IS VITA. The stipendons events that happened in Europe at the close of the last and fie er mmencement if the present century, had prepared the minds of win as pe pie for the expHTACCE is me great crisis, and had directed their attinson to the study of prophecy In Ith and the 5 de ving years, important meetings were beli in tus subject. at Albury, under the auspices of Mr. Damit wilth Irving wis present. The suit of these was to stimulate an earn ferpentinen that the garments of the Apocalypse were about to be fl Def and that the Lord vorbi sherty inpear. Not long afterwards two instan es coomed in Setland of persons intering the mprehensible sounds, which they regarded as a revival of the fngues, but it was not till April 30, 1931, that a Lke phenomenon summed i Lemba. at a prayer-meeting which was held at the boom of Mr. Carfale a solutnie Three distinct sentences were spoken by his wife in an unknows angle and then in English. The latter were, "The Lord vlll get a bit peer p The Lord hasteneth his coming," "The Lord cometh Bulk mat na afur this time, these phenomena became frequent occumesom, b a oniky khery members of Irving's ngregation. As a specimen of the

42. * give the following, for our readers to exercise their ingenting se Prodierna eme, supposed to mean, “I will undertake this demon Woneen on ta dare, Jesus in the highest;" Holimoth holif author, Hoy, wo Hong Yaner;" Hoze kamena nostra, Jesus will take our hands Cora nera batha cára, “This house will still be in my care." It will be sufficiently tear that are unknown, because unintelligible, and not merely in wengine velange unknown. Irving was ejected by the Scottish Kirk, in 1968, for presse ning the universality of redemption. Shortly after, he was ordained as angel of the church in Newman Street, and in the close of the following year he died of consumption, at the age of forty-two, a broken-down, worn-out old man, heary as with extreme age.

The influence he had evoked proved too mighty for his control. Though his fame in London as a preacher had been unrivalled, he was constrained to play a subordinate part in the new society he had been chiefly instrumental in calling into existence, and the spiritual powers assumed by his followers brought him under the tyranny of tongues and prophecies to which he never himself laid claim, and of an apostleship from which he was excluded. For the varied fortunes of the seet that is named from him, the reader is referred to the narrative of Mr. Miller. It is highly instructive and interesting in many respects, and though it is written with strict historical impartiality, and with every wish to do justice to the cause described, the judgment of the reader, which is in no degree biassed, can hardly fail to decide that the history of the movement is the best comment upon it, and The History and Doctrines of Irvingism. By Edward Miller, M.A. 2 vols. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co.

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points to a verdict that cannot be doubtful. When judged by the standard of the original apostolic revelation, it is only too palpable that this later and self-constituted one fails altogether from lack of evidence. In the one case we cannot but discern all the features of reality, in the other a conspicuous absence of them. Nor do the statistics of the sect promise well for the future. It seems that the total number of its adherents in England, Scotland, Ireland, and abroad does not exceed ten or twelve thousand, and nearly all its original leaders are dead or disabled. In two respects the testimony of Mr. Miller seems to us. worthy of note. "If any one were to go," he says, as the author did, directly from the forenoon service in Gordon Square to a celebration of the Holy Communion in an English Church, he would be struck by the greater warmth of the spiritual atmosphere in the latter place. He would seem to have moved from the celebration of a solemn ordinance to a realization of the Presence of the Lord Jesus. Amongst other things, these people, immediately after the prayers following the consecration are concluded, in a mass rise from their knees and remain sitting till their time comes to go up to the altar.” And again, "Mr. Grant, in his Apostolic Lordship,' gives numerous instances where the incompetence of the Irvingite ministers is plainly visible. 'Of Protestant, Anglican,' he says, and Roman Catholic priests and bishops I have seen much; and I must say that as a body "Apostolic" ministers do not either in individual zeal, devotion, study, or general perception of the multiform character of truth compare favourably with those in the Church at large, to whom I could refer.'" This last testimony is highly significant, and it is that of one who had himself been a member of the body, but afterwards broke loose from it. Mr. Miller's volumes deserve to be read by all who are interested in the study of religious movements and the aberrations of the religious mind.

THE SUPERNATURAL IN NATURE.*-The argument of the anonymous author may be briefly expressed in his own words, p. 245: "Everything visible leads to the invisible." In a treatise of some five hundred pages he has developed this idea with great variety of illustration, with considerable cogency of reasoning, and here and there with not a little eloquence. He has produced a learned and instructive book, of which the general tendency is what will be called "orthodox," as the ordinary reader may surmise from the fact that it is dedicated, with highly complimentary words, to the present Bishop of London. The writer labours to show that the Mosaic narrative of Creation is in complete harmony with-or at all events, not in contradiction to-the latest science; and, indeed, his work is a lengthened and exhaustive discussion upon the early chapters of Genesis, with a view to illustrating his ultimate position, that the deeper study of nature in every field of inquiry prompts and points us to the recognition of the supernatural, or of something in and beyond nature working as a causa causans, which, though half concealed, is at the same time half revealed in nature.

MONTESQUIEU'S WORKS.+-The works of Montesquieu belong to the splendid collection of French classics of the eighteenth century. The man, indeed, who was almost the first to attempt a history of the growth of society, the meaning and development of law, and the theory of constitutional liberty, is not likely to be forgotten. But for some unexplained reason that curiosity into personal details, which is insatiable as regards Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and others of the age, seems never to have been extended to the author of the "Esprit de Lois." So far as we know, this is actually the first biography-not counting as such the éloges of D'Alembert and Villemain-which has been attempted. It has seemed to mankind that the life of a man who spent ten years over the "Grandeur et Décadence des Romains," and twenty over the "Esprit des Lois," must have been perforce a quiet and monotonous life. It was not so; Montesquieu was more than a scholar, he was a traveller, a man of society, and a man of gallantry.

Among the courtiers whose religious convictions were changed at the same time as those of Henri Quatre, was a certain Jacques de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, from whom the great Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu et de la Bride, was descended. He belonged to the nobles de robe, and became by hereditary profession a lawyer, a magistrate at the earliest age possible, and eventually President à mortier of the Parliament of Guienne. The wife of the author of

• The Supernatural in Nature: A Verification by Free Use of Science. London: C. Kegan Paul & Co. + Histoire de Montesquieu et ses Œuvres par Louis Vian. Paris: Didier et Cie. 1878.