attributes. It seems to have been plain theism with just and wise men, who referred all things to the greater Zeus, or just powers above Zeus ; and perhaps, at great moments of their lives, the One Source of right was visible to all who believed in right. There is a highly important remark of Mr. W. W. Lloyd's (Age of Pericles II., p. 202) that highly personified as are the deities of Homeric mythology—

"When these divinities are in any case appealed to with unusual seriousness, their nature-character reappears. Zeus is the greatest, most glorious, the habitant of æther: the all-seeing Sun is not the smiter of overdone Patroclus on the back, but is attested by name, with the Rivers of the Earth, along with the powers which judge the perjured in another state (Hom. II. iii. 276); and so again elsewhere associated with Jove are Earth, Sun, and the Erinnyes. When Poseidon hesitates to defer to the positive commands of Zeus (Il. xix. 259), Iris reminds him that there are the Erinnyes to be reckoned with (Il. xv. 204), and he gives in at once."

This was Greek Pantheism, happily unconscious of the name: a condition of mind in which prayer and hope, for present and future, were reasonable and real, if not logical: for logic, happily, was not as yet. It was a religion under which, if you were particular about right, you could always ask Somebody to help you to do it in a thorough and searching manner; and to reward you for it, He best knew how or when. Nothing can be more different from this than that autolatry of our own time, which makes every man for himself the measure of all things. But what is more remarkable is, how easily the Greek acknowledged a separate personality at every turn, in the Dryad soul of the oak, and the Naiad spirit of the waters, &c., and then could collect them all, for his own greater needs, in the greater Zeus and awful deities who would do and have right, who were one with the powers of nature. Anything further from atheistic or impersonal Pantheism can hardly be conceived.

I could have wished to say something, as a person who has lived fifty years not inobservantly, of the immense importance of stronglyimpressed personality on moral and intellectual works, and to have illustrated it from long experience of personal ministry to the poor on the moral side, and of artistic criticism and production on the other. It has been maintained in this REVIEW that the word mechanical, when used in its bad sense, means absence of soul, of heart, or of evinced personality. The absence of soul in art or craft is held to diminish or destroy the value of results by making them what is called mechanical, and its absence from moral action receives the same name. A value attaches in the intellectual and moral product alike, in the good work and in the picture-to a certain subjective or spiritual condition in the doer: which establishes a plan of spiritual relation between him and the person affected by his deed-call it love, tenderness, sympathy, or what you will. No wonder atheists are shy of the personality of a Creator; but what are they to say to the personality of the created being? It is spirit; a gifted or admiring, delighted spirit has left its mark on

the picture; an honest spirit on a well-made box, a well-sewn seam ; a Christian spirit on a hundred of coals given in Christ's name. I should like to point out how mechanical charity, by board and committee, seems to lose the moral effect it often deserves; though it, like mechanical production, is a necessity of vast population and widespreading need. And I cannot resist quoting Mr. Hamerton's parallel example of the way in which worthless pictures used to be got up for the market impersonally, and by no end of different hands, like pins ; by a subject or composition-man, a draughtsman, a scumbler and glazer, a man for details, and many more. All this is matter of experience, and it certainly seems to find foundation for an argument on the presence of spirit—the spirit which has made man and all his working, at present in the world and in the ways of man. The working of the human soul is a symbolic testimony to the source from whence it came.

Principal Shairp's account of Wordsworth is doubly valuable, as it gives the double view of his mind, as trained on Christian sympathy with those he knew, constantly practised as a study; and on the Pantheism which sees God in all things. How can the latter offend anybody's faith? How can it go against the Nicene Creed, or the belief in Holy Scripture as containing all things necessary to salvation, to hold that the power and providence of God penetrate all things whatever, with more or less complete manifestation, in gradated order, according to His will? About as much as it controverts Bacon's Novum Organon, or Newton's Principia, or the University Calendar. How far did Wordsworth lose sight of the Personal Father of Spirits, in believing that He was before him, and behind him, and with his soul when it took the wings of the evening and the morning, and fled over the utmost parts of the sea? Professor Tyndall shows the way from analytic physics into metaphysic, and therefore into theology; Wordsworth shows it from surface physics, or the aspects of Nature, into psychology, and therefore into theology. She is like heat or pressure: at a certain depth, anywhere, you cannot escape her; for, wherever you go, you ask yourself who you are, and how you got there? and the ultimate answers to these questions she claims as her own.

On our own side, we have a right to call attention to the evolution of definite and orthodox Christianity in Wordsworth, as described with faithful accuracy in "Poetic Interpretation," &c., pp. 259, 397. The analysis there given is like that of an expanding germ or a ripening fruit, and the term evolution may fairly be applied to it. But to plain people it is a great deal more like the gradual entering in and possession of this man's soul by the Spirit of Him whom he had always sought according to his lights. It has exposed him to the animadversion of his brother bards "and of all the small fry of Liberalism," as Principal Shairp somewhat pithily observes. This is greatly to be regretted, but not on Wordsworth's account. The party spirit of

Shelley and of Byron, on behalf of the Whig party and the Devil in conjunction, is alike natural and subternatural. That of Macaulay, as a friend of the former Opposition only, is straightforward and excusable. Mr. Browning may write, in his character of a Cosmopolite in Hood's sense, that is to say, of one who is polite to all the world except his own country. If the lines entitled "A Lost Leader" are not directed at Wordsworth, it would give great satisfaction to some of us, who place Mr. Browning only second to the old Northman as a poet-philosopher, to be made sure of it. Mr. Browning may mean Lindley Murray, who has failed to conduct him into perfectly harmonious mastery of the English language. It is very difficult to understand or acknowledge the conventional claim of Revolution on the poets of the last and present generation. Aristocrats as insolent as Byron, and thinkers as refined as Mr. Browning, are all with Marat and Robespierre, and anticipate the glories of red ruin and the breaking up of laws. Satanic, Hellenic, Renaissance, Bohemian-from Byron to Béranger-they are all the same; there is always the same Nature worship, with the same equivocal meanings and unequivocal corollaries; there are always the same nobly-asserted heterodoxies about marriage and its restraints; there is always the same hissing aspiration after the throats of all the priests, who talk of God, and righteousness, and temperance, and judgment to come. Wordsworth certainly declined to lead or follow in the Red Republic; he was as independent of mobs of peers; and neither liked him for it. Was he to be an Anacreon of the guillotine? It was a reality in his day, and he had seen it. For love of the people and of all humanity, he did entirely possess that, or it possessed him, and he was filled with it. But there is a great difference between love of the people and hatred of an aristocracy—a desire to betray and destroy the aristocracy to which you belong. Byron may have loved the people, as he said, because he hoped to see them carry Castlereagh's head on a pole. Wordsworth's tenderness for poor leech-gatherers, outworn huntsmen, and mothers who lacked sons, was quite another feeling, acquired in quite another school, and perfected in another and incompatible service.

as

R. ST. J. TYRWHITT.

THE SCOT.

I.

F all the wonderful things in this world-a world which to the

most wonderful, perhaps, is the extent to which, in its construction, the principle of variety and contrast has been applied. It seems, to speak with reverence, as if this principle resided so inherently in the Supreme Intellect that it was purposely allowed a wider range than some other principles, which to our limited understandings might appear more important.

It is certain indeed that one of the highest human intellects, when venturing on the perilous problem of constructing a best possible world, I mean Plato,-did so in a spirit which clearly showed that he had left out of view that excellent mystery in the divine framework, whereby symmetry is redeemed from tameness, and harmony from monotony. It is not the pious Society of Friends only to whom the often-quoted remark applies, that "if they had been consulted in the creation of the world, a very drab-coloured creation they would have made of it." We are all cut from one common block in this respect. We are creatures of very limited notions and very mighty pretensions; and we all start in life with the idea that the one principle, whatever it be, which is dominant in us, is the best principle in the world, and which, both by divine and human right, ought to dominate over all other principles; in other words, we are all naturally inclined to despotise over God's various scheme with our individual and local conceptions, and to make it the business of our lives to mould the vastness of the divine organism of things after the type of our own. narrow notions, and partial sympathies. Look abroad into the wide history of human philosophies and theologies; or look around you in the small circle of your own village, city, or parish, and you will find

everywhere ample illustrations of this tendency of the human mind. In Russia, for instance, the grand idea is to Russianize the world, and to mould every characteristic nationality after the absolute ukas of the Czar. In France, the favourite notion of the Napoleons was always to imperialize the provinces of France, after the model of Paris, and, if possible, the whole world after the model of France, the beginning of course to be made with Germany.

After the same fashion, to pass from the empire of the sword to that of the pen, we have a class of small thinkers in London who seem to imagine that the greatest blessing which could be conferred upon Scotland at the present moment is to stamp upon it with a high hand the manners and institutions of England, and to obliterate with one unsparing sweep all its most marked national characteristics; in a word, to play the despot over the smaller half of the island with the narrow notions and the ignorant prejudices of the larger half. And this is not the assumption merely of a few; it is one of the prevailing tendencies of the age, against which it is our duty manfully and patriotically to contend. A minority united politically to a majority will always have a stiff battle to fight for the maintenance of its own integrity. Majorities are always tyrannical, in London as well as in New York; and though in the court of reason multitude of men, and multitude of moneys, be in themselves matters of the smallest moment, yet on the stage of the real drama of life they do often exert a mighty sway, especially when assisted by rank and fashion, and the smooth seductions of a spurious refinement and an external magnificence. From these influences it is that we behold the lamentable spectacle of not a few Scotsmen in Scotland more than half-ashamed of their country, and ready to forego, without regret, all its glorious memories, its hallowed traditions, its sturdy character, its free and manly religion, its beautiful Doric language, its dramatic and humorous poetry, its pathetic and popular music. I have always protested against these denationalizing tendencies of the age, in reference to Scotland; and I am proud to say that I have not protested in bad company. John Stuart Mill, in his admirable work on "Liberty," pronounced the sad sentence that Europe was, in his judgment, decidedly advancing towards the Chinese ideal of making all people alike," and that "energetic characters on any great scale are coming to be merely traditional." Who among us that has any sense for nature and truth, but laments, when reading the late Lord Cockburn's "Memorials of his Time," the disappearance of that "delightful set of excellent Scotch old ladies, strong-headed, warm-hearted, and highspirited merry even in solitude; very resolute; indifferent about the modes and habits of the modern world; doing exactly as they chose ; their language, like their habits, entirely Scotch, but without any other vulgarity than what perfect naturalness is sometimes mistaken for?" I much fear that the polish of the present time has not been

66