ART. VII.-The Collected Works of Sir Henry Taylor in Prose and Verse. Five volumes. 8vo. London: 1878. To the credit of the literary taste of the present generation there is a demand which justifies a collected edition of Sir Henry Taylor's works. The earliest of his writings was published in the reign of George IV., and since the appearance of Philip Van Artevelde, nearly fifty years ago, he has enjoyed a well-deserved popular reputation, though he is not by profession a man of letters. man of letters. During nearly the whole of his life Sir Henry Taylor has been actively employed in the Civil Service, where it was understood that he long exercised an influence over colonial administration out of proportion to his official rank. As another man of genius who was less eminent as a public servant formerly said of himself, Sir Henry Taylor's principal works, or the records of his heaviest labours, are probably accumulated on the shelves of the Colonial Office. One or two memorials on public questions, not directly relating to the business of his own department, are, with questionable judgment, included in the present collection. It might have been taken for granted that his official compositions were lucid, forcible, and worthy of serious attention; but it was hardly worth while to insert among imaginative and critical writings a disquisition on criminal jurisprudence, or a correspondence five-and-twenty years old on some details in the system of Civil Service examinations. It is not desirable that just appreciation of an original author should be disturbed by opinions on criminal law and administration, even if they were not at least apparently paradoxical. Whether a more frequent resort to the remedies of hanging and flogging, or the imprisonment for life of habitual drunkards, is or is not desirable, neither reform is likely to be tried. The proposition that the metropolitan police magistrates have been for a long series of years wanting in public spirit, moral sense, and judicial discrimination,' is not less surprising than the apology which is suggested for their shortcomings. May it not 'be,' says Sir Henry Taylor,' that a daily and hourly conversancy ' with crime, even as seen from the bench, renders men callous, so that they come to regard with more or less of moral indifference offences from which their whole nature in its original 'freshness would have revolted?' The statement ought to have been verified before the dream was interpreted. Capable magistrates are no more disturbed in nerve and temper by crime, than experienced surgeons by pain. It is the duty of both to apply 6 remedies which ought to be selected, not with indifference, but with calmness. A magistrate in a passion, and a surgeon in a fright, display their sensibility at the expense of justice or of humanity. If Sir Henry Taylor had been justified in his sweeping accusation or in his arbitrary excuse, the evil which he might have discerned would scarcely have admitted of a remedy. If daily and hourly conversancy with crime produces moral indifference, it only remains to entrust the administration of justice to an incessant succession of excitable novices. The essays on literature, on character, and on practical life, are more fitly associated with the dramas on which Sir Henry Taylor's fame will mainly rest. He would earnestly disclaim any pretension to be regarded as an instinctive or impulsive poet. Like his own hero, he deliberately knew the literary 'Ways before him rough or smooth, And from amongst them chose, not blindly brave, As the political enterprise of Philip Van Artevelde was the result of long meditation, so Sir Henry Taylor formed for himself a poetical theory before he embodied his opinions in verse. Only spontaneous poets belong to the first rank, but the disciplined vigour of Sir Henry Taylor's imagination places him high in the second. His prose and his poetry are visibly cast in the same mould, and both are polished with effective care. Though he is never obscure, his sentences are often elaborately complex in the expression of continuous thought, with its relevant digressions and proper limitations. The form of composition has not been preferred by chance or caprice. In some of his critical essays he censures the short and isolated sentences which condense processes of reasoning into antithetic epigrams. Something may be said for a form of writing which is to careless readers easiest of comprehension; but Sir Henry Taylor's theory coincides with the doctrine and practice of the greatest masters of the literary art, and it naturally proceeds from the character of his intellect and the course of his studies. He, sometimes arbitrarily, yet with the natural desire of men of letters to impose their own tastes on a reluctant world, recommends students to devote their chief attention to the literature of the seventeenth century. It would be as reasonable to insist on using in common conversation the language of Shakespeare or of Milton. Genuine sympathy and living curiosity attach themselves by preference, if not exclusively, to the interests of the present day, and to the contemporary expression of those interests. A scholar cannot be too deeply imbued with the thought and language of past ages; but if he is to exercise influence by speech or writing, he must belong to his own time. Sir Henry Taylor has been neither a careless observer of men and manners, nor an inactive bystander; but in his prose there is something archaic, as if he had learned to compose before he entered on practical life. His style is perceptibly and perhaps consciously derived from Bacon's, on whose Essays the form and manner of the treatise called The 'Statesman' is modelled. The resemblance, as far as it is deliberately studied, is a defect rather than a merit. An original writer ought not to borrow the manner of any other, especially of a predecessor who lived three hundred years ago. Bacon used the language of his own time, which would therefore be avoided by a faithful copyist of his spirit. From internal evidence it may be conjectured that Sir Henry Taylor was a student in his youth, and that he has never been a miscellaneous reader. Shakespeare, if he were now alive, would probably be a voracious consumer of newspapers and novels, as well as of the more solid literature of the present and the past; but a more discriminative intellectual digestion may not be incompatible with a less universal genius. Sir Henry Taylor, according to the distinction expressed in the Latin phrase, has read much, if he has not read the works of many authors. An unqualified and indeed excessive admiration of Bacon is indicated in all his writings; and he has been a careful student, though not a disciple, of Machiavelli. His references to Latin authors are rare, and he seldom or never derives illustration or authority from the Greeks. His precept of giving preference to the works of the seventeenth century coincides with his own practice. In poetry, he values nothing between Milton and Wordsworth, nor, although he is probably not unacquainted with Dryden and Pope, could it be readily discovered from his works that he has been impressed by the grace of Addison, the profound and sombre genius of Swift, or the marvellous humour of Sterne. Robinson Crusoe,' the Vicar of Wakefield,' Tom Jones,' and Tristram Shandy' have probably been rejected as unsuitable to his mental constitution. It is more remarkable that he appears to have little sympathy with Scott, of whose spirit he nevertheless inherits a not contemptible portion. An almost whimsical dislike of Byron is founded partly on moral antipathy, and also on critical disapproval. Sir Henry Taylor's poetical judgment and taste were formed during the height of Byron's popularity, when it was the fashion to affect misanthropic selfishness and gloom in mimicry of Childe Harold and Lara. Holding himself aloof from the current delusion, Sir Henry Taylor shared to a certain extent the fallacy of confusing the poet's heroes and professed doctrines with his vigorous eloquence. It is true that immoral and criminal recluses would be poor creatures if they were found in real life, and that Byron was ill employed in demanding admiration for caricatures not of himself, but of the melodramatic version of his own character which was suggested by a distorted egotism. Poetry is not to be judged by its subjects, and still less by the moral qualities of its fictitious personages. With all his caprices and errors of taste Byron was a poet; and if he was not a great poet he possessed extraordinary intellectual vigour. Sir Henry Taylor is right as a moralist in condemning the supposed heroism of habitual submission to passionate impulse; but to the critic Childe Harold is faulty, not because he is a useless cynic, but because he is an unsubstantial embodiment of vague impulses and theories. Don Juan himself, though he is much more human and therefore more interesting than his wandering predecessor, has a less definite personality than Scott's comparatively careless and secondary creations of character. Except incidentally, it is not necessary that a poet should be theoretically or practically wise or good, and virtue is still less indispensable to the heroes of his compositions. Two of Sir Henry Taylor's most thoughtful and most valuable essays are partly devoted to the proof of the contrary proposition, though they also contain much sound and instructive criticism. His review of Wordsworth's poems, first published in 1834, did much to accelerate the tardy recognition of a great writer whose best works had appeared forty years before. The extracts alone might in some degree explain the conversion of readers who had been deterred from the study of the poems by shallow and pretentious criticism; but Sir Henry Taylor's eloquent and convincing praises won over many proselytes. His analysis of the Old Cumberland Beg'gar,' and of Michael,' is equally subtle and just; and with sound æsthetic judgment he descends even to the investigation of the effects of sound which may be produced by a skilful manipulation of vowels and consonants. Enquiry into the moral and political orthodoxy of the poet is less relevant, and the present Bishop of Lincoln in his biography of his illustrious kinsman has much more than exhausted the subject. In a preface to the reviews, published some years later, Sir Henry Taylor remarks that the great English poets, though ardent 'lovers of freedom, have never, as far as I know, lent their ' countenance in a single line to the confounding of liberty with equality.' It would be as much to the purpose to assert that they had or had not lent their countenance to the decimal system of notation. A great French poet of the present day is an enthusiastic advocate of equality and fraternity. Shelley, who was a poet of a high order, accepted all the French revolutionary doctrines. The only considerable English poet of the generation which has not yet passed middle age professes a republican or Jacobinical creed. In his youth, when his poetic faculty was at the highest, Wordsworth sympathised passionately with the changes of 1789, and he was not at first revolted by the events of 1793. A poet is neither more nor less a poet for theories which may be right or wrong. Sir Henry Taylor holds that Wordsworth would not have been so great a poet if he had not also been a philosopher; but he uses the term philosopher in its early and etymological, and not in its ordinary sense. Wordsworth had a powerful understanding, closely associated with a strong imagination, and he had a not inconsiderable faculty of generalisation; but, except a misty pantheism which belonged rather to feeling than to theory, he had no philosophic opinions. The name of philosopher might be more plausibly applied to Coleridge, as far as he was a metaphysical student and reasoner; but in Edwin the Fair' Sir Henry Taylor introduces Coleridge, under the name of Wulfstan the Wise, as only conspicuous by imbecile garrulity. As a sagacious commentator on morals and on character, Johnson was in the same sense a philosopher, though he understood philosophy so little as to try to vanquish Berkeley not with a grin but with a kick. Even the great name of Bacon may be placed in the same category with those of Wordsworth and Johnson. A statesman, an orator, a scholar, one of the most brilliant and most pregnant of writers, Bacon is now by competent judges scarcely acknowledged to be a philosopher. As Mr. Ellis clearly proves in a dissertation published by Mr. Spedding, Bacon's celebrated scientific method has never during three centuries been employed by any man of science, and it has long since been definitively abandoned as false, shallow, and useless. His devoted admirer has added largely in prose and verse to the departments of practical wisdom in which Bacon excelled; but there is no trace in Sir Henry Taylor's writings of strictly philosophic study. The Statesman,' which is the most ambitious of his essays, is, as he himself suggests, inaccurately entitled, as it deals mainly with the details of official practice. Attentive readers had anticipated the |