that men demand the unreasonable and impracticable, only when the possible is made difficult that they fancy the impossible to be easy. Fairy tales are made out of the dreams of the poor.' At the same time we may gather from the other essay, as well as from The Cathedral and the Epistle to George William Curtis, that he had the scholar's love for the goodly heritage of the past, and the natural shrinking of the man of fine culture from the occasional rawness, roughness, and crudity of democracy. His attitude could not perhaps be better described than in the words with which he paints Fitz-Adam :

'A radical in thought, he puffed away

With shrewd contempt the dust of usage gray,
Yet loathed democracy as one who saw

In what he longed to love some vulgar flaw,
And, shocked through all his delicate reserves,
Remained a Tory by his tastes and nerves.'

Nor was it without some natural misgiving that, proud of the past of his country, and confident in the gloriousness of her future, he contemplated the corruption of American politics. 'Could we only,' he exclaims in bitter irony, 'have a travelling exhibition of our Bosses, and say to the American people, "Behold the shapers of your national destiny!" A single despot would be cheaper, and probably better - looking.' 'Our

leaders,' he asserts, and I am afraid the phenomenon is not confined to America, 'no longer lead, but are as skilful as Indians in following the faintest trail of public opinion.'

'What we want is an active class who will insist, in season and out of season, that we shall have a country whose greatness is measured, not only by its square miles, its number of yards woven, of hogs packed, of bushels of wheat raised; not only by its skill to feed and clothe the body, but also by its power to feed and clothe the soul; a country which shall be as great morally as it is materially; a country whose very name shall not only, as now it does, stir us as with the sound of a trumpet, but shall call out all that is best within us, by offering us the radiant image of something better and nobler and more enduring than we, of something that shall fulfil our own thwarted aspiration, when we are but a handful of forgotten dust in the soil trodden by a race whom we shall have helped to make more worthy of their inheritance than we ourselves had the power, I might almost say the means, to be.'

I must now bring my survey of Mr. Lowell's works to a close, incomplete on some sides, inadequate on all, as I feel it to be. The feeling with which I take my leave of him I am happy to be able to express in words fitter and more

:

beautiful than any I could write. In his fine preface to Men and Books, Mr. Robert Louis Stevenson says of the authors he there deals with -how admirably, the readers of the volume know: 'These were all men whom, for one reason or another, I loved; or when I did not love the men, my love was the greater to their books. I had read them and lived with them; for months they were continually in my thoughts; I seemed to rejoice in their joys and to sorrow with them in their griefs; and behold, when I came to write of them, my tone was sometimes hardly courteous, and seldom wholly just.'

And so of Mr. Lowell I would say that if the tone of my imperfect criticism is not one of unmixed eulogy, if I have had to point certainly with no malicious pleasure-to imperfections and flaws which impair the artistic value of his works, I would not on that account be thought to hold his fine gifts lightly, or to be insensible to the debt of gratitude which I, in common with many thousand readers, owe to a writer who knew better than most how to make his readers his friends and familiars. There are some authors who seem to hold us at arm's-length, so that we never feel at ease with them; there are others whose admirable talents extort our admiration, but for whom we can feel no personal liking.

Mr. Lowell-need I say it ?-belonged to neither of these classes. His large, sunny, and buoyant temperament shines through all his works, and we feel ourselves irresistibly attracted towards a nature so rich, so prodigally gifted, and yet so genial and so humane. An author of whom we may say this may not have set foot upon the topmost peak of Parnassus; his place may not be among that shining and glorious company-so small in number, so diverse in race and gifts-for whom we confidently predict an immortality of renown; perhaps for that very reason he comes closer to us who are not of the eagle kind, and find it hard to breathe for long space the clear and rare ether of those shining heights. And surely he must be accounted both happy and useful in his day and generation to whom men go, as to a dear friend, alike for sage counsel and for cleanly mirth.

THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF

ERASMUS1

IN the history of the intellectual development of Europe, the influence of no single man counts for more, perhaps, than that of Erasmus. The distinguishing characteristic of that development has been the constantly increasing distrust and dislike of formulæ which have nothing but tradition to rest upon, the free play of the human mind upon those great problems which were once so arbitrarily disposed of by the mere ipse dixit of an infallible church. It is true that the Reformation was the great outward symbol of the breach between the old order and the new, and it is also true that Erasmus held aloof from the Reformation, and viewed its progress with something like dismay. But none the less is it the case that the spirit of free inquiry which culminated in the Reformation was originally set on foot by the writings of Erasmus. Indeed, if he often seems out of tune with his own age,

1 Gray Trustees Prize Essay, Edinburgh University, 1895.