believe that it conveys some moral lesson. The world's history is not a wanton carnival-a mere blindfolded dance of death. Upon this consciousness has arisen what is somewhat pompously denominated the philosophy of history.' It is assumed that certain axiomatic propositions are the fruit of the world's experience during the six thousand years whereof some record remains to us. The Jewish commonwealth, hoary Eastern despotisms beside Tigris and Euphrates, beneath the Pyramids, beyond the Indus, the old and elegant humanity of Greece,' 'the grand panorama of the mistress of the world falling to wreck under the barbarians,' the nervous life and sinewy art of medieval republics, are supposed to have taught us something. What? The theory of righteous government, the laws by which the rise and decline of nations are regulated. But how many of these will bear the test, by which they fail to be tried, of conflicting races, institutions, and religions? We see a nation rise into lusty manhood; a few decades elapse, it withers away and perishes. We say the simple virtues of the Republic kept it great: it died because the subjects of the monarchy grew cowardly, vicious, and effeminate. But will the observance of any laws preserve the vigour of a race, or endow a State with immortality? Can any philosophical conclusions arrest the process of decay? Do we not, here as elsewhere, confound cause and effect? It is not the effeminate vices which kill: they indicate only that the vital energy, the principle of life, has worn out. When his years are accomplished, the man must die; and a nation cannot be kept alive any more than

a man can.

Some plain moral rules certainly, which it is an abuse of language to elevate into a 'philosophy of history,' are now commonly recognised by thinking men, who, however, except in one or two places, do not occupy the Ministerial benches. There is a moral order after which, throughout its disorder, the world

strives. Obedience to certain rules, it is observed, is best calculated to secure this order. 'Persecution is bad-liberty is good.' Not by any means a novel discovery, seeing that it was announced eighteen hundred years ago, though it has taken indeed the better part of that time to convince us that Saint Paul did not vindicate the inquisition. But even yet, and among ourselves—' a race ever famous and foremost in the achievements of liberty’— how false, historically, is the logic on which the principles of toleration are rested, and what an amount of practical evil has this falsehood, like all other falsehoods, to answer for.

Magna est veritas, et prævalebit. In the kingdom of God it will. But, as we have just observed, we have got in the meantime into a sadly confused and disorganized world, where truth, upon the whole, seems to have rather a hard time of it, and enough to do to hold its own. Persecution, the argument continues, is thus a mistake not less than a crime. It destroys the heretic, but it propagates the heresy. Not being an effective instrument, we had better leave it alone. On this assumption the policy of toleration is too frequently defended. To build on such an argument is to build on the sand. History discourses no such monotonous music. Persecution has slain the true as well as the false. The false as well as the true has triumphed, in spite of persecution. The martyr's blood has not always fallen upon fruitful soil: his dying appeal has been heard unheeded, and even his own disciples have denied the truth for which he died. We may be sure that the stake and the cross, sagaciously employed, are not ineffective. Most minds secretly acknowledge the power which the inquisitor wields; and few men, except the very few tempered of more ethereal stuff, have the firmness to resist authority when it comes arrayed in the majesty and terrors of the law-armed with the fire and the sword. Thus, in one sense persecution may be considered a not unsuccessful experi

ment; seeing that those who have employed it dexterously have often arrested, and not unfrequently extinguished, the spirit of revolt. Many a heresy' has died in its cradle, which, had it been left to ripen unmolested, would have blown into a victorious creed and a dominant church. An uneasy suspicion of this fact lies at the root of much of the intolerance we see around us. 'If persecution be a success, let us be persecutors. Great is the- et prævalebit,"

The feeling is very natural, and as respects the travestie of history against which it is directed, not perhaps unpardonable. It is well that a moral insurrection should force us now and again to sift popular misconstructions, and seek a securer basis of fact on which to rest our conduct and our convictions. In the present case our inveterate habit of making success the criterion and measure of truth is chiefly to blame. But a true doctrine of toleration needs no assumption of success. Intolerance is a crime and a mistake simply because its fruits are bad. The moral results of persecution are worthless. The inquisitor is either resisted or obeyed. If the victim resists he is strangled, and 'the worst use we can make of a man is to hang him.' When he obeys, it is only an obedience of the lip that he renders; the threat of the steel or the faggot cannot change a conviction in the heart; but he has submitted to an unworthy humiliation; his character is degraded, his self-respect is forfeited, his life is rendered false. The moralist who regards intolerance by the light thus cast upon it, will not lose his confidence in freedom, though history should assure him that Philip did not burn, nor Alva butcher in vain.

"There is a divine order in the government of the world, as there is in the government of each individual in it. What hurts the man, hurts the race; what is a blessing to the one, blesses the other.' Some such vague generalization may be hazarded; can we say more? I confess I cannot. A dramatic unity may

govern the whole; the successive pages in the history of mankind may contain the unfolding acts of a great drama. But whether this be so or no, I do not think that we, the actors, have got the key to the situation, or that we are able intelligibly to arrange the parts. History, to all practical intents and purposes, is the record of the individual life alone. But as it is impossible to arrange the characters or the motives of the men who make history' under any simple division, or any general law, what is the historian to do? Deprived of any plain rule of guidance, how can he undertake his task? How can we rely on the estimate which he forms, or what guarantee vouches for his fidelity?

'Surely,' I said to Reginald, 'it will be possible to write our biographies, at least. There will be abundant materials to enable the historian to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, about us.'

'No,' he replied, I do not agree with you. with you. Depend upon it, our annalists will entirely misunderstand us. But I want no biography. I would rather have that,' and he pointed across the ravine to the rustic churchyard, which, with its ivied shaft-'a broken chancel with a broken cross'-and its innumerous gravestones bathed in the crimson sunset, skirted the rocks. It was the Sabbath day-a Sabbath summer evening after the afternoon service. A homely group-village tradespeople, I suppose the father in a primitive black coat of formal cut, the mother and her little ones neat and trim, and in their 'Sundaybest,' wander among the tombs. They pause for a moment before a little grave, quite by itself as yet, and then the children run off, laughing and rosy-cheeked; and the father follows in a musing mood-somewhat vacant, but not unblessed. Only the mother waits; and taking her clean white handkerchief (still folded as when it came out of the lavender-scented drawer in the morning) from her antique outside pocket, brushes away a speck of sea-green moss that had gathered over one of the

tiveness.* Had Keats's genius been permitted to ripen, it would have gathered a richer fragrance, a mellower pensiveness, a steadier constructive force (as we partly see in Hyperion, the last and greatest of 'the astonishing remnants of his mind'); whereas Shelley would have remained very much the same-simple, fervid, eager, oratorical, passionate, and never quite tranquilhowever long he had lived. I even doubt whether his poetry would have gained greater definitenessthe absence of any special human interest being always very noticeable in it-for his vagueness and obscurity do not merely hide the inexperience and extravagance of boyhood, but indicate, moreover, the inveterate and constitutional habit of a mind unwilling to contemplate and unfitted to seize the concrete. What we see of his life, is partly true of his genius. He was perfectly pure all his days; but his purity was the purity of childhood, not of manhood. His white and chaste imagination remained unsullied; but we miss that light of light, that glory as of fire, which streams from the imagination--' chastened but not killed, persecuted but not forsaken, cast down but not destroyed'-which has been tried and tempted, and has triumphed.

It is not, however, Shelley's genius, but his life, which illustrates the argument I am urging.

The popular impression of his career which prevails, even among

the great majority of educated Englishmen, is somewhat to this effect:-A politician who preached rebellion; a law-breaker who lived in adultery; an atheist who denied his God. A character in every line eminently repulsive, from which we shrink with natural horror.

This is the popular view: the true one I believe to be very different. But many causes contribute to make it unacceptable; and these causes operate not in Shelley's case only, but have coloured, and continue to colour, our estimate of ever so many remarkable men. Of him, as of them, the religious public has written in hysterics-the hysterical being a favourite form of rhetoric with women and churches. Not that the world is altogether in fault, nor Shelley quite blameless. The relations between Society and a keenly-sensitive and delicately-fibred man (such as Shelley was), must always be peculiar. His nerves cannot stand the wear and tear of society, and society has no tenderness for his nerves. Nor is this all. For Shelley's justification there is needed an active effort of moral sympathy, a fire of charity, a boldness of love, which few of us dare to offer. His is one of those natures which require to be judged by a more lenient code than is written in the statute book; and society cannot be blamed very much if it decline to recognise exceptional cases, and adheres through good report and evil report to the strict letter of the law. For

the common race of men its tests are probably the safest. As history, however, has for the most part to do with uncommon men, the tradition of the vulgar is thus calculated, for yet another reason, to mislead and distract the historian.

I have summarised the popular estimate, and we can see how such an estimate may be entertained, not without apology. But we, who want to know the truth, rather than to find apologies for believing a lie, after looking into the matter (and fortunately the materials for doing so have not yet been entirely destroyed, as would have been the case had the poet lived five hundred or one thousand years ago), cannot but be aware how entirely false such a judgment is. The true Shelley is quite a different being; the real Shelley career is quite a different career. Here is the other side of the panel.

A man of true nobility, of a happy and eager benevolence, and of a most fearless purity. He is not a sensualist; on the contrary, his habits are ascetic, and he abstains from the simplest pleasures. Though he loves truth and liberty, and hates evil and despotism vehemently, he is gentle as a woman in manner and at heart. Still, a screw is loose somewhere. A mad angel,' some one said of him; and in certain respects Shelley was never quite sane. The symptoms of the disease may be traced through the fits of hopeless dread and despair which ever and again dashed his bright child-like cheerfulness, his birdlike enjoyment of the dawn, and the dewy fields, and the silver lining of the clouds, in the keen and extravagant pain which trifles caused him. The fine and sensitive mechanism wanted balance. The moral faculty of control, which is the ballast of the imagination, the sheet-anchor which holds the mind to its moorings, had been in his constitution overlooked or purposely omitted.

And in respect to that incident in his career which is least easily justified, and which even to understand aright requires a strong effort of charity, can we expect, or should

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we desire society to be able to deal fairly with him? And yet the plain truth-whether it is well that it should be known or not-is undoubtedly a very different thing from that which angry polemics and hostile critics have represented it to be.

It is a Greek picture, with somewhat more than Greek pathos in it. A Greek picture translated into the grave Christian world.

On the shore of a sunny Italian lake a couple of children, a boy and girl, embrace each other. That beautiful antique of the naked Cupid and Psyche, what has a prim modern society to do with that? And we, are not we immortal too? is not our beauty and our happiness imperishable as the marble? Alas! no; a sad burthen of change and decay runs through our mortal life, and, as the night wind moans among the falling leaves of the olive, the conscience is tortured by dim forebodings of retribution, and a desolate weariness, which the marble does not feel, makes our hearts restless. For the daily life of Englishmen and Christian women the romance of the marble will not serve.

And she-the girl, the woman, of whom such hard words are spoken, against whose purity such bitter insinuations are directedwhat of her? Her story is harder to read truly even than his, and needs a more delicate reserve of

sympathy. With grave composure the maiden of fifteen left her home with the poet—a home where she had been taught to disregard the moral etiquette which rules society, and where she had learned boldness in speculation without losing modesty of feeling. The sedate girlhood that looks through these tranquil eyes that do not falter, had not been overpowered by passion. What she did, she did advisedly. Her will and her reason consented; but it was a perilous leap. So though she does not repine, she feels at times that she has done a wrong to herself; and her sad composure, her gentle firmness, her almost cheerful resignation, are very touching. The world