appropriately prefaced by the direction Largo e mesto. But there is a London scherzo as well, from which we cull a picturesque passage:

"For earth and sky and air

Are golden everywhere,

And golden with a gold so suave and fine The looking on it lifts the heart like wine. Trafalgar Square —

The fountains volleying golden glaze — Gleams like an angel-market. High aloft

Over his couchant Lions in a haze Shimmering and bland and soft, Our Sailor takes the golden gaze Of the saluting sun, and flames superb As once he flamed it on his ocean round." But it is time to stay the hand in quotation, and we will even let the reader escape the literary moral half promised at the beginning of these desultory remarks. Who knows but it may have pointed itself in the course of them?

DEAN STANLEY died in 1881, and a series of obstacles, narrated in the preface to his Life and Correspondence, prevented till now the publication of any full record of his career. The reader has the advantage in a better perspective; a period of thirteen years is long enough to permit the softening of some outlines, the depression of some incidents which loomed up mightily at the time they occurred, but not too long to permit the fading of a strong character which rises out of the pages of this full memoir with a distinctness of personality almost as great as belonged to the man whose life Stanley made so contributory to English thought. Stanley's Arnold was a model biography in its full yet restrained portraiture; Prothero's Stanley has to do with a character no less marked than that of Arnold, but set in a much more complex frame of circumstance. Arnold, moreover, was but forty-seven when he died; Stanley, born ten years later than Arnold, was sixty-six when he died; and the most emphatic impression made by the book before us is of the abundance of a life led in the very centre of English thought and action. Mr. Prothero,

1 The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, late Dean of Westminster. By ROWLAND E. PROTHERO and G. G. BRADLEY.

- more,

with a candor not always to be found in a biographer, and with a fidelity which implies loyalty to truth, and not partisanship, has used a great many lines in drawing Stanley's portrait, perhaps, than a greater artist would have required; but the result is worth the pains taken. We could have dispensed with some of the delightful letters of travel, if we could have had more details of Stanley's intercourse with men,

as, for example, in the Revision Committee; for when a man's writings are so considerable and so interpretative as Stanley's, the biographer's task is rather to draw upon material not thus accessible to readers; and in the great variety of Stanley's social intercourse lay the opportunity for a fresh illustration of his character. Mr. Prothero also devotes himself with perhaps too great assiduity to comment on Stanley's theological position. Yet, after all the minor criticism one may make, these two volumes constitute an honorable monument to the memory of a man who was conspicuous in his generation rather than eminent, who exercised a strong personal influence rather than left a great impress upon his time, but who, by virtue of his In two volumes. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1894.

strong sympathies, his generous nature, and the positions which he occupied, never can be left out of account in any assessment of the England of to-day.

The external incidents of his career follow in swift and mounting succession. Born of an ancient family, the son of a clergyman who became Bishop of Norwich, early satisfying his passion for travel, a boy at Rugby when Arnold was setting his stamp upon impressionable youth, a student at Oxford when the University was stirred by a great ecclesiastical revival, secretary to the commission which was long engaged in reforming the higher education of England, tutor of University College, canon of Canterbury, professor of ecclesiastical history in the University, canon of Christ Church, the chosen companion of the Prince of Wales in his journey to Egypt and Palestine, married to a lady high in the favor of the Queen, established at Westminster as dean, in a position practically independent of ecclesiastical control, such a career stated in mere outline has power to arrest the attention; and when one considers further the wide range of Stanley's travel, the scope of his familiar acquaintance, and the deep security of his domestic life both before and after marriage, one sees the rich possibilities of a life so led.

It was because Stanley gave freely that he received freely. His achieve ments as a student, less in the formal academic way than in the eager essays at high literary expression, had already marked him among his fellows, at first in school, afterward in college. His Life of Arnold showed him a literary artist of no mean order, and his successive publications attested both the fecundity of his mind, and those qualities of appreciation, of vivid reproduction, which are acceptable in the field of nature, but far more keenly enjoyed when the material wrought upon is human history, and especially that history concerned with the ideas which underlie action.

If Maurice, in the same day and generation, was the prophet who disclosed the thought of God in human history, Stanley was the poet who reconstructed that which had been treated as sacred history, so that its humanity was restored, and its sanctity made to be resident in it, not imposed upon it.

It was by his Sinai and Palestine and his Jewish Church that Stanley acquired the widest repute, and the constructive, imaginative art of these books is likely to keep them alive among the people when more exact scholarship demands a treatment severer and more critical. But these books, though the deposit of his observation and reflection in travel and study, hardly suffice to account for the popularity of Stanley, and for the great interest which attaches to his personality, an interest which these two volumes of Mr. Prothero's labor clearly attest, and in a large degree explain. A single word may perhaps set this forth, but it is a large word. Stanley's patriotism was the rock upon which his fame was built. The patriotism of an intellectual man who was also a Churchman, who stood publicly for an order, yet never aggrandized that order, was something very fine in its quality and passionate in its lofty fervor. It did not expend itself in phrases, but was as deep-seated as life itself. It is possible to look at the term noblesse oblige until it becomes the synonym for a pharisaic complacency; but when a man whose familiar associations are with those who inherit rank and power strikes hands, by force of his nature, with those who are shut out from power or feel the weight of the classes above them, and does this without any sense of condescension, and with no consciousness of separation from his own order, we may justly say that he reckons himself under a common obligation. Stanley caught fire from Arnold's enthusiasm for a church and state which knew no dividing barrier. All the dialectics in the world could not serve either

of these men to make their proposition logically whole; but Stanley, unlike Arnold, who shot pamphlets at the mark, expended a life of restless energy in demonstrating in his own person how a great idea may dominate the soul, and tinge every part of one's activity. The deanship of Westminster was a vantage ground for a man so possessed, but it was also the natural and just landingplace of one with Stanley's patriotic pas sion. That it was, so to speak, the only official post in England where a man with Stanley's ideas could put them into official expression may intimate that a general acceptance of these ideas was not practicable; but it would be truer to say that the sentiment which dominated the Dean of Westminster was one entirely possible to Englishmen, whatever might be their theories of church and state; that Stanley's sentiment was infinitely more precious than his theory; and that the conspicuous use which he made of his opportunities served in the public mind very much as the colors of a forlorn hope. When Stanley forbade the use of the abbey to the Pan-Anglican Synod because it was in plan and purpose sectarian, though catholic in name, and opened its pulpit to nonconformists and laymen because he desired it to be the meeting-house of the English nation, he involved himself in a network of casuistic discussion, but his singleness of mind was vindicated. There was much that was imaginative, but there was more of lofty, comprehensive conception of national being in the whole attitude which he took toward English historic life, and the life of contemporary England. His delight in pageant, his amplification of trivial coincidences, his quick sense of occult comparisons, were the exuberant manifestations of a nature which was profoundly loyal, and gave itself unceasingly to every effort which looked toward unity and solidarity. It was impossible, one might say, for a mind so instinctively unifying in

all its operations, so highly associative in its constitution, to act otherwise; but the impelling power which drove all these mental forces in the direction of national well-being was not intellectual, it was emotional; the passion of patriotism was a steadily burning flame, and every activity was kindled by it.

It is hard for an ardent American, especially of the educated class, to read attentively such a book as this without a passing envy of the conditions under which a career like Stanley's was consummated. At first blush, there seems so much greater concentration of opportunity, so much closer connection between the man and the nation. Stanley seems almost to have given one hand to the Queen, the other to the workman, and to have held both firmly in his grasp. The personal element is noticeable, and the firmer texture of society makes every stroke of a man's work more evident. Instead of a vast area of manifold interests, isolated in great measure from each other, an island, with one controlling nervous centre; instead of a group of loosely organized religious bodies, an establishment, with its roots for better or worse in the very soil of the social and political world; instead of a multitudinous company of local magnates, a compact body of legislators, whose concern is both local and imperial. It is no wonder that, as one compares the two countries, the possibility of making one's personality tell upon national well-being in the United States seems inconsiderable beside that offered to ingenuous youth in England. Dissipation of energy appears to be the rule in one case, concentration of power in the other.

It would be a weak nature, however, which would be discouraged by such a superficial survey. Cathedrals, venerable universities, great estates, a highly organized society, - these have strong attractions, especially for those who look at them in the distance, from a fore

ground which is encumbered by the unordered materials of a new community. Stronger still is the power of attraction in a varied and immemorial history whose monuments are all about one, and whose institutions appeal to one's veneration. But there is another side to all this. The young American whose start in life may be regarded as somewhat parallel to that of Stanley, so far as social position and educational opportunity are concerned, has an outlook which may well stir him. The very breadth of his horizon carries with it a splendid summons. There is a conception of patriotism which, like Stanley's, draws its inspiration from deeper sources than party or order. No one, gifted like him with historic imagination and the power of generalization, need be at a loss for material from which to construct the real entity of the United States out of the discordant elements which so easily strike the casual observer; and seeing a nation in its highest destiny is to invest all one's own purposes of service with a noble quality. To be in with the mak

ing of a country gives more zest than to be a conserver; and in the application of his personal power to the accomplishment of great ends lies the true source of that constant spring which sets the young man in a large place. The pictorial circumstance of Stanley's career is as nothing to the deep spiritual conditions of his habit of mind; and the young American, inspired by his life, may hold lightly the circumstances of the very contemporaneous society in which he is set, when he considers how far freer are his motions, how much less dependent he is on place and station, and how liberal is the measure of his own opportunities of expression. After all, to be a person, and to be at the centre of things, demands freedom, and we suspect that this freedom in thought, in self-expression through words and action, is the birthright of the educated American in a sense in which it is denied the educated Englishman; for this very reason it calls for a higher type of patriotism, a loyalty to ideas even more than to persons and institutions.

ANY lingering idea that but for Lafayette, or the enthusiasm excited by him, the French government would not have assisted America, and that that government was actuated by generous sympathy for the oppressed, ought to be dispelled by an elaborate work which shows, from the archives of the Paris Foreign Office, why and how that assistance was rendered.1 M. Doniol, as director of the Imprimerie Nationale, was anxious to send to the Paris Exhibition of 1889 a specimen of its productions, and he obtained the permission of his 1 Histoire de la Participation de la France à l'Établissement des Etats-Unis d'Amérique.

superiors to relate the diplomatic history of French aid to America. He has accordingly issued five bulky quartos, only three of which appeared in time for that exhibition; but the French Academy did not wait for the completion of the work, to award him, in 1890, its Gobert history prize. The typography is admirable, but the paper, strange to say, is of that indifferent quality which, in the opinion of connoisseurs, condemns nearly all the French books of our day to an existence shorter than the span of human life. In a minute and painstaking narrative, Par HENRI DONIOL. In five volumes. Paris: A. Picard. 1886-92.

avowedly modeled on Mignet's Spanish Succession, and without any attempt at brilliancy, M. Doniol has utilized the works of his predecessors, including Bancroft's extracts from English and German archives. Indeed, while maintaining that Bancroft exaggerates the sympathy of Frederick the Great with America, and while resolutely controverting his view of the peace negotiations, M. Doniol acknowledges that the American historian is substantially accurate as regards French policy. The work will be a necessary auxiliary to future writers on the War of Independence, for it is rich in documents of unimpeachable authority; but its conclusions will not be universally accepted. It is not unlikely that a Spaniard, exploring his national records, would vindicate Grimaldi and Florida-Blanca from the many reproaches here cast on them, while an American would certainly challenge the judgment passed on Jay and Adams, and on the decisions of Congress.

The fact is that M. Doniol holds a brief on behalf of the Comte de Vergennes, who, the son of an obscure provincial judge, filled various foreign embassies from 1740 to 1768, and was at the head of the Foreign Office from 1774 till his death in 1787. Vergennes is the hero of the work; Maurepas, old and cautious after twenty-five years' disgrace for an epigram on Madame la Pompadour, and Louis XVI., pliable and inexperienced, being his nominal masters, but his usually docile associates. Vergennes is always right, whereas nearly everybody else is frequently or systematically wrong. We say "nearly everybody," for Washington is described as never forgetting his obligations to France, and Franklin is absolved, on the score of gout, from the bad faith imputed to his colleagues in 1783, though Talleyrand would probably have asked, as in an analogous case, "What motive has he for having the gout?" As for Spain, she has sometimes to be checked, more often to be urged on. She is bent on compenVOL. LXXIV. NO. 441. 9

sation for her intervention, and does not always inform her faithful ally of the enemy's secret overtures. But France is all along disinterested. She merely wants to rid herself of that humiliating clause of the treaty of 1763 which prescribed the demolition of the fortifications of Dunkirk, and entitled England to station a commissary there to watch against any reconstruction, a commissary who caviled even at repairs to the quays. She is allowed the benefit of extenuating circumstances when, protesting to England her strict neutrality, she gives the colonists what Vergennes himself styles "clandestine" support; advancing a million francs for war supplies, and inducing Spain to do the same; employing the dramatist Beaumarchais to pose as shipping contractor, and meeting England's remonstrances against the departure of his vessels from Nantes by orders of detention carefully timed to arrive too late. Now, although Vergennes is certainly overrated by M. Doniol, he did show tenacity of purpose, and he achieved his aim of weakening England. International ethics do not condemn a nation for wreaking revenge on an arrogant rival, and Vergennes unquestionably did what seemed best for his country's interest. It is by no means clear, moreover, that the French Revolution, which he did. not live to see, but which expatriated and ruined his sons, was hastened by American independence. It is true that French officers who had served in America returned home with ideas of liberty, but Lafayette's prominence in the Revolution was very transient. The cost of the war may have accelerated the financial deadlock which necessitated the summoning of the States - General in 1799, but if so it merely hastened an inevitable break-down.

Assuming, however, that the French monarchy was well advised in helping America, M. Doniol manifestly goes too far in maintaining that "a more honest, devoted, and noble attitude, from first to