still sleep in our blood, seldom conscious of themselves, but yet not quite extinct, capable still, after so many generations, of coming once more to the surface of things and playing a brief part in a world strangely altered from that of their beginning. So in this little poem the discerning ear can hear, behind the voice of the man of our own day, those of the primitive man, the Roman, and finally the Christian of many ages and ways of thinking, Greek, Latin and Anglican. Mr Bridges has himself edited a book of hymns for a country parish church, and one or two of his own hymns have been inserted in the English Hymnal,' the most recent book of the kind and the best. But, of course, the best of his religious poems stand a little outside the limits imposed on hymn books used in churches. In nearly all cases these seem not only to include bad verse, bad theology and immoral religion, but to have a clear prejudice against poetry. Yet where can fitter words be found to put into the mouths of young men at a University church, or indeed anywhere else, than these four verses of Mr Bridges? 'O youth whose hope is high, Thou that art bold to fly If thou canst Death defy, Beauty and love are nigh, And with their deathless quire Be numbered and expire.' Mr Bridges can make no claim to a place among the greatest religious poets. People to whom the peculiar ecstasy of religion is a real experience, who have known it as a thing going quite beyond the almost universal instincts of duty, worship and love, will ask for something that he cannot give. They will find what they want in Coventry Patmore or Francis Thompson, both of whom united religious with poetic genius. But most men know nothing of that amazing experience which for those who know it seems to make all else seem insignificant. For the majority a less ecstatic note awakens a quicker and truer echo. Their faith, such as it is, must be made out of their experiences, out of what they have accomplished and received in life as they have lived it. They need not deny that a life of ecstasy may be an actual experience too; but it is not theirs. They have to treasure their rare moments of vision. Ordinarily, perhaps, as Mr Bridges puts it in his fine poem on Joy, they find life dark, its problems difficult, its issues doubtful. 'And heaven and all the stable elements That guard God's purpose mock us, though the mind Then comes the happy moment: not a stir The morrow hath no name to call it by, But life and joy are one,—we know not why,- And once experienced, it must be firmly grasped, retained, made a fortress of faith, a fountain of life. 'But, O most blessed truth, for truth thou art, I have possessed more joy than earth can lend : The memory of thy witness and my joy.' One of the greatest living religious thinkers has laid stress on the three independent schemes of value, those of truth, beauty, and goodness, as constituting the great source of natural revelation, and suggesting the faith that, as each is absolute, all are ultimately one. This is, of course, in substance the ancient Platonic doctrine; and it is curious to see how living Plato remains even to-day; and to observe Mr Bridges recalling in noble verse the same great argument which the Dean of St Paul's has restated in his lectures. 'Gird on thy sword, O man, thy strength endue, Higher and higher shall thy thoughts aspire, Thy work with beauty crown, thy life with love: In whom all Beauty, Truth, and Love are one.' What a virility of soul there is in it, what a Roman manliness, simplicity and strength! It has not, of course, the imaginative power of Crashaw's 'Saint Theresa' or Thompson's Dead Cardinal'; but genius at its highest has always been a strange mixture of sanity and ecstasy, and some of those who have had most of it would feel more kinship with the noble sanity of Bridges than with the ecstatic fires of Thompson or Crashaw. The distinction is the old one; the gift of Crashaw and Thompson is the rarer gift: they add to life's possibilities a new and strange element into which few will enter. Mr Bridges, on the other hand, does a wider work with a plainer endowment, touching to new life and higher energy the most ancient and universal of the hopes and loves of man. There lies his special strength. Only those who have an actual or imaginative understanding of Christianity will ever appreciate such a poet as Francis Thompson. But there is no one who has not himself gone through some of the experiences which lie at the root of Mr Bridges' poems of Nature, Love, and Religion. He brings to each the questioning insight, the fearless sincerity, the untiring observation of our own day; but to each he also brings the sense of a great tradition of human thought and feeling, and of himself as only one of a great company drawn from all ages and all peoples. So there are two sides to the impression he makes on his readers. On the one hand, every new reading of his poetry strengthens the impression of the poet as a strongly marked individuality, as a man who is definitely and all through his life increasingly himself and no one else. On the other, he reminds his readers of many of his predecessors, men, some of them, so unlike himself; of Herrick sometimes, of Shelley now and then, of Tennyson occasionally, oftener of Wordsworth, oftener still perhaps of Milton, and again of Keats. He often, too, recalls the Latin poets, especially Catullus, and the Greeks, especially the choruses of the tragedians. Yet the dominant note is a modern one, and it is a modern poet more than anyone else who is recalled by the last word of his shorter poems. It is with a brave stoicism, one of action and not merely of endurance, like that of Carducci's last poems, that he gathers his heart together to face the inevitable end. 'Weep not to-day: why should this sadness be? Learn in present fears To o'ermaster those tears That unhindered conquer thee. Think on thy past valour, thy future praise: Up, sad heart, nor faint In ungracious complaint, Or a prayer for better days. Daily thy life shortens, the grave's dark peace Draweth surely nigh, When good-night is good-bye; For the sleeping shall not cease. Fight, to be found fighting: nor far away Deem, nor strange thy doom. JOHN BAILEY. Art. 13.-THE MARCONI AFFAIR. 1. Reports from the Select Committee on Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Limited, Agreement [152]. Published as a special supplement to 'The Times,' June 14, 1913. 2. Debates in the House of Commons. Times,' Oetober 12, 1912, June 19 and 20, 1913. THE circumstances under which the now notorious agreement between the British Government and the Marconi Company was negotiated, the story of the promotion, culmination, and collapse of the great Marconi boom, and the still more astounding story of the part played in one department of that boom by three of His Majesty's Ministers, have been brought before the public in three Special Reports from a Select Committee, in some 1500 pages of Bluebook, in 350 columns of Hansard, and in countless thousands of columns of print. The publication of these Reports, and the debates upon them in the House of Commons, afford the possibility of forming a final judgment on the whole affair which has hitherto been wanting. As regards the main facts, at any rate, we may assume them to be known to our readers. We are free then to proceed straight to the point and ask what precisely it was that the Attorney-General, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the Chief Patronage Secretary were doing when in April of last year they embarked upon their 'investment' in the shares of the American Marconi Company, what was the real nature of their transactions and in what sense and how far were they in any way improper or unbecoming? Let us look first at the bare facts, entirely divested of any question of Ministers' motives or of their realisation of what they were doing. The three Ministers concerned undoubtedly took part in a Stock Exchange gamble, which Lord Robert Cecil's report with justice stigmatised as scandalous. At any rate, as regards the original 10,000 shares, bought by Sir Rufus Isaacs, they took part in it as 'insiders' exploiting the ignorance of the public. In this respect alone the conduct of Ministers was, to use the mildest word, unbecoming. But that, |