the heroic; but that if prose has entered and taken possession somewhat of the realm that from time immemorial belonged to verse, verse has returned the compliment by transplanting her airy hosts and pitching her tents on the acknowledged territory of prose. The question proposed by Professor Masson, "What can verse do in narrative fiction that prose cannot; and, on the other hand, are there any compensating respects in which, in the same business, prose has the advantage of verse?" is not one likely to be discussed by a writer filled with the inspiration of his subject. Whether the writer chooses prose or verse depends in the first instance on the constitutional bent or proclivity of his mind; and in the second, on what he purposes to achieve. Tennyson chose

verse to set forth the monotonous sorrow of "In Memoriam ;" Goethe verse in "Faust;" but with a wider field before him, with a far deeper moral to inculcate, and with more stubborn and alien elements to reduce to obedience and order, in "Wilhelm Meister" he chooses, and rightly so, prose for his vehicle. Whatever passionately possesses the imagination of a writer, and which does not require for its fit setting forth the admixture of prosaic elements, will not move, happily, in a less elevated region than that of verse. Whatever has to work out its moral from the "thick and miscellany of things," from the humours, prejudices, the unloveliness and ordinariness of human life, must perforce betake itself to the lower platform of prose. To ask which, verse or prose, is the better vehicle of thought, is an inquiry somewhat useless; both are perfect in their proper place, and in such a discussion reference must always be had to the mind of the writer-what moral does he wish to inculcate, and through what medium, passionate or satirical, does he wish that moral to be made visible? haps on the whole it is better to let great writers alone, and not trouble

Per

them with impertinent questionings or theories. Had the "Idylls of the King" been written in prose, they might have reminded one of Mr. G. P. R. James; had the Newcomes been written in verse it would

be difficult to say of what it would have reminded us.

In the second lecture Professor Masson treats of Swift, Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, in a manner singularly appreciative and manly. Of the third lecture we need only say that its subject is Scott, and that it was delivered in Edinburgh. The great man is celebrated; but there is perhaps more than sufficient celebration of the beauty of the city by night and by day; more than sufficient celebration of the men who have followed Scott in the "gray metropolis of the North," and an amazing prophecy ventured as to the great men-their name is to be legion-who in that city are yet to appear and make their times glorious. It is not without reason that Professor Masson, in his preface, hints that "with respect to one of the lectures-the third it might even be obliging if the reader were to remember specially that it was prepared for an Edinburgh audience."

The fourth lecture is the most interesting of the series, in so far as it deals with contemporary fiction, and with writers who are at present alive. It is full of allusions to Bulwer, the Brontés, but is mainly occupied with a comparison of the merits of the two great rivals, Dickens and Thackeray. Here is a glimpse of both on Douglas Jerrold's funeral day :

"Perhaps there is a certain ungraciousness in our thus always comparing and contrasting the two writers. We ought to be but too glad that we have such a pair of contemporaries, yet living and in their prime, to cheer on against each other. I felt this strongly once when I saw the two men together. The occasion was historic. It was in June, 1857; the place was Norwood Cemetery. A multitude had gathered there to bury a man known to both of them, and who had known both of them

well-a man whom we have had incidentally to name as holding a place, in some respects peculiar, in the class of writers to which they belong, though his most effective place was in a kindred department of literature; a man, too, of whom I will say that, let the judgment on his remaining writings be permanently what it may, and let tongues have spoken of him this or that awry, there breathed not, to my knowledge, within the unwholesome bounds of what is specially London, any one in whose actual person there was more of the pith of energy at its tensest, of that which in a given myriad anywhere, distinguishes the one. How like a little Nelson he stood, dashing back his hair, and quivering for the verbal combat! The flash of his wit, in which one quality the island had not his match, was but the manifestation easiest to be observed of a mind compact of sense and information, and of a soul generous and on fire. And now all that remained of Jerrold was enclosed within the leaden coffin which entered the cemetery gates. As it passed, one saw Dickens among the bearers of the pall, his uncovered head of genius stooped, and the wind blowing his hair. Close behind came Thackeray; and, as the slow procession wound up the hill to the chapel, the crowd falling into it in twos and threes and increasing its length, his head was to be seen by the later ranks, towering far in the front above all the others, like that of a marching Saul. And so up to the little chapel they moved; and after the service for the dead, down again to another slope of the hill, where, by the side of one of the walks, and opposite to the tombstone of Blanchard, Jerrold's grave was open. There the last words were read; the coffin was lowered; and the two, among hundreds of others, looked down their farewell. And so, dead at the age of fifty-four, Jerrold was left in his solitary place, where the rains were to fall, and the nights were to roll overhead, and but now and then, on a summer's day, a chance stroller would linger in curiosity; and back into the roar of London dispersed the funeral crowd. Among those remitted to the living were the two of whom we speak, aged the one forty-five, the other forty-six. Why not be thankful that the great city had two such men still known to its streets; why too curiously institute comparisons between them? "

In his estimate of the two writers Professor Masson does not in the least run counter to popular feeling. He admits that Dickens is the more productive, versatile, and essentially rich mind, that Thackeray is the more

cynical, melancholy, weighty, and cultured. Dickens possesses gayer spirits and more exuberant natural genius; Thackeray has the more meditative eye, and is by far the profounder artist. Dickens from his lyrical turn, and in the excitement of work, is constantly tempted into extravagance and rhapsody. He has little command over his own creations, and they use him as they please. He is constantly wandering on the confines of existence, where the man melts into the shade. Most of his characters commit suicide, so far as the faith of the reader is concerned. They either crumble away into nothing before the book is closed, or change into something else. Pecksniff is not the same Pecksniff all through. We wonder his daughters did not express astonishment at the aspect of their changed papa. Thackeray plants himself more firmly on the reality of character, he holds his subject more in hand; and although his process is comparatively slow, his work, when finished, looks like a thing that will endure. There is nothing lyrical about Thackeray, he never loses his self-possession through enthusiasm. His tone is

Mr.

sober, and he seems to have made up his mind on every subject he touches, and on many subjects besides which he prefers to say nothing about. He has a quick and merciless eye for the little meannesses and vilenesses of human nature. He has the instinct of a flesh-fly for a raw. He does not care about grand passions and tragic crimes. He does not believe in them. A grocer sanding his sugar he rolls like a sweet morsel under his tongue; he cannot away with Othello in his jealous rage smothering a pure Desdemona with a bolster. Reading his books is like sitting in a police-court; there is always something going on, and respectable parties in the witness-box are continually letting out the shabbiest secrets about themselves, and the judge or bench is never astonished at the amount of that kind of thing which transpires ;

he seems to expect it, and to consider it the most ordinary thing in the world. It would take a good deal to shock him. Dickens is the more pleasing writer, and he really awakens the most benevolent sensations in the reader. After reading one of his books you wish every day in the year Christmas, and every man, woman, and child in the world nothing to do but to sit down to a table groaning with roast meat, with a huge plumpudding to follow. Mr. Dickens empties his pockets of their loose silver to the first beggar he meets shivering ankle-deep in the snow; Mr. Thackeray growls "tramp" from beneath his warm comforter, and buttons them more proudly up. Yet although the Titmarshian view of life is desponding and gloomy, it is so on the surface, for the most part. Thackeray knows, as well as any man, although he does not always choose to exhibit them, the nobilities that lie deep down beneath the outer crust. There is at times a strain of most sad, serious wisdom in him. "A smile on the lip and a tear in the eye," and that proud reticence of his, that noble shame of emotion, that stern crushing down of all weak and unmanly tears, makes his pathos, when it does force its way through mockery or satire, quite overwhelming. In Mr. Dickens' pathetic passages-and they are legion there are too many tears, and all too great a display of them. He weeps because he likes to weep. He believes in the "luxury of grief," and indulges himself pretty frequently in the luxury. Mr. Thackeray in his books displays some capacity for thinking; Mr. Dickens never does. No opinion of his carries the slightest weight with it. He cannot argue, he can only call nicknames, stinging and sticking. His opinions are as extravagant as his characters. Moreover he learns nothing. rience passes by him like the idle wind. The literary errors of his youth are the literary errors of his manhood. In his first works he attacked professors of religion, representing them as gluttons and wine

Expe

bibbers, and persons careful only of their own advancement; and in his later books the same representation is continued. Time has taught him no temperance, increased knowledge of mankind no charity. He still believes as in the days of his hot youth, when he wrote " Pickwick," that the synonym of Christian isStiggins. It is only the resolutely shut eye that is competent to such a feat.

Professor Masson considers that the novel is not likely soon to lose its popularity; on the contrary, he expects that it will rise into greater importance, and that the greatest minds will yet peer into its service and accept it as one of the noblest forms of literature. He wishes its capabilities to be increased, its range widened, and that greater attention should be paid by novelists to "real life and epic breadth of interest."

THE RECOLLECTIONS OF GEOFFRY

HAMLYN. By Henry Kingsley. Three Volumes. Macmillan & Co.

WE have read these three volumes of Rcollections with the greatest interest, and with all but the greatest pleasure. Mr. Kingsley possesses and has exhibited unquestionable power and marked cultivation. He is a true Kingsley-which is saying no littleand is distinguished by many of the same faculties, preferences, tastes, as have won golden opinions for the Rector of Eversley.

We

We have remarked in Geoffry Hamlyn three great virtues and one great defect. There is a highly attentive observation and appreciation of nature, with frequent remark on features or facts which have escaped almost all the world besides. might take as examples the very brief but powerful and graphic description of the glowing magnificence of the northern passes of Dartmoor, and of sundry Australian landscapes depicted with a light, rapid strength and finish of hand that betoken the master. We have great excellence in the portrayal, we might almost say, the evolution of character. The

dramatis persone seem to us to be worked out in an outward direction from the innermost soul and nature which each distinctly possesses. It is not here, as we have sometimes remarked it to be, that the artist has but one lay figure, and for characters only a number of different properties with which to drape it. This real manifestation of character, properly so called, we greatly admire.

The

consequence of it is, that we really understand each one of the personages represented in the drama. We know tolerably well what sort of conduct and behaviour to expect. And while we are not allowed the use of a telescope to see a long way off in the distance what we know we shall presently look at through our spectacles, we still can anticipate something as to the relative proportions of good and evil, nobleness and baseness, which he life of each one will develope.

The third virtue we have remarked is that fine moral and physical healthfulness which, we apprehend, must be supposed to run in the very blood of the Kingsleys, since it finds its way out in whatever they write. What finer, worthier, or nobler men and women can we ever expect t meet in this world than Frank Maberly, Major Buckley, his son Sam, Doctor Mulhaus, Mrs. Buckley, and Agnes Brentwood? Yet it is with reference to this same noble, we had almost said, magnificent moral healthfulness that we find the great defect we have spoken of. Whence do men derive it? And how does it happen that, in their works of fiction, the two Kingsleys, gifted and accomplished as they are, never tell us of the source of it? It surely is the product and growth of our religion. However it may be accounted for, it admits no question as to fact, that you never find it where Christianity is unknown and its teachings unheard. Yet anything distinctive as to Christianity is not to be found here. We know sufficiently well that it is not the prime duty of a novelist to fill his three volumes with religious reflections or evangelical exegesis. But,

without this, he may at least suffer the essentials of his religion to manifest themselves whenever, in the process of his story, they naturally would do so. What we complain of is the stopping short. Take Frank Maberly. He is a very muscular Christian indeed, but withal as fine a man, in many respects, as ever stood in a pulpit. We are introduced to him as he celebrates, in no other place than the Bishop of Exeter's palace, the success of his little terrier in throttling a rat. In due time he becomes Dean of something in Australia, and meets with all the best of his Drumston friends, who have by this time been in their new home for some years. He is a most likeable and gallant fellow, and preaches none the worse sermon because he can run four miles in twenty minutes, and take a five-barred gate at a flying leap. But his religion, properly so called-where is that? Worked out in his life! In part we grant. But if we did not know about his religion from the fact of his being a member of the English Church we might remain for ever in profound ignorance of its most fundamental truths, as also of the spirituality of the life to which they lead. We of course admire Maberly's zeal and fidelity, working his life out, as we are told he does, in that grand Australian colony, and we have no manner of doubt that he deserves a martyr's crown. But he is "priest" of what? Verily we know not, except so far as may be inferred from the fact of profession mentioned.

But notwithstanding this great fault, we cordially thank Mr. Kingsley for his book, shall be right glad to meet him again, and hope we may on another occasion see something of the TVEμa of his Christianity as well as it σùpέ, that from the second edition of this book he will omit the dozen grammatical blunders which appear in the first, and that our admiration for the next creation of his genius may not have to be stinted by the exception which has been taken to this.