all that he was, may be read in the collections of letters from which we have quoted, but cannot be summarised here. Everything is to be found there, for he had no reserve in the confidence which he gave to his friends.

The question of religion can never be left out when we try to form a true conception of a character. If it is absent, we deduct it from the sum. And to many it appeared that Rossetti had no religion. He professed no form of religion, and conformed to none. But he called himself a Christian, and he had a strong belief in an immortality. His works, he said, showed that he was a Christian; and he believed himself to have had intercourse with the spirits of the dead, both by direct visions and through 'spiritualistic' divinations. A few months before his death he expressed a wish to have absolution from a priest. A Protestant he certainly was not; and whatever religious affinities he had, beyond those conceptions which are common to all creeds, were with the Roman communion. We cannot frame a creed for the man who would have none.

I cannot suppose,' he says, writing of the Cloud Confines,' * 'that any particle of life is extinguished, though its permanent individuality may be more than questionable. Absorption is not annihilation; and it is even a real retributive future for the special atom of life to be re-embodied (if so it were) in a world which its own former ideality had helped to fashion for pain or pleasure. Such is the theory conjectured here.'

The refrain of this beautiful lyric is—

'Still we say as we go,

Strange to think by the way,
Whatever there is to know

That shall we know one day "';

and it contains a hope which is not bred of Atheism, nor of that colder dogma which calls itself Agnosticism.

We would say, in conclusion, that Rossetti seems to us to be a man not to be tried by common standards of morality, intention in art, or work achieved. He was above all a rara avis; sympathetic to all influences of literature and beauty, and at the same time as full of antipathies as sympathies, and as original as he was reflective. His moral nature was strangely mixed. His 'innocent adolescence' gave place to a manhood disturbed by passion, and guided by an imperious love of beauty. His aim in art was at first sincerity, then beauty, and lastly beauty in female form. He sought this ideal in experience of all

*Letter to W. B. Scott, vol. ii. pp. 134-5.

kinds, higher or lower, without regard to its effect upon his own character. Self-culture he contemned as the destruction of self-sacrifice; and yet for self-sacrifice, except in devotion to art, he had no taste.

"I am reading "Wilhelm Meister," where the hero's self-culture is a great process, amusing and amazing one. On one page he is in despair about some girl he has been the death of; in the next you are delighted with his enlarged views of Hamlet. Nothing, plainly, is so fatal to the duty of self-culture as self-sacrifice, even to the measure of a grain of mustard-seed. The only other book I have read for more than a year is St. Augustine's "Confessions," and here you have it again.''

*

His will, when exerted on others, was strong and masterful; but he had little mastery over himself. His moral ideal was to feel keenly and sincerely. As for the work he accomplished, it fell short of his ideal, partly from technical imperfection, partly because his ideal constantly shifted, as new forms of perfection occurred to him in the progress of his work. In almost all his pictures, and in most of his poetry, we have a sense of incompleteness, beauty aimed at and not fully reached; a defect which is also a merit, for it enhances the interest which we feel in his works, and suggests the idea of infinity, a series continually approaching but never attaining its sum. As a human being, his commanding and attractive personality, his wit and humour, his dramatic and oratorical power, his marvellous memory, his reach of speculation and versatility of thought, his voice, countenance, and gesture, his originality and caprice, his strength and weakness, his self-assertion and dependence on friendship, made him an endearing and engrossing object of the love lavished upon him by his friends. Great as his genius was, it was incurably diseased: and this morbid side of his nature was in part the secret of the fascination, the Baokavía, which he never failed to exercise,

He will not have his place at the side of the greatest, Keats, Browning, Reynolds, Turner; but he will always remain one of the most interesting and perplexing of English poets and painters; honoured' (as his epitaph reads) among painters as a painter, and among poets as a poet,' and in his double genius unique in the history of art.

*W. B. Scott, vol. i. p. 294.

ART.

ART. X.-The Philosophy of Belief; or, Law in Christian Theology. By the Duke of Argyll, K.G., K.T. London, 1896.

IT has often been our intention t

T has often been our intention to write a work upon the We have been impressed by their value. To cull a sentence from the literature of the pavement, we say that no busy man should be without one. In hobbies we find a refuge from melancholia, and we forget our anger with the world. If men have misunderstood us, our hobbies meet us with a smile: they are always amiable; they are not like recalcitrant majorities and wayward constituents; they do not force our unwary hand or stultify our most carefully considered plans. They are what we make them. We find in them alike shelter and repose. If we slumber over them, they will not blame us. When we work at them, they are works of pleasure and choice, and not of compulsion. Coleridge thought that poetry flourished best when it was a man's hobby and not his life's work. The hobby is in modern life what the beechtree was to the classic poet-there we may meet repose and not contradiction. Under its shelter we escape the fierce beams which beat upon our public life.

It is one of the happy features of English parliamentary life. that so many of our statesmen pursue such worthy hobbies. We could part more readily with some of Mr. Gladstone's parliamentary measures than we could with his translations. He has often found repose in classic shades. To use the words of his own version of the Horatian lines:

'Me the cool grove, the bounding choir
Of nymphs, with satyrs grouped, inspire,
Far off the vulgar; if the lyre

Of Polyhymnia be not mute,

And if Euterpé grants the flute.'

Sir John Lubbock finds his hobby in interesting researches among bees and ants and the hundred best books. Mr. Balfour finds it in golf and philosophic doubt. The Duke of Argyll finds it in observing the facts and laws which suggest the unity of nature and the foundations of religion.

Hobbies so pursued are doubly blessed. They bring their reward to him who cultivates them; and they often prove to be of national advantage.

English life has reaped much fruit in this way. No legislative assembly in the world, we believe, possesses so many statesmen who have devoted the hours not demanded by politics

to

to the cultivation of some useful hobby. It is a happy thing when those who are labouring for the good of the State find time to bestow labour upon those questions of philosophy and . faith which touch the well-being of races. We are old-fashioned enough to believe that the possession of moral ideals is an important factor in national life. We are yet more oldfashioned: we believe that the vital power of such moral ideals is largely dependent upon the purity of current religious conceptions and the reverence with which they are handled. It is, in our judgment, a healthful sign when questions which touch the roots of moral and spiritual life occupy the minds of those who are justly reckoned as leaders of national life and movement; and we therefore welcome a work like the Duke of Argyll's, which deals with problems of vital interest to faith and conduct. We can hardly over-estimate the importance of such works. It may be true that a book which comes from the pen of some political leader receives a greater amount of public attention than falls to the lot of abler works from less prominent men. This is only human nature. But it still remains true that the attention so awakened is of great national value; and, if sometimes out of proportion to the intrinsic value of the work, is usually strictly proportional to the public services and worth of the distinguished statesman. It only means that the man whose voice carries furthest is heard at the greatest distance; and who will murmur at this if the message which the voice conveys is one of hope and wholesomeness? It is well, moreover, that a healthy intercourse should be maintained between different spheres of life. Politics do not lose, literature does not lose, because statesmen are writers, and because those who have to solve questions connected with national wellbeing can also face deep questions of never-failing human interest.

The Duke of Argyll's political life now ranges over nearly fifty years. He has been a member of several Cabinets. He served under Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, and Mr. Gladstone. He has held important offices. He has been Lord Privy Seal, Postmaster-General, and Secretary for India. He has been one of the most frequent, as he is certainly one of the foremost, debaters in the House of Lords. He has taken a deep and earnest interest in ecclesiastical affairs in Scotland, and during the agitations of the Secession of fifty years ago he pleaded for peace and moderation. In the midst of this life of varied and anxious duties he has found leisure to deal with questions of science and faith. His works the Reign of Law,' the Unity of Nature,' and the Unseen Foundations of

Society'

Society' are well known; and now once more he enters the lists with a volume of five hundred pages in which he champions with skill and unabated vigour the cause of reasonable faith.

Our first duty is with the book; but we cannot pass forward to this task without expressing our conviction that the delightful autobiographical introduction will be to many readers the most attractive part of the work. We do not disparage the work in saying this-we merely yield to the wand of the enchanter. All men are interesting when they speak of themselves; and the Duke's preface shows us a man of rich and cultivated endowments in his most interesting attitude.

The book is the third of a series, connected in general idea, but independent in treatment. The first of the series, the 'Reign of Law,' had an enormous circulation. It dealt with the question whether physical laws are sufficient to account for Nature as we know it, or whether 'Mind and Will are seated on the universal throne.' The 'Reign of Law' was followed by the Unity of Nature,' in which the competency of our human faculties to give us adequate and trustworthy knowledge of Nature was investigated. The present volume, which closes the series, extends the reasonings and conclusions of the two previous works, and examines the relation in which this great conception of Natural Law, when properly understood, stands to religion in general and to Christian Theology in particular.

But though the present volume thus crowns a series, it can well stand alone. Reference to the previous works will enhance the interest of the reader, but is not necessary for understanding the argument, which is set forth with an eloquent and almost superfluous fulness. The work consists of two parts. The first treats of Natural Theology, which, however, our author prefers to describe as Intuitive Theology. The second part deals with the Theology of the Old and New Testaments. We shall in the first place set before our readers a summary of the work, following as closely as we can the Duke's order and employing as far as possible his language.

We begin with definitions. The word Nature must be defined at the outset, for misleading and limited ideas of Nature are current. Nature properly is the sum of all existences, visible and invisible. This was the ancient view, and it is the view which in modern times receives the endorsement of J. S. Mill and Professor Huxley. But Nature so regarded is no accumulation of dead material. A Divine reason breathes through her. The intuitions of mankind have recognised the universal agency which lies behind phenomena; and to this agency mental characteristics were habitually ascribed. Witness

of