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what is extremely doubtful. In many people, perhaps with the majority of educated persons, the love of nature is nearly imperceptible at ten years old, but strong and operative at thirty. In general we may say of these high instincts of early childhood, the base of the alleged systematic philosophy of Wordsworth, what Thucydides says of the early achievements of the Greek race: "It is impossible to speak with certainty of what is so remote; but from all that we can really investigate, I should say that they were no very great things."— Matthew Arnold: Essay on Wordsworth.

See also remarks by J. S. Mill, quoted in Notes on Tintern Abbey, 35-49.

ODE TO DUTY.

Had the man who wrote this Ode lived in the days of Ahab the son of Omri he would have rested under the juniper-tree with Elijah the Tishbite and would have ascended with him unto Horeb the mount of God.

Had he lived in days of Milton, stoutly would he have fought against the profane Cavalier, the word of the Lord in his mouth and a two-edged sword in his hand.

When the bugle-call of Duty sounds, such men are Ready! Aye Ready! If they fall, they fall with face to foe; their names shine forth imperishable, emblazoned forever in the Book of The Hero and The Martyr!

SONNET.-TO MILTON.

This Sonnet was written in 1802. No one acquainted with the social condition of England then, can deny the truthfulness of Wordsworth's picture. - In both the matter and the manner of this Sonnet we see Wordsworth at his best; we have here a fine illustration of one part of Arnold's oft-quoted criticism: 'Wordsworth's poetry is great because of the extraordinary power with which Wordsworth feels the joy offered to us in nature, the joy offered to us in the simple primary affections and duties; and because of the extraordinary power with which, in case after case, he shows us this joy, and renders it so as to make us share it.'

MACAULAY.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY was born in 1800. His father, Zachary Macaulay, was the friend and co-adjutor of Wilberforce. At fifteen Macaulay had read widely enough to deliver a critical judgment on the comparative merits of Chaucer and Boccaccio; at Cambridge (1818-1822) he detested mathematics, but took prizes in the classics and in English. His Edinburgh Review articles on Milton (1825) and on Mill (1829) made him famous; the Whigs were glad to secure so promising a recruit and in 1830 he entered Parliament under their patronage. The debates on the Reform Bill of 1832 showed him to be a match for the most experienced orators of the day; after four years of intense political and literary activity, he accepted the lucrative position of Member of the Supreme Council of India, with the honorable motive of assisting his younger brothers and sisters, and of making possible for himself a purely literary life. Returning to England in 1838, he was induced to assume, for three years more, the 'wasteful drudgery of office;' this delayed the publication of the Lays until 1842, and of the first two volumes of the History of England until 1848. In 1852 his health began to fail, but he worked on manfully, publishing occasional Essays and the third and fourth volumes of his History. He was raised to the peerage in 1857, but lived to enjoy his well-earned honors a short time only. He passed quietly to rest on the 28th of December, 1859.

Truthfully may we apply to him almost the very words he wrote of Johnson:. The more we know of his private life, the more is our conviction strengthened that he was not only a great but a good man.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

LIFE AND TIMES. The sincerity and sweetness of Macaulay's character portray themselves in his Life and Letters edited by his nephew G. Otto Trevelyan. No one can afford to be ignorant of this delightful book. Morison's Macaulay (E. M. L.) is more critical than biographical. Thackeray's Nil Nisi Bonum (in his Roundabout Papers) contains an affecting tribute to Macaulay by one who knew and loved him well. For the History, see Macaulay's Speeches; Spencer Walpole's History of England, Cap. vii. - xiv. (1820-1837); McCarthy's History of Our Own Times, Cap. i.-xl. (1837-1859). CRITICISM (on the Poetry).-7. S. Mill in the Westminster Review; Vol. xxxix. (Old Series); Leslie Stephen in Hours in a Library, Third Series; J. Cotter Morison in his Life of Macaulay, Cap. iv. Those who desire to study Macaulay's Poems with a copious and scholarly commentary, can find it in the excellent edition of the Lays by Professor J. C. Rolfe (Harpers).

HORATIUS.

In his General Preface to The Lays of Ancient Rome, Macaulay writes: 'In the following poems the author speaks, not in his own person, but in the persons of ancient minstrels who know only what a Roman citizen, born three or four hundred years before the Christian era, may be supposed to have known, and who are in nowise above the passions and prejudices of their age and nation. To these imaginary poets must be ascribed some blunders which are so obvious that it is unnecessary to point them out. The real blunder would have been to represent these old poets as deeply versed in general history, and studious of chronological accuracy. To them must also be attributed the illiberal sneers at the Greeks, the furious party-spirit, the contempt for the arts of peace, the love of war for its own sake, the ungenerous exultation over the vanquished, which the reader will sometimes observe. To portray a Roman of the age of Camillus or Curius as superior to national antipathies, as mourning over the devastation and slaughter by which empire and triumphs were to be won, as looking on human suffering with the sympathy of Howard, or as treating conquered enemies with the delicacy of the Black Prince, would be to violate all dramatic propriety. The old Romans had some great virtues, fortitude, temperance, veracity, spirit to resist oppression, respect for legitimate authority, fidelity in the observing of contracts, disinterestedness, ardent patriotism; but Christian charity and chivalrous generosity were alike unknown to them.

'It would have been obviously improper to mimic the manner of any particular age or country. Something has been borrowed, however, from our own old ballads, and more from Sir Walter Scott, the great restorer of our ballad-poetry. To the Iliad still greater obligations are due; and those obligations have been contracted with the less hesitation, because there is reason to believe that some of the old Latin minstrels really had recourse to that inexhaustible store of poetical images.

It would have been easy to swell this little volume to a very considerable bulk, by appending notes filled with quotations; but to a learned reader such notes are not necessary; for an unlearned reader they would have little interest; and the judgment passed both by the learned and by the unlearned on a work of the imagination will always depend much more on the general character and spirit of such a work than on minute details.'

Macaulay's Preface to Horatius is as follows:

'There can be little doubt that among those parts of early Roman history which had a poetical origin was the legend of Horatius Cocles. We have several versions of the story, and these versions differ from each other in points of no small importance. Polybius, there is reason to believe, heard the tale recited over the remains of some Consul or Prætor descended from the old Horatian patricians; for he introduces it as a specimen of the narratives with which the Romans were in the habit of embellishing their funeral oratory. It is remarkable that, according to him, Horatius defended the bridge alone, and perished in the waters. According to the chronicles which Livy and Dionysius followed, Horatius had two companions, swam safe to shore, and was loaded with honours and rewards.

'These discrepancies are easily explained. Our own literature, indeed, will

furnish an exact parallel to what may have taken place at Rome. It is highly probable that the memory of the war of Porsena was preserved by compositions much resembling the two ballads which stand first in the Relics of Ancient English Poetry. In both those ballads the English, commanded by the Percy, fight with the Scots, commanded by the Douglas. In one of the ballads the Douglas is killed by a nameless English archer, and the Percy by a Scottish spearman: in the other, the Percy slays the Douglas in a single combat, and is himself made prisoner. In the former, Sir Hugh Montgomery is shot through the heart by a Northumbrian bowman: in the latter, he is taken, and exchanged for the Percy. Yet both the ballads relate to the same event, and that an event which probably took place within the memory of persons who were alive when both the ballads were made. One of the minstrels says:

'Old men that knowen the grounde well yenoughe

Call it the battell of Otterburn:

At Otterburn began this spurne

Upon a monnyn day.

Ther was the dougghte Doglas slean:

The Perse never went away.'

'The other poet sums up the event in the following lines:

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'It is by no means unlikely that there were two old Roman lays about the defence of the bridge; and that, while the story which Livy has transmitted to us was preferred by the multitude, the other, which ascribed the whole glory to Horatius alone, may have been the favourite with the Horatian house.

'The following ballad is supposed to have been made about a hundred and twenty years after the war which it celebrates, and just before the taking of Rome by the Gauls. The author seems to have been an honest citizen, proud of the military glory of his country, sick of the disputes of factions, and much given to pining after good old times which had never really existed. The allusion, however, to the partial manner in which the public lands were allotted could proceed only from a plebeian; and the allusion to the fraudulent sale of spoils marks the date of the poem, and shows that the poet shared in the general discontent with which the proceedings of Camillus, after the taking of Veii, were regarded.

'The penultimate syllable of the name Porsena has been shortened in spite of the authority of Niebuhr, who pronounces, without assigning any ground for his opinion, that Martial was guilty of a decided blunder in the line,

'Hanc spectare manum Porsena non potuit.'

'It is not easy to understand how any modern scholar, whatever his attainments may be,—and those of Niebuhr were undoubtedly immense, can venture to pronounce that Martial did not know the quantity of a word which he must have uttered and heard uttered a hundred times before he left school.

Niebuhr seems also to have forgotten that Martial has fellow-culprits to keep him in countenance. Horace has committed the same decided blunder; for he gives us, as a pure iambic line,

'Minacis aut Etrusca Porsenæ manus.'

'Silius Italicus has repeatedly offended in the same way, as when he says, 'Cernitur effugiens ardentem Porsena dextram ;'

and again,

'Clusinum vulgus, cum, Porsena magne, jubebas.'

A modern writer may be content to err in such company.

'Niebuhr's supposition, that each of the three defenders of the bridge was the representative of one of the three patrician tribes, is both ingenious and probable and has been adopted in the following poem.'

1-17. Lars (English, Lord); a title of the Etruscan Kings, as 'Pharaoh' was of the Egyptian. See note on Aruns, line 323. Clusium; at this time the most important of the Etruscan cities. Tarquin. The Tarquins (an Etruscan family) were expelled probably during the sixth century B.C. Tradition has assigned the exact date - 509. Etruscan. The Etruscans were not a Latin race and their origin is not definitely known.

18-41. With the exception of Massilia, all the towns mentioned in these lines can easily be located on the map of Etruria. Volaterræ (Volterra) still shows the ruins of massive Etruscan fortifications. Populonia became a manufacturing city in early times, drawing its iron-ore from the island of Ilva (see line 304). the modern Pisa.

must have been Gauls. near lake Trasimenus.

seen.

Pisæ;

Massilia; Marseilles. The fair-haired slaves

Clanis; a tributary of the Tiber. Cortona;
Remains of the ancient walls are still to be

42-57. Auser; the Ciminian hill (Monte Cimino); Volsinian mere (Lago di Bolsena); in Etruria. Clitumnus; in Umbria. Byron has a beautiful description of this stream in Childe Harold iv. 66-68. Macaulay's lines 54-55 are from the 5th and 6th lines of Byron's Stanza 66.

58-65. Arretium (Arezzo) in Etruria was early famous for its pottery. In later times it became celebrated as the home of Mæcenas and the birthplace of Petrarch. Umbro (Ombrone); next to the Arnus (Arno), the largest river in Etruria. Luna, the

most northerly city of Etruria, famed for its wine, cheese and marble.

66-80.

verses = prophecies. See the story of the Sibyl in Æneid Traced from the right: the Etruscan manner of

iii. 441-460.

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