the Temple. Author of the articles on Lamb and Hood in this work; of selections, with a memoir, from Hood; and of a book on Crabbe ('Men of Letters' series, 1903), he is best known in literature as the biographer (1882; new ed. 1888) and editor (6 vols. 1883-88) of Lamb.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky, historian and moralist, was born at Dublin on 26th March 1838, and educated for the Irish Church first at Cheltenham and then at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book (1860) was on The Religious Tendencies of the Age. He soon resolved to make historical research his life-work; and after a distinguished literary career he was from 1895 till 1903 M.P. for Dublin University. In 1861 he published anonymously The Leaders of Public Opinion in Ireland, four brilliant and sympathetic essays on Swift, Flood, Grattan, and O'Connell ; the greatly enlarged edition of 1903, which omitted Swift, expanded the O'Connell article into what is the best history of Ireland from the Union to the potato famine. His final judgment on Swift appeared in the introduction to an edition of the Dean's works (1897). His learned, luminous, and dispassionate History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe (2 vols. 1865; new ed. 1899) does not deal with rationalism in the sense of religious free-thought or mere anti-supernaturalism in interpreting the Bible-still less with rationalism in the stricter sense of one specific school of German Biblical criticism. It has for its subject the dawn of the age of reason and the decline of the age of unhesitating faith, the gradual revolt, conscious or unconscious, against traditional, ecclesiastical, and clerical standards of judgment in all that concerns life and manners. The decay of the belief in witchcraft and magic; fading faith in the miraculous as an explanation of mysteries; the sapping of the persecuting spirit by the growth of toleration; the disappearance of superstition and the secularisation of life-all fall within the scope of this scholarly and original work. The statements, guardedly made, are supported by a mass of copious notes and references; and though the work is well written, Lecky attached more importance to the substance of what he said than to the manner of saying it. The tone is nowhere that of a partisan; but the ethical philosopher is the unhesitating friend of progress, and in his own sense of the word is a broad-minded rationalist. He did, and did admirably, some of the work Buckle proposed to do; but his spirit was not the spirit of Buckle-it was more truly historical, more genial and broad-minded.

The History of England in the Eighteenth Century (8 vols. 1878-90; 12th ed. in 12 vols. 1899) is not a history in strict chronological form, but rather a philosophical study of events and their causes, a succession of dissertations on the manners of the last age, relieved by an admirable

series of finished historical portraits. Perhaps the most original portion of the work is the treatment of the American war of independence; but the five volumes dealing with Ireland are even more valuable, and it should count as a special merit that one Irish historian was able to treat Irish political history with moderation and charity. Lecky stands midway between the dramatic school of literary historians and the modern scientific type of researchers in archives who are not ashamed of the dryasdust method. He rarely obtrudes any personal prepossession, and is singularly free from prejudice; he is afraid of purple patches and epigrams as disturbing the judicial attitude; but when he gives the reins to his imagination he commands an impressive diction. In him the task of the historian is not so much to paint a picture as to solve a problem-to explain a nation's present by the past. The History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 vols. 1869) is also learned laborious, and judicial, and it occupies a field of its own, showing exceptional power of gathering vast masses of detached social phenomena, too much unheeded, into a new light, and of interpreting their significance and their lesson. A volume of poems (1891) was not generally considered to show Lecky at his best; he was essentially a thinker and expositor, and not a lyrist; but as counterpieces to his best prose the verses are of great interest to his readers. Lecky, who was in substance a Whig and a Moderate, took, in spite of his warm Irish sympathies, a strong side against Home Rule, and in his Democracy and Liberty (1896; new ed. 1899) revealed the anti-Radical who does not hesitate to lay bare the defects and dangerous tendencies of unrestrained democracy, at home and abroad. The Map of Life: Conduct and Character (1899), though it demands only the freedom which is consistent with a determinist view of life, is not a disquisition on the foundation of morals, but a compendium of practical observations on such subjects as the management of character, success, money, marriage, national and individual ideals, and the disproportionate amount of English energy devoted to political interests. Lecky, who was LL.D. and D.C.L., was admitted to the Privy Council in 1897; one of the first authors to receive the new Order of Merit in 1902, he was the first to be removed by death (22nd October 1903).

Persecutions of the Wesleyans.

From the time of the institution of lay preachers Methodism became in a great degree independent of the Established Church. Its chapels multiplied in the great towns, and its itinerant missionaries penetrated to the most secluded districts. They were accustomed to preach in fields and gardens, in streets and lecture-rooms, in market-places and churchyards. On one occasion we find Whitefield at a fair mounting a stage which had been erected for some wrestlers, and there denouncing the pleasures of the world; on another, preaching among the mountebanks at Moorfields; on a third, attracting around his pulpit 10,000 of the spectators at a racecourse; on a

In a

his supporters was ransacked, and bull-dogs were let loose upon him. At Dublin Whitefield was almost stoned to death. At Exeter he was stoned in the very presence of the bishop. At Plymouth he was violently assaulted and his life seriously threatened by a naval officer. (From England in the Eighteenth Century.)

Early Christianity and Patriotism. The relations of Christianity to the sentiment of patriotism were from the first very unfortunate. While the Christians were, from obvious reasons, completely separated from the national spirit of Judea, they found themselves equally at variance with the lingering remnants of Roman patriotism. Rome was to them the power of Antichrist, and its overthrow the necessary prelude to the millennial reign. They formed an illegal organisation, directly opposed to the genius of the empire, anticipating its speedy destruction, looking back with something more than despondency to the fate of the heroes who had adorned its past, and refusing resolutely to participate in those national spectacles which were the symbols and the expressions of patriotic feeling. Though scrupulously averse to all rebellion, they rarely concealed their sentiments, and the whole tendency of their teaching was to withdraw men as far as possible both from the functions and the enthusiasm of public life. It was at once their confession and their boast that no interests were more indifferent to them than those of their country. They regarded the lawfulness of taking arms as very questionable, and all those proud and aspiring qualities that constitute the distinctive beauty of the soldier's character as emphatically unchristian. Their home and their interests were in another world, and, provided only they were unmolested in their worship, they avowed with frankness, long after the empire had become Christian, that it was a matter of indifference to them under what rule they lived. Asceticism, drawing all the enthusiasm of Christendom to the desert life, and elevating as an ideal the extreme and absolute abnegation of all patriotism, formed the culmination of the movement, and was undoubtedly one cause of the downfall of the Roman Empire.

fourth, standing beside the gallows at an execution to speak of death and of eternity. Wesley, when excluded from the pulpit of Epworth, delivered some of his most impressive sermons in the churchyard, standing on his father's tomb. Howell Harris, the apostle of Wales, encountering a party of mountebanks, sprang into their midst exclaiming, in a solemn voice, 'Let us pray,' and then proceeded to thunder forth the judgments of the Lord. Rowland Hill was accustomed to visit the great towns on market-day in order that he might address the people in the market-place, and to go from fair to fair preaching among the revellers from his favourite text, 'Come out from among them.' In this manner the Methodist preachers came in contact with the most savage elements of the population, and there were few forms of mob violence they did not experience. In 1741 one of their preachers named Seward, after repeated illtreatment in Wales, was at last struck on the head while preaching at Monmouth, and died of the blow. riot, while Wheatley was preaching at Norwich, a poor woman with child perished from the kicks and blows of the mob. At Wednesbury-a little town in Staffordshire-then very famous for its cockfights-numerous houses were wrecked; the Methodists were stoned, beaten with cudgels, or dragged through the public kennels. Women were atrociously abused. The leaders of the mob declared their intention to destroy every Methodist in the county. Wesley himself appeared in the town, and the rioters speedily surrounded the house where he was staying. With the placid courage that never deserted him in danger, he descended alone and unarmed into their midst. His perfect calmness and his singularly venerable appearance quelled the most noisy, and he succeeded by a few well-chosen words in producing a sudden reaction. His captors, however, insisted on his accompanying them to a neighbouring justice, who exhorted them to disperse in peace. The night had now fallen, and Wesley was actually returning to Wednesbury protected by a portion of the very crowd who had attacked him, when a new mob poured in from an adjoining village. He was seized by the hair and dragged through the streets. Some struck at him with cudgels. Many cried to knock out his brains and kill him at once. A river was flowing near, and he imagined they would throw him into the water. Yet in that dreadful moment his self-possession never failed him. He uttered in loud and solemn tones a prayer to God. He addressed those who were nearest him with all the skill that a consummate knowledge of the popular character could supply, and he speedily won over to his side some of the most powerful of the leaders. Gradually the throng paused, wavered, divided; and Wesley returned almost uninjured to his house. To a similar courage he owed his life at Bolton, when the house where he was preaching was attacked, and at last burst open, by a furious crowd thirsting for his life. Again and again he preached, like the other leaders of the movement, in the midst of showers of stones or tiles or rotten eggs. The fortunes of his brother were little different. At Cardiff, when he was preaching, women were kicked and their clothes set on fire by rockets. At St Ives and in the neighbouring villages the congregation were attacked with cudgels, and everything in the room where they were assembled was shattered to atoms. At Devizes a water-engine played upon the house where he was staying.

His horses were seized. The house of one of

There are, probably, few subjects on which popular judgments are commonly more erroneous than upon the relations between positive religions and moral enthusiasm. Religions have, no doubt, a most real power of evoking a latent energy which, without their existence, would never have been called into action; but their influence is on the whole probably more attractive than creative. They supply the channel in which moral enthusiasm flows, the banner under which it is enlisted, the mould in which it is cast, the ideal to which it tends. The first idea the phrase 'a very good man' would have suggested to an early Roman would probably have been that of great and distinguished patriotism, and the passion and interest of such a man in his country's cause were in direct proportion to his moral elevation. Ascetic Christianity decisively diverted moral enthusiasm into another channel, and the civic virtues, in consequence, necessarily declined. The extinction of all public spirit; the base treachery and corruption pervading every department of the Government; the cowardice of the army; the despicable frivolity of character that led the people of Treves, when fresh from their burning city, to call for theatres and circuses, and the people of Roman Carthage to plunge wildly into the excitement of the chariot races,

on the very day when their city succumbed beneath the Vandal-all these things coexisted with extraordinary displays of ascetic and of missionary devotion. The genius and the virtue that might have defended the empire were engaged in fierce disputes about the Pelagian controversy, at the very time when Attila was encircling Rome with his armies, and there was no subtlety of theological metaphysics which did not kindle a deeper interest in the Christian leaders than the throes of their expiring country. The moral enthusiasm that in other days would have fired the armies of Rome with an invincible valour, impelled thousands to abandon their country and their homes, and consume the weary hours in a long routine of useless and horrible macerations.

WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. From a Photograph by Russell & Sons.

When the Goths had captured Rome, St Augustine, as we have seen, pointed with a just pride to the Christian Church, which remained an unviolated sanctuary during the horrors of the sack, as a proof that a new spirit of sanctity and of reverence had descended upon the world. The Pagan, in his turn, pointed to what he deemed a not less significant fact-the golden statues of Valour and of Fortune were melted down to pay the ransom to the conquerors. Many of the Christians contemplated with an indifference that almost amounted to complacency what they regarded as the predicted ruin of the city of the fallen gods. When the Vandals swept over Africa, the Donatists, maddened by the persecution of the orthodox, received them with open arms, and contributed their share to that deadly blow. The immortal pass of Thermopyla was surrendered without a struggle to the Goths. A Pagan writer accused the monks of having betrayed it. It is more probable that they had absorbed or diverted the heroism that in other days would have defended it. The conquest, at a later date, of Egypt by the Moham

medans, was in a great measure due to an invitation from the persecuted Monophysites. Subsequent religious wars have again and again exhibited the same phenomenon. The treachery of a religionist to his country no longer argued an absence of all moral feeling. It had become compatible with the deepest religious enthusiasm, and with all the courage of a martyr.

(From The History of European Morals.)

Lord Acton (1834-1902), born at Naples JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON, was the grandson of the Minister of Ferdinand IV. of Naples, and succeeded his father as baronet in 1838. He was educated at Oscott under Cardinal Wiseman, and at Munich by Dr Döllinger, whose views he zealously espoused, distinguishing himself in Rome in 1870 by his hostility to the dogma of papal infallibility. He sat in Parliament for Carlow (1859-65), and was raised to the peerage by Mr Gladstone in 1869 as Baron Acton of Aldenham. The leader of the Liberal Catholics in England, he was for a time editor of the Home and Foreign Review, and afterwards of the Weekly Chronicle and British Quarterly; but it was rather by his universal repute as a scholar of singular learning and breadth of mind than by his writings on the Vatican decrees (1874), Wolsey (1877), German Schools of History (1886), and other occasional publications, that he had shown himself exceptionally well qualified to hold the Cambridge chair of History as Seeley's successor (1895). His inaugural lecture on The Study of History expounded the high and deep view he took of the subject. The inherent worth and interest of humanity was his leading thought; the course of history was for him a philosophy of history. Historical facts were for him not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul.' His point of view was cosmopolitan; his erudition was vast and his insight profound. But his lofty ideal of fastidious accuracy limited his productiveness. No scholar of anything like his learning wrote or published so little; perhaps his chiefest bequest to posterity was his planning and mapping out and laying the foundations of the great Cambridge Modern History, of which the first volume appeared in the year of his death. His enormous library, purchased after his death by an American millionaire, and presented to Mr John Morley, found an appropriate resting-place in the University of Cambridge. A bibliography of the works of Bishop Stubbs, Bishop Creighton, and Lord Acton was edited for the Royal Historical Society in 1903 by Dr W. A. Shaw.

William John Courthope, the son of a Sussex clergyman, was born in 1842, studied at Harrow and New College, Oxford, and besides being a Civil Service Commissioner, has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Editor of Pope's works and author of a Life of him, he has written, besides a short Life of Addison, The Paradise of Birds, and other works, a magistral History of Poetry (4 vols. 1895-1904).

John Morley, son of a surgeon at Blackburn, was born on the 24th December 1838. He entered Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1856, and three years later took his degree. At that time the Tractarian movement, which had long dominated Oxford, had spent its force, and was followed by a movement in the direction of Liberalism; J. S. Mill succeeded to the intellectual throne vacated by Newman. At a formative period of his life Mr Morley came under the influence of Mill, to whose memory he has paid a noble

tribute. On the conclusion of his university course he embarked upon a literary career; and after a few preliminary ventures (as in editing the Literary Gazette and the Morning Star), he was appointed editor of the Fortnightly Review, in succession to G. H. Lewes. 1880 he became editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, then the leading organ of advanced Liberalism in London, notably in dealing with Irish politics; and he conducted the Pall Mall till he was sent (1883) to Parliament by Newcastle. In

In

1886 he was appointed Secretary for Ireland in Mr Gladstone's Home Rule administration, with a seat in the Cabinet;

unpopular side; but by the force of his personality and his steadfast adherence to his principles he has retained the respect of those who have differed most violently from him. The key to Mr Morley's public career is to be found in his writings. A friend and admirer of J. S. Mill, he has carried to the study of modern problems the spirit and methods of Philosophical Liberalism; and he has freed the creed of his masters from many of its crudities. On the historic side the old Liberals

In 1895

and in 1892, when the Gladstone Government again held office, he returned to his old post. Mr Morley was one of those who lost their seats in the disaster which overtook the Liberal party; his loss of popularity being largely due to the stand he made against Socialistic interference with the hours of labour in the form of a compulsory eight hours' day. In 1896 he re-entered Parliament as member for the Montrose Burghs. Since 1894 he has been a trustee of the British Museum.

Mr Morley's speeches, models of literary excellence, are distinguished by dignity of tone, elevation of thought, and manifest sincerity. In recent years, especially on foreign questions-notably on the South African war-Mr Morley has taken the

were always weak. They condemned or approved institutions, not according to their relative values, but according to their relation to an abstract system of political philosophy. This

error was noted by Mill, but he came upon the scene too early to profit

by the revolution worked in political philosophy, especially on the historic side, by the evolutionary conception of society. Mr Morley accepts in the main the leading conceptions of the Philosophic Liberals— namely, a belief in individual and social progress along the lines of freedom knowledge progress being accelerated by the growth of justice and sympathy. His political creed,

and

rooted in a passionate desire for justice and freedom, makes him look coldly upon recent Socialistic developments. And it is his intense interest in the progress of humanity which explains his antipathy to the Imperialist conception; in his view, Great Britain should be not the military dictator but the moral pioneer of humanity. Mr Morley is entirely free of the crude views of the early Radicals, who hoped in their day to see the establishment of the Age of Reason; evolution, not revolution, is the keynote of his thinking. His study of Burke and Comte has shown him the relative value of old ideas and old institutions; and by his deep historic sense, his fondness for the concrete, his vital interest in humanity, apart from philosophic shibboleths, Mr

Morley has left behind him the old revolutionary Liberalism of his masters, and has advanced to what may be called evolutionary Liberalism.

Mr Morley's philosophy of life must be gathered from a study of his writings, of which that On Compromise (1874) is one of the most characteristic. In his Voltaire (1872) we have his attitude towards religion, particularly to that form of it which in his view has been the main obstruction to individual and social progress. In his Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1878) we have his insistence upon the paramount importance of knowledge and freedom as the two vital factors in progress; and a generous tribute is paid to the advanced thinkers of the Revolution period, who fought so valiantly for the liberation of humanity. In Rousseau (1873), along with appreciation of Rousseau's influence as supplementary to the hard, dry, critical influence of Voltaire, we have a protest against the dangers of importing into political life sentimentalism and intuitionalism. In Burke (1879) Mr Morley presents us with a sketch of the ideal politician, in whom the desire for progress is held in check by a profound regard for the principles of order and continuity. In his Life of Cobden (1881) he does justice to those great politico-economic principles which, in his opinion, tend to internationalise commerce and industry, thereby promoting the brotherhood of man. Two series of Critical Miscellanies (1871 and 1877) and a volume of Studies in Literature (1891) are an integral part of Mr Morley's literary work; and the Oliver Cromwell (1900) showed how fairly Mr Morley could deal with a man and a revolution dominated by religious conceptions he does not share. His Life of Gladstone (3 vols. 1903) was sure to be not merely a permanent addition to the political history of the time, but a literary masterpiece. Yet as Gladstone's career was so bound up with the public life of his time, there was an obvious danger that the historian would encroach on the biographer; that against the massive historic background the figure of Gladstone would shrink into something quite indistinct and shadowy. But in this greatest of our political biographies, Mr Morley's intuitive. sense of literary proportion stood him in good stead; the history of the time is depicted with superb and attractive lucidity, while Gladstone all through remains the central figure.

The Political Spirit.

It is at least well, and more than that, it is an indispensable condition of social well-being, that the divorce between political responsibility and intellectual responsibility, between respect for what is instantly practicable and search after what is only important in thought, should not be too complete and universal. Even if there were no other objection, the undisputed prominence of the political spirit has a plain tendency to limit the subjects in which the men animated by it can take a real interest. All matters fall out of sight, or at least fall into a secondary place, which do not bear more or less directly and patently upon the material and structural welfare of the

community. In this way the members of the community miss the most bracing, widening, and elevated of the whole range of influences that create great characters. First, they lose sincere concern about the larger questions which the human mind has raised up for itself. Second, they lose a fearless desire to reach the true answers to them, or if no certain answers should prove to be within reach, then at any rate to be satisfied on good grounds that this is so. Such questions are not immediately discerned by commonplace minds to be of social import. Consequently they, and all else that is not obviously connected with the machinery of society, give way in the public consideration to what is so connected with it, in a manner that cannot be mistaken. . . . How momentous a disadvantage this is we can best know by contemplating the characters which have sometimes lighted up the old times. Men were then devoutly persuaded that their eternal salvation depended on their having true beliefs. Any slackness in finding out which beliefs are the true ones would have to be answered for before the throne of Almighty God, at the sure risk and peril of everlasting damnation. To what quarter in the large historic firmament can we turn our eyes with such certainty of being stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human life and the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated by its seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits whom the Protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal responsibility brought to the front in Germany in the sixteenth century, and in England and Scotland in the seventeenth? It is not their fanaticism, still less is it their theology, which makes the great Puritan chiefs of England and the stern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our sight. It is the fact that they sought truth and ensued it, not thinking of the practical nor cautiously counting majorities and minorities, but each man pondering and searching so 'as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.' (From On Compromise.) HECTOR MACPHERSON.

James Bryce, son of Dr James Bryce, geologist and schoolmaster, was born at Belfast, 10th May 1838, and educated at Glasgow High School and University, and Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1862 as double first. Elected a Fellow of Oriel, and called to the Bar in 1867, he was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford from 1870 to 1893, and entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1880. In 1886 he was made Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and in 1892 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; and he is a member of the Privy Council. His literary works give him a place among the most accomplished scholars of the day. His first book of note, The Holy Roman Empire, which appeared in 1884, was an elaboration of a university prize essay, and contains a luminous sketch of the central political institutions of the Middle Ages; his Transcaucasia and Ararat (1877) is the record of a visit to the East, in which he climbed the historic mountain. The monumental work on The American Commonwealth (1888) marked him as the successor of De Tocqueville, and won him the honour of a corresponding membership of the Institute of France. His later works are Impres