the summum imperium may be strongly held by the central rulers, while they leave to others, not only much of local power, but that which is even dearer to the human mind, at any rate in the East, the form and accidents of sovereignty. The wise conqueror leaves to the subdued all that he can both of real power and appearances, and concerns himself with the essentials. By these means, in India, we have enlisted in the maintenance of the Imperial system the interests of native princes who do not know whether their thrones would be equally well respected by another foreign conqueror, or whether they would stand firm in a period of internal anarchy. The Imperial Government, through these princely houses, has an indirect hold upon great populations to whose imagination they are dear; and this gives to it a better standingground than if it rested solely upon direct rule by aliens from beyond the sea. Besides, by our consistent policy in respecting established rights, we have given proof, clear and convincing, that we do not covet, without definite reason, territory, dominion, and powers of taxation. Our success in Indian wars has proved that if we had desired to swallow up entirely the native monarchies we could have done so. Our policy in India has been 'parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.' A word lately used by Lord Rosebery, incorporation with the British Empire,' better describes than the word 'annexation' the working of Indian methods. Again and again in Indian history we have taught a native prince our power by the lesson of war, and then handed back his dominions to the family to be held as a dependent fief. It is believed that the willing loyalty of the Indian princes amply justifies this policy.

To

We have shown how magnificent a field India would offer to the romantic writer were it not for the fatal obstacle of the social gulf which divides the English writer and reader from the intimacies of Indian life. the historic and philosophic mind this matters little. To such a mind the romance of India lies in its possible futures, in the political and intellectual and religious developments which must issue from this wonderful conjunction between the masculine active West, begetter of laws and political institutions and discoveries in physical science, and the feminine brooding East, mother of

religious ideas. 'It may be,' says Sir Alfred Lyall in one of his Asiatic studies,

'it may be that those are right who insist that Asia has always been too deep a quicksand for Europe to build upon it any lasting edifice of morals, politics, or religion; that the material conditions forbid any lasting improvement; that the English legions, like the Roman, will tramp across the Asiatic stage and disappear; and that the clouds of confusion and superstition will roll up again.'

Sir Alfred does not commit himself to this belief, but it is the melancholy creed of Mr Meredith Townsend. In essay after essay he has insisted that, by the nature of things, European rulers must be endured with as much dull dislike by Asiatics as Asiatic rulers would be endured with active dislike by Europeans, because our ways and thoughts are not theirs nor ever can be; and that British rule in India rests only on force, and will vanish as soon as that force suffers internal decay, or a stronger nation assails our dominion from without. Every European empire in the populous parts of Asia must, he thinks, sooner or later decline and fall, and leave hardly a wrack behind. His conclusions on the whole matter, he says, may be summed up in Matthew Arnold's famous lines:

'The East bowed low before the blast

In patient, deep disdain;

She let the legions thunder past

And plunged in thought again.'

There are some who think that it matters little whether these Cassandra vaticinations of decline and fall of empire are true or not. Nothing lasts for ever. The English were drawn by their destiny into India; and, if their destiny should one day deprive them of India, they will have done a good day's work there which cannot be entirely wiped out. It may be that, in the ways of Providence, all political dominations are but means to a higher intellectual and moral end. Rome conquered and ruled Greece and Syria, but was conquered herself by Greek wisdom and Syrian religion; and from the conjunction of Rome, Greece and Syria came the new civilisation. Who can foretell what will be, in the sphere of intellect and religion, the result of the new conjunction of Europe

and Asia through British rule? The East broods all the more deeply now that the Pax Britannica has so largely silenced the tumult of the outer world. It is almost certain that, if the great peace and reign of law and justice should last, many of the lower and grosser superstitions of India, the reflections of the former fears and terrors of an oppressed and afflicted people, must fade and vanish, and that with them the power of the old priesthood must decline. India may be like the sleeping princess. The touch of the healthier and saner western life may at last wake her out of the trance which has for so many centuries bound her senses, and rekindle that fresh and objective view of things which makes itself felt in the earliest Hindu writings. On the other hand, the deep level thought of Indian sages may do much to spiritualise the too material life of Europeans, and make them assess the values of things on a truer scale. It will, perhaps, some day be said that the translation of the sacred books of the East in the nineteenth century marked the beginning of a new intellectual era, much as the translation of the Greek writers did in the fifteenth century. The world always seems to be awaiting the voice of the sage who shall discover the solution of the relations between the subjective life and the objective, between renunciation and enjoyment, between thought and action, the life of the spirit and the life of the senses, moral order and freedom, the form of religion and its essence. In India such opposites are now in the field that from their collision may be struck the spark of truth. Who can tell that, in some mud-cottage in a hamlet of the plains, or a shepherd's cottage in the hills, there may not at this moment be lying a babe from whose mouth some day will proceed that which millions will for ages accept as part of their guidance in the difficult journey of life?

Art. IV.-JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

1. James Russell Lowell: a biography. By Horace Elisha Scudder. Two vols. London: Macmillan and Co., 1901. 2. James Russell Lowell. By M. A. Lawrence Lowell. (Proceedings of Massachusetts Historical Society, 1896.) 3. Letters of James Russell Lowell. Edited by Charles Eliot Norton. Two vols. Osgood, MacIlvaine and Co., 1894. 4. James Russell Lowell and his friends. By Edward Everett Hale. London: Constable, 1899.

5. A Literary History of America. By Barrett Wendell. London: Fisher Unwin, 1901.

THE life of Lowell by Mr Scudder completes our materials for a full appreciation of the man. A short but excellent notice by Mr Lawrence Lowell, and a collection of letters carefully edited by Professor Norton, were followed by an interesting account of 'Lowell and his friends' by Dr Hale. Mr Scudder, writing with the help of Professor Norton, most intimate of Lowell's friends for many years, has now given us a formal biography,' as a complement to the letters. Besides publishing some new material, he has written a judicious narrative, cordially appreciative, and not marked by undue partiality. Perhaps the value set upon Lowell's serious poetry in his own country may justify some critical discussions which strike an English reader as somewhat superfluous. From Professor Barrett Wendell's 'Literary History,' indeed, which is brief, judicious, and well written, we perceive that the critic is abroad in Lowell's own university; and his appreciation of Lowell, though friendly enough, certainly does not err on the side of blind devotion. Meanwhile Mr Scudder's biography is adequate, and brings out the characteristics which made, and will, it is to be hoped, continue to make Lowell attractive, both as man and author, on both sides of the Atlantic.

That Lowell should have had warm friends in England as well as in America is not surprising; certain personal qualities which he possessed in no common degree-warmth of heart and absolute integrity of purpose-are, we may hope, held in equal honour in both countries. But there may be at first sight some difficulty in regard to the popularity of the author. No writings will

ever be more thoroughly racy of the soil than the 'Biglow Papers'; and yet it was precisely in the character of Hosea Biglow that Lowell first became known and is still most warmly admired in England. His friend, Dr Hale, seems to be a little puzzled or even scandalised by the phenomenon. 'You can never tell,' he says, 'what they will like in England, or what they will not like. But this is clear, that, having little or no humour of their own, they are curiously alive to humour in others.' We cannot quite accept, though we will not discuss this plausible and complimentary theory. But how did it come to pass that we were not repelled by the strong Yankee flavour of this rare exotic? The case, we may say, is not without precedent. Lowell could not be more intensely patriotic or provincial than Scott or Burns. The Scottish stamp did not prevent these authors from achieving cosmopolitan fame, although it may be true that a Southron is incapable of entering fully into the spirit of Burns. Lowell may be considered as a particular case of the general problem suggested by these famous instances: how does it happen that a man, writing in the dialect of a small province, and showing in every line the idiosyncrasies of its natives, can yet make himself intelligible to the outside world, and even give additional zest to his utterance by his quaint dialect?

The answer may be suggested by considering the history of the case. Lowell has himself described in several essays the peculiar social atmosphere in which his early days were passed. The French officers who accompanied Lafayette to America fancied, as he tells us, that they saw an Arcadia through their 'Rousseau-tinted' spectacles. Their colonial allies might stand for unsophisticated children of nature, or the embodiment of the republican virtues for which they were accustomed to find precedents in Plutarch. The American legend of the War of Independence-now sometimes sanctioned by English historiansaccepts this view and places the heroes of Lexington and Bunker's Hill on a moral pinnacle, looking down upon tyranny and corruption as personified by George III and Lord North. Whatever their virtues may have been, they were not outwardly picturesque. They had inherited the prosaic gloom, if they had partly lost the fanaticism, of their Puritan ancestors. They might find cause for complacency in the absence of castles and cathedrals which