expect a lawyer of forty years' standing to sympathise very much with a youth who regards it as his great hardship to be educated for the law. By applying your parts to that profession, you may render the greatest benefits to individuals, and to your country, which is or ought to be the principal object of your studies.'

The name of this youthful aspirant for literary fame was Edwin Hill Handley. But in spite of the not altogether unfavourable prognostics of these high priests of the Muses, and of the originality and energy of his own character-known to a very small circle of intimate friends-ill health and adverse circumstances terminated at an early period a life which seemed at one moment likely to lead to distinction. He died young, leaving a considerable portion of his fortune to the Royal Society for the encouragement of philosophy and science. Perhaps this munificent donation, which has, we believe, been recently paid over to the Society, and our own slight accidental tribute to his memory, may rescue his name from total oblivion. But of those who enter upon life, spurning the ordinary duties of a professional career, and devoting themselves with what seems to be a noble scorn of gain to the highest efforts of the imagination and the intellect, how many fail and falter by the way like this inheritor of unfulfilled renown,' or attain renown like Haydon only to perish bruised and maimed at the feet of their idol!

We regret that our limits forbid us to follow in greater detail Haydon's very interesting letters, which bring before us many persons of note from the Duke of Wellington and Lord Melbourne down to Lamb and Wilkie. But there is one class of Haydon's friends whom we cannot pass over in silence-we mean his pupils, who became his brother-artists, and achieved success in art far beyond his own. Nothing enlisted Haydon's sympathy more surely than an indication of early talent. He discovered the precocious genius of Edwin Landseer-gave him his own anatomical drawings of a dissected lioness to studyproduced his drawings at Sir George Beaumont's-and helped him to sell his first picture. When little Lance came to ask Haydon on what terms he would give him lessons, the artist replied, Let me see what you can do; I don't ask the length of my pupils' purses; if you can draw I will teach you for nothing.' Lance became a favourite pupil, and in point of colouring an excellent painter of still life. Wilkie was Haydon's contemporary, and they remained sincerely attached to each other through life; though nothing could be more opposite than the perfect skill with which Wilkie realised and reproduced the familiar scenes before him, and the imperfect

skill with which Haydon aimed at the sublime, the imaginative, and the unreal. Haydon's eyesight was so impaired that he was utterly incapable of painting a small picture, composed of true and delicate harmonies of colour and expression. Large composition was a necessity to him, and we question whether his eye really saw his work as others see it. Of all Haydon's pupils none did him greater honour, and none expressed with greater feeling his obligations to his master, than Charles Eastlake. He, of all the English artists of our time, carried to the farthest point the study of the history and the mystery of his art. Other painters may have surpassed him in vigour and manual skill, but in the knowledge and appreciation of that marvellous power which animates the marbles of Greece with undying life-which breathes in exquisite refinement through the earlier school of Italy-and which is the true cradle of art, Eastlake was confessedly supreme. Haydon had set him on the right track; and Eastlake used to admirable advantage the more favourable conditions in which he was placed-his own modest and sedate temperament-his long residence in Italy— his visit to Greece-his vast acquaintance with the literature of art. To Haydon himself none of these things were vouchsafed by fortune. Eastlake's sympathy and gratitude never deserted his early friend: and we know not which of the two suffered most when Eastlake had to announce to his heroic old instructor that the cartoon which Haydon had sent in to the competition at Westminster Hall was not placed for a prize.

Sir George Beaumont, annoyed by the irritation produced by Haydon's writings, once urged him to throw aside the pen and stick to the brush, by which he might paint himself into fame. But, though the advice was well meant, we are not sure that it was judicious. There were fatal and insurmountable deficiencies in Haydon's painting, and an artist who aspires to the highest walk in art must either succeed grandly or not succeed at all. There is no middle path. The real merit of Haydon's large compositions was rather overrated than underrated by his friends and companions. They knew he had noble intentions, and they gave him credit for them. Literature is a less jealous mistress: she admits of a thousand degrees in her service. Haydon would certainly not have written a Shakspearian tragedy or a book of Paradise Lost,' but as a critic, speaking of subjects which he knew, we think he might have been a fair rival to Hazlitt. His letters prove that he wrote with uncommon spirit and perspicuity. Some of his published compositions, especially the letter in which he

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demolished the pedantry of Payne Knight and vindicated beyond all controversy the unrivalled majesty of the Elgin Marbles, were mordant and successful in the highest degree. No pamphlet of Swift was more effective or more popular than that letter. In these volumes we find a powerful and well-argued vindication of Christianity against the scepticism of John Scott; and a narrative of a visit to Stratford-uponAvon, which can hardly be surpassed for feeling, descriptive grace, and humour. We regret that it is too long to be quoted. His Table-Talk, too, abounds in wit, shrewd observation, and amusing anecdote. Our conclusion therefore is that Haydon mistook his course from enthusiasm for an art in which it was not given to him to attain the highest excellence; and that if he had done less with his brush and more with his pen, he might perhaps have anticipated the services which critics like Mr. Ruskin have since rendered to the arts. It may only happen once or twice in centuries that a man is gifted with the extraordinary power of creating visible forms which touch the most sublime feelings of our nature, and excite love, sympathy, grief, adoration. But the humbler task of maintaining and enforcing sound principles in art, and of leading men to know and feel whatever is best and most beautiful, is no unworthy duty. It requires knowledge of the art itself, a correct judgment, an enthusiastic nature, and the power of language. These Haydon possessed, and this duty he might have performed with profit to himself and with advantage to society.

ART. III.—A History of England principally in the Seventeenth Century. By LEOPOLD VON RANKE. 6 vols. Oxford, at the Clarendon Press: 1875.

THE

HE Germans are ever welcome contributors to our literature, historical and political, whether they come in their more ambitious mood by correcting our provincial crudities through some purely intellectual process analytic or synthetic, or submit to the humbler but more valuable science of microscopic examination in some sequestered corner. A book is doubly welcome when it combines in due proportion the national powers of minute analysis and broad induction. Germany has in recent times been prolific in contributions to the history of the British Empire. When authors in the same path follow quick upon each other's heels, it is a natural fatality in the conduct of periodical literature that the latest arrival may receive

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the immediate notice that can be given but to a few. But here comes one whose transcendent merits demand priority of courtesy and attention. In order to take the measure of these merits it may be well to recall, if only in a transient glance, the shape and colour that the progress of our Constitution has taken heretofore in the literature of our continental neighbours. Our stormy history of perils and disasters used to be told as a warning, that those who lived in the serene repose afforded to them by the paternal government of a Louis le Grand or a Friedrich der Grosse might be conscious of their blessings and remain unperplexed by fear of change. From the Histoire des Révolutions d'Angleterre' of Father Orleans, downwards, the English people were ever held up as examples of turbulence, fickleness, and hostility to their own constitution and laws. The calamities consequent on these political iniquities were favourite warnings, especially addressed to the French, until the day when their own revolutionary tempest obliterated such puny recollections. We esteem ourselves as a people loving order and rendering a willing obedience to the laws; but the typical Englishman of historical literature, French or German, was ever a turbulent, restless being breaking through all rules and restraints; and when the being thus created was made reconcilable with the existence of so much rule and order as were necessary for keeping a State from falling to pieces, the author seemed to have no other remedy at hand save the creating out of his own imagination an apparatus of correction still more harsh and cruel than the machinery of the despotism under which he lived. A few thinking men like Montesquieu and Delolme tried to do us justice, but theirs was the still small voice of philosophy lifted against inveterate prejudice.

As yet, and for all that the terrible sufferings of the other European nations have taught them, the progress of our Constitution, and especially the portion of its history that is counted as revolutionary, is so little known that it is difficult to exaggerate the greatness of the service done to the world by a book like the present, revealing in distinct sequence the history and causes of our political peace and power. The service is in so far valuable that it does us justice before the world; but it will be infinitely more valuable to that outer world itself, in showing that it is not by thirst of change, not by encouraging and following conceited schemers who profess a capacity to take society to pieces and restore it renewed and strengthened, that we owe our happy quietness when surrounded by revolutions; but it is to the fact that all our great popular battles have been fought for the preservation in efficient working order of

old revered constitutional precedents. It will be an inestimable blessing to Europe when her revolutionary spirits shall no longer have to plead the strength and blessed repose of our political condition as the fruit of the school of political opinions to which they belong.

The service of rendering justice to the history of our Constitution is not the less meritorious that it has been strangely neglected or mismanaged among ourselves, especially in the portion of historical literature that deals with the great struggle of the seventeenth century. Clarendon left behind him his story told with a grand and touching eloquence; it was the story of a suffering martyr-a man of amiable character and blameless life, told by the affectionate servant who lamented his misfortunes, and had thrown his own lot into the unfortunate fate of his patron's descendants. Without much distortion or any stain of malignity, he made his hero appear the victim of restless fanatics and intriguers, ever as they gained concession after concession pressing on for more and more. Partial as it was when its author dropped the pen, it was retouched thirty years afterwards with an eye to its influence on the politics of the day of publication, yet with an assurance on the part of those who published it, that it went forth unaltered. But this does not exhaust the incidents that cooperated in spreading abroad the delusion. Hume's history of the period is just Clarendon's lightened of some words of antiquated and turgid eloquence. Thus were all the great chancellor's efforts in his master's vindication revived and sent forth afresh into the world. They were the soul and substance of the history that was read everywhere, from the library to the schoolroom, and re-echoed in every European tongue. For those who choose to be set right we have the valuable criticisms of Brodie, Hallam, Forster, and many others; but a natural touch of indolence in mankind leaves a plausible story well told long in the supremacy it has once gained. Carlyle, to be sure, lifted up a testimony louder and stronger, but it is as the voice of one crying in the wilderness. His school of sceptical fanaticism and hero-worship stands apart like some exclusive sect of hyper-Brownists or old-light anti-burgers, anathematising not only Antichrist, but all who had gone before them in the same denunciatory process with a less certain sound.

No doubt the great civil war, however truly and impartially told, cannot but make a sad and humiliating history, darkened by many catastrophes not wholly undeserved by those whom they overtook. There was the strange brood of uncouth