fordshire, Monmouthshire, and the six southern Welsh counties. In this way I had an opportunity of seeing a considerable portion of Great Britain with a minuteness which few have enjoyed. And I did my business after a fashion in which no other official man has worked, at least for many years. I went almost everywhere on horseback. I had two hunters of my own, and here and there, where I could, I hired a third horse. I had an Irish groom with me, an old man, who has now been in my service for thirty-five years; and in this manner I saw almost every house-I think I may say every house of importance in this large district. The object was to create a postal network which should catch all recipients of letters." This and similar work brought incidents of an amusing character, which Mr. Trollope recounts, in passing; but his autobiography is not one of his life, except as it bears pretty distinctly upon his literary career, and so he does not dwell at length upon his experience. It is very clear, however, that this excursiveness of occupation brought him immense resources, and enabled him to give that multitudinous detail on which he built the structure of his stories and their characters. If one is studying a particular subject every book which he opens casually has a page which illumines his study; and Mr. Trollope, busy with the creation of characters and incidents, could not fail to find right and left, as he went about the post-office business, materials for his work. He does not say this in so many words, but the passage which we first quoted in this paper leaves us in no doubt. No one could live day by day in the imaginary world which Mr. Trollope projected, consort with its people and know them intimately, without economizing to the fullest extent all the experience which he enjoyed in the fleshand-blood world which he inhabited. Mr. Trollope went still further. He accustomed himself to a continuity of literary labor which fairly takes one's breath away. He is to the weak-willed literary brother what Miss Jane Taylor's Mistress Dial was to the Discontented Pendulum. For Mr. Trollope was an indefatigable civil-service clerk; he was a rider to hounds, who followed that amusement with a dogged persistency which makes his sport a satire upon other men's business; he was a club man; he was, so far as glimpses show, a man of fine domestic habits. In each occupation he did enough to satisfy those who were engaged in the same way, and yet in literature he was the most voluminous of authors. At the close of his autobiography, he writes, — "And so I end the record of my literary performances, which I think are more in amount than the works of any other living English author. If any English authors not living have written more, as may probably have been the case,I do not know who they are. I find that, taking the books which have appeared under our names, I have published much more than twice as much as Carlyle. I have also published considerably more than Voltaire, even including his letters. We are told that Varro, at the age of eighty, had written four hundred and eighty volumes, and that he went on writing for eight years longer. I wish I knew what was the length of Varro's volumes; I comfort myself by reflecting that the amount of manuscript described as a book in Varro's time was not much. Varro, too, is dead, and Voltaire; whereas I am still living, and may add to the pile." The explanation has been hinted at. The old prescription of nulla dies sine linea was taken literally by Trollope. When at home he did all his writing before breakfast, and when traveling he worked on the railway train or in his stateroom until he had finished his stint. So perfectly did he have his literary pulse under control that it beat two hun dred and fifty words to every quarter of an hour. Think of that, unhappy littérateurs, who wait for the mood and weave a Penelope's web, tearing up every night the unsatisfactory pages of the day! Not only was this daily practice possible because of the daily association with the characters to be drawn, but the familiar life with the heroes and heroines of his stories, to which Mr. Trollope refers so often, was made a habit by the daily record of their doings. If he had only thought about them, and rarely written, they would have faded from his thought. If he had written irregularly and by moods, he would have needed to recall features and characteristics with a special effort. It was because Mr. Trollope made his work so common that he was able to make it so real and so generally even. The narrative of his literary career is the occasion of his autobiography, and brings with it many reflections upon the history of the novel, criticisms upon other writers, and suggestions of the condition of authorship in England. By what he says of criticism Mr. Trollope lifts the corner of a curtain which hides a very repulsive picture of English literary life. Is it possible that there is so much lack of self-respect in authors and so much personal prejudice in criticism as Mr. Trollope, by making his own career an exception, would have us believe? The whole work is so entertaining that it is hard to forego the pleasure of pointing out the many amusing passages. Mr. Trollope, criticising himself, and turning over the leaves of his own books in the company of the readers, is as delightful as any figure which he has placed within those books. The suggestions which his career makes to the young littérateur are well worth heeding; but after all, there is nothing which the autobiography gives of so much value as the character of this sturdy Englishman, the very hero of the matter of fact; tramping through fiction, riding to hounds, making straight lines from the post-office to every house, who worships in his novels an English Destiny as sure as the Greek Fate, and looks back upon his own life with a solid satisfaction in the good sense which has made it a cheerful success. GREATER BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES. BISHOP BUTLER, in the course of an argument, entertained the theory that a whole nation might suffer from an attack of insanity. Mr. Seeley, in his lectures on the Expansion of England, seems to assume that the English nation is the victim of mental myopy. Here is a nation, he says in effect, which is a world-state, and has been since 1600, yet stupidly insists on regarding itself as a European kingdom, with large, in 1 The Expansion of England. Two Courses of Lectures. By J. R. SEELEY, M. A. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1883. deed overgrown, colonial and dependent possessions. Its historians and statesmen persist in confining their attention to the interior development and the politics of a little island; its people are still insular in their consciousness; yet all the while a Greater Britain is forming, which must be measured, not by the limited states of the European system, but by the two great powers which cast their shadows on the future, Russia and the United States. It is Mr. Seeley's business, in these lectures, to interpret English history since the time of Eliz abeth by the growth of this Greater civilization, that we find it by far the Britain. best working hypothesis of the development of England which has been presented to students. It is so simple, so comprehensive, and so suggestive that we accept it at once, and are scarcely prepared to offer any objection, except the obvious one that if Mr. Seeley is right, then historians for the most part have been on the wrong track; and more startling still, the English people have wanted the consciousness which it is hard to dissociate from a long historic development. It may be suggested, however, on this last point, that there is a good deal more of practical recognition of Greater Britain than shows itself in parliamentary discussion, or even in journalism. Certainly one of the most striking phenomena apparent to the stranger in London is the evidence which meets him on every hand that the city is the metropolis of Greater Britain. A walk of an hour about the Mansion House district brings to the eye the geographical names of all quarters of the globe. There is something almost grotesque in this conception of a people attaining an imperial state, yet so near-sighted as to need the artificial aid of two courses of lectures to enable them to see distinctly beyond their nose. M. Jourdain becomes commonplace, in comparison. None the less, the reader of these lectures, especially if he be an American, does not find it difficult to accept Mr. Seeley's judgment of his countrymen. When Disraeli, acting out one of his own spangling romances, invested Queen Victoria with the title of Empress of India, the conventional Englishman was made thoroughly uncomfortable. He felt that the prime minister was making a guy of the Queen, and yet he was unable to deny that England did have an unquestionable sovereignty in India. The Jingo crowd were delighted, but apparently still less able to give an historic justification. It was the open secret of Disraeli's mysterious nature that he had the penetration of a Semitic mind with the vulgar liking for a hair-oil gentility, which made him capable of an imperial instinct while he appeared to be a showman. It comes easier, we suspect, to an American, who has grown up in the consciousness of his citizenship, to give immediate assent to the main propositions laid down by Mr. Seeley in his fascinating volume. We are accustomed, in the United States, to think continentally, when we undertake historical studies; and by our remoteness from the party politics of England and the influence of social traditions, we are able to follow more freely a generalization of history which is indifferent to the triumphs of party and the succession of a royal family. At any rate, Mr. Seeley's reading of English history is so reasonable, and so intelligent in its apprehension of the relation of the United States to modern The first course of eight lectures concerns itself with the history of England as it regards the colonies and the United States, and is in effect a new reading of that history in the eighteenth century. Mr. Seeley complains that the unity of the period has heretofore been missed, because students have pursued an artificial method in grouping the facts. “We have an unfortunate habit," he says, " of distributing historical affairs under reigns. We do this mechanically, as it were, even in periods where we recognize - nay, where we exaggerate the insignificance of the monarch. The first Georges were, in my opinion, by no means so insignificant as is often supposed; but even the most influential sovereign has seldom a right to give his name to an age. Much misconception, for example, has arisen out of the expression Age of Louis XIV. The first step, then, in arranging and dividing any period of English history is to get rid of such useless headings as Reign of Queen Anne, Reign of George I., Reign of George II. In place of these we must study to put divisions founded upon some real stage of progress in the national life. We must look onward, not from king to king, but from great event to great event. And in order to do this we must estimate events, measure their greatness; a thing which cannot be done without considering them and analyzing them closely. When, with respect to any event, we have satisfied ourselves that it deserves to rank among the leading events of the national history, the next step is to trace the causes by which it was produced. In this way each event takes the character of a development, and each development of this kind furnishes a chapter to the national history, a chapter which will get its name from the event." We may say, in passing, that an American student is likely to accept this rational statement more easily than an English student, because the shortness of administrative terms and the wider distribution of authority have led him to study his history rather by natural periods; and though the formal division by Presidents is still retained in many textbooks, the better judgment refuses to acknowledge it except as a convenience to the memory. With this principle in mind, Mr. Seeley, taking the period from 1688 to 1815, finds that the great events are foreign wars, and he aims to discover the unity of purpose pervading them. Upon the surface there is only a confused succession of wars, having "But look a no apparent connection. little closer," he proceeds, "and after all you will discover some uniformities. For example, out of these seven wars of England five are wars with France from the beginning, and both the other two, though the belligerent at the outset was in the first Spain, and in the second our own colonies, yet became in a short time Now and ended as wars with France. here is one of those general facts which we are in search of. The full magnitude of it is not usually perceived, because the whole middle part of the eighteenth century has passed too much into oblivion. . . . The truth is, these wars group themselves very symmetrically, and the whole period stands out as an age of gigantic rivalry between England and France, a kind of second Hundred Years' War. I said that the expansion of England in the New World and Asia is the formula which sums up for England the history of the eighteenth century. I point out now that the great triple war of the middle of that century is neither more nor less than the great decisive duel between England and France for the possession of the New World. It was perhaps scarcely perceived at the time, as it has been seldom remarked since; but the explanation of that second Hundred Years' War between England and France, which fills the eighteenth century, is this, that they were rival candidates for the possession of the New World; and the triple war, which fills the middle of the century, is as it were the decisive campaign in that great world-struggle." All this has a familiar sound to our ears; for no one, in reading the history of the United States, has failed to recognize the critical passage of the struggle of England and France for possession, and the momentous result of the fall of Quebec. It is in the relation of minor European complications to this struggle. that Mr. Seeley shows his historical insight, and in his clear discrimination of the relative importance of the colonial and the church question. Thus, he illuminates at once the perplexity of the war of the Spanish succession, when he says, "We must not be misled by the name. Much has been said of the wicked waste of blood and treasure of which we were guilty, when we interfered in a Spanish question with which we had no concern, or terrified ourselves with a phantom of French ascendency which had no reality. How much better, it has been said, to devote ourselves to the civilizing pursuit of trade! But read in Ranke how the war broke out. You will find that it was precisely trade that led us into it. The Spanish succession touched us because France threatened, by establishing her influence in Spain, to enter into the Spanish monopoly of the New World, and to shut us irrevocably out of it. Accordingly, the great practical results of this war to England were colonial, namely, the conquest of Acadie and the Asiento contract, which for the first time made England on the great scale a slave-trading power." This, then, is the thesis, worked out with a most suggestive use of historical material, and full of instruction to American as well as English students. Mr. Seeley is led, necessarily, to inquire into the whole meaning of colonies and empire, and to distinguish between these systems as applicable to England and systems having the same title but far different historical interpretation. He maintains that Englishmen, when asking, What is the good of colonies? have constantly been misled by a false conception of what English colonies really are. "That question," he remarks, " implies that we think of a colony, not as part of our state, but as a possession belonging to it. For we should think it absurd to raise such a question about a recognized part of the body politic. Who ever thought of inquiring whether Cornwall or Kent rendered any sufficient return for the money which we lay out upon them, whether those counties were worth keeping? The tie that holds together the parts of a nationstate is of another kind; it is not composed of considerations of profit and loss, but is analogous to the family bond. The same tie would hold a nation to its colonies, if colonies were regarded as simply an extension of the nation. If Greater Britain, in the full sense of the phrase, really existed, Canada and Australia would be to us as Kent and Cornwall." When he says of the term colonial possessions, "At the bottom of it certainly was the idea that the colony was an estate, which was to be worked for the benefit of the mother-country," he almost succeeds in putting into a phrase the explanation of the secession of the thirteen American colonies from Great Britain. The most noticeable omission in Mr. Seeley's argument is in a failure to take account of the factor of local government. He sees that in the increased facility of intercourse mere distance of space is not fatal to unity of government; but he does not seem to consider that, while Canada and Australia are much nearer to London than the colonies here were in 1775, the principle of autonomy which lay imbedded in English liberty, and acted as a powerful solvent in separating the thirteen colonies from Great Britain, is constantly gaining in force in the colonies of Great Britain to-day, and shaping the destiny of those colonies. He points to the United States as having successfully solved the great problem of expansion on a vast scale, when she throws out States into her new territory without shaking her political system, and he appears to intimate that the future of Great Britain lies in federation. Unless we misread his pages, he regards the United States as offering an illustration of such federation; but the unity of the nation lies deeper than any state lines or ad. justment of state interests. There is an indefeasible property in territorial boundaries, which cannot be overlooked. Were the time ever to come when Alaska should be a flourishing state, there would be a steadily growing demand to rectify the boundaries of the Pacific. coast, and the old war cry of "Fiftyfour forty, or fight!" would have a new significance. A federation of separated |