trouble of ants?' as Tennyson said, speculating on the same idea only to reject it vehemently.

'Then bitter self-reproaches as I stood

I dealt me silently,

As one perverse-misrepresenting Good,
In graceless mutiny.'

So Mr Hardy writes in one of his poems. And in this passage he shows, at least, that, despite the inordinate power which a sensibility so quick, delicate, and acute as not to be entirely healthy, exerts over his imagination, he can at times perceive something else than a soul of evil in things that the rest of men account to be good. Yet we must admit that, even from the verses in question, it is evident how completely his judgment is swayed by feeling, for it was only in the æsthetic rapture of gazing at a lean black stretch of moorland, transfigured in the light of a setting sun, that he was moved to accuse himself so sternly.

It seems to be a difficult matter to avoid extravagance of statement in attempting a comparison between a modern novelist, however brilliant, and a great poetic dramatist. Jane Austen and Shakespeare-how often, since Macaulay, have these disparate names been coupled together! And now, after reading in the letters of the late Lord Acton that if Sophocles had lived in the light of our culture George Eliot might have had an equal, we really hesitate to mention a grand poet of such ancient and universal fame as Euripides in conjunction with a modern prose-writer like Mr Hardy. Yet we think that some curious points of resemblance in temper of mind and general outlook on life might be discovered in the novels of the author of 'Jude the Obscure' and the plays of the dramatist whose 'Hippolytus the Veiled' was resented on moral and artistic grounds by the Athenians.

In their work an intense love of natural beauty, a dislike to town life and a warm regard for the honest home-keeping countryman, are alike observable; and in their women of strange, passionate, and irresponsible temperament, they display a similar type of heroine. Each of them, one would say, was a man of vehement but partial sympathies and brooding imagination, with

an intellect of a high but receptive order, given to cloudy speculation based more upon emotions than upon ideas. In happier circumstances, with their genius for expressing romantic feelings with exquisite realistic art, they might both have clothed the most commonplace truths of life with fresh beauty and significance, as Mr Hardy, indeed, has done in his first and best novels; but, children of an age of scepticism, their religious instincts were soon sophisticated, and their works then reflected, in a want of nobility and balance, the continual inward struggle between the wild idealism of their hearts and the despondency of their minds. Yet the Greek poet never went so far as Mr Hardy goes in blind revolt. Like most thinking men, he found that man by logic alone cannot discover for what end he was born, with a soul in which goodness was mingled with evil, into a world where suffering was inseparable from joy. Instead, however, of finding in this inability of our understanding to explore the unsearchable ways of Providence a cause for excessive disparagement of the worth and the purpose of life, Euripides, the rationalist, in his last and strangest drama, wrote, in a passage splendidly paraphrased by Mr Gilbert Murray: 'Knowledge, we are not foes!

I seek thee diligently;

But the world with a great wind blows,
Shining, and not from thee;

Blowing to beautiful things,

On, amid dark and light,

Till Life, through the trammellings
Of Laws that are not the Right,
Breaks, clean and pure, and sings,

Glorying to God in the height!'

Mr Hardy's philosophic creed is that of a sentimental materialist; he is a mighty yet restless and woeful spirit, a prince of modern English literature by reason of his earlier works, but in certain of his later works a misdirected force.

EDWARD WRIGHT.

Art. VIII. THE PENINSULAR WAR: BAYLEN AND CORUNNA.

1. A History of the Peninsular War. By Charles Oman. Vols I and II. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902-3.

2. The Diary of Sir John Moore. Edited by MajorGeneral Sir J. F. Maurice. Two vols. London: Arnold, 1904.

3. Correspondance de Joachim Murat. Par A. Lumbroso. Turin: Roux Frassati, 1899.

4. Campagne de l'Empereur Napoléon en Espagne. Par le Commandant Balagny. Vols I and II. Paris: Berger Levrault, 1902-3.

5. Les Guerres d'Espagne sous Napoléon. Par E. Guillon. Paris: Plon, 1902.

6. La Capitulation de Baylen. Par Lieut.-Colonel Clerc. Paris: Fontemoing, 1903.

7. The Life of John Colborne, Field-marshal Lord Seaton. By G. C. Moore Smith. London: Murray, 1903.

SINCE Napier, more than sixty years ago, published the last volume of his famous history of the Peninsular War, great additions have been made to our knowledge of the events which he therein narrated. The correspondence of Castlereagh, Wellington, and Napoleon has been given to the world; in the case of Napoleon, even the letters suppressed by the famous commission that sat in the days of the Second Empire to edit the correspondence have now, for the most part, seen the light; while step by step the correspondence of Napoleon's relatives and subordinates is making its appearance. To this stream of documents of the first importance must be added numerous memoirs and autobiographies of famous soldiers and statesmen of the period which have recently become accessible. We have had ordered histories in the great work of the Spanish General Arteche, the standpoint of which is altogether different from that of Napier; in Commandant Balagny's admirable summary of Napoleon's campaign in Spain, which is now complete as far as December 1808, and is of peculiar value in that it prints the original documents and orders, collected painfully from the archives of the three Powers that took part in the war; and finally, in Professor Oman's two

volumes-the first instalment of what promises to be a great work-which deal in the fullest detail with the progress of the struggle as far as the retreat from Talavera. Last, but not least, are monographs such as that of Colonel Clerc, treating of the events of Baylen in the light of the French and Spanish records. It would have been strange indeed if all this mass of information had not modified the conclusions arrived at by such historians as Napier and Foy, who were too near to the events which they described to be free from prejudice or always correctly informed.

No reader of Napier can fail to notice the curious party bias which marks his work whenever it touches upon questions of policy. He was a strong Whig; and it was the whole duty of the Whig during the Napoleonic era to exalt the beneficent intentions and applaud the character of Napoleon, while overwhelming with abuse the names of Castlereagh and Perceval. Professor Oman has pointed out that Napier nowhere renders homage to the insight and tenacity of Castlereagh, who first discerned the merits of Wellington as a general, and then supported him steadily in the teeth of the bitterest abuse from the Whig party in England. It is as though some eminent soldier who held strongly the view which we of this generation have learnt to know as pro-Boer were to write the history of the South African war. Such a work might be trustworthy on matters of purely military interest; yet, as war and policy go hand in hand, every conclusion would be coloured with prejudice, and the result would, in such respects, be unsatisfactory.

At the very outset Napier ignores the plain signs of Napoleon's hostility to Spain before the court intrigues of October 1807, and ascribes the Emperor's intervention mainly to these intrigues. Mr Oman rightly draws attention to Napoleon's casual remark to Jourdan in 1805, that, whether for the consolidation of my dynasty or for the safety of France, a Bourbon on the throne of Spain is too dangerous a neighbour.' But two years before this, in 1803, when Spain showed some sign of withdrawing from the disastrous alliance forced upon her by France, he had threatened that the first insult to his fleet at Corunna should be followed by the fall of the Spanish monarchy; and a month later he had demanded

the dismissal of the King of Spain's favourite, Godoy. It is to be observed that both Napier and Mr Oman regard Godoy as a miserable character, though the fact that he was the object of Napoleon's personal hostility suggests that he was not quite so bad a Spaniard as has been represented. Napoleon, as he said himself, only attacked people whom he thought formidable; and his libels have been swallowed with excessive credulity. More than once Godoy had thought of resistance to France, and he was the author and inspirer of the famous proclamation of 1806, which finally determined Napoleon--as Metternich thought, and as Mr Oman shows conclusively-to annex Spain when the convenient moment should arrive.

Hence Mr Oman is almost certainly right and Napier as certainly wrong in the view taken of the motives of the treaty concluded between Godoy and Duroc in 1807 for the dismemberment of Portugal. It was intended by Napoleon to give the excuse for the military occupation of Spain by his armies. That he anticipated no serious fighting is the only possible conclusion from the quality of the troops that formed this army of invasion. With the exception of Junot's corps, which was composed of seasoned soldiers, the French divisions were made up of raw recruits in provisional regiments. Murat, in his correspondence with the Emperor, points out that many regiments wanted officers; nearly all the divisions were without staffs or chiefs of the staff; there were few engineers. Our young fellows' (says Murat) are in very poor condition, and generally badly commanded; that is to say, the character of the officers is generally bad'; there is a great want of coats and shakos'; 'the corps of Marshal Moncey is in a very bad state; there are not 2000 men in it who are not suffering from scurvy'; 'the corps is a bear-garden; every one gives orders.' Troops such as these were not fit for a serious war; and no one knew this better than Napoleon. The conclusion is irresistible that he never expected a serious war, though months later, in a letter to his brother Joseph, he pretended with his usual assumption of infallibility that nothing that had happened had surprised him. 'He thought that he could accomplish his purpose without striking a blow,' wrote Metternich in 1809.

The irruption of the French armies did not at first