nacle, a sensible letter on "National Education." He would have the Government look only to secular matters, and leave religious ones to the parties best instructed therein, and best authorized to treat them. "It seems to me monstrous (he adds) that the State should be prevented from taking any efficient measures for teaching Roman Catholic children to read, write, and cypher, merely because they believe in the Pope and the Pope is an impostor, which I candidly confess he is." How Sterling's love of what he believed to be real could, however, be influenced by what he was wont to look upon as sham, is manifested in his conflicting opinions touching St. Peter's. On his first visit to Rome he is not affected by the theatrical yet cold aspect of the great cathedral scene. On a subsequent visit, when he was again flying from his home circle to avoid the scythe of the Inevitable, he acknowledges that "the depth, sincerity, and splendour that there once was in the semi-paganism of the old Catholics, comes out in St. Peter's and its dependencies almost as grandly as does Greek and Roman art in the Forum and the Vatican galleries." These two opinions are precisely those of a merely impressionable man. The impressions vary according to the humour of the moment, and, irreconcilable as they seem, they are to be reconciled by the portion of truth which lies in both. In the month of May, 1839, we find Sterling back again at Clifton, and ere a month has well elapsed we meet with proof that the influences of Carlyle are again acting strongly upon him. This proof we have in a letter to the last named person, wherein the writer speaks in terms of glowing eulogy of the German Rationalistic Strauss and his work entitled the "Life of Jesus"-a work in which the person of the Redeemer is reduced to the shadowy outline of a myth. Sterling holds this work as being unanswerable by modern, Christian, orthodox, theologians, and he finds in it the anti-creed and anti-code for which he had long been sighing. This opinion, which we cannot cite at length, contrasts strangely and strongly with the noble and touching letter written by Sterling to his eldest son. The poor, buffeted struggler, tossed into the Church by Coleridge-kept there in usefulness for a season by Archdeacon Hare-and beckoned thence by the upraised finger of Carlyle, was wont to say, fearfully as it were, that it would not do to "blaze out" all at once against a national creed; and he appears to have paused ere he would tear it from the hearts of those near and dear to him. Even against the pungent plausibility of his tempter, he seems to have struggled. He penned, indeed, a paper in his praise, and

printed it in the Westminster under the title Carlyle." It gave to the living subject of that paper, as he himself naively confesses, a "deep silent joy." The joy arose from the symptoms adduced of the writer's ultimately bowing his neck altogether to the influence of" Sir Oracle !" We are told that Sterling was "often enough the stiff gainsayer," in the private communings held between himself and Carlyle; and now, says the latter in exultation and in reference to the praise in the Review, Sterling "was the doer of this." He got small praise in return for any of his own doings when he turned to rhyming; nor was the public judgment, when he gave his first volume of poems to the world, much more favourable than that of Carlyle, and this unfortunate circumstance probably compelled the foiled poet to look with more respect than ever on the dicta of the philosopher. And yet there was feeling within him that he could effect something that would keep his name fresh in the popular memory; and it was to show that this feeling was well based that, in 1840, he published his poem "The Election." From this poem we will cite one passage, and contrast therewith another devoted to the description of a similar object, by Keats, whose story, sufferings, and death so nearly resembled that of Sterling, and who has left a name less perishable, because, even under more adverse circumstances, he kept before him one end in view, and was not tossed about by the conflicting opinions of men who set themselves up for authorities without adequate warrant. Both the passages below paint an interior, with a fair maiden, deep in pure meditation, and her thoughts clinging closer to her than her garments. And first, Sterling:

"Now in her chamber, all alone, the maid,
Her polished limbs and shoulders disarrayed,
One little taper gave the only light,

One little mirror caught so dear a sight.

'Mid hangings dusk and shadows wide she stood,

Like some pale nymph in dark-leaved solitude

Of rocks and gloomy waters all alone,

Where sunshine scarcely breaks on stump or stone.
To scare the dreamy vision this did she,

A star in deepest night, intent but free,
Gleam through the eyeless darkness, heeding not
Her beauty's praise, but musing o'er her lot.

"Her garments, one by one, she laid aside
And then her knotted hair's long locks untied
With careless hand, and down her cheeks they fell,
And o'er her maiden bosom's blue veins swell.

The right hand fingers played amidst her hair,
And with her reverie wandered here and there:
The other hand sustained the only dress
That now but half concealed her loveliness;
And, pausing, aimlessly she stood and thought,
In virgin beauty by no fear distraught."

We

This is not pure from Castalia; but greater men have written worse lines, and there is-promise we would have said -but we remember that the writer was now considerably past thirty-the age for performance, if it be ever to come. may conclude, therefore, that this was the best the writer could effect in this particular line. How inferior it is to the picture of Madeline, in the "Eve of St. Agnes," by the younger and, as it seemed, more hopelessly struggling Keats, three stanzas by the latter will suffice to show:

"A casement high and triple-arch'd there was,
All garlanded with carven imageries

Of fruits and flowers, and bunches of knot-grass,
And diamonded with panes of quaint device,
Innumerable stains and splendid dyes,

As are the tiger-moth's deep-damask'd wings;
And in the midst, 'mong thousand heraldries,
And twilight saints, and dim emblazonings,

A shielded scutcheon blush'd with blood of queens and kings.
"Full on this casement shone the wintry moon,
And threw warm gales on Madeline's fair breast,
As down she knelt for heaven's grace and boon;
Rose bloom fell on her hands, together prest,
And on her silver cross soft amethyst,
And on her hair a glory like a saint:
She seems a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven :-Porphyro grew faint:
She knelt so pure a thing, so free from mortal taint.
"Anon, his heart revives: her vespers done;
Of all its wreathed pearls her hair she frees;
Unclasps her warmed jewels, one by one;
Loosens her fragrant boddice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees:
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake, and sees,
In fancy, fair St. Agnes in her bed,

But dares not look behind, or all the charm is fled."

But, if Keats surpassed Sterling in this style of poetical limning, the gentleman excelled the son of the Finsbury stable-keeper in dramatic portraiture. Carlyle, indeed, gave a "stingy verdict," as he calls it, against Sterling's tragedy of

"Strafford," which, contrasted with the lumbering and thundering "Otho" of Keats, is as Marlow to mad Nat. Lee. Our hero, one would think, occasionally felt with pain the thraldom in which he was held, or the impediments to labour offered by his feeble condition of health. In the summer of 1841, when sojourning at Falmouth, he expresses mournfully "the only wish at the bottom of his heart is to be able to work vigorously in his own way, anywhere, were it in some circle of Dante's Inferno;" and it comes upon us as mournfully to discover that, at this very time, he is deep in correspondence with Carlyle as though he was not to have the leisure he longed for, even if he had the strength; and then we strike upon the trail, which the latter was compelling his young friend to follow, in a sentence of one of Sterling's letters wherein is the following passage:-"The oddest sign of the times I know is a cheap translation of Strauss's Leben Jesu,' now publishing in numbers, and said to be circulating far and wide. What does-or rather, what does not-this portend?" He was, probably, not even yet so complete a recipient of the Carlyle wisdom, the theological especially, as that sublime mystifier would have had him. Sterling proposed to his master, indeed, to start a Magazine for the purpose of spreading Carlylean views: but Carlyle very modestly declared that there were not honest fighters enough among literary men to give such a work a chance of success. The old sense of uncertainty thereupon-or, at all events, thereafter-fell upon the spirit of Sterling. "What we are going to (he says) is abundantly obscure; but what all men are going from is very plain!" Is it not saddening to contemplate this poor inquirer, weak yet honest of purpose, beating despairingly about in a mist, conscious of light beyond, and, when hastening thitherward, kept back by those who called themselves his guides," and finally accepting his position as one that was not to be resisted? And yet, he had a sharp vision for detecting the false positions of others whose superstition was only of a different quality from his own. Thus, in the spring of 1842, he spent a few weeks at Naples. He smiles with good-humoured contempt at the "religious ignorance," as we may term it, around him. "The favourite device on the walls of Naples (he writes) is a vermillion picture of a Male and Female Soul, respectively up to the waist-(the waist of a soul!)—in fire; and an angel above each watering the sufferers from a watering-pot. This is intended to gain alms for masses." And, again, he says-" The miracle of Januarius's blood is, on the whole, my most curious experience. The

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furious entreaties, shrieks, and sobs of a set of old women, yelling till the miracle was successfully performed, are things never to be forgotten." He could despise all this, and it was, and remains, debasing enough; but what is there in it more incomprehensible than in the "eternal silences," the "cathedrals of immensity," the "ghastly spectralities," and the many still less understandable things in the gospel according to Carlyle?

Be

But the drama is closing and the last scenes are tragical, as was to be expected from a story sad from the very chords of the opening symphony. In 1843--he was then at Falmouth in shattered health himself, and giving solace to his affectionate wife suffering deeply from premature confinement -his father had all but ceased to live. The once strong man broke a blood-vessel, and thereon body and mind fell into gradual ruin, till death came quietly to end all at last. His good mother, too, fell ill and died before her husband. tween the two sick couches of mother and wife, Sterling experienced a divided duty. He remained with her to whom he had promised aid and love in sickness and in health; but, from that bed-side, he dispatched missives to his dying mother, such only as son of truest heart could send to mother worthiest of his love. And there are in them, gleams of sunshine that the world may enjoy, as well as words of tender and touching affection intended to reach the mother's heart alone::

...... Knowing how you suffer, and how weak you are, anything is a blessing to me that helps me to rise out of confusion and grief into the sense of God and joy..... Dear mother-there is surely something uniting us that cannot perish. I seem so sure of a love that shall last and re-unite us that, even the remembrance, painful as that is, of all my own follies and ill tempers, cannot shake this faith. When I think of you and know how you feel towards me, and have felt for every moment of almost forty years, it would be too dark to believe that we shall never meet again. It was from you that I first learnt to think, to feel, to imagine, to believe; and these powers, which cannot be extinguished, will one day enter anew into communion with you........Since you have been so ill, everything has seemed to me holier, loftier, and more lasting-more full of hope and final joy."

It was on Tuesday the 18th of April, 1843, that Sterling entered the room of his suffering wife with letters in his hand. To her enquiries he simply answered, "My mother is dead!" "Poor old man"-exclaimed the true woman, thinking now only of the desolate and helpless survivor-"Poor old man!" --and therewith she fell back and shortly after died! There