marvel.

It is very hard to write characters in one country to be popular in every land and age. Especially hard in narrative. (Drama parades characters by numberless speeches, and autographs them by soliloquy-an expedient false in nature, but convenient in art.)

Hardest of all to create such world-wide and everlasting characters in few words, a bare record of great things said and done.

One test of difficulty is rarity: number, then, the world-wide characters-if anyin Thucydides and Herodotus, and observe whether Josephus, when he leaves watering the Bible and proceeds to supplement it, has added one deathless character to the picturegalleries of Holy Writ. Shall we carry the comparison higher, and include poetic narrative? then go to the top of the tree at once, and examine the two great epics of antiquity.

The Eneid-what a stream of narrative! what fire of description! what march and music of words! But the characters ?Eneas mediocre, his staff lay figures. Dido just interesting enough to make one angry with Eneas. Perhaps the strongest colour is in the friendship and fate of Nisus and Euryalus; and there a Jewish pen had shown

of civilisation no country with independent states ever got those states to unite in leaving home and besieging a distant city to recover the person of a solitary adultress. The manner: the first dawn of civilisation showed men that cities placed like Troy can always be taken by one of two methods, blockade or assault. But Homer's Zulus had neither the sense to blockade that civilised city and starve it out, nor the invention to make ladders, covered ways, and battering-rams, nor the courage to scale walls, nor even to burn or break through a miserable gate. The civilised Trojans had a silver currency, the Tyrian shekel, called by scholars with Homer on the brain "the Homeric shekel." Homer never mentions it, never saw it. The uncivilised Greeks had no currency but bullocks; no trade but exchange of commodities. The attack and defence of Troy were of a piece with the two currencies: the civilised Orientals, with a silver currency, barred out the Zulus, with a bullock currency and calves' brains, like a pack of school-boys, and showed their contempt of them by coming out and attacking them in the open with their inferior numbers. Yet the genius of Homer could dazzle men's eyes, and bewitch their ears, and confound their judgments, and sing black white. So behold the barbarians gilt for ever, and the civilised people smirched. Carent quia vate sacro.

But turn from the glories of the wondrous tale this magician has built on a sorry subject-fitter for satire than epic-to his characters, and he is no longer supreme.

To be sure, he does not dose us with monotonies, abstractions, lay figures; fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum: he discriminates the brute courage of Ajax and the airy valour of Tydides, the wisdom of Nestor and

the astuteness of Ulysses. But his gods and goddesses mere human animals; blue ?. blood for red, and there ends his puerile invention in things divine. His leading heroes are characters, but not on a par with his descriptions, his narrative, and his music. They are the one ephemeral element in an immortal song. Achilles, with his unsoldierlike egotism, his impenetrable armour, his Zulu cruelty to his helpless foe, and his antique tender friendship, is a brave Greek of the day, but he is not for all time; twothirds of him no modern soldier would deign to copy.

The twenty-four books devoted by so great a poet to Ulysses have not engraved "the much-enduring man" on the Western heart.

In short, the leading heroes of Homer's epics are immortal in our libraries, but dead in our lives.

Now take the two little books called Samuel. The writer is not a great master like Homer and Virgil; he is artless, and careless to boot; forgets what he had said a few pages before, and spoils more than one good incident by putting the cart before the horse-I mean by false transposition, by presenting events out of their true and interesting sequence: a sad fault in composition. But the characters that rise from the historical strokes of that rude pen are immortal: so solid, and full of colour too, that they stand amidst the waves of time like rocks, carved into statues by Phidias, and coloured by Apelles.

Yet this writer has no monopoly of the art in ancient Palestine; he shares it with about sixteen other historians, all Hebrews, though some of them write Hebrew and some Greek.

In our day character-painting is much attempted by certain writers of fictitious narrative; but their method excludes them from a serious comparison with Homer, Virgil, and the sacred historians. They do not evolve characters by simple narration. They clog the story with a hundred little essays on the character of each character. They keep putting their heads from behind the show, and openly analysing their pale creations, and dissecting them, and eking them out with comments, and microscoping their poodles into lions. These are the easy expedients of feeble art. They succeed with contemporaries, and, indeed, are sure to be popular for a time, because most readers have slow or lazy minds, and love a writer who will save them the trouble of studying and penetrating character by doing it for

But it

them in the very text of the story. would be paying this false method-which microscopes real mediocrity into false importance-too great a compliment to compare its fruits with the characters that are selfevolved in the sacred writers, and indeed in Homer and Virgil, for their method was, at all events, the true one, though its results in the single particular of character were inferior.

In further support of my present position let me submit a few truths to be taken in conjunction.

First. Moderate excellence in writing is geographical; loses fifty per cent. in human esteem by crossing a channel or a frontier.

Second. Translation lowers it ten per cent. Third. But when you carry into the West a translation of a work the East admires ever so much, ten to one it will miss the Western mind. Eastern music is a dreamy noise to a Western ear, but one degree beyond the sweet illogical wail of an Eolian harp. Eastern poetry is to the Western a glue of honeyed words, a tinkling cymbal, or a drowsy chime. The sacred Koran, the Bible of a hundred million Orientals, is to your Anglo-Saxon the weakest twaddle that ever drivelled from a human skull. It does not shock an Occidental Christian, or rouse his theological ire. It is a mild emetic to his understanding, and there's an end of it.

Fourth. The world is a very large place: Palestine is a small province in the East.

Fifth. What the whole world outside Palestine could very seldom do at all, this petty province did on a very large scale. About seventeen writers, all Israelites, some of them with what would nowadays be called a little learning, some without, some writing in Hebrew, some in Greek, all achieved one wonder. They sat down to record great deeds done, and great words spoken, in Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, which districts united are but a slice of the East, and they told them wondrous briefly, yet so that immortal and world-wide characters rise like exhalations from the record.

Written in the East, these characters live for ever in the West; written in one province, they pervade the world; penned in rude times, they are prized more and more as civilisation advances; product of antiquity, they come home to the business and bosoms of men, women, and children in modern days.

Then is it any exaggeration to say that "THE CHARACTERS OF SCRIPTURE ARE A MARVEL OF THE MIND?"

seen, he had resolved at a very early period -as indeed many other young men have resolved before and since that he would live to brighten the lot of the poor, it was some time before it appeared that this was to be the main vocation of his life. His Oxford career, which ended in the distinction of a first class in classics, had given him the thought of devoting himself to science or literature, and the thought continued to haunt him for a few years even after his entrance on parliamentary work. Even tually, however, he perceived that whatever his tastes, his circumstances marked him for a political career, because with his advantages of station and connection, it was in such a career he would be able to be most useful to his generation. But when launched in politics, he had then to choose between the career of the ordinary placeman and the career of the philanthropic reformer. No doubt his natural bent soon discovered itself; his very first speech was in demand of lunacy legislation to humanise the treatment of the insane; in his first office, as Indian Commissioner, to which he was soon appointed by the Duke of Wellington, he made some endeavours to suppress suttee; and before he was half-a-dozen years in Parliament he had acquired such a character as a general friend of the miserable that the Short Time Committee asked him, in 1833, to take charge in the House of Commons of the "Ten Hours Bill," in place of Mr. M. T. Sadler, who had failed to secure a seat in the Reformed Parliament. Curiously enough, he had known nothing of the subject till Mr. Sadler's committee had published their evidence a year before; but that evidence had made a profound impression on his mind, and he believed that the factory children were suffering inhuman and disastrous wrongs which no Christian nation ought to allow. He therefore accepted the invitation and fairly embarked on what turned out a most remarkable and protracted struggle. He probably could not then have foreseen that this struggle was to occupy him for the rest of his life, but he certainly knew the responsibility he undertook; he knew he had to face much obloquy from all sides and to risk alienation from his political patrons and forfeiture of the expectation of office. But he made the choice then without a back-thought, and again and again in his life he did the same. Peel offered him a place in the Household in 1841 and a seat in the Cabinet in 1845; but each time Shaftesbury declined the office on the ground that party obligations might cripple

his factory agitation. Palmerston urged him to join his Cabinet in 1855, and Derby in 1866; but his answer was that there were still 1,600,000 factory children to provide protection for, and he could not give up the freedom necessary to plead their cause for the sake of place, emolument, or power. To enter into the full significance of this ever-renewed choice of Hercules, we must bear in mind that Lord Shaftesbury was, for a peer, a very poor man, and that down to the very end his life was one long struggle with pecuniary straits. His income was always narrow, and before his accession to the title half of it was borrowed money, which accumulated at high interest and left him a crippled and embar rassed man for years after his accession. His father had made him a very inadequate allowance-only £100 a year more, when he was a public man and had a numerous family, than he had received as a young bachelor at Oxford; and when he took up the factory question, the father so strongly disapproved of his conduct that they became absolutely estranged for ten years, and there seemed no alternative but to go into debt. The pecuniary penalty of this alienation was not the worst of the trial; but to Shaftesbury the voices of the children rang in his ear like the voice of God, and to prefer father or mother was to make the great renunciation. His straitened circumstances were peculiarly distressing to him as a philanthropist, because his labours in that capacity brought in upon him, from people who imagined he must be rich as well as charitable, a continual crowd of claims which he was unable to support as he desired. And after he entered on his estates, it is touching to read of his gratitude to his sister for offering to build some decent cottages on the property for him in room of the filthy and abominable huts which he found there, but lacked the means of replacing with better. It enabled him to take the beam out of his own eye, for he was distressed to find that, after rating others for the wretched dwellings they let their poor labourers live in, he had himself come into an estate which, as he himself says, was "rife with abominations to make one's flesh creep, and I have not a farthing to set them right.'

The multifarious character of his activity as a social reformer is most striking. In general politics he interposed only now and again, chiefly when some grave moral question seemed involved, but the interests of the poor found him always a ready pleader, and the interests of the poor are many. He

was not only a zealous but an effective pleader, because he was always a convinced one. In fact he said himself he could not speak at all except from conviction, that he had little of the ordinary politician's aptitude to make a good appearance for his side whether he agreed with it completely or not. Then he had always previously mastered the details, and generally, by personal inspection of the circumstances. He had taken tea hundreds of times in workmen's houses; he had "slummed" so far back as 1846, and the result was the Model Lodging House Act; he visited asylums and mills, and saw everything with his own eyes before he exposed it in the fierce light of Parliament. No account can be given in the present limited space of his successive and continuous labours for the insane, for the blind, for the homeless boys of the streets, for sanitary legislation of all sorts, for ragged schools and training ships, for children in mines and brickfields and mills, for needle-women and flower-girls, for poor Jack at sea, or for his humble but particular cronies the costermongers, to whose brotherhood he belonged, owning a barrow, and hiring it like one of themselves, and once suggesting in joke that he might be addressed "K.G. and Coster." The combination is characteristic; he was probably as truly touched by the honour that sprang from the gratitude of these simple folk as by the decoration from the Crown. And speaking of honours, it is singular how few of them seem to have come his way. The Garter he had indeed twice refused before he finally accepted it, partly because he feared it might entail party obligations that would hamper his social work, but chiefly, we fear, because he could not afford the £1,000 of initiation fees. Up, however, till his decoration with the Garter, he had never received any public recognition whatever, except the freedom of the burgh of Tain. As a reformer, Shaftesbury was no fanatic and no sentimentalist. He was often blamed for interfering with things he could know nothing about by men who claimed to be "practical" men because they were merchants or millionaires, but the event has now proved on which side the true practicality lay, and though his language was occasionally violent, his advocacy was always really distinguished by a close adherence to facts and by a moderation in policy. Did he not, for accepting the practicable compromise of ten and a half hours instead of ten in 1847, incur the fierce and ungrateful denunciations of Oastler, the Fieldens, and other more extreme friends of the measure, as if

he had been a traitor-he who might be thought to have already sufficiently established his sincerity by his prolonged sacrifices for the cause? or to take an example from another field of social effort, while losing no opportunity of exposing the sad evils of drunkenness, he never saw his way to be a total abstainer, still less a prohibitionist. Temperance was the virtue, not abstinence; and in 1868 he made at a public banquet what will seem to many a curious speech in defence of " a very old custom which seems to have been going out of late, but which," he says, "I am glad to see is being revived-the custom of drinking a glass of wine with your fellow-man." He speaks of it as "one of the wisest institutions" because he had often known it to be the means of composing quarrels and cementing friendship, and concluded, "Therefore, I say, never give up this convivial system, only take it, like you should every other means of enjoyment, in moderation." He was a simple, manly nature who liked the touch of honest friendship; his attachment to Palmerston, for example, is very beautiful; and while respecting abstainers he would not follow them because he would not have men ascetic, though he would have them sober.

The violent language I have spoken of was no exclusive characteristic of Shaftesbury's speeches, but was indeed an unhappy quality of the whole factory agitation and all who took part in it on whatever side. Charles Greville says it was the bitterest agitation he remembers in his day, though it was outside ordinary party lines, and arrayed Tory against Tory and Whig against Whig. Shaftesbury himself often complained of the strangely assorted host that was encamped against him, and of the asperity he endured in quarters where he believed he had a right to expect support. He was, he thought, the best-hated man of his time. Wilberforce had begun his work with a powerful committee and a prime minister at his back, and attacking as he did a system external to the country, excited few animosities at home. But with the Factory Acts the case stood otherwise. The manufacturing interest was naturally opposed to him as a body, though individual mill-owners sided with him, and factory legislation was started by a mill-owner, the first Sir Robert Peel; the landed interest, which sometimes claims now to have stood his friend, really held aloof, so that he found it difficult to get a peer to take charge of his Bill in the Upper House; ministers thought him dangerous, Sir James