on the very day when their city succumbed beneath the Vandal-all these things coexisted with extraordinary displays of ascetic and of missionary devotion. The genius and the virtue that might have defended the empire were engaged in fierce disputes about the Pelagian controversy, at the very time when Attila was encircling Rome with his armies, and there was no subtlety of theological metaphysics which did not kindle a deeper interest in the Christian leaders than the throes of their expiring country. The moral enthusiasm that in other days would have fired the armies of Rome with an invincible valour, impelled thousands to abandon their country and their homes, and consume the weary hours in a long routine of useless and horrible macerations. WILLIAM EDWARD HARTPOLE LECKY. From a Photograph by Russell & Sons. When the Goths had captured Rome, St Augustine, as we have seen, pointed with a just pride to the Christian Church, which remained an unviolated sanctuary during the horrors of the sack, as a proof that a new spirit of sanctity and of reverence had descended upon the world. The Pagan, in his turn, pointed to what he deemed a not less significant fact-the golden statues of Valour and of Fortune were melted down to pay the ransom to the conquerors. Many of the Christians contemplated with an indifference that almost amounted to complacency what they regarded as the predicted ruin of the city of the fallen gods. When the Vandals swept over Africa, the Donatists, maddened by the persecution of the orthodox, received them with open arms, and contributed their share to that deadly blow. The immortal pass of Thermopyla was surrendered without a struggle to the Goths. A Pagan writer accused the monks of having betrayed it. It is more probable that they had absorbed or diverted the heroism that in other days would have defended it. The conquest, at a later date, of Egypt by the Moham medans, was in a great measure due to an invitation from the persecuted Monophysites. Subsequent religious wars have again and again exhibited the same phenomenon. The treachery of a religionist to his country no longer argued an absence of all moral feeling. It had become compatible with the deepest religious enthusiasm, and with all the courage of a martyr. (From The History of European Morals.) Lord Acton (1834-1902), born at Naples JOHN EMERICH EDWARD DALBERG-ACTON, was the grandson of the Minister of Ferdinand IV. of Naples, and succeeded his father as baronet in 1838. He was educated at Oscott under Cardinal Wiseman, and at Munich by Dr Döllinger, whose views he zealously espoused, distinguishing himself in Rome in 1870 by his hostility to the dogma of papal infallibility. He sat in Parliament for Carlow (1859-65), and was raised to the peerage by Mr Gladstone in 1869 as Baron Acton of Aldenham. The leader of the Liberal Catholics in England, he was for a time editor of the Home and Foreign Review, and afterwards of the Weekly Chronicle and British Quarterly; but it was rather by his universal repute as a scholar of singular learning and breadth of mind than by his writings on the Vatican decrees (1874), Wolsey (1877), German Schools of History (1886), and other occasional publications, that he had shown himself exceptionally well qualified to hold the Cambridge chair of History as Seeley's successor (1895). His inaugural lecture on The Study of History expounded the high and deep view he took of the subject. The inherent worth and interest of humanity was his leading thought; the course of history was for him a philosophy of history. Historical facts were for him not a burden on the memory, but an illumination of the soul.' His point of view was cosmopolitan; his erudition was vast and his insight profound. But his lofty ideal of fastidious accuracy limited his productiveness. No scholar of anything like his learning wrote or published so little; perhaps his chiefest bequest to posterity was his planning and mapping out and laying the foundations of the great Cambridge Modern History, of which the first volume appeared in the year of his death. His enormous library, purchased after his death by an American millionaire, and presented to Mr John Morley, found an appropriate resting-place in the University of Cambridge. A bibliography of the works of Bishop Stubbs, Bishop Creighton, and Lord Acton was edited for the Royal Historical Society in 1903 by Dr W. A. Shaw. William John Courthope, the son of a Sussex clergyman, was born in 1842, studied at Harrow and New College, Oxford, and besides being a Civil Service Commissioner, has been Professor of Poetry at Oxford. Editor of Pope's works and author of a Life of him, he has written, besides a short Life of Addison, The Paradise of Birds, and other works, a magistral History of Poetry (4 vols. 1895-1904). John Morley, son of a surgeon at Blackburn, was born on the 24th December 1838. He entered Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1856, and three years later took his degree. At that time the Tractarian movement, which had long dominated Oxford, had spent its force, and was followed by a movement in the direction of Liberalism; J. S. Mill succeeded to the intellectual throne vacated by Newman. At a formative period of his life Mr Morley came under the influence of Mill, to whose memory he has paid a noble tribute. On the conclusion of his university course he embarked upon a literary career; and after a few preliminary ventures (as in editing the Literary Gazette and the Morning Star), he was appointed editor of the Fortnightly Review, in succession to G. H. Lewes. In 1880 he became editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, then the leading organ of advanced Liberalism in London, notably in dealing with Irish politics; and he conducted the Pall Mall till he was sent (1883) to Parliament by Newcastle. In 1886 he was appointed Secretary for Ireland in Mr Gladstone's Home Rule administration, with a seat in the Cabinet; unpopular side; but by the force of his personality and his steadfast adherence to his principles he has retained the respect of those who have differed most violently from him. The key to Mr Morley's public career is to be found in his writings. A friend and admirer of J. S. Mill, he has carried to the study of modern problems the spirit and methods of Philosophical Liberalism; and he has freed the creed of his masters from many of its crudities. On the historic side the old Liberals JOHN MORLEY. From a Photograph by Russell & Sons. and in 1892, when the Gladstone Government again held office, he returned to his old post. In 1895 Mr Morley was one of those who lost their seats in the disaster which overtook the Liberal party; his loss of popularity being largely due to the stand he made against Socialistic interference with the hours of labour in the form of a compulsory eight hours' day. In 1896 he re-entered Parliament as member for the Montrose Burghs. Since 1894 he has been a trustee of the British Museum. Mr Morley's speeches, models of literary excellence, are distinguished by dignity of tone, elevation of thought, and manifest sincerity. In recent years, especially on foreign questions-notably on the South African war-Mr Morley has taken the were always weak. They condemned or approved institutions, not according to their relative values, but according to their relation to an abstract system of political philosophy. This error was noted by Mill, but he came upon the scene too early to profit by the revolution worked in political philosophy, especially on the historic side, by the evolutionary conception of society. Mr Morley accepts in the main the leading conceptions of the Philosophic Liberalsnamely, a belief in individual and social progress along the lines of freedom and knowledge-progress being accelerated by the growth of justice and sympathy. His political creed, rooted in a passionate desire for justice and freedom, makes him look coldly upon recent Socialistic developments. And it is his intense interest in the progress of humanity which explains his antipathy to the Imperialist conception; in his view, Great Britain should be not the military dictator but the moral pioneer of humanity. Mr Morley is entirely free of the crude views of the early Radicals, who hoped in their day to see the establishment of the Age of Reason; evolution, not revolution, is the keynote of his thinking. His study of Burke and Comte has shown him the relative value of old ideas and old institutions; and by his deep historic sense, his fondness for the concrete, his vital interest in humanity, apart from philosophic shibboleths, Mr Morley has left behind him the old revolutionary Liberalism of his masters, and has advanced to what may be called evolutionary Liberalism. Mr Morley's philosophy of life must be gathered from a study of his writings, of which that On Compromise (1874) is one of the most characteristic. In his Voltaire (1872) we have his attitude towards religion, particularly to that form of it which in his view has been the main obstruction to individual and social progress. In his Diderot and the Encyclopædists (1878) we have his insistence upon the paramount importance of knowledge and freedom as the two vital factors in progress; and a generous tribute is paid to the advanced thinkers of the Revolution period, who fought so valiantly for the liberation of humanity. In Rousseau (1873), along with appreciation of Rousseau's influence as supplementary to the hard, dry, critical influence of Voltaire, we have a protest against the dangers of importing into political life sentimentalism and intuitionalism. In Burke (1879) Mr Morley presents us with a sketch of the ideal politician, in whom the desire for progress is held in check by a profound regard for the principles of order and continuity. In his Life of Cobden (1881) he does justice to those great politico-economic principles which, in his opinion, tend to internationalise commerce and industry, thereby promoting the brotherhood of man. Two series of Critical Miscellanies (1871 and 1877) and a volume of Studies in Literature (1891) are an integral part of Mr Morley's literary work; and the Oliver Cromwell (1900) showed how fairly Mr Morley could deal with a man and a revolution dominated by religious conceptions he does not share. His Life of Gladstone (3 vols. 1903) was sure to be not merely a permanent addition to the political history of the time, but a literary masterpiece. Yet as Gladstone's career was so bound up with the public life of his time, there was an obvious danger that the historian would encroach on the biographer; that against the massive historic background the figure of Gladstone would shrink into something quite indistinct and shadowy. But in this greatest of our political biographies, Mr Morley's intuitive sense of literary proportion stood him in good stead; the history of the time is depicted with superb and attractive lucidity, while Gladstone all through remains the central figure. The Political Spirit. It is at least well, and more than that, it is an indispensable condition of social well-being, that the divorce between political responsibility and intellectual responsibility, between respect for what is instantly practicable and search after what is only important in thought, should not be too complete and universal. Even if there were no other objection, the undisputed prominence of the political spirit has a plain tendency to limit the subjects in which the men animated by it can take a real interest. All matters fall out of sight, or at least fall into a secondary place, which do not bear more or less directly and patently upon the material and structural welfare of the community. In this way the members of the community miss the most bracing, widening, and elevated of the whole range of influences that create great characters. First, they lose sincere concern about the larger questions which the human mind has raised up for itself. Second, they lose a fearless desire to reach the true answers to them, or if no certain answers should prove to be within reach, then at any rate to be satisfied on good grounds that this is so. Such questions are not immediately discerned by commonplace minds to be of social import. Consequently they, and all else that is not obviously connected with the machinery of society, give way in the public consideration to what is so connected with it, in a manner that cannot be mistaken. . . . How momentous a disadvantage this is we can best know by contemplating the characters which have sometimes lighted up the old times. Men were then devoutly persuaded that their eternal salvation depended on their having true beliefs. Any slackness in finding out which beliefs are the true ones would have to be answered for before the throne of Almighty God, at the sure risk and peril of everlasting damnation. To what quarter in the large historic firmament can we turn our eyes with such certainty of being stirred and elevated, of thinking better of human life and the worth of those who have been most deeply penetrated by its seriousness, as to the annals of the intrepid spirits whom the Protestant doctrine of indefeasible personal responsibility brought to the front in Germany in the sixteenth century, and in England and Scotland in the seventeenth? It is not their fanaticism, still less is it their theology, which makes the great Puritan chiefs of England and the stern Covenanters of Scotland so heroic in our sight. It is the fact that they sought truth and ensued it, not thinking of the practical nor cautiously counting majorities and minorities, but each man pondering and searching so 'as ever in the great Taskmaster's eye.' (From On Compromise.) HECTOR MACPHERSON. James Bryce, son of Dr James Bryce, geologist and schoolmaster, was born at Belfast, 10th May 1838, and educated at Glasgow High School and University, and Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1862 as double first. Elected a Fellow of Oriel, and called to the Bar in 1867, he was Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford from 1870 to 1893, and entered Parliament as a Liberal in 1880. In 1886 he was made Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, and in 1892 Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; and he is a member of the Privy Council. His literary works give him a place among the most accomplished scholars of the day. His first book of note, The Holy Roman Empire, which appeared in 1884, was an elaboration of a university prize essay, and contains a luminous sketch of the central political institutions of the Middle Ages: his Transcaucasia and Ararat (1877) is the record of a visit to the East, in which he climbed the historic mountain. The monumental work on The American Commonwealth (1888) marked him as the successor of De Tocqueville, and won him the honour of a corresponding membership of the Institute of France. His later works are Impres sions of South Africa (1897), Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1902), and an interesting volume of Studies in Contemporary Biography (1903). Sir George Otto Trevelyan, son of Sir Charles Edward Trevelyan, Governor of Madras and Baronet, and Hannah, the sister of Lord Macaulay, was born in 1838 at Rothley Temple in Leicestershire, the birthplace of his illustrious uncle. Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he graduated as second classic in 1861, and gave high promise of distinction in literature by his Aristophanic skits of Horace at the University of Athens (1861) and The Ladies in Parliament (1869). In 1865 he entered Parliament as a Liberal, and sat, mainly for Scotch constituencies, until 1897, filling at different times the Cabinet offices of Chief Secretary for Ireland and Secretary for Scotland. His earlier prose works were the Letters of a Competition Wallah (1864) and the brilliant but rather too emphatic narrative of the defence and fall of Cawnpore (1864). In 1876 he enriched English biography with his admirable Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, which ranks next to the masterpieces of Boswell and Lockhart, and in 1880 he followed it up with a vivid picture of later eighteenth-century politics in The Early History of Charles James Fox. The American Revolution (parts i. and ii., 3 vols. 1899-1903) was in a sense a continuation of the Fox.-His youngest son, George Macaulay Trevelyan, born in 1876, has also applied himself to historical studies, and published a volume on England in the Age of Wycliffe (1899). Mandell Creighton (1843-1901), born at Carlisle, from Durham School passed to Merton College, Oxford, where he was elected a Fellow in 1866. Successively vicar of Embleton, Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge, Bishop of Peterborough (1891) and of London (1896), he became one of the most authoritative of English historians, amongst his works being a book on Simon de Montfort (1876), his great History of the Papacy during the Reformation Period (1882–94; new ed. 6 vols. 1901), and the sumptuous Queen Elizabeth (1897). His Memoir of Sir George Grey, privately printed in 1884, was published after his death; as were his Thoughts on Education and his Essays and Reviews (1902). William Hale White was born at Bedford about 1830, the son of a bookseller who was from 1850 to 1880 doorkeeper to the House of Commons. In 1848-51 Mr Hale White qualified at Cheshunt and New College for the Congregational ministry, but was expelled for his views on inspiration, whereupon he became a journalist and miscellaneous writer. His translation of Spinoza's Ethic (1883; revised by Miss Hutchison Stirling; new ed. 1894) was published under his own name; but he owes his literary eminence to the powerful studies of domestic, social, moral, and theological problems contained in the remarkable trilogy of novels, The Autobiography of Mark Rutherford (1881), Mark Rutherford's Deliverance (1885), and The Revolution in Tanner's Lane (1887), edited by Reuben Shapcott.' 'Mark Rutherford's' later novels, Miriam's Schooling, Catherine Furze, and Clara Hopgood (1896) attracted less notice. He collected and edited in 1897, as The Inner Life of the House of Commons, a series of articles contributed by his father to a weekly paper. In a book on The Apostasy of Wordsworth (1898) he vindicated the poet's consistency; in 1900 he gave us Pages from a Journal. William Robertson Smith (1846–94), the son of the Free Church minister at Keig in Aberdeenshire, was educated at Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Bonn, and Göttingen, and in 1870 became Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis in the Free Church College at Aberdeen. For his article on the 'Bible' in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica he was prosecuted before the General Assembly of the Free Church of Scotland on a charge of heresy, but acquitted, in 1880. Another article on 'Hebrew Language and Literature' cost him his chair, from which he was dismissed in 1881. Subsequently he delivered in Edinburgh and Glasgow the lectures republished as The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (1881) and The Prophets of Israel (1882), and after assisting and succeeding Professor Spencer Baynes in the editorship of the Encyclopædia Britannica, he was made Professor of Arabic in Cambridge University in 1883 and university librarian. Ere his death he had gained the reputation of one of the foremost Semitic scholars in Europe; The Religion of the Semites (1889) containing some of his most pregnant work. Edward Dowden, born at Cork in 1843, was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where in 1867 he became Professor of English Literature. To him we owe Shakspere, his Mind and Art (1875), a work which gave a decided impulse to Shakespearean study and gave him high standing as a Shakespearean scholar; the invaluable Shakspere Primer; the Introduction to Shakspere (1893); the standard Life of Shelley (1886); and an excellent small book on Southey; besides poems, several volumes of studies in literature, a History of French Literature (1897), and Puritan and Anglican (1900). He has also edited Shelley, Wordsworth, selections from Southey, critical editions of Hamlet, of Romeo and Juliet, and of the Sonnets, the correspondence of Sir Henry Taylor, and that of Southey with Caroline Bowles. Professor Dowden contributed the article on Matthew Arnold to the present work. John Pentland Mahaffy was born near Vevay, Switzerland, in 1839, studied in Germany and at Trinity College, Dublin, and from 1871 to 1899 was Professor there of Ancient History. He has written on Kant, on primitive civilisation, on Greek antiquities, on papyri, and on the art of conversation, but is best known for a series of fresh and interesting works on Greek history, such as Greek Social Life from Homer to Menander, Alexander's Empire, Greek Life and Thought from Alexander to the Roman Conquest, and The Empire of the Ptolemies. Henry Austin Dobson was born at Plymouth on the 18th of January 1840, and at the age of eight went with his parents to Holyhead in Wales. Educated at Beaumaris and Coventry, and afterwards at the gymnase of Strasburg, he returned to England in 1856, intending to follow his father's profession of civil engineer; but it was fated that he should enter the Civil Service as a clerk in the Board of Trade, where-for the last seventeen years as principal of his departmenthe served until his retirement in 1901. His officework did not debar him from favourite studies in art, or from practising in prose and verse. His first poetical contribution to a magazine was to Temple Bar in December 1864. But his literary career practically began in March 1868, when he became a contributor of verse to St Paul's Magazine, then under the editorship of Anthony Trollope; and to the editor his first volume of poems, Vignettes in Rhyme and Vers de Société, was dedicated at its publication in October 1873. Proverbs in Porcelain followed in 1877, Old-World Idylls in 1883, and At the Sign of the Lyre in 1885. Whether in the artificial forms of old French verse-rondel, rondeau, ballade, triolet, chant royal, and villanelle (which he was among the earliest to write systematically) -or in more familiar and less elaborate rhythms, his poems are remarkable for perfection of technique, for freshness, spontaneity, and sprightly humour, while many are instinct with true pathos or genuine satire. Activity in prose composition and editorial work soon followed. In 1879 Mr Dobson began his literary studies of the eighteenth century with the Life of Hogarth (expanded in the subsequent editions of 1891, 1898, and 1902), and continued them in the monograph on Fielding in the 'English Men of Letters' (1883; new American ed. 1900), since followed in the same series by Richardson (1902) and Fanny Burney (1903); in Thomas Bewick and his Pupils (1884; new ed. 1889); in Steele (1886) and Goldsmith (1888); in Horace Walpole (1890), in EighteenthCentury Vignettes (1892-96), A Paladin of Philanthropy (1897), and Side-Walk Studies (1902). By these he has approved himself an accurate and sympathetic biographer and an exquisite critic, having at command the rare gift of combining the results of conscientious and laborious research with lightness and brightness of presentment. Through his various works in prose and verse, and through his editing of a selection of EighteenthCentury Essays (1882), and the Fables of Gay (1882), the poems of Prior (1889), and the plays, poems, and novel of Goldsmith, as well as by his contributions to Ward's English Poets, Craik's English Prose, and to most of the principai magazines and reviews, Mr Dobson has attained critical rank as the supreme authority on the lighter literary aspects of the ages of Pope and Johnson; and his intimate knowledge of French literature is seen in his Four Frenchwomen (1890. His prose has the same pleasant ease and daintiness of style as distinguishes his poems, which, with some new additions, were collected in 1897. The fifth edition (1902) contained selections from Carmina Votiva, poems first privately published in 1901. In 1902 Edinburgh conferred on him its honorary degree of LL.D. He contributed important articles to the Dictionary of National Biography, to the Encyclopædia Britannica, and to Chambers's Encyclopædia; and the value of his contributions to the present work (see Vol. II, pages 1-13, 294-300, 339-348, 478-494) cannot fail to be recognised by every reader. Angel-Court. In Angel-Court the sunless air Grows faint and sick; to left and right Nay the Eternities are there. And Love has climbed that crumbling stair On a Fan. Chicken-skin, delicate, white, Roses and vaporous blue; Eyes that could melt as the dew,— This was the Pompadour's fan! See how they rise at the sight, Eager to sigh or to sue,— Things that great ministers do; Things that, maybe, overthrew Those in whose brains they began ; Here was the sign and the cue,—— This was the Pompadour's fan! |