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ing his manner as he went, and adapting it to congenial matter with rare precision and propriety. In Isabella the semi-archaic style is exactly suited to the character of the story; Lamia, as he himself said, "has that sort of fire in it which must take hold of people in some way"; of the rich splendour of the diction in the Eve of St. Agnes it is unnecessary to speak. In all these poems his style is truly natural, and as unlike as possible to the artificial trickle which, in Endymion, must displease all masculine taste. Nevertheless, its congenital infirmity lies never very far beneath the surface; we are always in the neighbourhood of concetti, in other words, of labour spent upon thought that does not deserve the effort. There is conceit, for instance, even in the lines about Madeline, which Mr. Colvin unreservedly admires,

But to her heart her heart was voluble

Paining with eloquence her balmy side;

where all that is really said is that her heart beat violently as she communed with herself; but here the conceit is defensible, because it was right for the poet to bring out emphatically the contrast between the actual silence of his heroine, and the loud language of her inward thought. But there is no such excuse for an image like this:

Sudden a thought came like a full-blown rose
Flushing his brow, and in his pained heart
Made purple riot.

It is Keats the painter, not Porphyro the impassioned lover, who speaks in the third of the following lines:

My Madeline! sweet dreamer! lovely bride!

Say, may I be for aye thy vassal blest?

Thy beauty's shield, heart-shaped, and vermeil-dyed?

There is no propriety, whatever, in the comparison in which the sleeping Madeline is said to be

Clasped like a missal where swart Paynims pray;

and examples of similar conceits might be produced by the score. The Ode to Psyche is a beautifully wrought specimen of Keats' jeweller's workmanship, of his power of seizing on an abstract thought, and chasing it with fanciful imagery. The last stanza belongs essentially to the order of concetti but the sternest votary of classical simplicity could hardly find it in his heart to protest against a structure of such delicate and airy grace.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain
Instead of pines, shall murmur in the wind;

Far, far around shall those dark-clustered trees

Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And then by zephyrs, streams, and birds and bees,
The moss-lain Dryads shall be lulled to sleep

And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress

With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,

With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,
With all the grandeur Fancy e'er could feign

Who, breeding flowers, will never breed the same;
And there shall be for thee all soft delight

That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

To let the warm Love in !

If Mr. Colvin had said that Keats was the most Spenserean poet since Spenser, instead of the most Shakesperean since Shakespeare, his criticism would, I think, have been more just. Like Keats, the predominant poetical quality in Spenser was fancy, and, following this wherever it led him, he constructed a fairy world full of picturesque beauty, but deficient in human interest. Like Keats, he lets his imagination roam at large in the gardens of classic mythology. Like him, too, he "affects the obsolete." But the moral element, which was as strong in Spenser's genius as it was feeble in Keats', inspires the work of the elder poet with an elevation and dignity to which his successor scarcely attains. Though faded into allegory, we feel that the feudal ideal, as reflected in the Faery Queen, had, for Spenser, as it had for Sidney and Raleigh, something more than a picturesque significance. The procession of the Seven Deadly Sins in the House of Pride has, no doubt, all the character of the pompous masques of the period, but it has something besides, namely, the genuine spirit of mediæval theology. Even the mythological imagery, which blends so strangely with the Christian allegory, breathes in the Faery Queen a natural and joyous insouciance, expressive of the influence of the Renaissance on the still youthful English mind. In all directions we feel that Spenser reflects in his verse the religious, moral, and political ideas of his age. The fairy world of Keats, on the other hand, is the tour de force of an individual mind, a vision of the past, won by a powerful fancy from books and natural objects, in opposition to the most vital external forces then shaping the action of society. He was confronted with all the complex social problems produced by the conflict between experimental science, Christian theology, historic institutions, and democratic change; and he escaped from the chaos and hubbub into a region of poetical abstraction. He found, as the instrument of poetical expression, a language full-grown, refined, harmonious, reflecting in itself the centuries of thought that had passed into its development since the days of Chaucer, and he deliberately travelled back two hundred years up the stream to reconstitute for himself out of the diction of a simpler age a mode of harmony adapted to the images that possessed his mind. "A vast idea!" as he himself calls it,

and worked out with a skill, a precision, and an artistic propriety only possible to the rarest genius! This, by itself, would be sufficient to make him a characteristic figure in the history of our literature. Other causes have, however, conspired to produce the special enthusiasm which his works excite in the mind of a large class of modern readers. It is, doubtless, the vivid intensity with which he has reflected certain tendencies of modern civilizationits softness, its luxury, its ennui, its fastidious distaste for what is trite and traditional-that has enabled him to influence so powerfully many of the most refined intellects of the age. In the absorbing pursuit of ideal beauty, men forget how this kind of lotus-eating takes the life out of patriotic sentiment, and the pith and manliness out of the national idiom. To admire the achievements of the artist is quite consistent with a moral censure of his design; indeed, as regards "the end and aim of poesy," we shall most truly appreciate the splendid qualities shown in Lamia and St. Agnes' Eve if we recognize that they are as different in kind as they are in degree, from that masculine method of representing nature which distinguishes the great standard poets of the world, Homer and Virgil, Milton and Dante, Eschylus and Shakespeare.

WILLIAM JOHN COURTHOPE.

ALLOTMENTS.

A GREAT deal of confusion has arisen from the common use of the word "allotments" in several different senses. We hear sometimes, for example, on good agricultural authority, that "allotments" to be successful must be profitable, and for that reason they are regarded by most practical agriculturists as "a delusion and a snare." In other words, these authorities doubt the economy of small farms. On the other hand, when the subject of allotments was discussed before the London Farmers' Club last autumn, the Earl of Onslow, who has written a capital book on Labourers and Allotments, was able to say, in the course of the discussion, " I have not heard a single word this evening against allotments." The same influential club, which reflects accurately the opinions of farmers, discussed "The Allotment System: its Uses and Abuses," thirty years ago, with great sympathy. At that time a general movement for the extension of allotments took place amongst the owners and occupiers of land, the very classes who are sometimes accused of being opposed to such an extension.

The "Land and Glebe Owners' Association for the Voluntary Extension of Allotments" has Lord Onslow for its honorary secretary, and Lord Onslow states in his book that 248 owners of large estates have become members of the association, and that the whole of them, proprietors as they are of one-fourteenth the total area of the cultivated land of England and Wales, have expressed their readiness to meet the demands for allotments by persons. residing on their estates.

Then, again, Mr. Jesse Collings has founded an Allotments Association in Birmingham. But Mr. Collings desires for the labourers, not allotments in the strict sense, but small farms. It seems to me that the word allotment has been rather inconveniently distorted from its original meaning. Allotments are by no means so old in history as small farms, but they are as old as the century, and they have never been regarded with disfavour by any class of the community. Mr. T. Hall Hall states, in a recent work entitled The Law of Allotments, that fifteen statutes in the present century, and thirty-four Parliamentary papers within the past fifty years, have related to allotments. He gives an inte

resting account of their progress without revealing a single case of opposition to them, but he defines the word as meaning exactly the same as a garden, not a market garden such as may be cultivated for the sale of produce, but a household garden, if the term may be used, the produce of which is intended for the family. He attaches the same meaning to the word as a farmlabourer in a gardenless village when he goes to the squire and applies for an allotment, that is for one of the garden plots in the field outside the village, which, at some time or other, was set apart to supply the deficiency within it. The town of Nottingham has 10,000 such allotments, and Leicester has 106 acres of land belonging to the corporation, and let to the working classes in small plots or allotments.

The earliest notice I have seen of the advantages of allotments is contained in the first volume of the Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition, and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, 1798, where the Earl of Winchelsea describes his allotments in Rutlandshire.

A very successful movement for their extension in all parts of England where gardens were deficient, took place after the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The Labourers' Friend Society, founded in 1830, took a very active and effective part in the same direction. Then, as now, the great land proprietors, followed by the lesser ones, by the force of example, were generally found acting in unison in matters of this kind, and between the years 1830 and 1845 they effected a very great extension of allotments. The Duke of Bedford and other proprietors in the same country were active in promoting them. It was a tenant of the Duke of Bedford's, Mr. Trethewy, who read the earliest paper on the subject before the Farmers' Club in 1858, and the same gentleman, full of knowledge and experience, attended at the reading of another paper in 1886, and contributed to the discussion his life-long experience of the working of allotments, describing the area which labourers have found most advantageous for cultivation under various circumstances, and the good results which have always followed their occupation of a little land. Some of his own men, for example, had commenced with allotments of a rood each, and had risen to the position of farmers of forty or fifty acres each.

Many other examples of the spread of the allotment system were brought forward on the same occasion, and among them it was mentioned that the people of Alconbury, in Hants, had become so notorious at the period of the labour riots of 1830-31, that a saying became current: "As bad as the people of Alconbury." It is said further, the reforming influence of the allotments provided for this place by the Bishop of Durham, had a great deal to do

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