"Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1881. "We the undersigned, while by no means willing to identify ourselves with, or to defend, all the means and measures used by the Salvation Army in the prosecution of their efforts for the restoration of the worst portion of the population to habits of morality, temperance, and religion, nevertheless feel bound to state that we know they have succeeded in this town and neighbourhood, not only in gathering together congregations of such as never previously attended religious services, but in effecting a marked and indisputable change in the lives of many of the worst characters. We are therefore strongly of opinion that their services ought not to be left to the mercy of riotous disturbers, but should have the fullest protection." The document is signed by the Mayor and Sheriff, by four members of Parliament, and by twelve resident magistrates. Such evidence could easily be multiplied from various parts of England. I have myself seen confidential letters from the chief-constables of three large towns, bearing emphatic testimony to the reformation work effected by the Army. One at least of the chief officers of the Detective Force in London bears uncompromising evidence to the practical good done in the worst neighbourhoods. The records of some of the Temperance Societies will furnish similar evidence. The most conclusive, indeed, of all replies to those who pooh-pooh the movement as "mere passing excitement," is the fact that its converts are required, from the very first, to renounce not only intoxicating drink, but tobacco also. One clergyman has told me that two whole streets in his parish, which were once a very den of thieves," have become quiet and comparatively respectable since the Salvation Army opened fire on them. These are stubborn facts. On the other hand, it is no imaginary risk that attends the nightly gatherings of these large crowds. One of the most devoted and hardworking clergymen in London writes as follows: "Few districts have been so little affected as ours,-for we have the lowest of the low, but so far as my experience goes the evil done directly and indirectly more than counterbalances the good. Parents complain" of the bond of filial obedience being weakened, and "immorality has resulted from the meetings in which the young mingle and excitement runs high." It is but fair to remember that the very object at which the Army aims is to collect crowds of the abandoned and the careless. Some of the evils referred to in the letter I have quoted may be merely the ordinary outcome of a series of such gatherings, and might have passed unnoticed had they followed from meetings which did not profess to be of a religious kind. The risk seems to me inseparable from any movement which attracts a multitude of the godless, whether it be for conversion or for amusement. It would be the height of folly on the part of a mother or a mistress to imagine that the holy object which the Army has in view secures its meetings from all such danger. It is right, however, in summarizing facts, to put forward the dark as well as the bright side. I ought to add that I have not myself, at any meeting I have attended, seen the slightest symptom of any such impropriety. I have in this paper said nothing whatever about the Church's duty at the present juncture. I possess neither the right nor the ability to offer such advice. It will be given, I hope, before very long by those who possess both. Meantime, the manner in which this strange new movement has been met is an encouraging symptom of wider sympathies, and of an increasing readiness to learn.* The assertion so often trumpeted by the Army's advocates, that the Church is doing nothing for "the masses," and that her agencies are "an acknowledged failure,” has for the most part been wisely left unanswered. The provocation to a stinging retort must have been keen in many a parish where the steady, prayerful work, to which devoted men and women have for years been giving their lives, has long borne its increasing fruit. Least of all would it have been desirable to attempt such an answer here. My paper has dealt almost entirely with the external methods of the Army's work. It is a mere compendium of my own observations, and it obviously commits no one but myself. In abstaining carefully from doctrinal questions, I have precluded myself from reference even to so vital a point as the Army's position with respect to the Sacraments of Christ. That question, about which there seems still to be much uncertainty in the Army's councils, must be dealt with soon, and firmly, if the Church is to extend active sympathy to the Army as a whole. All that I have tried to do is to record and estimate what I have myself seen of the Army. I believe in its high aims. I believe in its great possibilities. I believe in the earnestness and power of the leaders at its head. I pray that God may give them, by His Spirit, a right judgment to direct its progress and to reform its faults. RANDALL T. DAVIDSON. A well-known clergyman in Surrey writes as follows:-" For more than eighteen months we have been carrying on Salvation Army work, on Church of England lines, with much encouragement. I have at present ten captains under me, each of whom has five to ten men under him. The very lowest stratum is being reached. All our other efforts at Evangelizing have failed to gather in the lowest classes. But since we have adopted the present methods the worst characters have been brought within the sound of the Gospel, and most encouraging instances of real conversion to God have been the result. We work the meetings separately: that is, the women on Mondays, and the men on Thursdays. On special occasions, such as Bank Holidays, the meetings are mixed, nearly the whole day being then devoted to outdoor and indoor work. We follow out in the main the Salvation Army methods of dealing with the working classes, such as processions, testimony meetings, and the penitent form. But we keep the meetings well under control, and check all extravagances." THE POETRY OF WILLIAM MORRIS. SOME OME twenty-five years ago, a periodical called The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine was published, and, like most college magazines, "lived a lily's life and died." A twelvemonth sufficed for its course; and the bound numbers form one stout volume, which the curious are glad to find in booksellers' catalogues. The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine in some ways resembled The Germ, a little journal of which much has been said since the death of Mr. Dante Rossetti. The University serial, like The Germ, was the "organ" of a small set of men, with original views and very enthusiastic sentiments about life and art. The criticisms in The Germ were, as a rule, appreciative criticisms of Mr. Tennyson and Mr. Ruskin, who, even in those days, had scarcely won their present established fame, There were bright prophecies, not yet quite fulfilled, of what the University of the future was to be. But the stories were the most remarkable things in this old college magazine. They were not, generally, novels of modern life; their heroes lived in the fourteenth century, or in some less definite date, in the dark backward of the Middle Ages. These warriors and lovers, ladies and priests, were quite unlike Scott's medieval characters. They took a fierce delight in battle for its own sake, for the sake of the swing and clash of twohanded swords, and the shock of encountering horses. But they were above petty considerations of booty; they were neither like Le Balafré, nor Front de Bouf; they did not say "By my halidom," and very little was told of their religion. They loved mysterious ladies, who possessed none of Rowena's calm common sense and imperturbable self-possession, but who were seen vaguely wandering among fields of lilies or asphodels, or glancing for a moment from the windows of a magical tower, or leading through an ancient garden a gallant knight manacled with a silver chain. The only priest in these strange tales whom I remember was the ecclesiastic that observed "Peter, it's dragon time," whereupon a great yellow dragon dropped from the roof, and "began to do the oath in the most orguilous manner that it might be done," as Malory would say. Among these wild stories, the wildest and most attractive was "The Hollow Land." In the midst of incoherencies, there were strangely distinct pictures, presented, as if in a vision, of stormed castles and terrible revenges: of a battle like "that last battle in the west," on the misty verge of a haunted down; pictures of knights wandering in the purgatory of fevered fancy, where fiends or dead men "painted the judgments of God in yellow and red," and the music of a dreamlike conclusion; for the tale closed like the ending of a dream, "whose waking should have been in paradise." These matters may seem to have little connection with the title of this article: "The Poetry of William Morris." But, as some of Mr. Morris's earliest verses appeared in the old journal of which I speak, and as he was one of its conductors, and, I believe, the author of "The Hollow Land," it seemed well to begin by saying something of his first literary efforts. Twenty-five years ago, he was one of several Oxford undergraduates interested in art and literature. Mr. Burne Jones was another contemporary; the names of the rest are among those on which the "iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth his poppy." As far as one can make out from a study of the first writings of Mr. Morris and his friends, these beginners in art were chiefly inspired by the art of the Middle Ages. The last faint wave of the Tractarian movement was stirring; the religiousness was almost gone; the love of the beauty of old religious art was still retained. Oxford is a place in which that old beauty (in spite of Messrs. Street, Waterhouse, Butterfield, and other builders of new buildings) still partially survives, and may foster ideas of poetry and painting like those expressed in the old college magazine. The Preraffaelite Brotherhood were still young (and still Preraffaelite) in 1856, and Mr. Rossetti, especially, was a friend of the young Oxford men of letters. His "Blessed Damozel" was printed in their magazine, and queer pictures of that period of taste still moulder on the roof of the old debating-room of the Oxford Union Society. All the influences of which mention has been made, the influence of the Middle Ages, beheld through an atmosphere as of Brocken mist blended with incense smoke, the influence of Mr. Rossetti, and even, perhaps, the influence of Mr. Browning, may be detected in Mr. Morris's first book of verses, "The Defence of Guinevere, and other Poems. By William Morris. Bell & Daldy, London, 1858." The poems are often rough in execution; occasionally they are obscure in expression. The obscurity is sometimes caused by an abrupt and rapid manner, not unlike that of Mr. Browning; sometimes by the nature of the theme in which the poet is content to indicate supernatural conditions, and to arouse the imagination, without presenting any definite intelligible picture. The old use of the refrain is revived, and one poem with the burden, Two Red Roses Across the Moon, has often been the subject of parody aud banter. These are the defects of the verses, a young man's verses, not mature in form, but remarkable for intensity of feeling, and for wonderful distinctness of vision. No one sees what he describes more vividly and distinctly than Mr. Morris, and to no one are given sights more dramatic in character. If a critic may for a moment indicate his personal relations to the work received, I might say that I, and several of my contemporaries at college, knew The Defence of Guinevere almost by heart, before the name of Mr. Morris was renowned, and before he had published The Life and Death of Jason. We found in the earlier book something which no other contemporary poet possessed in the same measure: an extraordinary power in the realm of fantasy; an unrivalled sense of what was most exquisite and rare in the life of the Middle Ages. We found Froissart's people alive again in Mr. Morris's poems, and we knew better what thoughts and emotions lay in the secret of their hearts, than we could learn from the bright superficial page of Froissart. In Mr. Morris's poems the splendour of the Middle Ages, its gold and steel, its curiousness in armour and martial gear, lived again, and its inner sadness, doubt, and wonder, its fantastic passions, were re-born. It is only possible here to indicate the pages in which perhaps these strongest qualities of Mr. Morris's early verse are best expressed. In dramatic power, in a keen sense of what men's life was in these melancholy years, when the English arms were covering, like a tide, the soil of distracted France, none of the poems excel "Sir Peter Harpdon's End." One may be permitted to quote the lines in which Sir Peter Harpdon, an English knight, surrounded and betrayed in a half-ruined fort, "a sprawling lonely yard with rotten walls," expresses the strength and charm of all forlorn causes, and illustrates them by the favourite story of the Middle Ages, the tale of Troy. SIR PETER. "There! they were wrong, as wrong as men could be; For, as I think, they found it such delight To see fair Helen going through their town: Yea, any little common thing she did (As stooping to pick a flower) seem'd so strange, The whole of the final scene, in which Sir Peter's lady, Alice, hears |