and Calhoun is well illustrated by the case of Senator Smith. A Crawford man in the early twenties, he opposed Calhoun as a nationalist; he lost his seat in the Senate to Hayne in 1823 because of his radical theories and his opposition to Calhoun's candidacy for the presidency. In 1826 there was a reaction and he was returned to fill the unexpired term of Senator Gaillard; but in 1828 he again failed of re-election-for then his radical views were too conservative for the prevailing sentiment. To the end of his career this old line State rights leader opposed Calhoun, and he finally left the State on account of his political discontent.

Both Mr. Hunt and Mr. Jervey have done much to rehabilitate the South Carolina Unionists. In 1828 and again in 1830 they were strong enough to stem the tide of nullification. Their final failure was not so much the strength of Calhoun as their failure to unite on a strong, constructive theory; opposed to nullification they were, but that was the only common bond among them; there was no general political theory on which they could unite; and the stream of nullification was allowed to drift into the wider stream of secession.

No phase of South Carolina history is more suggestive than the fate of these Unionists. No tyrant of old, no Italian despot nor modern ward boss, was more intolerant of opposition than Calhoun. He also believed his enemies to be personally unworthy and evil-minded. It was therefore his duty as well as his pleasure to rid society of them. One by one all who opposed his policies either left public life in South Carolina or migrated from the State. "So far as the State was concerned," says Mr. Hunt, "Calhoun's victory was complete, and his opponents were crushed almost to the point of annihilation. The victory was too complete, for it was followed by the peace of death, and almost unanimity of public opinion; nor was there ever again a healthy stimulus of active difference of opinion and robust opposition to the ruling party in South Carolina. A number of the strongest minds who had opposed Calhoun and would have kept up the fight against his tenets and disputed his control, left the State because of the tyrannical course pursued by his party. Only a few of these refugees need be mentioned. Judge William Smith went to Alabama, where, to his dying day, the very name

of Calhoun was hateful to him. Thomas Williams, his most devoted lieutenant in the Carolina legislature, accompanied him. William Drayton removed to Philadelphia. Theodore Gaillard Hunt and Randall Hunt went to New Orleans, where they continued to fight against Calhounism. . . . Petigru returned to the practice of his profession and appeared no more in the political field. Poinsett and Legaré tried to ignore the visible consequences of the struggle. Daniel E. Huger, seeing no present danger of disunion, drifted with the tide which followed Calhoun.

A few years after the nullification incident, William C. Preston, Calhoun's colleague in the Senate, and an admirer of Henry Clay, endeavored to lead the State over to the Whigs, but the effort failed signally, and Calhoun's sway was never afterward seriously disturbed."

Hayne was a pleasing contrast to this intolerant type of leadership. In him there was no bitterness over the outcome of the nullification movement; he came to realize that the economic decline of South Carolina was not due primarily to the tariff, but to the condition of labor and industry within the State, and he saw that economic development of the North and South tended to make two nations instead of one. Therefore, with all his mind and soul he threw himself into the movement for building a railway connecting Charleston with Cincinnati and St. Louis, a line that would revive the foreign commerce of Charleston, facilitate the exchange of Southern and Western products, and be a constructive bond of unity among the sections. The last few years of his life were devoted to this ambition. The recent opening of a new line from upper South Carolina across North Carolina to Tennessee, thence to coal fields of Kentucky, known as the Carolina, Clinchfield and Ohio, gives a present interest to the last chapter of Mr. Jervey's book.

Calhoun, on the other hand, held practically all of his energies to political affairs. From the failure of nullification to his death he became the leader of the State sovereignty and pro-slavery forces. The chapters of Mr. Hunt's biography which deal with these years so replete with national issues have not the same distinction in style and subject matter as the preceding. Calhoun's relations to expansion and diplomacy, the anti-slavery struggle, the tariff, and finance do not stand in such clear relief

as his relation to nullification and South Carolina politics. For this Calhoun's defensive position is in part responsible; in part also the cross currents of national history which time has not yet entirely fathomed.

To these historical impressions must be added that of style. The life story of a great man should, above all other things, be clear, lucid, and entertaining to the imagination as well as the reason. In this Mr. Hunt has to a large degree succeeded. Up to the close of the nullification movement his story is told with more than the average ability, each page fitting into the others with the power that rivets attention; but the last chapters, doubtless because of less unity in their theme, have less literary value. Mr. Jervey's book, on the other hand, is more of a monograph than a biography. He has collected a vast amount of material, some of it hardly relative to Hayne; many rare sources have been drawn upon to give facts of intrinsic interest to South Carolina political and social history; but this has been done at the expense of Hayne, the man, the personality whom the biographer should make live again in the printed page. Yet such studies have their place as storehouses of information, and many of them must still be written before a master shall write the history of Southern life before 1860.

BOOK REVIEWS

JOHN KEATS: A LITERARY BIOGRAPHY.

By Albert Elmer Hancock. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1908,xii., 226 pp.

Would any book in literary biography or criticism invite quite the attention that is engaged by the name John Keats? Professor Hancock states that "the final word can never be said." And that is true about "a man of lasting genius." It is singularly true of Keats; and yet, as far as reaching definitive knowledge of Keats's genius is aimed at, how vain are further words! Colvin in biography and Lowell and Matthew Arnold in criticism have said about all that is to be said. An extensive review of the Keats bibliography will support this statement. Why, then, is it so hard to keep silent on Keats?

There are some lines in literature that seem to compress to a verse the significant truths that would be expounded in volumes. Shelley's "inheritors of unfulfilled renown!" That memorable phrase accounts for this unceasing return to Keats. He is by performance with the great English poets; he was, many believe, by unmistakable promise destined to be with the very greatest. The sense of unfulfillment haunts us when we think of Keats. Some of us are sure that the poet who attained a magic of expression that places him next to Shakspere in poetic phrasing, who sounded the epic note as we have not heard it elsewhere than in Hyperion since Milton, was destined to be the supreme poet of the nineteenth century. So we wage a pitiful warfare with the fate that robbed us of him at the threshold of his achievement, and vainly, and rather blindly, seek fulfillment of that renown by our words of praise.

Mr. Hancock has added little or no information as to the facts of Keats's life. In this respect his book is hardly a contribution. Yet he has given a sane, an enthusiastic, appreciation of the poet, and he has given an interpretation of his poetry that will please most sympathetic readers of Keats. In the preface the author states his purpose in a conception that has exciting promise: "In this book I have endeavored to conceive of Keats as the protago

nist of a domestic drama, coming upon a stage of shifting scenes, as in the old chronicle-histories,-coming, playing his part, and passing tragically under the blight." Instantly our attention is keenly awakened. Click! and the lights are out. The curtain rises, and in enthralling suspense we await the protagonist. Our minds hurriedly guess at the forces in the play. In the counteraction there are the hostile reviewers, ill-health, Fanny Brawne, disappointed ambition; these, against the manly courage, loyalty to the highest aims in poesy, the consecrated labor, energy, purpose of the protagonist. Perhaps the biographer promised too much. Certainly the reader finds a lack of dramatic coherence in the structure of the book. Valuable as the conception may have been to Mr. Hancock in writing the separate chapters, he made no use of such a plan in developing the story of Keats's literary life. Analysis of poems and appreciative and judicial criticism retard the action of the story; they must do it, for they constitute the substance of the book.

It is not pleasant, though so easy, to find fault. But Mr. Hancock's style is not winning, and it is not adequate to his literary insight and judgment. The work as a whole falls short not merely of dramatic coherence; it lacks the flow of well ordered narrative and the logical continuity that Keats's poetic growth should give. And the separate chapters, paragraphs even at times, show the same fault. Indeed, one fears that the author aims first of all to be striking, vivid, or brilliant. Apparently, in an effort to be unacademic and unconventional in literary expression, he comes perilously near affectation at times.

But the valuable chapters in the book are not seriously marred by the style. And we are grateful for these valuable chapters. John Keats was known to his friends as "Junkets." The Keats of this circle Mr. Hancock would have us remember as well as the poet who sat under the blossoming plum tree inspired to immortal poetry by the nightingale's cry. He shows him as a man-not as a nerveless æsthete or a morbid sentimentalist,— but as a man who fought and drank and smoked, a man of robust tastes and robust friendships. What Keats says of Bailey, an orderly, straight, manly clergyman, is effectively quoted by Mr. Hancock.

But, as indicated above, the interest of this biography lies in