"I'll tell you what it is," said MacAndrew, after a brief pause, You must go to Paris."

6.

"I," said Guy, his eyes rather lighting up at the thought.

"Yes, you. To make inquiries as to the Bank of Athens. We know there is such a bank," said the manager, "but it will be as well to see if the letters we have are really signed by the Jerang, or manager, or whatever you call him, and also to see how the bank stands. If these two points are clear, I will let him have the rails, as agreed; and I think I shall offer him fifty pounds to take off his ugly face, and never come near us again."

"Where is one to inquire in Paris ?" said Guy. "There's Lafitte, and Donon, and Rothschild."

"Very well," said Guy, "just give one your idea of the credentials."

66

Why

Dear me," said the manager, "how particular you are. something to this effect: Messrs.' -and here he added a name of European celebrity-"Dear Sirs, -This will be presented to you by our Mr. Carrington, and we shall be extremely obliged if you will favour him with your kind advice in some matters connected with our business, as to which we desire information. We are,' I should say, 'your faithful and obedient servants.' They are correspondents of the firm since old Sir Robert's time, you know."

"Thank you," said Guy; "but don't you think that it will look too assuming to call me our Mr. Carrington. They will think me of more importance than I am, you know."

"Not at all," replied replied the manager; "proper expression. I should say just the same if it was Dodder-or Stumps-illustrious Lord Stumps, you know. I say, I can tell you a grand story about Stumps."

"Pray do," said Guy, who loved fun.

"Well," said the other. "But I say now, on your word of honour, you were not hoaxing me?"

"What, in the translation ?" said Guy. "My dear sir, I always endeavour to be exact to a letter."

"So I conclude. Well, I read that letter to Stumps, you knowcouldn't help it-just to see how he would take it. I could see his mouth water after the letter. Well,' says I, for the matter was at an end, you know, if the letter is of any use to you, just make a fair copy of it for the office, and you can keep the original for a curiosity. Mr. Carrington will copy it, if you ask him properly,' said I."

"So I did," said Guy.

Well," continued the manager, "what do you think he's been and done with it? Now, guess. He's had it framed and glazed, and hung up over his grandmother's chimneypiece. The old folks are so delighted that they don't know what to do; and I had his uncle at my house the other day saying they could never show enough gratitude to me for having obtained him such an honour. Prime, isn't it? But really you must not waste my time in gossiping to me about trifles of this kind. Monday, let's see, on Thursday you'll be back."

"Thursday, from Paris!" said Guy in amaze.

"To be sure-twelve hours to London-twelve hours London to Paris. You can see the advertisement. Half-an-hour will give you what you want-ah!--but you'll have to go to the Greek Bank, too. Say two hours for that-twenty-six and a

IN speaking of a company of writers so individual and various as those classed together in this paper under the title of the School of Culture, one is conscious of a certain injustice. One has but a doubtful right to such a term in describing authors that agree in no peculiar system of poetry as delivered by any teacher; these poets are bound together by no distinctive rules, no characteristic mannerism; each sees the world and art from his own stand-point and with his own eyes. But such excuse as there is for the title, beyond the plea of convenience, is not altogether forced or insufficient. These poets all alike owe more to thought and culture than to direct inspiration or to the influence of overpowering passion. They are related by an attitude of devotion and regret towards classical beauty and the more poetic conditions of faith and life in ancient Greece and Rome; the same tone, reverent but agnostic, pervades all their philosophy, and they are poets more than usually philosophical. A vague melancholy, the patient recollection of a beauty eternally lost, tinges the writing of them all.

Another distinguishing feature of the School (if, under protest, we may call it so) is its strongly marked critical faculty; these are poets rather by an effort of intellect and knowledge than by a singing impulse. Their overrefined taste would effectually prevent them from yielding to the

lyrical abandon, the pure emotional joy of Burns or Shelley, of Sappho or Anacreon, of Béranger or Mrs. Browning. Mr. Matthew Arnold has long ago declared that in every poetical effort he sees not only a creative but a critical power, of course varying in degree-high in Goethe, low in Wordsworth. This is very true of his own work, and of the productions of those poets associated with him here to-day, but as regards the work of others, a half truth at best. To the lack of knowledge and critical faculty he imputes Byron's emptiness of matter, Shelley's incoherence, Wordsworth's lack of completeness and variety. To none of the poets of this school can this reproach be made; knowledge and critical faculty they possess in abundance; what sometimes they need is to forget these excellent qualities, and yield to feeling and the spontaneous impulse of song.

All alike they lay too much stress on the intellectual and interpretative side of the poetic nature; but it is by force of feeling not of mind, by power of creation not interpretation, that we recognise the highest poets.

It is, however, natural that these writers should preserve some critical qualities in their verse; for none of them, save Mr. Lewis Morris, is exclusively a poet. Mr. Arnold may easily be called the first of living literary critics, Mr. Symonds's studies in the Greek poets are almost as widely read as they deserve to be; he has, more

He is par excellence the poet of culture, and this is no light thing to be if we remember his own definition of culture-a study of perfection. Mr. Arnold has studied to be perfect with the earnest love of a real artist. He has lived so long with the best Greek models that he has caught an echo of their music, and always carries about with him a breath of their perfume. Sometimes in reading his books we come upon a strain of rare simplicity and directness that strikes strangely on our ears, accustomed to the complex and subjective utterances of our modern poets. But if Mr. Arnold has reached some of the beauties, he is also bounded by the limits of the antique world-none of the wide sympathies, the immense creating force, the abandonment to inspiration, the Titanic energy of Shakespeare and his contemporaries are here. Mr. Arnold, with his classic nature, his self-discipline, urbanity, amenity, his delicate and sensitive intelligence, has more affinity with the Athenian spirit in literature than with the sublime but barbarian northern genius. We must indeed, go to the Greek for words to express his distinguishing excellence. It would be difficult to define in English his σωφροσύνη, his ευφυΐα. His verse rings with an Attic clearness, and continually reminds us of the most distinctively Greek of all Greek

poets, "who saw life steadily and saw it whole "the pure and temperate Sophocles.

It is perhaps the consciousness of this classic bent of his mind that has persuaded Mr. Arnold that he is born out of his due time. So often we hear this melancholy note of discontent that it seems hard to believe that he is really a true voice of his own age. And yet no living poet has more fully expressed its yearning desire for unattainable beauty, its never-to-be-answered doubts and despairs, the sense we have that we fill an interval between the faith of tradition, weighed and found wanting, and some larger, fuller religion that we hope the future holds for us. This busy and hurried age has many children who, like Mr. Arnold, continually long for rest and moderate labour and temperate pleasure, for the quiet and relief of a well-ordered tranquillity. This, the poet, more fortunate than others, has in some measure been able to attain. The greater part of his life has been passed in the learned seclusion of Oxford, in an atmosphere of scholarly leisure. Few parts of his poems are more beautiful than those that describe the many-spired and lovely city and the woods and meadows and little hills that lie all round. He has made classic ground of Hinksey, of Headington Hill, of Bagley Wood, and the banks of the Thames with their white and purple fritillaries.

It is Mr. Arnold's most cherished theory that in poetry the expression should be subordinated to the action, that individual action should be sacrificed to the general impression, that the treatment should be consistently simple and objective. If all these good results have been attained, it has not been without much expense of labour and energy, and of this, unfortunately, we are too well aware. It is the signal defect of

For

Mr. Arnold's carefully polished poems that they always seem the result of care and pains taken; not a free gift from heaven, a spontaneous snatch of song. One feels the file, as the French say. instance, when Empedocles, after his fine outburst about the loneliness and eternal desolation of the stars, suddenly recollects himself, and says that of course it is a mistake to suppose that they are affected by his misery; that they are subject to quite distinct conditions of existence and so on; who has not felt an uncomfortable suspicion that the despairing sage has just remembered Mr. Arnold's theory that poetry should be simple and objective? Yet, although less than perfect, "Empedocles on Etna" is a rare and characteristic piece of work, and all lovers of verse must have rejoiced when, at the request of Mr. Robert Browning, it was restored to its place among the poems of its author.

The poem of Sohrab and Rustum, which ends with so Miltonic a burst of splendid description, where the very sound of the words represents the large and shining beauty of the idea they would express, has as characteristic an example of Mr. Arnold's worst defect of style. This is a peculiar inappropriateness of simile, a sort of bombast of imagery. The same fault often vexes the student of Wordsworth-we all remember the signal unfitness of his comparisons; for example, the famous simile that the poet himself so greatly admired, where an old leech-gatherer on a moor is likened to a huge stone couched on the top of some bald eminence; much the same fault, the same almost ludicrous inappropriateness, the same necessary length of description is not unfrequently met with in Mr. Arnold's verse. In Sohrab and Rustum the similes are petty, and

un

lend an indignity to the things with which they are compared. The warrior Sohrab lying wounded on the plain is likened to a purple hyacinth cut down in its bloom by an unskilful gardener mowing the grass-plots near its bed; and the hero's white side stained by the blood from his wounds to soiled white violets left, freshly-gathered, on their native bank by romping children suddenly called indoors by their nurses. Where is the likeness between the two things compared; between the tragic death of a hero and these garden-fancies? And where, indeed, is Mr. Arnold's Attic taste?

Not many months ago, in an article on Mr Arnold's life and works, the qualities of his poetry were discussed at full in our pages. Now we have only space to tell the names of such perfect poems as "The Grande Chartreuse,' "Dover Beach," "The Buried Life," and "A Summer Night."

There are between Mr. Arnold and Mr. Symonds several points of likeness and of contrast. The admiration of the former for the dignity and temperance of Greek art reaches in Mr. Symonds an intensity of vain regret, an unsatisfied desire for a renewal of its beauty, that lends an indescribable melancholy to his work. Mr. Arnold is melancholy too; but what in him is stoical or desperate, becomes tender and pathetic in the verse of his contemporary. Mr. Arnold is a little hard, but Mr. Symonds would gain by some of his hardness, and might often with advantage prune the luxuriant graces of his verse to the soberer excellence of Mr. Arnold's style. Both writers have a fine feeling for nature grave and northern in Mr. Arnold, full of Greek life and southern abundance in Mr. Symonds. Yet it would be false to imagine that the verse of Mr.