gale by which some of the more venerable trees were blown down. He commemorated the day, year after year, in the pious way which his humble tenants and neighbours would appreciate, by a sacrifice in recognition of the hand of some higher power in preserving him from sudden death. Yet, curiously enough, he seems to have been uncertain to which member of the popular pantheon he should attribute his deliverance, for at each allusion to the event he ascribes his rescue to a different divinity. At one time he affirms that Faunus, the god of fields and shepherds and likewise the guardian of poets, warded off the blow of the falling tree. At another time he assigns his escape to the intervention of the genial Muses of whom he was the devoted follower. In a third reference, he is convinced that his deliverer could be none other than Liber, the god of the vineyard, to whom he makes offering of flowers, and a basket of frankincense laid with charcoal on an altar of fresh turf, together with a savoury repast and the sacrifice of a white goat (Od. II, xiii; xvii, 27; III, iv, 27; viii, 1-10).

Deeply imbued with the poetry of Greece, Horace in his lyrics naturally availed himself of the mythology and theogony which Greek fancy had made so attractive. There can be little doubt that the combined wildness and beauty of his own Sabine surroundings, with their commingling of mountain and crag, meadow, grove and stream, furnished the kind of scenery that would often suggest to him the actual presence of the gods and goddesses of Hellenic legend and song. For the purposes of his Muse he peopled his glen with these divinities; and, in so doing, he probably had no inconsiderable share in helping forward the practice of transferring to the old native deities of Latium the attributes and adventures of the Olympian hierarchy.

During the years preceding his possession of the farm, Horace had lived in Rome, an ardent lover of town-life. He heartily enjoyed the agreeable society and the endless variety of interests, occupations and amusements in the city. He has himself drawn his own portrait at that time of his life when, as an active manabout-town, with pleasant speech and merry laugh, he delighted in fine clothes, wore his black hair shining with unguents, drank freely of unmixed Falernian wine,

even in the middle of the day, strolled in meditative mood along the Via Sacra, and in the evening sauntered through the crowd in the Circus and Forum, watching the tricks of the jugglers and fortune-tellers. At first, although glad from time to time to escape from the bustle and din of the capital to the quiet of his 'citadel among the hills,' he was not sorry to quit the solitude of the country and to find himself again at the great centre of the Empire. But, as we have seen, in the course of years the attractions of the Sabine home obtained such a mastery of his affections that he never cared to leave, and was always glad to regain it.

Thus by degrees the duties which his property imposed upon him, together with the quiet pleasures of country life, transformed the town-dandy into a temperate and careful landowner, who interested himself in the work of his farm, looked after the welfare of his tenants and slaves, kept open house for his friends, and took his part worthily as the head of a little rural community. But on the poetic genius of the man the influence of the country was still more profound. It continually accustomed him to appreciate the varied charms of hills and woods and streams, and gave him the boon of often finding himself alone face to face with Nature. It thus stimulated in him the inspiration which found vent in some of the finest lyric poetry of the ancient world. It likewise afforded him that uninterrupted leisure for reflection and meditation on the problems of life which enabled him to express in terse and vivid language the precepts of mellow wisdom and genial criticism which have made his Satires and Epistles the delight of every successive generation of cultivated men. That secluded valley among the Sabine Hills is thus sacred to his memory. It has become a shrine to which the scholar repairs to offer his tribute of homage to one of the great masters of Latin literature, and to which every lover of Nature and of poetry owes a deep debt of gratitude for the share which it had in prompting and sustaining the Muse of Horace.

ARCHIBALD GEIKIE.

Vol. 225.-No. 447.

2 L

Art. 13.-THE GRANVILLE CORRESPONDENCE.

Lord Granville Leveson Gower (First Earl Granville). Private Correspondence, 1781 to 1821. Edited by his Daughter-in-law, Castalia, Countess Granville. Two vols, with Portraits and Illustrations. London: Murray, 1916.

THE last thirty or forty years have witnessed the publication of so many autobiographies, collections of letters, and other contemporary documents dealing with the early years of the nineteenth century that it might almost be thought that there was no room for more books of the same kind. Add to these the many modern Lives of the eminent people of the epoch of Pitt and Napoleon, based by trained historians upon contemporary documents; and what need, the impatient reader might ask, is there for any further materials for the history of that time? We can make no better answer than to refer him to the two volumes of the Granville Correspondence, just edited and issued by Castalia, Countess Granville, the widow of the well-remembered Foreign Secretary. They cover the years 1781-1821, that is to say the last two-thirds of George the Third's reign, the wars with the French Republic and the First Empire, the predominance of Pitt and the wavering government of his successors, the Regency, the Union with Ireland-in a word, the origins of modern England. They treat the events of the time with intimate knowledge and with singular freshness; and their personal and psychological interest is great. They are based upon a vast correspondence, of which practically the whole of one side has been preserved; and the letters have been selected, and the whole book edited and annotated with an amount of care and skill that does great credit to Lady Granville. We need add no more by way of preface than that the centre of the correspondence was the late Lord Granville's father; that quite two-thirds of the Letters were written by his friend Lady Bessborough; and that the rest are either from himself or from one or other of his many friends, of whom George Canning was the chief.

Granville Leveson Gower was the youngest child of the well-known statesman who had been second Earl

Gower from 1754 to 1786, when he was created Marquis of Stafford. Lord Gower held high public offices, and was for many years in the front rank of Government men. In 1783 he was offered, and refused, the post of Prime Minister. The few letters from him which appear in this book imply a just and fair-dealing mind, but there is no denying that they also reveal the despotic temper of one whose word was law, and who meant that it should always be so. On the other hand, his third wife, who had been Lady Susan Stewart, and was the mother of Lord Granville, was a woman of a most kindly and amiable disposition, wise, accomplished, and religious; an admirable mother and a softening intermediary between father and son. Her letters, of which the first volume of the book contains a good many, are just what might be expected from a woman of this kind, with considerable experience of life, a clear sense of the dangers to which a wealthy young aristocrat was exposed, and a judgment that was in the best sense liberal. Of the other members of the immediate family we hear but little. Granville's half-brother and sisters were very much older than himself; when the lad was eleven years old, the eldest brother married Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, and, having inherited great wealth from his uncle, the last Duke of Bridgewater, ultimately became the first Duke of Sutherland. One of Granville's half-sisters became Lady Carlisle; and his own sisters married respectively W. Eliot, who became Earl of St Germans, and Lord Harrowby, afterwards a prominent statesman.

*

Granville himself, who received the courtesy title of Lord Granville Leveson Gower when his father, in 1786, was created Marquis, was born in 1773, became Viscount Granville in 1815 and first Earl Granville in 1833. He married in 1809 Lady Harriet Cavendish, the daughter of the Duke of Devonshire and of the beautiful Duchess Georgiana; became the father of several sons and daughters, the eldest of whom was the Earl Granville who was Foreign Secretary under Mr Gladstone; and died in 1846. Before passing to the letters which he

*First of the new creation. The celebrated statesman Carteret had become Earl Granville in 1744, on the death of his mother, created Countess Granville in 1715; but the title became extinct on the death of his son.

received or wrote, the outline of his life may be briefly sketched.

There is not much to be said about his early education, which was carried on at two private schools, of which the first seems to have been chosen by the celebrated Lord Chancellor Thurlow, a close friend of his parents. After the fashion of those days, he was sent to Christ Church at the early age of fifteen. The few letters which remain from this next period show that the lad was taking a proper interest in work of various kinds, notably Livy, algebra and natural science; also, we regret to add, that he was beginning to practise the vice which beset him for a good many years afterwards the vice of gambling-and this in spite of tender warnings from his mother and his father's severe remonstrances. On the other hand, Oxford provided him with several life-long friends, of whom the chief was George Canning, just three years his senior. He stayed about three years at Christ Church, those being the years of the French Revolution; and early in 1792, his father having expressed 'no wish' about his taking a Master's degree, he and his school friend Lord Boringdon started on the indispensable Grand Tour.

Lady Stafford was under no illusions as to the usual results of the Tour:

'Most of the Young Men who travel had better remain in their own Country; they learn Follies and contract Vices in Foreign countries, without getting either knowledge or Improvements; to make a Bow, or to come into a room like a Gentleman, they sometimes acquire. How many of them lose all Idea of Religion! they hold the Government of the Passions in Contempt, connect themselves with married Women, and return what the World calls a fine Gentleman. My dear Granville, if these were to be the consequences of your foreign travel it would break my Heart.' (1, 40.)

So the careful mother wrote, before her son started; but she need not have been anxious. He and young Boringdon proved themselves model travellers, taking their fill of churches and galleries, and using their social advantages to the utmost. Granville had already seen Paris; besides, France in 1792 was no place for a couple of young nobles. So they went to the Hague and to Frankfurt,