'They sell benefices of Holy Church,' d'Outremeuse writes of the Greeks, and so do men in other places; God amend it when his will is! And that is great sclaundre, for now is Simon king crowned in Holy Church; God amend it for his mercy!'*

It seems impossible to read into these sentences any other meaning than bitter hatred of the Sovereign Pontiff, who is implicitly accused of being, 'in bond with iniquity,' as the Acts say of Simon Magus.

If this view be correct, the success of Mandeville in England is easily explained. Edward III, to whom the Travels are dedicated in a letter prefixed to some French manuscripts, had repudiated the Pope's supremacy over the realm in 1366; and the Wycliffite movement was maturing in the very years when they were being published and translated. Their insistence on natural as opposed to revealed religion, their open sympathy for all forms of belief and of social organisation that departed from the standard of the Roman Church, are perhaps signs of the secularising spirit at work. England, one of the centres of rebellion, figures prominently in the tale of fictitious authorship; and even the mystery hiding the real writer's identity may be interpreted as a convenient veil to shelter him from punishment. The book, launched with an eye to the state of affairs in England, which was no doubt well known to d'Outremeuse, would in its turn be welcomed by supporters of Wycliffe and translated by one of the more ignorant among them. Its later fortune, in its manuscript and printed forms, seems to have risen and fallen with the Reformation. In Protestant Great Britain it has remained popular to this day, while it is nearly forgotten in the Catholic land of its origin.

When that strenuous enemy of Rome, John Bale, named Mandeville in his Catalogue of British writers, he repeated from the Latin version a distich against the corruption of the times, which has accompanied the abridgment of the Travels in Hakluyt's collection :

'On his return to England he saw the soils of his century and the pious man said: In our time it may be said with

* Pollard's Edition, p. 14. The English version spoils the sense by reading 'simony.'

more truth than before that virtue is faint, the Church downtrodden, the clergy in error, the devil powerful, simony prevailing, etc.'

No reader would think of calling Mandeville a pious man now-a-days, but there appears to be still some danger of exaggerating his proximity to the Wycliffite movement. This has been done by M. E. Montégut, owing partly to his disregard of the conclusions previously reached by other workers, and partly to his lack of familiarity with medieval modes of thought. He has yielded to the temptation to vindicate the Travels as a sign of the coming Reformation, and has thus come to read into them a zeal and a gravity utterly alien to d'Outremeuse's temper. We shall come nearer to the truth if we connect them with the quarrels of Popes and Anti-popes, for our Liége notary was a plagiarist born, a slave to the past, and constitutionally incapable of divining the future.

Instead of a proselytiser's earnestness, we can find in Mandeville only frivolity verging on the indecent, and loose and superficial expressions of an indifferent onlooker's irony. Is it not indeed significant enough that a detached, impartial survey of religious variations should have been possible at the end of the 14th century, and that such by-names as Averroist, Indifferentist and Naturalist should be applicable to a popular author, who described infidelity as an entertaining show, without aversion, and even with indulgent apologies? In fact, the peculiar flavour of the book and the perennial difficulty experienced by critics in passing a satisfactory judgment upon it are due to its elusive irony; the reverential phrases of the ages of faith are repeated in it without sincerity and without demur, and intermixed with the most flippant utterances. A mere rationalist could only feel impatient with the whole pilgrimage and with its meandering progress. A sincerely religious mind must be shocked at its worldly and careless handling of solemn subjects. Only the amateur's superficial interest in the Middle Ages can find pleasure in it. And this is the reason for the success enjoyed by it during

Script. illustr. catal. n.d. Press mark 819, l. 18. Brit. Mus.

two periods of scepticism-the century after its appearance, which struck the first blow at ecclesiastical authority; and the romantic revival that began about the time when the English Mandeville was first edited with painstaking conscientiousness (1725).* Whatever attraction the book retains to-day is largely due to the backwash of that great movement.

It is in the rare position of being at the same time a parody and a full presentation of the thing parodied, a string of orthodox devotional sentiments and a mockery of them. Good and bad, true and false, are subtly blended into a medley which the reader can take neither quite seriously nor quite in jest. Should a summary of its general attitude be desirable, we should look for it in passages where doubt is cast on the value of all absolute standards, and where men are taught never to accept any tenet without remembering that the opposite doctrine is no less worthy to be considered or apt to be defended-in other words, that our antipodes walk as upright as we do.

'For from what part of the earth that men dwell, either above or beneath, it seemeth always to them that dwell that they go more right than any other folk. And right as it seemeth to us that they be under us, right so it seemeth to them that we be under them' (Mandeville, ed. Pollard, p. 123). This love of topsy-turvydom can hardly be raised to the dignity of a philosophical system. Only d'Outremeuse's wonder at what was strange and marvellous destroyed his respect for all things obvious, established and orthodox, and mere common truths appeared to him tame, dull and unexciting, in comparison with the whimsical realm of improbabilities and monstrosities. He was then no more a satirist or moralist than he was an historian or geographer; and his lineal descendants are those peculiarly Anglo-Saxon humorists, the dreamers and writers of books of nonsense. If his thoughts were less frivolous, and his writing less slovenly, he might be called the Swift of his day, and the traveller Sir John Mandeville the lineal ancestor of Captain Gulliver.

PAUL HAMELIUS.

Cf. Mr Gosse's recent lecture, given before the British Academy, on Joseph and Thomas Warton as pioneers of Romanticism.

Art. 4.-OLD AND NEW IN THE DAILY PRESS.

1. John Thaddaeus Delane, 1817-1879. By A. I. Dasent. Two vols. Murray, 1908.

2. Some Memories of my spare time. By Sir Henry Brackenbury, G.C.B. Blackwood, 1909.

3. Fleet Street in seven Centuries. By W. G. Bell, Pitman, 1912.

4. The Annals of Fleet Street: its Traditions and Associations. By E. Beresford Chancellor. Chapman &

Hall, 1914.

THE best known and the most effective among recent editors of the 'Standard' did not long outlive the newspaper which he administered with equal energy, resourcefulness, and success for nearly a generation. After that long and distinguished term of service, W. H. Mudford in 1900 gave over the editorship of the 'Standard' to G. B. Curtis, his second in command, well trained in his own methods and intimately acquainted with his ideas; but he was unfortunately just spared to see his paper victimised to the usages that have profoundly changed -in some respects, for the worse-the journalism to which he was born. The Fleet Street first known by him and by those considerably his juniors was the thoroughfare of Thackeray's newspaper novel, 'Pendennis.' The Press which had its home therein was identical in organisation and conduct with the 'mighty engine' apostrophised by George Warrington. Some time before Mr Mudford died, he saw the whole journalistic region annexed by the syndicate and the 'boss.' Four years after his retirement, the Shoe Lane property, including the 'St James's Gazette,' was sold to Sir Arthur Pearson and his associates; but not long after the transaction, now some five or six years ago, Sir Arthur withdrew from the journal for whose acquisition he had long waited an opportunity, his interests being taken over by Mr Davison Dalziel. The debenture-holders, however, were now preparing to foreclose. On the 16th of March, 1916, about seven months before Mr Mudford's death, the last number of the paper appeared. Its wonted fire may not live in its ashes, but its ashes exist, and are seen in the St James's Gazette,' incorporated

with the Evening Standard,' long carried on more or less prosperously as an independent business. When he followed his newspaper to the grave, Mr Mudford only wanted two years of fourscore. The accident precipitating his tragic end must be connected with the shock received by him seven months earlier when he heard that his old paper was no more.

In order to understand Mr Mudford's place in English journalism and his unique position as editor and manager, a few words of retrospect are necessary. John Birkenhead, Roger L'Estrange, Marchmont Nedham, and Daniel Defoe were called by Isaac D'Israeli the seventeenth-century fathers of the newspaper press. L'Estrange's 'Observator' was at any rate the first journal enjoying full ministerial confidence and run for the single purpose of supporting the Government. Rather less than a hundred years later an initiative, vigorous beyond precedent, was taken in periodical letters by Daniel Stuart. This shrewd, suave, and clear-sighted Scot, establishing himself in London during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, acquired, and so improved as practically to recreate it, the oldest London newspaper, The Morning Post,' then sold for threepence. Of the two editors he successively employed, Bate, eventually Sir Edward Bate Dudley (Bart.), left him in 1780 to become, by founding the 'Morning Herald,' the progenitor of the 'Standard.' The scurrility and scandal, which had caused Bate's dismissal from the Post,' now unchecked, ran riot in the Herald.'

·

Happily for the paper and its posterity, between 1827 and 1857, The Herald' passed into new, clean, as well as eminently enterprising hands. Dudley was now dead; his journal had been bought by Edward Baldwin, a thoroughly respectable as well as far-seeing trader in Fleet Street products. His son Charles enlarged the paternal field of operations by buying the St James's Chronicle.' At the same time he established a new claim upon the then champions of the existing constitution in Church and State by converting his new purchase from a Whig into a Tory sheet. In 1827, the temperature of the struggle over Roman Catholic Emancipation had risen to boiling point. Charles Baldwin scented an opening for a new venture; on May 21 he presented Eldonian