think I have much to say. He is, regarded from the outside, one of the irreproachable young men of the period. His tie, his collar, his pantaloons, his shootingcoat, are—each in its own way-exact and faultless. He rides well and he shoots well. He is a strong swimmer and a stalwart deer-stalker. His manner is quiet, and slightly reserved; the young man of the period does not indulge in strong colours; and Horace is never excited, nor impatient, nor openly indignant. He can say caustic things when he chooses, but they are uttered with the historical serenity of Lord Westbury. His convictions, if he has any, rather perplex his friends. He is for relaxing the Articles, but he wants a stringent code about poachers. He would rather like to see the Tories in office, but he does not object to universal suffrage. Such is Horace-viewed objectively.

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If you wish to know what his mind is like, I cannot do better than ask you to look through this Commonplace Book' of his—which I have brought with meand judge for yourselves. You will find it, moreover, a sort of chronicle of the literary likings and dislikings of the past five-and-twenty years: for Horace was reflective rather than original, and mirrored shadows as water does.

It stretched back almost into his boyish days, when he had a simple creed and untested convictions; when Latin verses were an abomination, and cricket was 'Lord of all;' when he believed in church and catechism, and pastors and masters, and dignitaries in general. But the day arrived when he began to use

his eyes on his own account; when he dared to interrogate men and books and institutions, to look below the surface of things, to see what the fact was, and how far he himself and his surroundings were founded upon it and consistent with it. It was Carlyle, I think, who first led him to look beyond the phenomenal shows of sense into the invisible world that lay behind. Such sentences as these, vehemently italicised, fill many of the earlier pages of the book :—'Who am I; what is this Me? A voice, a motion, an appearance; an embodied, visualised idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum. Alas! poor cogitator; this takes us but a

little way. Sure enough I am, and lately was not; but whence? How? Where to? The answer lies around, written in all colours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousandvoiced, harmonious nature; but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless phantasmagoria and dream-grotto: boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lie not even near the verge thereof; sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense; but Him, the unseen being, whose work both dream and dreamer are, we see not: except in rare waking moments suspect not.' It appeared that to Horace, as to England (as Sterling wrote to Carlyle), 'no man has been and done like you.' Behind the Master, however, came fervid, eager apostles,-Emerson, with his lofty platonism, and his moonlight chastity of style; Kingsley, rich, eloquent, intense; Martineau,

the most imaginative controversialist of the age. One discoursed on our phantasmal life; another inveighed against the corruption of our institutions. Quoth Emerson, 'Here we drift like white sails across the wide ocean, now bright on the wave, now darkling in the trough of the sea-but from what port did we sail? Who knows? There is no one to tell us but such poor weather-tossed mariners as ourselves, whom we speak as we pass, or who have hoisted some signal, or floated to us some letter in a bottle from afar. But what know they more than we? They also found themselves on this wondrous sea. No; from the older sailors, nothing. Over all their speaking-trumpets the grey sea and the loud winds answer: "Not in us, not in time.” 'And so I left him,' added the author of Yeast, 'assuring him that, living in the nineteenth century, I wanted to hear the Church of the nineteenth century, and no other; and should be most happy to listen to her as soon as she had made up her mind what to say.' This was the strong meat on which Horace was fed at the time, and it left him,-eager for truth, but rather uncertain where that commodity was to be had. Out of the believing attitude of childhood he had emerged suddenly, arriving at a frame of mind which mercilessly interrogated the universe, and all that was in it and above it. A period of mental tumult, of mental bewilderment, succeeded. Goethe (with his shrewd, wary step, and his swift dashes into the darkness) seems to have held him captive for a time. The audacious speculations of Wilhelm Meister suited a period of

mental energy and recklessness. Yet Horace was an unsteady disciple. One day he would say with the great German, 'I, for my share, cannot understand how men have made themselves believe that God speaks to us through books and histories. The man to whom the universe does not reveal directly what relation it has to him; whose heart does not tell him what he owes to himself and others; that man will scarcely learn it out of books, which generally do little more than give our errors names.' And next day the frankness, the honesty, the lofty temperance, the admirable fairness, the devout intelligence of Maurice, would win him back to his moorings, and assure him that natural religion, without a personal declaration of the Divine, was a feeble, if not sophistical teacher.

Then he began to acquiesce. Carpe diem. I find at this stage many extracts from the familiar writings of David Hume. One is emphatically marked, 'I believe I shall write no more history, but proceed directly to attack the Lord's Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and the Single Catechism, and to recommend suicide and adultery; and persist until it shall please the Lord to take me unto himself.' This tone of humorous sceptical listlessness was the one which Horace began to use. In literature, in politics, in religion-laissez faire. In literature—are we greater than our fathers? In religion-why chaos,-whereof Coleridge says, 'The very cats ran against each other,' -is not darker than theology. In politics are not our institutions only more rotten than they used to be?

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And when they said, 'But Reform will cure them,' he answered, 'I do not know. Yet it seems to me that the most radical reform of the past thousand years has not come to much-is only, as seen through and through by our greatest moralist, "the somnambulism of uneasy sleepers." Thackeray, with admirable literary skill, in words keen with the polish of the scholar, and yet fearlessly idiomatic, has portrayed this acquiescent attitude. There it is,' said Pendennis, speaking of the British Constitution, 'extant among us, a part of our habits, the creed of many of us, the growth of centuries, the symbol of the most complicated tradition. There stand My Lord the bishop, and My Lord the hereditary legislator-what the French call transactions, both of them-representing in their present shape mail-clad barons and double-sworded chiefs (from whom their lordships-the hereditaries-for the most part don't descend), and priests professing to hold an absolute truth and a divinely inherited power, the which truth absolute our ancestors burned at the stake, and denied there the which divine transmissible power still exists in print, to be believed or not, pretty much at choice; and of these I say, I acquiesce that they exist, and no more. If you say that these schemes, devised before printing was known, or steam was born; when thought was scared and whipped; and truth, under its guardians, was gagged and swathed and blindfolded, and not allowed to lift its voice, or to look out, or to walk under the sun; before men were permitted to meet, or to trade, or to speak with each other-if any one says (as some faith