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Consarning of goin' to public-house, I would never be too particular. A man may do it, or a man may not, according to manner of his things at home, or his own little brew, or the temper of his wife. I would not blame him, nor yet praise him, for things as he knoweth best about. To make light of a man for not going to public, is the same as to blame him for stopping from church. A man as careth for good opinion goeth to both, but a' cannot always do it. And I ain't a been in church now for more nor a week of Sundays.'

"The force of this reasoning came home to Cripps. If a man was unable to go to church, there was good room for arguing that his duty towards the public-house must not be too rigidly exacted."

It is no common humourist who writes like this, and "Cripps the Carrier" is no common book. We are glad to see it reproduced in one handsome volume.

W

EBENEZER ELLIOTT.*

E do not know what has prompted this new edition of the poems of the "Corn Law Rhymer;" but it is beyond dispute that the poems ought to have been accompanied by something in the shape of a biography, however short. There is plenty of material-in print-and Ebenezer Elliott was a most picturesque and suggestive figure. Unless our memory fails us much, some poems are suppressed in this collection—perhaps because of their bitter personality; but the poet's sincerity of purpose, to say nothing of his simplicity, could have borne any burden that attached itself to his somewhat boyish heats of political passion. Some would say hatred, but we do not believe in the man's hatreds. He was something like Landor in that respect; or at least like Dickens' copy of him, Boythorn in "Bleak House." He was never wholly free from a poet's compunctions. If he "hated" Wellington, it was as a symbol ; as "bread-tax winning Famineton," and not otherwise. In spite of his recorded "indignation" when some one spoke of corn-law landlords as "amiable men," he would have been the first to find them "amiable" in private intercourse.

We have spoken of Ebenezer Elliott's simplicity and of his heats as boyish, and in truth he was simple and boyish all his life. All his notions of himself are juvenile in tone, the writing of one who never stopped to think twice: who had a quick but not greedy eye to his own interests; with whom it would be a word and a blow; and forgiveness as quick as the anger. In Elliott's writings there is one striking mark of the boyish, crude enthusiast-he is for ever writing fresh native rhymes to heroes who strike his fancy. Now it is Brougham; now it is Bowring; now it is Jeremy Bentham; now it is Charles Hindley; now it is one of the great unknown. Yet we may easily be very sure that Elliott's opinion of Brougham or Bentham was not worth the paper on which it was written, and that it was liable to bitter reversal the next week. The man is all apostrophe. It is "Hail !" and "Oh thou!"—note of admiration after note of admiration; blessing and ban in rapid succession; and not too much to show for it after all.

It does not follow that Elliott was not a man of genius, and a good man too-he was both. But he was, boy and lad, of the genus dunce; was in maturity a tradesman and politician more than a poet; and he never conquered for himself a literary manner entirely his own. We have to read him carefully in order to get a firm hold of his best. If we read him harshly we are apt to say, "This is like Burns; and that is like Crabbe; here is Byron; and there is Landor: this is poetic rhetoric, and this

The Poetical Works of Ebenezer Elliott. Edited by his Son, Edwin Elliott, Rector of St. John's, Antigua. A New and Revised Edition. Two Volumes. London: Henry S. King & Co.

is poetic epigram-but where is the simplicity of poetry?" Opening at random, we alight upon the closing lines of the "Village Patriarch:"

"The Patriarch died! and they shall be no more.

Yes, and the sailless worlds which navigate

Th' unutterable deep that hath no shore,
Will lose their starry splendour, soon or late,
Like tapers, quenched by Him whose will is fate!

Yes, and the Angel of Eternity,

Who numbers worlds, and writes their names in light,

Ere long, O Earth, will look in vain for thee,

And start, and stop in his unerring flight,

And, with his wings of sorrow and affright,

Veil his impassion'd brow, and heav'nly tears!"

Is this poetry? Hardly. True, it is as good as much of Campbell, and better. But, after all, it is rather the sort of thing that purveyors of "Elegant Extracts' and "Readings for Elocutionists" delight in, than what the lovers of poetry remember without an effort, and dwell upon when the tired soul seeks a resting-place.

But still there is force and fire enough in such writing as this to make a reader fresh to Elliott's work turn the page again; and the following is in a much better vein :

This is pathetic; but it is well-nigh grotesque-there is a total want of the fluidity of good poetry, and there is not in the sixteen lines one that will bear isolation. There is even some obscurity in the construction. We may be sure that "Better to die than wed" means "To die is better for such poor people as we are than to get married as your father and I did "--but the bare words do not express that meaning. "Clammed" is a north-country word which means fasted, and nobody dreams of wishing it altered; but the line

"Why did his master break?"

issuing after such utter commonplace as

is in bad plight.

"Tears on his hollow cheek

Told what no tongue could speak,"

The following is a fair specimen of Elliott's manner in description :

"When daisies blush, and wild-flowers, wet with dew;

When shady lanes with hyacinths are blue;
When the elm blossoms o'er the brooding bird,
And, wild and wide, the plover's wail is heard;
Where melts the mist on mountains far away,
Till morn is kindled into brightest day;

No more the shouting youngsters shall convene,
To play at leap-frog on the village-green,
While lasses, ripening into love, admire,

And youth's first raptures cheer the gazing sire.

The Green is gone! and barren splendours gleam,
Where hiss'd the gander at the passing team,
And the gay traveller from the city praised

The poor man's cow, and, weary, stopp'd and gazed."

:

This has not an intensely original ring; but it is good; and perhaps a third of these poems-not more-is up to the mark of our quotations.

SPINOZA: 1677 AND 1877.

ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE UNVEILING OF THE MONUMENT AT THE HAGUE ON 21ST FEBRUARY.

ON

N this day two hundred years, in the afternoon, and at about this same hour, there lay dying at the age of forty-three, on the quiet quay of the Pavilioengragt a few paces hence, a poor man, whose life had been so profoundly silent that his last sigh was scarcely heard. He had occupied a retired room in the house of a worthy pair, who, without understanding him, felt for him an instinctive veneration. On the morning of his last day he had gone down as usual to join his hosts; there had been religious services that morning; the gentle philosopher conversed with the good folk about what the minister had said, much approved it, and advised them to conform themselves thereto. The host and hostess (let us name them, their honest sincerity entitles them to a place in this beautiful Idyl of the Hague related by Colerus), the Van der Spycks, husband and wife, went back to their devotions. On their return home, their peaceful lodger was dead. The funeral on the 25th of February was conducted like that of a Christian believer in the new church on the Spuy. All the inhabitants of the district greatly regretted the disappearance of the sage who had lived amongst them as one of themselves. His hosts preserved his memory like a religion, and none who had approached him ever spoke of him without calling him, according to custom, "the blessed Spinoza."

About the same time, however, any one able to track the current of opinion setting in among the professedly enlightened circles of the Pharisaism of that day, would have seen, in singular contrast, the much-loved philosopher of the simple and single-hearted become the bugbear of the narrow orthodoxy which pretended to a monopoly of the truth. A wretch, a pestilence, an imp of

hell, the most wicked atheist that ever lived, a man steeped in crime this was what the solitary of the Pavilioengragt grew to be in the opinion of right-thinking theologians and philosophers!

Portraits were spread abroad exhibiting him as "bearing on his face the signs of reprobation." A distinguished philosopher, bold as he, but less consistent and less completely sincere, called him "a wretch." But justice was to have her day. The human mind, attaining, in Germany especially, towards the end of the eighteenth century to a more enlightened theology and a wider philosophy, recognized in Spinoza the precursor of a new gospel. Jacobi took the public into his confidence as to a conversation he had held with Lessing. He had gone to Lessing in hopes of enlisting his aid against Spinoza. What was his astonishment on findng in Lessing an avowed Spinozist! "Ev kaì Tâv, said Lessing to him-this is the whole of philosophy. Him whom a whole century had declared an atheist, Novalis pronounced a "God-intoxicated man." His forgotten works were published, and eagerly sought after. Schleiermacher, Goethe, Hegel, Schelling, all with one voice proclaim Spinoza the father of modern thought. Perhaps there may have been some exaggeration in this first outburst of tardy reparation; but time, which sets everything in its place, has substantially ratified Lessing's judgment, and in the present day there is no enlightened mind that does not acknowledge Spinoza as the man who possessed the highest God-consciousness of his day. It is this conviction that has made you decree that his pure and lowly tomb should have its anniversary. It is the common assertion of a free faith in the Infinite, that on this day gathers together, in the spot that witnessed so much virtue, the most select assembly that a man of genius could group round him after his death. A sovereign, as distinguished by intellectual as by moral gifts, is among us in spirit. A prince who can justly appreciate merit of every kind, by distinguishing this solemnity with his presence, desires to testify that of the glories of Holland not one is alien to him, and that no lofty thinking escapes his enlightened judgment, and his philosophic admiration.

I.

The illustrious Baruch de Spinoza was born at Amsterdam at the time when your Republic was attaining its highest degree of glory and power. He belonged to that great race, which by the influence it has exerted and the services it has rendered, occupies so exceptional a place in the history of civilization. Miraculous in its own way, the development of the Jewish people ranks side by side with that other miracle, the development of the Greek mind;