life; as a sort of mental soporific or anæsthetic. Indeed, in this connection, it may be noted that there are critics among ourselves who opine that literature in this sense is too little with us, and that we are open overmuch to the rude blast of current affairs.

The trophies of literature, however, are neither in dilettantism nor cult, nor in the creation of an exotic mental atmosphere; not in the possession of many books, nor in mere knowledge of other men's thought. Its trophies are not even displayed on occasions set apart for solemn evening sacrifice like to night, but they are rather to be found in life which literature has made finer, sweeter, and nobler, as when, for instance, Gladstone, after reading Dante, wrote "It was not merely a pleasure, a tour de force, or a lesson, but a vigorous discipline for the heart, the intellect, the whole man.'

Sir Archibald Geikie, Professor of Geology, recently delivered the Romanes lecture, at Oxford, on The Influence of Scenery on Literature, showing how a writer's scenic surroundings necessarily affect him, and how, indeed, they may be evolved from his work as easily as a man's dinner may be diagnosed from his chimney smoke. He exhibits all the genuine geologist's enthusiasm in (so to say) chipping around, and in discovering and classifying the local scenes -mountain, meadow, or stream-which have inspired writers, whether Northerners, like Ossian, Burns, and Thomson (preferences pardonable in a Geikie), or mere Southrons, like Cowper and Wordsworth-scenes which are embedded in these authors' work like flies in amber, or fossils in limestone.

So in like manner life in all its manifold aspects has a no less powerful influence on literature: it has streams of tendency, mountain tops of aspiration, dead levels of every-day effort, and bye-ways of contemplation; phases through which life passes, and which are traceable in literature as surely and unmistakably as the colour of the soil is traceable in the stream.

It is this influence upon literature of life as a whole to which I ask attention, to show that literature is neither a mere luxurious adjunct of life, nor an academic anodyne for its cares, but rather a something which is instinct with, inseparable from, and indispensable to life. It is, as Arnold says, "a criticism of life;" it is the faithful mirror which reflects humanity more completely and vividly in proportion as it derives illumination from close association with its pursuits, its successes and failures, its comedy and its tragedy.

The metaphor of the mirror may be justified, for it not only gives back to us life in thought and action, from past to present, but also not infrequently reflects what is of equal if not of greater value, namely, the personality of the writer. So the intentional reflection given by Pepys, in his Diary, of the Age of the Restoration, with its strange mixture of ribaldry, bribery, and business, is

excelled in interest by the unintentional discovery of his own inimitable self.

In venturing, however, to discuss in some further detail these external and internal influences of life upon literature it seems only prudent, in view of the magnitude of the undertaking, to adopt the popular precaution of limited liability, and to confine my "rough and all unable pen" to a brief examination of these influences as exhibited in some few of our great writers.

It is, perhaps, in the writings of one of our earliest poets that these influences are most apparent. Chaucer was our great preraphaelite literary portrait painter of the fourteenth century. His gallery of nine-and-twenty pilgrims is five hundred years old, but the colour is as fresh and the features are as convincing to-day as if they had for the first time adorned the line of this year's Academy. The main secret of this is, perhaps, contained in the poet's own life which was striking in its many parts of English soldier, French prisoner, royal valet, ambassador, and man of affairs. Consider how great an opportunity this variety offered to a man of keen observation, and of poetic expression. Personal experience gave him skill in draughtsmanship, and faithfulness in expression, from the parson who (like a parson of to-day)

Christës law and His apostles twelve

He taught, but first he followed it himself. to the jolly wife of Bath who said (as a wife may say to-day for all I know)

By God, if women had but written stories
As clerkës have within their oratories,

They would have writ of men more wickedness
Than all the race of Adam may redress.

Other tales of his time, as, for instance, the Decameron of Boccaccio, were but slightly strung together; but with Chaucer the pilgrims, from the knight to the pardonere, stand out in the Prologues like living actors, with mine host of the Tabard for chorus and critic.

There is a peculiar charm in the seventeenth century inseparable from an age when new realms of life and thought were alike opened up. Its cold grey dawn is inseparably associated with the great name of Francis Bacon, an obsequious suitor and corrupt Chancellor it may be, but a philosopher and aphorist of undying fame; not, however, as Dean Church says, "a mere idealist or recluse, to undervalue or despise the real grandeur of the world, but one who took the keenest interest in the nature and ways of mankind." Yet the old note is sounded when the Dean expresses astonishment at his engaging in politics. But surely the key-note of this man is life. Philosophy was no aimless art of disputation, but 66 a new birth," a new method," "a restoration," all tending

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to the palliation of the ills of human life. His very scorn of the English tongue was a tribute to life, due to his conviction that knowledge in Latin would survive his age, and the very accident of fortune enabled him, when in office, to infuse the life of equity into the hide-bound common law of his old enemy, Coke.

I referred to the "cold grey dawn" as associated with Bacon, and, indeed, he lacked, as has been said, "not only the vices of passion, but its virtues," knowing neither gratitude nor love his very Essay on Love beginning, infamously enough, thus -"the stage is more beholden to love than the life of man." And yet of all this great man's great work the chief survival to day is these very Essays, monuments of pithy wisdom, and terse cynicism. He gave one reason of their success when he said, "for that as it seems to me they come home to men's business and bosoms," but a no less reason is that they reflect Bacon to us with all the truth of an unconscious pen.

I turn, with some trepidation, to a yet greater name that of Shakespeare-poacher, roysterer, play actor (whose skill Irving would have scoffed at), play-writer and adapter, theatre proprietor, and (last, but not least) man of business, and of solid substance. Had he been a passionless philosopher we could never have had Falstaff; had he treated the stage with scholarly disdain his plays would have lost the living charm which the actor alone can give; had he lacked the level-headed common sense that ran naturally to native acres we might have had a genius lacking in balance, without restraint or sense of proportion; whereas, being what he was, he gives us life in all its varying moods, and in all its completeness. An American writer says, that "To criticise Shakespeare is like coasting round a continent" an expression of which I feel the full force, since the continent comprehends the allied dominions of life and literature.

So much fiction has been lavished on the poet that it is quite restful to alight on a fact of pure prose. It is refreshing to learn that he sued one Master Philip Rogers, in Stratford Court, for £1 15s. 10d., for corn delivered at divers times, and this while he was writing Macbeth. Incidentally it does not appear who pleaded the poet's cause, nor how the spoil was divided; but how rarely life and literature went hand in hand with a man who could simultaneously write heavy tragedy and bring a light-hearted county court action-who could depict Hamlet, and cautiously invest London savings in tenements and hereditaments of his dear native town of Stratford-upon-Avon !

Notwithstanding my reference to Shakespeare as the actual writer, some deference is due to the vexed question of identity, a question which threatens the mental balance of some, and absorbs the efforts of two sects of ingenious enquirers, who cry with Pistol,

"Under which king?"-Baconian or Shakespearean? Apart from external evidences (or inferences), one sect points to familiarity with the classics, philosophy, history, and statecraft, credible only in a Chancellor; the other points to rustic humour, street life, and Falstaffian laughter, utterly scandalous to the Woolsack. Even the religion of the writer is in issue, and one recent and reverend inquisitor claps a Geneva Bible in the poet's hand, and dubs him Puritan.

I may, however, for the present purpose, let these factions rage and imagine what vain thing they please. I may even (for the sake of peace) admit the poet knew his Scriptures as well as the parson knows his plays. This remains, that Shakespeare holds the mirror up to life, from the Cæsars to the Tudors, and with supreme art discovers himself only by his great and comprehensive spiritexasperating to those of our generation who seek after a sign, and glory in cinematographic accuracies.

I touch the "tender stops of various quills" and turn to Milton, "that master," as Bagehot puts it, "of solemn music and brooding charm."

His earlier days of study, travel, and pure-souled meditation gave preludes as pure as Comus, and as tender as Lycidas and Il Penseroso; his manhood of rude politics, and ruder controversy, made a harsh interlude; but blind and desolate age brought a divine theme

"What in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support,
That to the height of this great argument
I may assert Eternal Providence,

And justify the works of God to men."

It may seem strange to find how slightly he was affected by the momentous period of Puritan triumph. Wordsworth says, "His soul was like a star and dwelt apart," yet this was not due to the exclusiveness of the scholar "deep versed in books and shallow in himself," nor to any fine disdain of rude humanity; but rather to the firm hold which he laid upon life, consecrating with enduring purpose his unmatched powers to an aim only achieved late in life when he sang "of things invisible to mortal sight."

There is a stomachic sensation like descending an Atlantic billow (to recall a recent experience) in plunging from Milton to Defoe, that devious and extraordinary man, who may be said to have photographed from life in a happy pre-photographic age. The difficulty is to say what life this apostle of the English novel had not lived, whether of trade, travel, politics, or journalism—and yet the marvel is that his Robinson Crusoe is a picture of life in its barest and most elementary form, as if the vicissitudes of existence

had taught him what was superfluous. Poverty and debt he knew. When Crusoe shakes out those immortal grains of corn they might be unsuspected sixpences falling from the author's old breeches - he had known bankruptcy (which is but shipwreck in its most awful form) - he must therefore have known social ostracism and isolation--and there you have Robinson Crusoe literature born of the stern lesson of life.

The burly figure of Dr. Johnson looms before us as a unique specimen of what may be called living literature. "Brave old Samuel, ultimus Romanorum," as Carlyle calls him. A man of action, and a man of letters, ready with a portentous stick for poor Foote, the ribald actor, and prompt with argument as deadly as a bludgeon. Ancient and modern literature had made him a scholar, but the school of poverty, obscurity, and disease, taught the scholar how to solve the problem of life, and its solution inspired his tremendous rebuke to Lord Chesterfield. The influence of life on literature is seen in Boswell's biography, where the Doctor's huge stores of knowledge are quickened by their application in solving amazing moralities for Boswell's queasy stomach, in delivering opinions on law (barbarous Scots law), and in crushing all comers, ore rotundo, and with infinite gusto.

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Johnson's friend Burke, "The greatest of those who have wrought marvels in our English prose," forms a companion picture. With Baconian pith he wrote to his hapless son, Reading, much reading, is good, but the power of applying it to every occasion in life is far better," and like Chaucer's parson, Burke not only preached the doctrine, but first followed it himself. With him literature was not a mere formal ornamental plant for the library window, but a robust growth, fit alike for the out door life of the farm, the smoky atmosphere of the Kit-Cat Club, and the windy wastes of the House of Commons, and ready in book pamphlet, or speech.

It is in this close association of life and literature, no less than in his fearless assertion of principle, sturdy independence of constituencies, and disdain of reward, that he recalls Gladstone, who in our own day has shown characteristics as striking, and to whose memory a brief digression may be pardoned. Where so much has been written of a life so remarkable in its achievement, and so memorable in its close, it is sufficient for me to refer to what the great statesman called his Temple of Peace. In an age fraught with materialism it is our duty to cherish the memory of a man whose literary lighthouse shone steadily on the very rocks and breakers of political existence.

To return, however, and to skip from Burke to Scott, whose fine genius and manly spirit are a fee-simple of delight. Here we have a writer whose life presents no variety of incident like Defoe's,