but the organism would not bear transplanting, and the Pitcairners fast declined into the common mass of men. Is this to be the fate of the men of Montenegro when they substitute ease, and plenty, and power, and the pleasures and luxuries of life, for that stern but chivalrous wooing of Adversity, the 'relentless power,' in which they have been reared to a maturity of such incomparable hardihood? I dare not say they have a firmer fibre, a closer tissue than ever was woven in the soft air and habitudes of Pitcairn; may they prove too strong for the world, and remain what in substance they are, a select, a noble, an imperial race!

In another point of view, they offer a subject of great interest to the inquiries of the naturalist. Physically, they are men of exceptional power and stature. Three causes may perhaps be suggested. The habits of their life have been in an extraordinary degree hardy, healthy, simple; if they have felt the pressure of want at times, they have never known the standing curse of plethora,

Nec nova febrium

Terris incubuit cohors.

Next, may not the severe physical conditions of the Black Mountain have acted as a test, and shut out from the adult community all who did not attain to a high standard of masculine vigor? Among other notable features, they are a people of great longevity. Sir G. Wilkinson (shade of Lewis, hear it not!) found among them, living together as a family, seven successive generations; the patriarch had attained the age of 117, with a son of 100. A youth at 17 or 18 very commonly marries a giri of 13

or 14. But, thirdly, I conceive that moral causes may have cooperated powerfully with outward nature in this matter. Fortes creantur fortibus et bonis. The men who went up with Ivan were men of great souls; and this greatness, transmitted with blood and fortified by habit, may have assisted in supplying us with what seems to be a remarkable case of both natural and providential selection.

For the materials of this sketch I have been principally indebted to the two works named at its head. They are, I believe, the best on the subject; one is large and elaborate, the other, also full, coming down almost to this day. There is as yet no comprehensive book on Montenegro in our language. We have recently had articles on it in the Church Quarterly Review and in Macmillan, the latter guaranteed by the high name of Mr Freeman. Sir Gardner Wilkinson led the way thirty years ago with some chapters on the Mountain in his Dalmatian work. Dr Neale has supplied some very brief but interesting notices. Lady Strangford's sketch is slight and thin, but with ample power of observation. Miss Mackenzie and Miss Irby were able to bestow far more of time and care on a subject well worthy of them, and have probably made by much the most valuable contribution extant in our language, under this as under other heads, to our knowledge of those South Slavonic provinces whose future will, we may humbly trust, redeem the miseries of their past. 'Whereas thou hast been forsaken and hated, so that no man went through thee; I will make thee an eternal excellency, a joy of many generations.'*-The Nineteenth Century.

Of all men in the world the biographer of Lamb deserved to be fortunate in his own biographer, and the volume before us, fragmentary as it is, conveys a complete impression of the charm which the compiler has felt. We hardly know Mr. Procter when we have read it, but

*"Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall)." London: G. Bell and Sons. Boston: Roberts Bros.

we know why he was loved by all who knew him. The book is full, one might say, of the perfume of a flower which has bloomed its time, and it is rather a gain than a loss that there is no print of the discolored petals on the leaves. If one wishes to see how the dead flower looked in the keen air that killed it, one must turn to Miss Martineau, who made

* Isaiah lx. 15.

Procter the subject of one of the shrewdest and not the least kindly of her sketches. At first it looks as if it were her talent to pick out the facts of the poet's personality, while it was C. P.'s talent to explain facts away; but after all it is C. P. who leaves the impression of a character which might be conceived as a whole. This is the more important because Mr. Procter, like Lamb, originally owed his place in the literary world quite as much to his personality as to his talent. Lamb's personality had a piquancy which can be explained, but Mr. Procter's charm, though as genuine and as potent, was more indefinite.

"His small figure, his head not remarkable for much beside its expression of intelligent and warm goodwill, and its singular likeness to that of Sir Walter Scott; his conversation, which had little decision or 'point' in the ordinary sense, and often dwelt on truths which a novelty-loving society banishes from its repertory as truisms, never disturbed the effect, in any assemblage, of his real distinction. His silence seemed wiser, his simplicity subtler, his shyness more courageous than the wit, philosophy, and assurance of others. When such a man expressed himself more or less truthfully in a series of gracious poems, of which he alone of all his circle did not seem proud, it naturally followed that all who knew him were eager to declare and extend the credit and honor to which he had aspired with so much simplicity, and which he bore with so entire an absence of self-assertion. The tradition of such a character has the power of lingering in the world even when the life has been so uneventful as to leave little scope for biography and even for anecdote. And the writings which are the outcome of that character are floated down by such tradition to a posterity which might never have heard of them but for this proof of their genuineness."

That is true, and admirable, and generous, and yet it points to another point of view. Observe that the system of female kinship is limitation: the chief lesson of the lives of Byron, or Shelley, or Burns, is how much their inspiration cost; but we do not admire the inspiration less because it was visibly at the cost of the life. Their greatness is such that we feel judgment to be an imperti

nence: it is only of smaller men that the observation holds good. "Their ways cast suspicion on their works, and the reputation of a man of genius who lacks in his life the courage or the habits of his inspiration may suffer for generations, or even for ever, if his biography happen to have been such or so written as to go down to posterity with his truer self."

Mr. Procter's life did honor to his poetry, and is in a way in harmony with it; but it is the harmony of contrast, the harmony of the leaf and the flower, one might almost say the harmony of the ashes and the flame. Here, too, we are reminded of Scott, whose practical life as lawyer and laird, with its eager bustle of practical cheerfulness, contrasts oddly with the sentimental regret for the past, on whose ruins he throve; as Mr. Procter's idealism in verse, with its alternations of romantic grace 'and wilful exaltation, contrasts with the cautious prudence and refinement of his life. Of course if we knew Mr. Procter as well as we know Scott, we should see that the life had its romantic, perhaps even its wilful, element, too. Only with Scott the turn of the homely practical element came first; with Mr. Procter the turn of the romantic element came earlier, in the long interval between boyhood and middle age. Another difference is that in Scott's large nature there was room for both at once. One 'side might be more conspicuous at one time, and another at another time, but both were always there. The contrast forces itself upon us more in a nature of narrower range, less massive and less complex, and proves perplexing from its very simplicity. The poetry of Barry Cornwall is the record of the extravagances of one who was habitually sober, the audacities of one who was habitually cautious, the eloquence of one who was habitually reserved. And yet there is no inconsistency, the contrasted elements heighten and sustain each other. It is a mistake to suppose that the only way to make the most of what we value in life is to concentrate ourselves upon it. Labor heightens the zest of a holiday, and a holiday restores the energy of the laborer; there is a reaction after a fit of high spirits, but there is a reaction from depression too. The reason that most of us fear to abandon ourselves to the

natural alternation of our moods and desires, as we abandon ourselves to the natural alternation of cloud and sunshine, day and night, is that we are not disinterested and free: our appetites and theories chain us to a treadmill which we must go on mounting as long as we can, because we know that we shall lose our footing, and be crushed at last. Such unity as our lives attain is due to the pursuit of a purpose, the carrying out of a doctrine in season and out of season: the unity of a life like Mr. Procter's, serene and beautiful, even on "the woeful threshold of age," where he had to linger so long, is due to the spontaneous nobility of mind which never forgot its innate generosity, delicacy, and uprightness, in converse with nature as with men, with books and the world, but gave their due to all.

He came of a good stock, of a family of farmers which had held their own in Yorkshire or Cumberland - he never knew which for three hundred years or more without producing anybody distinguished, and rather ashamed than otherwise of the one period when their line was crossed by a strain of indisputable gentry. His father was one of several children "the best among the males." Perhaps this was the reason why he came up to London to seek his fortune; he found it rather than made it, and when he had found it he "subsided into a private station where he lived unoccupied and independent for many years. He possessed," his son says, "the most uncompromising honesty I ever met with. My mother was simply the kindest and tenderest mother in the world.”

In his autobiography, which does not go beyond his twentieth year, he dwells with predilection on everything that can be made to show himself in a commonplace light. He was really a singular and precocious child, with a touch of something out of the common in his quality from the first, and yet neither then nor afterwards was his mental stature much above the common. At five he knew nothing beyond his letters, or a little easy reading acquired mainly from a Bible full of pictures; but for a year past he had, as we learn on the authority of his mother, preferred books to everything, and could hardly be got to leave them for his meals.

His senses, he says, were attracted by the scent of the violet, the April grass and the flowers; he heard noises in the winds and the running river; otherwise he marched quietly onwards in the great crowds of human life with his undiscovered destiny before him. The sign of that destiny showed itself in the childish love, whose story is told in the beautiful essay on the Death of Friends. In the height of his passion he was sent to school; he tells us little of himself or of what he learnt there, but much of a charming, kindhearted, emigrè M. Molière who was one of the masters, who was fond of mignonette and myrtle, and denied himself even these pleasures for the sake of charity. At thirteen he went to Harrow, where he was the contemporary of Peel and Byron, and he once promised to pay Peel half a crown to do an imposition for him. He did not admire the studies of the place; and the levelling character of public school discipline told upon him to the full. "The daily task, the daily meal, the regular hours of sleep and exercise, or idleness, were all sufficient in themselves for me. I had nothing of that feverish unwholesome temperament which opens the scholar into worlds beyond his reach, and which is sometimes called genius; not much even of that vigorous ambition which tempts him into the accessible region just above him; yet I was not without daring." In fact he was rather celebrated for his boxing, and liked in after years to recollect that he had beaten boys bigger than himself.

It was in the vacations in the country, which he spent mostly at the house of his mother's uncle, that his individuality nourished itself: he fancied that a raven haunted him; some things which were beautiful, and many things which were terrible, operated very sensibly upon him; he began to dream and to recollect his dreams, and strove to discover their meaning and origin. A healthier influence was that of a servant, the daughter of a man who had failed in a profession or business. She knew Richardson and Fielding well, and told him stories out of them, and taught him to worship Shakespeare, whose works he bought with the first money he got, and entered into a world beyond his own: it is characteristic that he did not attempt

carry on his Shakesperian studies at Harrow. He left there at eighteen, and was articled to Mr. Atherton, a solicitor at Calne, where he spent two of the most fruitful years of his life. He learned to think and feel, and there was nothing to interrupt him: he was attached to Mr. Atherton but not to his profession, which only influenced him by setting him to brood on all the difficulties and intricacies of life. In his autobiography he makes light of the doubts and change of opinion which at the time he dignified with the name of speculations, and it is, perhaps, to be wished, that people whose individual opinions are of less value than Mr. Procter's, were as far from the pretension of idealising them. Country life told favorably upon susceptibilities which he regarded as more important: he fell in and out of love, and cultivated his imagination, and even began to write verses.

About 1807, at the age of twenty, he came to London to live, and for the first eight years he seems to have been sufficiently occupied with living. He did not work at his profession; he can hardly be said to have worked at literature: oddly enough, it was his acquaintance with three literary men whom he could hardly admire, that first made him aware that he too was capable of literature. He had no ambition, and a great awe for authorship in the abstract; but when this awe was worn away by experience, he was attracted by a refined amusement which lay within his reach. In 1815, he began to contribute poetry to the Literary Gazette. In 1816 his father died and left him what seems to have been a handsome independence for a bachelor, which he enjoyed without impairing it, though some temporary embarrassment connected with his partnership with a solicitor of the name of Slaney made him, about 1821, dependent upon his literary earnings, to his great disgust. He kept a hunter, he took boxing lessons from Cribb, he went to the theatre. In his youth, he says himself, he had some courage and some activity. These years of freedom and enjoyment were also the years in which he made his mark as a poet: The Dramatic Scenes, Marcian Colonna, the Sicilian Story, Mirandola, a tragedy, and the Flood of Thessaly, all appeared be

Then,

tween the years 1819 and 1823. too, he laid the foundation of the lyrical collection which was published in 1832 and continued to receive additions for many years. One almost fancies that the Barry Cornwall of those years was the true Procter, and that then his life and imagination were of a piece, and that the irony, now paradoxical and now pathetic, of the later years, was due to the contrast between the old life and the new-the true self flashing through the veil which custom and courtesy and prudence had woven over it. Mr. Procter wrote a poem in the maner of Beppo, and there is a whole side of his poetry which reminds us of Byron; only in him the révolt, natural to a simple vivid spirit in its hours of exaltation against secondhand systems of doctrine and proprieties of conduct, was not inflamed by a morbid organization or poisoned by personal excess. It may be doubted whether he had force enough to sustain him in his revolt; and the temper of rebellious scorn was subdued by the influence of a dutiful and prosperous life, till his best friends doubted whether it was more than a poetical caprice, just as he doubted himself whether Godwin's magnanimity had any existence except on paper.

It is noticeable that he seems to have thought Don Juan was Byron's great poem. Perhaps its realism attracted him: one can fancy his disliking the rather rhetorical mysticism of Childe Harold, and the rather theatrical heroism of the Giaour and the Corsair. He had the sense of measure and of sanity, if not exactly of reality; he disliked what was vast and vague and pretentious. Не was capable, which Stothard was not, of a genuine imaginative sympathy with passion; but subject to this limitation we might adopt the biographer's graceful parallel between them. In their characters, even more than in their works, there is a quality rarely found elsewhere, except in sensitive single-hearted (and slightly 'spoilt ') children; children who are confident of their company, and have not been laughed or frightened out of knowing and speaking their own minds. These alone express themselves with such directness, concreteness, and naïve limitation; often attaining, in their artlessness, to humor, wit, and grace which are the artist's envy. The greatest point

of resemblance between Stothard and the poet is that last named-a narrow limitation of the sphere of thought and feeling; a sort of voluntary ignoring of all that might clash with or contradict the habitual mood or idea." "Stothard and Mr. Procter are alike chargeable with sometimes giving the effect of hard out lines where no outlines really exist; and this through no incapacity of touch, but by an artistic idiosyncrasy; an insistance on the beloved limitations; a protest against the vastness, variety and inscrutability of fact."

In Mr. Procter's case the protest was accentuated by his innate energetic rightmindedness. "Few men surpassed him in the unpretentious and untalkative wisdom and fidelity of a right direction of heart and mind." And for this very reason he had a curious dread and distrust of public opinion, which is always too noisy to be quite sincere, and is always insisting on more than it really wants, and pretending to more than it really has. Those who have the power of being leaders without the vocation of being martyrs, make the most of it as a boisterous approximation to truth; but it presents itself as a hypocritical tyranny to simpler, perhaps finer, natures who ask only to lead their own lives, do their own duty, and take their own pleasure.

At the time we are speaking of public opinion was divided against itself, it was the opinion of a party, and for this reason Mr. Procter feared it the more; he had a sort of feeling that unless he kept clear of party warfare, party spirit would crush him as he believed it had crushed Hazlitt, whose clearness and precision and robust sincerity were very attractive to him. He was fond in his old age of dwelling on his own freedom from party connection (though Blackwood and the Quarterly long insisted on abusing him as a Whig), and believed that it was to this that he owed his free intercourse with all the literary men of his day; which was really the reward of his talent for exquisite hospitality and his entire freedom from self-assertion. Bu though he saw the whole literary movement of his day and sympathised with it, his own place in it is very definite. He belongs to the group of Leigh Hunt and Lamb and Keats: Leigh Hunt influenced him as an example; Lamb influenced him as

a guide in the wide field of Elizabethan drama. One cannot say that either he or Keats influenced each other; but there is a real analogy in their method, and in their dependence upon the literature which they studied. Keats, of course, is incomparably the most fertile and splendid of the two; but, except in his odes and sonnets and the ballad of La Belle Dame Sans-Merci, Keats never mastered his materials, while Mr. Procter, who did not begin to write till he was eight-andtwenty, is always thoroughly workmanlike, and the union of purity and delicacy, with masculine sanity and vigor, is always attractive. Like Keats Mr. Procter sometimes touches Shelley, as in the Journal of the Sun which the editor has printed, on the side where Shelley touches Greece, and Byron on the side where Byron touches Ariosto, and one might add this is not the most valuable side of Keats or Barry Cornwall. And with all his manliness there is an element of unreality in Barry Cornwall which there is not in Keats. Keats wrote of what he imagined, though his imagination was colored by his reading. Barry Cornwall's imagination was not so rich. He wrote of what he read and felt, without having seen or known. So far as his reading fed feeling which found itself a musical expression, he was justified in the gentle contempt he entertained for the tendencies of a later school, with whom reading sometimes serves to feed nothing better than a cold, fanciful precision of detail; but after all he stops short of real insight. It is not that by choice or by defect of power he has to subordinate force and truth of detail to general harmony and richness of effect: it is that in the narrative poems, at any rate, he has no first-hand grasp upon nature and fact at all. He gets his effects, which are really rich and harmonicus, by combination and reflection out of the second-hand impressions which he has retained from reading.

His dramatic works are of a higher order. Lamb said of the Dramatic Scenes that there was not one of them that he would not have placed in his collection if he had found it in one of the Garrick plays at the British Museum. And though this praise has its limits, it is not at all too high. The scenes Lamb extracted from the ancient drama are