Mary Trevellyn suddenly dies away, and he goes back to his studies, his books, and his meditation, summing up the conclusion his pursuit of love had brought him to:"Faith, I think, does pass, and Love; but knowledge

abideth ;

Let us seek knowledge; the rest may come and go as
it happens."

In "Dipsychus " (the two-souled), the unfinished poem which was published after his death, we get a vivid idea of that curious dual mind which Clough possessed, and was so painfully conscious of possessing. Someone has called this fragment the English Faust, but I think the term is not a happy one. In the colloquy between Dipsychus and the Spirit, the view of things which this modern Mephistopheles takes is so cleverly brought out that one is reminded of certain aspects of Ibsen's teaching, and we are obliged to confess that he is not always the Spirit of the World dodging the footsteps of the "idealist" and irritating the higher yearnings and desires of the nobler nature. The imagined "higher yearnings" may be a refusal to look on the real facts of life, and the common sense point of view which the Spirit takes may be after all the sane view, and the view of truth. The ideals of Dipsychus are turned into ridicule. The Spirit endeavours to prove that they are valueless and absurd in a world where men have to push and blow their own trumpet, and eventually submit to its ways.

To Dipsychus these are mocking words, but he has to listen to them :

"The stern necessity of things
On every side our being rings;
Our sallying eager actions fall
Vainly against that iron wall;

When once the finger points the way

The wise thinks only to obey;

Take life as she has ordered it,

And come what may of it, submit!

Submit, submit!"

The poem begins with the soliloquy of Dipsychus, in which he repeats the opening verse of the beautiful poem "Easter Day", with its sharp, agonising cry, "Christ is not risen!"

"Through the great sinful streets of Naples as I passed, With fiercer heat than flamed above my head

My heart was hot within me; till at last
My brain was lightened when my tongue had said

Christ is not risen!"

The vigour of this poem, with its exposure of the shams and hypocrisies of human puppets; its clear cry for a life of sincerity and freedom, of genuine hard work and natural manners, obliges us to acknowledge that Clough's strongest work is to be found in "Dipsychus ". And yet it is poetry that would never be popular. The man in the street would hand it back to the man in the study. And he in his wish to enlarge the circle of devoted Cloughites might point his finger to this passage as a final argument in favour of Clough's ethics :

"To herd with people that one owns no care for,
Friend it with strangers that one sees but once;
To drain the heart with endless complaisance;
To warp the unfinished diction in the life
And twist one's mouth to counterfeit; enforce
Reluctant look to falsehood; base alloy
The ingenuous golden frankness of the past;
To calculate and plot; be rough and smooth,
Forward and silent, deferential, cool,

Not by one's humor, which is the safe truth,
But on consideration."

Clough's life at University Hall was brightened by at least one warm friendship. He found a congenial spirit in the person of Walter Bagehot. To Bagehot the friendship with Clough was one of the most precious things in his life, and he rendered him many a useful service, "mediating," as Mr. Hutton well says, "between that enigma to Presbyterian parents-a college head who held himself serenely neutral on all moral and educational subjects interesting to parents and pupils, except the observance of disciplinary rule-and the managing body who bewildered him, and were by him bewildered ". Bagehot's account of Crabbe Robinson's breakfasts, where poor Clough had to sit and listen to a fearful parody of his favourite Wordsworth, while waiting for his tea or milk or sugar, is very funny. Bagehot recalls "the wonderful and dreary faces which Clough used to make ", pointing out that "to Clough certain of Wordsworth's poems were part of his inner being, and he suffered at hearing them obtruded at meal time just as a High Churchman

would suffer at hearing the collects of the Church. Indeed, these poems were among the collects of Clough's church."

His life in Gordon Square was, however, a lonely and unhappy one, so that Emerson's urgent appeal to try Boston met with a ready acquiescence. In October, 1852, he sailed for Boston. Lowell and Thackeray were on board the steamer that conveyed him to the new world.

He was happier during his short stay in America than he had been for some time. Surrounded by many congenial friends, who gave him a warm welcome, his health and humor perceptibly returned, and gradually the ironic side of his nature was softened by absence from irritating misunderstandings and pharisaical Philistinism. I cannot refrain from quoting the following passage from one of his letters :

"The extremely respectables of Boston attend 'The Stone Chapel', an Episcopalian church of old time, whose minister, some thirty years ago perhaps, told his congregation that he had become a Unitarian, and therewith resigned. So they considered and consulted, and said, 'Well, they liked him very much, and they thought they would turn Unitarians too; what was good enough for him was likely to be as much as would do very well for them'. So they took the English liturgy (for, moreover, certain endowments depended on the use of the Church liturgy), and cut off the tails of the prayers, and pruned things here and there, and lo! they have a very handsome Common Prayer Book, quite as good as any genuine one. And to this Stone Chapel go all the fashionable Unitarian people of Boston in their best dresses, just as if they were Church of England people, and are deeply attached to their liturgy just as if it were the real thing. Is not that curious?"

In 1853 he returned to England to take up a post at the Education Office, which his friends had obtained for him. It was a letter from Carlyle which called him home, as a letter of Emerson's had been the means of drawing him away from his country. In the following year he married, and the perplexities and unsettled habits of mind, which were his for so long, received a quiet and happy ending in the surroundings of a simple and affectionate domestic life. His natural buoyancy and genial optimism returned to him, and on his death in Florence on the 13th November, 1861, he left behind

him a small but deeply attached circle of friends. One of these, as we all know, has immortalised his memory in the ever beautiful "Thyrsis".

The attempt to popularise Clough by issuing him as a "Penny Poet" will, I think, prove futile, whatever proof may be given as to the number of copies sold. Bagehot pointed out long ago that such poetry as Clough's can never really be popular; “its subject would forbid it ", he says, "even if its treatment were perfect; but it may have a better fate; it may have a tenacious hold on the solitary, the meditative, and the calm ".

The army of those who think, "the solitary, the meditative, and the calm", has by the very circumstances of modern life grown to some considerable proportion. To whom better can they go for refreshment and inspiration than to this wise sane optimist, this honest and vigorous soul?

CHARLES F. NEWCOMBE.

THE SAXON AND THE CELT.'

PROFESSOR HUXLEY, in his little book on "Hume", remarks that the Scotch philosopher's observations on national character are full of sense and shrewdness, the subject being one "about which more nonsense, and often very mischievous nonsense, has been and is talked than upon any other topic". It is with a view of dispelling some of this mischievous nonsense on the subject of race that Mr. J. M. Robertson has written the volume entitled "The Saxon and the Celt". Racial prejudices are among the most deeply seated of our frailties. They doubtless serve certain more or less useful functions. Most people have not sufficient time for just distinctions. It saves trouble for the English to set down the Irish as "a bad lot ", and for Germans to consider decadence the note of the French. No form of racial prejudice has had more political play of late than that which, roughly classifying whole nations as Saxon or as Celtic, assumes the invariable superiority of the former and the degeneracy of the latter. Various causes have conspired to give strength to the Saxon cult our German monarchy, the Teutonic proclivities of such writers as Kingsley, Carlyle, Freeman, and Ruskin; and, above all, the success of the Fatherland in the Franco-Prussian War, have led to such glorification of the Germanic races that some Britons are half persuaded that they are nearer to the Pomeranians of East Prussia than to the Bretons across the channel. I know it is heresy, but I venture the opinion that there is more ethnographic value in L. O. Pike's "The English and Their Origin", published thirty years ago, than in most similar works written since the war of 1870-71; and Mr. Pike by anticipation overthrew much of the nonsense about our Teutonic race. His volume may still be commended to those who think the English

"The Saxon and the Celt: A Study in Sociology." By John Mackinnon Robertson. University Press, Limited, 16 John Street, Bedford Row, W.C.