course would be opened both for the large and for the little culture -both for the scientific capitalist and for the labouring man. In how many directions, then, do we find our present land system barring improvement and holding us back; or, still worse, working mischief amongst us! We have seen that it lessens the amount of useful and necessary commodities which the land of the country may be made to produce for the people of the country; that it obliges us to carry on our agriculture with a class of persons so circumstanced as to be incapable of appreciating rightly education, which is the great need of these times; that it necessitates a poor law, which, administered as it must be under existing conditions, is one of our chief sources of moral, of economical, and possibly of coming political mischief; that it prevents the people who do the manual labour, if not of all kinds, at all events of agriculture, from having homes; and that, as the acquisition or the improvement of a home is the natural, universal, proper object of saving, by destroying this motive, and superadding dependence on the poor law, it teaches unthrift, and all its attendant immoralities. We cannot suppose here, as we might in Switzerland and France, that every cottage we pass may be a school for the acquisition of the domestic virtues; and that by industry, and the practice of many forms of self-denial, a little hoard is being accumulated within it to meet all the adverse contingencies of life; and we have seen that it is our land system which has long been putting such homes as these, homes which do not breed drunken women and wife-kicking husbands, beyond our reach. I will now, in as few words as possible, indicate two or three more evil fruits of the system, for it is instructive to see how widely and in what widely-differing directions the mischievous effects of a false system applied to land, which is the natural basis of society, ramify. It is because they are without property that we dread to give the franchise to a large section of the people. It is for the same reason that we cannot give military training to the whole people. Everybody notices the poverty and meanness of social life in our country towns: the reason of this is that the rent of any district does not contribute through those who own it to the enrichment and embellishment of the social life of its town. This, too, is the main cause of the difficulty, everywhere experienced in this country, of establishing good local middle schools. If the land were more largely divided, the difficulty would vanish, for then there would be on the spot a sufficient number of persons interested in the establishment and maintenance of such schools. The depopulation of our rural parishes, and the deterioration of the social condition of those whom our system maintains in them, constitute a great difficulty in the question of local government. There are many parishes in which not a man resident in the parish owns a rood of land in it, or even the house in which he lives. The system has made us the most homeless and propertyless of all people. In such parishes there are not the materials for local government. The same fact will render disestablishment accompanied by disendowment, if it is to come, a far more difficult question economically at this day than it would have been seven hundred or a thousand years ago. At those dates there were a sufficient number of owners of property in each parish to build the parish churches; in these days, in many parishes there are not enough to keep the fabric in repair. I do not present the evils just indicated, together with those referred to in the course of this paper, as an exhaustive list of the charges that may be brought against our present land system: I shall, however, be satisfied, if what has been said be enough to dispose some of those who have hitherto not given much attention to these matters, to look a little into them. Here are several distinct evils. Like everything else in the world, they must have causes. Are their causes those I have suggested? If not, then what? Again, the times have certain acknowledged wants. If they cannot be supplied in the ways I have suggested, how are they to be supplied? I have at times, in the preceding pages, been withheld by want of space from giving my reasons for the conclusions I had arrived at. Discussions, however, of some of the questions involved in them, should any one think it worth his while to make the reference, may be found dispersed throughout the three volumes I have lately published on Switzerland. In this article my aim is to set forth the fact that in our English Channel, within a few hours' steaming of our own shore, we have living under the English Crown a population more self-respecting, intelligent, enterprising, and generally well-to-do, than any equal number on an equal space anywhere else in the United Kingdom: my hope is that some of us may thereby be led to ask whether there is in the nature of things any prohibition against our becoming on our imperial scale what they are on their small island scale? My belief is that they could not have attained to their present position if they had had our land laws; and that, if land were distributed here as it is there, or still better perhaps if it were made absolutely free, that is absolutely the property of each generation both to sell and to devise as each proprietor at any moment pleased, no mischief of any kind would ensue; but that, on the contrary, as I have endeavoured to show, some grievous evils would be abated and some great advantages secured. I do not shrink from giving expression to this conclusion, because any one who is disposed to pursue these inquiries himself may, if he please, be on the day after he has read this article in the Channel Islands, seeing with his own eyes, and judging for himself how far the condition of their inhabitants has herein been rightly appreciated, and how far its evidence can be claimed in support of the views I have been maintaining. F. B. ZINCKE. THE THREE STAGES OF SHAKESPEARE.1 THE example afforded by the Comedy of Errors would suffice to show that rhyme, however inadequate for tragic use, is by no means a bad instrument for romantic comedy. In another of Shakespeare's earliest works, which might almost be described as a lyrical farce, rhyme plays also a great part; but the finest passage, the real crown and flower of Love's Labour's Lost, is the praise or apology of love spoken by Biron in blank verse. This is worthy of Marlowe for dignity and sweetness, but has also the grace of a light and radiant fancy enamoured of itself, begotten between thought and mirth, a child-god with grave lips and laughing eyes, whose inspiration is nothing akin to Marlowe's. In this scene, as in the overture of the play and in its closing scene, but especially in the noble passage which winds up for a year the courtship of Biron and Rosaline, the spirit which informs the speech of the poet is finer of touch and deeper of tone than the sweetest of the serious interludes of the Comedy of Errors. The play is in the main a yet lighter thing, and more wayward and capricious in build, more formless and fantastic in plot, more incomposite altogether, than that first heir of Shakespeare's comic invention, which on its own ground is perfect in its consistency, blameless in composition and coherence; while in Love's Labour's Lost the fancy for the most part runs wild as the wind, and the structure of the story is as that of a house of clouds which the wind builds and unbuilds at pleasure. Here we find a very riot of rhymes, wild and wanton in their half-grown grace as a troop of "young satyrs, tender-hoofed and ruddy-horned;" during certain scenes we seem almost to stand again by the cradle of new-born comedy, and hear the first lisping and laughing accents run over from her baby lips in bubbling rhyme; but when the note changes we recognise the speech of gods. For the first time in our literature the higher key of poetic or romantic comedy is finely touched to a fine issue. The divine instrument fashioned by Marlowe for tragic purposes alone has found at once its sweet new use in the hands of Shakespeare. The way is prepared for As You Like It and the Tempest; the language is discovered which will suit the lips of Rosalind and Miranda. What was highest as poetry in the Comedy of Errors was mainly in rhyme; all indeed, we might say, between the prelude spoken by Egeon and the appearance in the last scene of his wife in Love's Labour's Lost what was highest was couched wholly in blank (1) Continued from the Fortnightly Review for May, 1875. verse; in the Two Gentlemen of Verona rhyme has fallen seemingly into abeyance, and there are no passages of such elegiac beauty as in the former, of such exalted eloquence as in the latter of these plays; there is an even sweetness, a simple equality of grace in thought and language which keeps the whole poem in tune, written as it is in a subdued key of unambitious harmony. In perfect unity and keeping the composition of this beautiful sketch may perhaps be said to mark a stage of advance, a new point of work attained, a faint but sensible change of manner, signalised by increased firmness of hand and clearness of outline. Slight and swift in execution as it is, few and simple as are the chords here struck of character and emotion, every shade of drawing and every note of sound is at one with the whole scheme of form and music. Here too is the first dawn of that higher and more tender humour which was never given in such perfection to any man as ultimately to Shakespeare; one touch of the by-play of Launce and his immortal dog is worth all the bright fantastic interludes of Boyet and Adriano, Costard and Holofernes; worth even half the sallies of Mercutio, and half the dancing doggerel or broadwitted prose of either Dromio. But in the final poem which concludes and crowns the first epoch of Shakespeare's work, the special graces and peculiar glories of each that went before are gathered together as in one garland "of every hue and every scent." The The young genius of the master of all poets finds its consummation in the Midsummer Night's Dream. The blank verse is as full, sweet, and strong as the best of Biron's or Romeo's; the rhymed verse as clear, pure, and true as the simplest and truest melody of Venus and Adonis or the Comedy of Errors. But here each kind of excellence is equal throughout; there are here no purple patches on a gown of serge, but one seamless and imperial robe of a single dye. Of the lyric and the prosaic part, the counterchange of loves and laughters, of fancy fine as air and imagination high as heaven, what need can there be for any one to shame himself by the helpless attempt to say some word not utterly unworthy? Let it suffice to accept this poem as the landmark of our first stage, and pause to look back from it on what lies behind us of partial or of perfect work. The highest point attained in this first period lies in the domain of comedy or romance, and belongs as much to lyric as to dramatic poetry; its sovereign quality is that of sweetness and springtide of fairy fancy crossed with light laughter and light trouble that end in perfect music. In history as in tragedy the master's hand is not yet come to its full strength and skill; its touch is not yet wholly assured, its work not yet wholly blameless. Besides the plays undoubtedly and entirely due to the still growing genius of Shakespeare, we have taken note but of two among those which bear the partial imprint of his hand. The long-vexed question as to the authorship of the latter parts of King Henry VI., in their earlier or later form, has not been touched upon; nor do I design to reopen that perpetual source of debate unstanchable and inexhaustible dispute by any length of scrutiny or inquisition of detail. Two points must of course be taken for granted: that Marlowe was more or less concerned in the production, and Shakespeare in the revision, of these plays; whether before or after his additions to the original First Part of King Henry VI. we cannot determine, though the absence of rhyme might seem to indicate a later date for the recast of the Contention. But it is noticeable that the style of Marlowe appears more vividly and distinctly in passages of the reformed than of the unreformed plays. Those famous lines, for example, which open the fourth act of the Second Part of King Henry VI., are not to be found in the corresponding scene of the First Part of the Contention; yet, whether they belong to the original sketch of the play, or were inserted as an afterthought into the revised and expanded copy, the authorship of these verses is surely unmistakeable : "The gaudy, blabbing, and remorseful day Is crept into the bosom of the sea; And now loud howling wolves arouse the jades Aut Christophorus Marlowe, aut diabolus; it is inconceivable that |