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apart in his honour, and kept as a festival, during which all unnecessary work was to be suspended.

In 1203 John, a Greenland Bishop, visited Paul, and they together consecrated oil of chrism; and the Greenlander taught his brother how to make wine out of the berries of the Empetrum nigrum, according to a receipt given him by King Sverrer.

By Bishop Paul's advice a standard measure of a yard was made, and ordered to consist of two ells. He also gathered statistics with reference to his diocese. He found in it two hundred and twenty churches, and two hundred and ninety priests; but as the priests were in the habit of making excursions abroad and neglecting their duty, he for the future restrained them, unless every cure was provided for during their absence. Of the well-ordering of his own household the historian thus speaks:

'His wife, Herdisa, managed all things with the utmost judgment, and was the most active of all. . . . Their children, from the earliest age, were brought up to habits of diligence. Their son Lopt became a skilful artisan, and was shrewd and learned. Ketill became an excellent scribe and scholar. Their daughter Halla was energetic in domestic work, and well skilled in literature, and her sister Thora was eminent for her docility and affectionate disposition.'

It must have been a severe blow to the Bishop when his wife and eldest daughter were lost in crossing the river Thiorsa. The rest of his life was spent in endeavours to arbitrate between the Bishop of Holar and a certain Kolbein, who were engaged in litigation, and in continuing the adornment of his church. He died in 1211.

From the two specimens given, it may be seen how many curious and interesting particulars may be gathered from these ancient memoirs of the Icelandic Bishops. The whole series has not as yet been published, but there have already been given to the public the lives of Thorvald, the first Missionary (A D. 986), of Bishop Isleif (1006-80), of S. Thorlac (1133-93), of Paul (1171-1211), of S. John of Holar (1052-1121), of S. Gudmund (cons. 1203, d. 1237), of Aron Hjorleifson (contemporary of S. Gudmund), of Rafn, a friend of S. Gudmund, of Arni of Skalholt (cons. 1277, d. 1298), of Laurence of Holar (cons. 1322, d. 1330), and of John Halldorson (cons. 1325). Few of these are deficient in interest, and most of them would repay translation.

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ART. V.-Clarissa.

A Novel, by SAMUEL RICHARDSON. Edited by E. S. DALLAS. London: Tinsley Brothers.

As a reader in old days of Richardson, and one who had once on a time lived under his spell, it occurred to us, upon seeing advertised a reprint of Clarissa,' to revive old impressions. We therefore inquired for it at a circulating library, and were answered by the master of the shop, with an air of some rigidity, that they had not and never should have it; evidently regarding his shelves as too select for such company. And yet some of the good man's novels would have made Richardson protest in the cause of virtue, while nothing would have surprised him more than that exception should be taken to a tale which he composed for the guidance of the young and innocent, as an express warning against the dangers that lay in their path in a corrupt age: designed, in short, for such an exposure of the wiles of vice as should unveil the machinations of all gay Lotharios to the end of time. No plausible villain should succeed again if he could help it. Still we took the tacit rebuke in good part, and in fact regard a popular reprint of the fine old novel without favour and a thing to be regretted. In the first place, it cannot be done in fairness to its author. No publisher would undertake a bona fide reprint. The heavy weight of moralizing must be made short work of, under the apology that nobody would read it if it were there, but really because it would double the expense, and diminish the book's chance of success at the same time. A vast amount of detail lies under the same ban, and meets the same fate, as retarding the progress of the story, and intolerable to our impatient generation. But Clarissa' not thus weighted is no 'Clarissa' of Richardson's. We must bring to the task of reading it a patience in conformity with the patience towards prosiness which characterised that day: we must allow the author his own leisurely way and time in admitting his reader into the scene and atmosphere of his tale: we must know the people who drove the heroine into her fatal dilemma: we must realize family life and parental authority in the society it portrays, and the claims and immunities of birth and position. in those days we must enter into the family conclave-a tribunal which does not exist now,-see the domineering father's protracted obstinacy; the cold, ambitious, selfish brother in all his inflexibility; the envious sister, unmoved by appeal after appeal; the poor, weak mother: we must linger in the porch of the story, and work ourselves into its surroundings, and know

all the people by a gradual acquaintance, and learn to esteem the author, not only for his careful, patient elaboration of a tragic situation, but for his sense of duty to the moral responsibilities of the task he undertook, before we are in a fit temper; that is, such a temper as his virtuous admirers of one hundred and twenty years ago brought to bear on the perusal of this his masterpiece.

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Mr. Dallas takes his motto from Sir Walter Scott, who says, The prolixity of Richardson, which, to our giddy-paced time, is the greatest fault of his writing, was no such fault to his contemporaries. But a modern reader may wish that "Clarissa " had been a good deal abridged at the beginning.' This cannot be denied, yet there is danger by omitting the preaching, and turning the eight volumes into a modern three-volume novel, doing what can be done towards turning 'Clarissa' into a sensational novel with the conventional scruples and decorums left out; though nothing can bring it into any real affinity. Even if readers do not read every word, it is only justice to the author that they should own themselves skipping: they have a correcter idea of him and his design as they turn the leaves, not without a passing insight into their contents. Readers ought to come to Clarissa' in an historical spirit; and the young ought not to read it at all, because they know nothing of the state of society in which Richardson lived and wrote, and, if carefully trained, are happy in an ignorance of evil impossible a hundred years ago. His Lovelace, when thus vigorously depicted, though now an unfamiliar monster, had in his leading characteristics been, for more than one generation, the favourite hero of the stage. Every one who went to the play-and few had scruples on this point was familiar with his avowed principles in all their grossness. Things were spoken of which are unmentionable now. Richardson outraged no proprieties, shocked no sensibilities. The most distinguished and excellent of his female readers could vouch for the truth of his tacit charges against society. A forced marriage, for example, a family compact where the wishes of the unhappy bride were not for a moment considered,—would be felt more than a possibility by Mrs. Delany, a friend of Richardson's, herself a similar victim, who in some other respects might stand for the original of Clarissa. Her early correspondence is a voucher for his truth on many a point which outrages modern ideas of likelihood; it tells of abductions and hints at atrocities which the law then was not strong enough to punish, and which society pardoned. Even the necessity the epistolary plan of his works put him in, of making his villain detail all his villanies to a friend, could not then produce quite the same anomalous effect on the reader it

must do now. The theatre furnished examples in plenty of the same manner of intercourse, and matter for easy boasting confession. What was new was the design, the honest design, we fully believe, to show up the fascinating rake who had taken possession of so many foolish female fancies, in all the cold, remorseless cruelty of his nature-to show the devil's work in a bad heart.

Richardson hated his hero, and intends that his readers should hate him. There is no sneaking kindness; we detect no lurking excuses, no inevitable slips and sins, no dilemmas and temptations, from which we know not how to deliver him. He decks him with no insidious generosity, to take our fancy in spite of us. The rake had been too long an avowed popular character: Richardson set himself to expose him and show what he was made of. A keen, silent observation of the ways of the world, carried on for sixty years, for it was at this mature age that Clarissa' saw the light, qualified him for a dispassionate performance of such a task. There might be colecisms in the manners he portrayed, for his insight was not derived from intercourse, but the fine gentlemen of those days allowed their principles to transpire to the outer world with a grossness not permissible now, and his imagination supplied him with the rest, enough for practical purposes. All this excuses much in his day which it would not in ours; but no testimonials in favour of virtue, no twinges of conscience or remorse, no revelation of a wicked heart in all its vileness of deceit and treachery, can make a scoundrel's familiar letters fit reading for the family circle. The critics, one and all, declare themselves the better for reading 'Clarissa;' they find it a moral tonic; and, familiar as they are with the modern sympathetic tone towards sin, we quite believe it. But they are not in the position to judge of what is good for the simple unsophisticated reader. Clarissa' now is a study it must not take its place among light literature, to be read in the careless spirit in which the ordinary novel is taken up.

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What, perhaps, strikes the reader most in Richardson's delineation of Lovelace, is that he makes him witty without betraying the least relish for the wit himself. He stands aloof, and merely records. This may be called art; but we see more than this. We feel sure that his own conversation was without a tincture of Lovelace's wit or humour. It is all under protest: he does not like the sort of thing; would have us feel that he sees the emptiness, shortsightedness, selfishness, frivolity of it. His taste lies in another sort of style altogether; he prefers to record sententiousness,-fine observations, as he calls them, on the passage of time and the dangers of procrastination. Love

lace is proud of the ebullitions of his 'whimsical spirits;' but the author is not. He takes in hand an avowed popular character. He reproaches women, strict in their own manners and censorious towards their own sex, for their toleration of vice in men; and, through his portrait of a rake, would make them ashamed of themselves. These are the trivialities he tells them to beguile silly girls and to please boon companions, but the reader is never allowed to rest satisfied with such frothy, unsubstantial aliment. His standard of excellence in conversation involves a great deal of solid reflection; he expects his readers to have the same; and, in fact, it was the standard of the grave and thoughtful of his contemporaries. Richardson's fictions match with the divinity and with the published correspondence of his time; he belonged essentially to his own day and Clarissa's piety, her faith, her sense of duty, her forms of expression, all illustrate the religion, too much decried and disparaged, of the devouter spirits of the eighteenth century, with whom gravity was a test of sincerity and earnestness in a degree we have slipped away from.

Mr. Dallas, in the preface which he has attached to the abridged 'Clarissa,' strikes us as far too modern to understand, and, therefore, to do justice to, his author, whose work he commends with much high-flown panegyric, while he strangely contemns both the conscience and the powers of the workman. We are not denying that Richardson's moralizing is often tedious, and that it savours of commonplace; what we think it only fair and just to him to believe is, that he thought it valuable and valued himself upon it; and, in fact, good advice went down, if we may use the familiar phrase, then better than it does now. Mr. Dallas, however, actually calls these careful antidotes to Lovelace's vile principles all a trick, and thus expresses himself upon it :

'His moralizing would be intrusive even if inspired by veritable history; it becomes intolerably tedious and solemn joke when it starts from fiction. It was regarded as a mistake in days when there were scarcely any good novels but his own in existence; in our days, when our literature teams with good novels, which avoid homily, the preaching of the author, far from tending to illusion, is at once detected as a trick. We resent the artifice of bringing God and His commandments into a story that we may give it a credo. In epic poetry we have, it is true, the so-called machinery of deities, one great purpose of which is precisely that of Richardson-to give the sanction of religion to the tale; and modern poets who attempt the epic make a grand mistake when they introduce machinery which no one believes in, and which, therefore, is powerless to invest the fictions they encumber with the faith of the soul. But the use of machinery—the use, that is, of religion in art as an instrument of sensation and as a means of pumping up faith in the story, is now obsolete, and the mild form of machinery employed by Richardson, where conscience with its monitions, or a preacher with his texts, takes the place of Jove and his decrees, defeats his end. We are not edified, we are not convinced, we are

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