solve to be deaf to every counsel of moderation, and to pursue to the end the phantom of disestablish ment. He may repeal every law which has been enacted respecting the Irish Church. He may strip the Protestant Episcopalians of Ireland of every glebe, every tithe, every parish church, every cathedral, every endowment; but so long as the Church of England abides in England, he will not have disestablished them. He will have fallen upon an arbitrary meaning attached by himself to disestablishment. In actual fact the Irish Episcopalians will remain as much established as ever, because they will still have a personal and ecclesiastical connection with the State which will be possessed by no other body of Christians. The Roman Catholics will know nothing of the State: the Protestant Episcopalians will simply declare themselves to be members of the Church of England, and they will instantly restore the State Church to Ireland. They will cry, Le roi est mort: Vive le roi! There will be no break in the continuity of the Church: they were members of it previously, they will be members still. Their membership will come instantly under the protection of the civil courts; the predominance of the law of Parliament, as their legislature, the prayers and articles prescribed by Parliament, the obligation of their clergy to conform to the injunctions of the State, will have, undergone no change. It will be open to a dissatisfied clergyman to leave them, no doubt but he will be as unable whilst he stays amongst them to alter their ritual as Mr. Mackonochie has been in England. Whilst the Church of England lasts in England, disestab lishment is impossible for Mr. Gladstone-true disestablishment, the real separation of Church and State, the ignoring by the State of all forms of religious belief. Irish disendowed Episcopalians, as voluntary members of the State Church of England will remain an abiding monument of the impo tence of a statesman who clutched at a word but was powerless to seize the substance. The 2 Or all the many branches in which literature flourishes, there is none which has been so widely and universally developed in our own generation as that of fiction. We are informed on all sides that we have made immense progress in positive knowledge of every description; but we can see for ourselves the astounding progress which has been made in that special track of art, which demands, some people think, the minimum of knowledge, cultivation, or training. It has come to be a conmon doctrine that everybody can write a novel, just as it used to be that everybody, or rather anybody, might keep a school; and in point of fact, nowadays most people do write novels, with a result which can scarcely be called satisfactory. The art is as old as human nature; and yet it is not so old in its present shape but that we can identify the fountain from which so many springs have flowed. The similitude is one too energetic, too violent, however, for the subject. VOL. CV. NO. DCXLI. The modern English novel, which is in everybody's hands nowadays; which gives employment to crowds of workpeople, almost qualifying itself to rank among the great industries of the day: which keeps paper-mills going, and printing - machines, and has its own army of dependants and retainers, as if it were cotton or capital, the English novel, we say, arose, not with any gush, as from a fountain, but in a certain serene pellucid pool, where a group of pretty smiling eighteenth-century faces, with elaborate "heads," and powder and patches, were wont to mirror themselves in the middle of George II.'s reign; while Pope was singing his melodious couplets, and Chesterfield writing his wonderful letters, and Anson fighting with the winds and seas, and Prince Charley planning the '45. all the confused events of which the world was full-bewildering destruction of the old, still more bewildering formation of the new the spectator turns aside into the 8. From quaintest homely quiet, the most domestic, least emotional, of all household scenes: and there finds Samuel Richardson, a good printer, a comfortable, affectionate, fatherly tradesman, kind to everybody about him, and very much applauded by his admiring friends, but with no special marks of genius that any one can see. Other men of far greater personal note breathed the same air with this active, pottering, and virtuous bourgeois; men with good blood in their veins, and gold lace on their coats, and Greek and Latin at their fingers' end, not to speak of youth, and vivacity. and high spirits, and knowledge of the world. There was Henry Fielding, for instance, writing bad plays, and painfully casting about what to do with his genius. What was he to do with it? having at the same time an ailing wife and little children, burdens which Pegasus can take lightly en croupe, when he is aware what he is about, and has his course clear before him, but terrible drawbacks to the stumbling steed which is seeking a path for itself across the untrodden ways. It is impossible to give any sketch of one of the two great novelists of the age without introducing the other. Fielding has a thousand advantages to start with over our homely forefather. He is so genial, so jovial, such a fine gentleman; so high an impulse of life and current of spirit run through his books. His wickednesses are not wicked, but mere accidents-warmth of blood and rapidity of movement carrying him away. And then his knowledge of the world! Richardson's knowledge was only of good sort of people, and secondary litterateurs, and-women, who are not the world, as everybody knows. This curious distinction of what is life and what is not, which has prevailed so widely since then, probably originated in the eighteenth century; though the observers of the present day might be tempted, in the spirit of an age which in quires into everything, to ask why Covent Garden should teach knowledge of the world more effectually than Salisbury Court, and whether i players and debauchees throw more light upon the workings of human nature than honest and reasonable souls,-this is so entirely taken for granted by critics, that it would be vain to make any stand against so all-prevailing a theory; and yet the question is one which will sug-2 gest itself now and then to the unprejudiced. But, notwithstanding the superior knowledge of the world, which gave Fielding an advantage over Richardson-notwithstanding his better acquaintance with polite society, and immensely greater spring and impulse of genius-it was the old printer, and not the young man of the world, who found out the mode of employing his gift. The path once opened was soon filled with many passengers; but to Richardson must be given the credit of having directed the stream towards it and opened the way. Richardson's personal history is of a kind unique in literature. He had lived half a century in the commonplace world before any one suspected him of the possession of genius. Ordinary duties, commonplace labour, had filled up his fifty years. He had gone through what it was natural to suppose would be the hardest affliction of a man conscious of an original gift of his own, the printing and publication of much rubbish of other people's, with the greatest patience, and had, to all appearance, occupied himself with his own life without any thought of reproducing its mysteries for the edification of others. He had been respectable and helpful and friendly from his cradle. One of Fielding's biographers declares contemptuously that Richardson "had never known the want of a guinea, or committed an act which the most rigid moralist could censure." It seems the worst accusation that could be brought against him. Neither man nor maid could lay their scath to T 0 the better of him at every turn, him. He was a little fussy, a little to good men, who took a horn of ale in the kitchen, whose chief means of communicating with the squire or his lady was through "the waiting gentlewoman," herself a curate's daughter. That he had "only common school learning," and at fifteen chose a business, was no doubt a great deal better for Samuel, as well as for his future readers. He describes himself as being not fond of play," and of being called Serious and Gravity by the other boys, who, however, sought his society as a teller of stories, some of which were from his memory, but others, "of which they would be most fond, and often were affected by them," of his own invention. "All my stories carried with them, I am bold to say, a useful moral," says the virtuous romancer. And we may be sure they did; for whatever may be the objection of the precocious modern child to an overdemonstrative moral, there can be no doubt that stern poetic justice, and the most rigid awards of moral ity, are always most congenial to the primitive intelligence. It was not only schoolboys, however, who benefited by his moralities. The following incident shows the lad in a more curious light: "From my earliest youth I had a love of letter-writing. I was not eleven years old when I wrote, spontaneously, a letter to a widow of near fifty, who, pretending to a zeal for religion, and being a constant frequenter of church ordinances, was continually fomenting quarrels and disturbances, by back biting and scandal, among all her acquaintance. I collected from the Scripture texts that made against her. As suming the style and address of a person in years, I exhorted her, I expostulated with her. But my handwriting was known. I was challenged with it, and owned the boldness; for she complained of it to my mother with tears. My mother chid me for the freedom taken by such a boy with a woman of her years; but knowing that her son was not of a pert or forward nature, but, on the contrary, shy and bashful, she commended my principles, though she censured the liberty taken." A certain delicious air of selfsatisfaction in this narrative shows plainly enough that the mature moralist, in the height of his fame, approved, and was on the whole somewhat proud, of these doings of the baby prig. The little monster, we believe, might even now be matched in here and there a virtuous Low Church household. The reader will recollect a set of American novels much repandu some fifteen or twenty years ago, in which the creature flourishes, and is not "chid" but adored for its pious men-a success impudence. Pleasanter incidents, however, are in the life of this droll little precocious adviser and sage. It is clear that he was born with an old head upon his young shoulders, and his success was great among woof a character curiously out of tune with the manners of the time, and at which critics, born conservators of the sneers. of all the ages, continue to jeer, notwithstanding that the cycle has run round again, and a Platonic counsellor of womankind has once more become a favourite character in life and fiction. Here is a companion picture of a much more agreeable kind : As a bashful and not forward boy, I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half-a-dozen of them, when met to work with their needles, used, when they got a book they liked, and thought I should, borrow me to read to them, their mo thers sometimes with them, and both mothers and daughters used to be pleased with the observations they put me upon making. "I was not more than thirteen, when three of these young women, unknown to each other, having a high opinion of my taciturnity, revealed to me their love-secrets, in order to induce me to give them copies to write after, or cor rect, for answers to their lovers' letters; nor did any one of them ever know that I was the secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide, and even repulse, when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before me, overflowing with esteem dreading to be taken at her word, diand affection, and the fair repulser, recting this word, or that expression, to be softened or changed. One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour and vows of everlasting love, has said, when I have asked her direction, 'I cannot tell you what to write; but (her heart on her lips) you cannot write too kindly;' all her fear was only that she should incur slight for her kindness." Never was a more distinct foreshadowing of the life to come. The quaint urchin, in his little coat and breeches, a wise little undergrown T T |