only to make it again to find there a true and devoted woman whose love would be worth that of a thousand Gudruns. But of Ingebjorg there is no further count taken; and because Gudrun will not divorce herself from Bodli, Kiartan weds not Ingebjorg but Refna. It would not be easy to find a parallel to this mingled baseness and absurdity, unless perhaps we look for it to the confessions of Augustine, who sends away the long-loved mother of his child because he wishes to marry a Milanese lady, and because this lady is still too young, enters into another unlawful connexion until she should be old enough to marry him. To make the matter even worse, when his sister Thurid has told Kiartan the truth about Refna, Kiartan with a certain feeling of relief lays himself on his bed, thinking of Ingebjorg

'And all the pleasure her sweet love had brought
While he was with her; and this maid did seem
Like her come back amidst a happy dream :'

and Kiartan now called himself a Christian.
'will you have?' asks Mr. Morris.

sore.

Ah, well! what

'This was a man some shreds of joy to save
From out the wreck, if so he might, to win
Some garden from the waste and dwell therein.
And yet he lingered long, or e'er he told
His heart that it another name might hold
With that of the lost Gudrun.'

This is intolerable. What we would have is the plain duty of a Christian man-which in such a case would be, either that he should remain as he was, or that, as he could not marry the woman whom he had first loved, he should betake himself to her whom he professed to love with a strange love great and In strict truth, there was no wreck and no waste except such as he had chosen to make. According to the Icelandic ethics of the day, all might be settled on Gudrun's part by an appeal to the divorce court; on his own part, he was bound to make Ingebjorg happy and not to make Refna miserable. But in point of fact, he had allowed another name to hold his heart along with that of Gudrun, if there was but a grain of truth in the words which he had spoken of Ingebjorg; nor can we shut our eyes to these glaring inconsistencies in an awkwardly constructed story.

We need all our patience to go through the sequel of the tale. It is enough to say that a feud is made to spring up between the house of Bathstead and Kiartan's house of Herdholt -that Kiartan finds it consistent with his Christian profession

to harry his neighbour's house and steal his cattle, and that in the issue

'Gudrun's five brethren, and three stout men more,'

valiantly attack Kiartan and his single attendant in a desolate pass, and at length succeed in slaying him, their luck being better than that of the eighty assailants of Grettir, who are vanquished by that hero as easily as the thousand Philistines were smitten by Samson when armed with the jaw-bone of an ass. The rest may be told in few words, but these are not the less noteworthy. Refna dies soon of a broken heart; and three years later Bodli is slain by Kiartan's kinsfolk. As to Gudrun,

'when Bodli's sons were men,

And many things had happed, she wed again;'

and when Thorkel in his turn had been dead for a long while, she discourses to one of the sons of Bodli on the merits of her several husbands. If we allow, as well we may, when she came to speak of one who had not been her husband, that she told no more than the bare truth in saying,

'I did the worst to him I loved the most,'

we must also allow that, if these words imply blame to herself, that blame was most fully deserved; but as we can see nothing to praise or to love in her life, we can find little that is wholesome in the chronicle of her self-inflicted miseries.

It may, indeed, be said that if there are horrors here, there are horrors also in the story of Jason. But when we get among fire-breathing bulls, and men springing up after the sowing of dragon's teeth, and the marvels wrought by the wise Colchian maiden, our thoughts pass at once into another channel, where the contrast of the tale of Gudrun with the laws which underlie all our social life is not forced upon us; and in the story of Jason Mr. Morris has found a subject which he has handled with even greater skill than the most beautiful of the legends selected for the poems of the Earthly Paradise.' That this poem is tinged with the same tones of thought and feeling which pervade all the others, we have already seen; but here, as elsewhere, the lines in which these feelings are expressed are among the most melodious of Mr. Morris's rhymes. The Argonautic legend itself is worked up into a tale of absorbing interest; and from the moment when the Olympian Queen reveals her loving purpose respecting Jason to the hour when he lies down to take his last sleep beneath the divine Argo, we are carried on with the art of the bard whose strains drive away all sleep from the eyes of his hearers. The contrast

between the earlier scenes of the story and those in which the career of Jason is brought to the end, is drawn with singular force. The great work of Medea is done, and she sits a queen besides her crowned king:

'Yet surely now, if never more again,

Had she and all these folk forgotten pain,

And idle words to them were Death and Fear;
For in the gathering evening could they hear
The carols of the glad talk through the town
The song of birds within the garden drown:
And when the golden sun had gone away,
Still little darker was the night than day
Without the windows of the goodly hall.

But many an hour after the night did fall,
Though outside silence fell on man and beast,
There still they sate, nor wearied of the feast;
Yea, ere they parted, glimmering light had come
From the far mountains, nigh the Colchian's home,
And in the twilight birds began to wake.'

The golden light rests on all,

And there in happy days, and rest and peace,
Here ends the winning of the Golden Fleece.'

But the winning of the Golden Fleece is not the end of the story; and, as though to nerve himself for the great catastrophe, Mr. Morris breaks off into one of the few passages in which he speaks of himself; nor will his readers think that in these lines he advances a claim which savours in the least of presumption.

'So ends the winning of the Golden Fleece,
So ends the tale of that sweet rest and peace,
That unto Jason and his love befell.
Another story now my tongue must tell,
And tremble in the telling. Would that I
Had but some portion of that mastery
That from the rose-hung lanes of woody Kent
Through these five hundred years such songs
To us who, meshed within this smoky net
Of unrejoicing labour, love them yet.
And thou, O master!-yes, my master still,
Whatever feet have scaled Parnassus' hill,

have sent

Since like thy measures, clear and sweet and strong,
Thames' stream scarce fettered, bore the bream along
Unto the bastioned bridge, his only chain.
O master, pardon me, if yet in vain
Thou art my master, and I fail to bring
Before men's eyes the image of the thing

My heart is filled with; thou, whose dreamy eyes
Beheld the flush to Cressid's cheeks arise,
When Troilus rode up the praising street,
As clearly as they saw thy townsmen meet
Those who in vineyards of Poitou withstood

The glittering horror of the steel-topped wood.'

Chaucer himself might regard with complacency the work of his disciple throughout this poem, and, most of all, in that closing scene in which Jason thinks with tenderness of his first love and with more than tenderness of the later-won maiden, 'Whose innocent sweet eyes and tender hands Made [him] a mocking unto distant lands,'

and with high purpose nerving his heart, can still say 'with the next returning light will I

Cast off my moody sorrow utterly,

And once more live my life as in times past,

And 'mid the chance of war the die will cast.'

So, thinking of great deeds still to be done in other lands,

and

'gazing still across the sea,

Heavy with days and nights of misery,

His eyes waxed dim, and calmer still he grew,
Still pondering over times and things he knew,
While now the sun had sunk behind the hill,
And from a white-thorn nigh a thrush did fill
The balmy air with echoing minstrelsy,

And cool the night-wind blew across the sea,

And round about the soft-winged bats did sweep.'

The next day a shepherd of the lone grey slope finds crushed under the ruined stem of Argo all dead of Jason that here can die; and amid the funeral rites of the great king and hero the divine ship is offered

'to the Deity

Who shakes the hard earth with the rolling sea.'

6

We turn reluctantly from this noble poem as from the charming tales which Mr. Morris has gathered from the great storehouse of Greek tradition. Of the Earthly Paradise' we need only say that if, as in the story of Gudrun, there may be some thorny plants in its beautiful garden, and if the songs which tell us of its glories and its pleasures rather add to than lighten the burden of life, we are not blind to the loveliness of its flowers, or deaf to the music which is heard amidst its groves.

ART. X-1. Aktenstücke zur Orientalischen Frage, nebst chronologischer Uebersicht. Zusammengestellt von Dr. J. von JASMUND. Drei Bände. 8vo. Berlin: 1855-1859. 2. Papers on Eastern Question. Presented to Parliament

1855-1856.

3. Treaty, Protocols, and Correspondence relative to the Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. Presented to Parliament May 1867. 4. L'Impasse orientale. Souvenirs et Observations. Par le Baron CHARLES de ***. Leipzig and Brussels: 1871.

WE

E shall deal very briefly with the question which has been suddenly cast upon the troubled waters of Europe, by the declaration of the Court of St. Petersburgh that it should cease to be bound by one of the most important of its public engagements. For we do not propose to speculate at all upon the matter. We leave Mr. Mill in possession of his theory of the faith of treaties; we leave Mr. Froude to the belief that England and Russia are the two great civilising Powers of the East,' and that we ought to have accepted in a 'less jealous 'spirit' the Emperor Nicholas' proposal made to Sir Hamilton Seymour for a partition of the Ottoman Empire. These are speculative questions of morals and politics. Our object is simply to remind our readers of the history of the transaction and engagement which has been so suddenly and violently impugned. For this purpose we shall turn to the records of the negotiations carried on during the war of 1854 and 1855, which happily led to the Peace of Paris. Dr. Jasmund's volumes supply us with these documents in the most convenient form. A short recapitulation of the passages relating to that engagement which Prince Gortschakoff proposes to throw off and annul at the pleasure of his august master, will demonstrate that this breach of faith is of the most radical and fundamental character-that it is directed against the most important result of the Crimean war, and against that condition which in the judgment of all Europe was regarded as the most essential for the maintenance of peace. Diplomatic protocols and correspondence are apt to be forgotten, and they are never of a very amusing character. But when they bear upon the interests of the day and determine the basis of a great European settlement, it is proper that they should be brought back to light. Whilst we were engaged in the researches imposed on us by our task, a foreign diplomatist of experience and ability was pursuing the same path of inquiry. We have just