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issuing from factories, and begriming great public buildings for which he has consented that the nation should pay large sums of money; and it might be suggested to him, that this smoke, though one of the greatest evils of modern civilisation, is at the same time one of the most easily preventible. One might then take him into the most densely populated parts of the town; and show him how absolutely abominable are all the primary arrangements for habitation, which have to be endured by thousands, and tens of thousands, of his poorer fellow-countrymen. The remedies for these evils need not be sought for in forms of legislation, which will encounter much opposition by evoking political passions or prejudices. They lie within the placid realm of the improver. 'I do not undervalue the great political measures which remove political disabilities, and are framed with a view to making large masses of our fellow-countrymen more contented with imperial rule. But it is improvement in those minor matters before enumerated, which will make life more comely, and which will create good citizens as well as good men.

'There are, at this moment, vast schemes for change and reform brought forward by men who have, as yet, but little political standing, or political weight in the State. Without undervaluing the labours of these men, or depreciating the objects they have in view, one can hardly doubt, that practised statesmen look upon these outsiders somewhat as quacks, while they consider themselves to be the regular practitioners. But let statesmen take this fact to heart; that it is only from their failures, that these men, whom perhaps they affect to despise, derive their chief influence; and I contend that these failures are mainly to be attributed to the negligence of statesmen, in improving the condition of the poorer classes by measures, not of great political, but of immense social urgency.

'The statesmen of almost every country might afford to despise the efforts of the most democratic agitators, if the welfare of the common people, in what are regarded as comparatively minor matters, had been sufficiently attended to. That man is seldom inclined to be clamorously destructive, who has a comfortable home, and who finds that the legislation of his country is directed, not merely to the redress of political grievances, but concerns itself with all that can free his condition from whatever is ignoble, unhealthy, and unbecoming.

'If these minor improvements, when tried, had been found to failif experience had proved that men whose homes had been made more comfortable, and whose well-being had been looked after in every way by their superiors, had still continued to be agitators, or the prey of agitators we might conclude that that was not the way to satisfy mankind. But the experiment has been tried and proved to be successful. Wherever, and whenever a great manufacturer, or other large employer of labour, has had somewhat of the spirit of the true statesman in him, and has striven to create a happy and contented population in the neighbourhood of his works, he has uniformly, as far as my knowledge goes, succeeded in doing so. Now, if statesmen would place a similar object in view, for the whole of the labouring population, they also might meet with similar success. And the means by which

they might attain that success lie rather in the way of improving the legislation that has already been begun with that view, than in bringing forward great measures of political or social change.

'I am by no means anxious to contend that there are not many subjects for political action, which need the reformer in preference to the improver. But I maintain, that an enormous field of mere improvement lies before those who would have the modesty to limit their political action to improvement. That "last infirmity of noble minds," the desire for fame, which, however, I would characterise as the first infirmity of minds ignoble as well as noble, has, in no branch of human life, effected more mischief than in politics. I have scarcely a hope of increasing the number of improvers; but I think that they might be consoled for the want of fame attendant upon their labours, by their fully appreciating what an extensive sphere of usefulness lies before them.' (Pp. 155-60.)

It is somewhat inconsistent with the general tenor of Mr. Helps' work, which, as we have remarked, relates almost exclusively to civil administration rather than to political government, that he has introduced into his fourth chapter some remarks of rather a perfunctory character on a subject of such vast political importance and difficulty as the constitution of a Second Chamber in the Legislature, and particularly of the House of Lords. We shall not follow him at the close of this article upon ground so strewn with burning ashes; and we shall confine ourselves to one or two observations. To assert with Mr. Helps that the House of Lords as at present constituted does not do the work or even provide the restraint which a Second Chamber should do or should provide, is to beg the whole question. For we would ask those who desire to modify the constitution of the House of Lords, what it is they desire to do? To make that body more powerful, or less powerful? to increase its claims to check and resist the will of the House of Commons, or to diminish them? To those who desire to strengthen the House of Lords, we would observe that it has already the weight derived from continually attracting to itself many of the finest intellects and most experienced statesmen and lawyers in the country, and that if its power were increased, the danger arising from a collision with the House of Commons would be materially increased also. There cannot be two estates of the realm exactly equivalent in force. To those who desire to weaken the House of Lords by reforming it, we would observe that it has now exactly the amount of power which is useful to arrest a precipitate decision, though it be quite unavailing to oppose the deliberate will of the nation. Lastly, there are those who condemn the House of Lords because it is an aristocratic assembly; but would the influence

VOL. CXXXVI. NO. CCLXXVII.

I

of the heads of the great houses of England be diminished if instead of sitting by themselves in a separate chamber, with limited powers, they were returned, as they would be returned, to sit on the benches of that Assembly which is practically in this country supreme? The influence of Lord Derby or Lord Salisbury, of Lord Kimberley or the Duke of Argyll, sitting in the great popular Council would be far greater than it ever can be in the assembly of their peers. The present constitution of the House of Lords tends rather to circumscribe than to augment their real power. It excludes the great heads of families and the clergy from the House of Commons. It removes them from the principal arena of contest, and it confines them to a highly useful, but comparatively inglorious function in the State, which many a young and energetic peer would willingly exchange, even at the loss of his privileges, for a more active position in the ranks of the great army. This subject, however, has no real connexion with the principal matters treated of by Mr. Helps in this volume. It is a question of constitutional law and legislation rather than of government; and we prefer to confine ourselves to the topics he has discussed with so much ability in these pages.

ART. IV.-1. Geschichte der Stadt Rom. Von ALFRED VON REUMONT. 3tter Band.

2. Italie et la Renaissance.

1ste Abtheilung. Beriin: 1869. Par J. ZELLER. Paris: 1869. Von J. BURCKHARDT.

3. Cultur der Renaissance.
durchgesehene Auflage. Leipzig: 1869.
THERE

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HERE was a moment in the history of Catholic Europe when the course of civilisation having taken a strong and definite bent apart from the sphere of ecclesiastical dogma, the Papal See had to decide between working with it or against it, and chose the former line of action. For a limited period, by a few pontiffs, the experiment was sedulously made of trimming the sails of St. Peter's bark to catch the gales of secular progress. How long the attempt lasted, how far it succeeded or failed, and what the phenomena were which it presents to the view of the philosophic historian, it may be interesting shortly to review at a time like the present, when the old essential warfare is so emphatically proclaimed.

The books whose titles stand at the head of our article

are

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1. That portion of the History of the City of Rome,' by

Alfred von Reumont, which comprises the period from the election of Pope Martin V. to the death of Pope Alexander VI., 1417-1503. Von Reumont writes as an accomplished scholar, and views his subject in varied lights. He treats of the political and Church history of Rome, of its economic history, of its literary and artistic history. It is with his very interesting chapters on literary history that we shall have to deal. He writes as one whose sympathies are with the Roman Catholic Church, but who is fully alive to her sins and shortcomings at given periods. His point of view may best be described in the words of his preface:

'After a long intermission,' he says, 'Rome steps forth once more (in the early part of the fifteenth century) into the sphere of the great movement of mind. The mode and nature of her action are decisive, for good and for evil, of the tendencies of that brilliant period which followed. During the eighty-three years' interval between the date of Martin's return and the death of Alexander VI., the political and ecclesiastical history of the Papacy reveals two currents, flowing in divergent directions, and bearing unmistakeable resemblance to the two currents which come to the broad light of day afterwards. It is easy to misunderstand the last without accurate knowledge of the first. For the city of Rome, the fifteenth century is a time of resurrection after deep decay. But for the Papacy, its close marks a moment of obscuration. The sequel [he is referring to the sixteenth century, the history of which, with the close of the work itself, has been published more recently,] will reveal the modern city on the pinnacle of its splendour; it will also show the expiation and the resuscitation of the Pontificate.'

2. The work of Zeller is written in a lively and popular strain, but makes no pretensions to original scholarship. He brings before us the leading tendencies and characters of the Renaissance from the middle of the fifteenth century to the end of Leo X.'s reign, depicting them with a good deal of the antithetical effect common in French writers, and also, we believe we must add, with some of that deficiency of critical conscience which is content with the transposition of a small anecdote or fact to enhance antithetical point.

3. Burckhardt's Cultur der Renaissance' is a new edition of perhaps the most satisfactory and scholarly work on the intellectual aspect of the fifteenth century that modern criticism has produced. It would be difficult to do justice, in a few words, to the discriminating and sympathetic spirit with which the author follows up each line of thought, each whim of taste, suggested to the lively fancy of the Italians by the various elements of culture around them, notably by that devotion to the literature of ancient Greece and Rome, which gave the predominant character to the epoch.

Taking these three works for the basis of our remarks-or rather the first and third, for Zeller's work is less calculated for our purpose-we shall proceed to consider the leading characteristics of a movement possessing unusual fascination of interest both in its facts and its suggestions.

The subject brings us face to face with that remarkable mental phase of the fifteenth century known by the name of Humanism; psychologically, the questioning of man's understanding with the awakened sensibilities of his soul; historically, the turning aside of students from the technical ways of thought stereotyped in the learning of the schools, to investigate the experience and the taste of classical antiquity under their natural conditions.

The impulse to the Humanist movement came from various sources. That when the human mind received the impulse to move at all, the old scholastic framework should have been cast aside, was inevitable; the notions on which it was based That were mere unrealities to inquiring and feeling men. classical antiquity should have been the medium in which exclusively the self-emancipated intellect found range for its sympathies, was a consequence of the poverty of the world in experimental knowledge, added to the impatience inherent in all enthusiasm. There was assuredly, at that moment of time, no other influence which could compete with antiquity in its attractions for the culture of reason and of fancy. Science and philosophy could only be reached through the writings of the ancients: poetic beauty and grace found aptest reflection in them. A sense of their pre-eminence had indeed prevailed throughout the darkest ages. Homer and Virgil, Aristotle and Plato, had never ceased to be ideals in the sanctuary of popular fame. The Italian poetry of the Trecento might, perhaps, have shown that there was originality enough in the national genius to have led the way in the formation of a new literature. But to the eager students who followed Dante and Petrarch, the glamour of a past which had been glorious, took the brilliancy from the hues of a day whose promise was young. interest of the new movement, moreover, consisted in great measure in this: that it was an appeal to the real facts of a given period of intellectual life, in lieu of conventional representations, vague popular legends, and phantom logomachies. Ultimately, no doubt, it resulted in a somewhat servile shifting of allegiance from one class of authorities to another; but in its outset it had definite features of analogy with the scientific revolution inaugurated two centuries later by Bacon. It was in the fifteenth century that Humanism attained to

The

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