rose alike as a poet and a thinker that we quote what must be well known to all our readers :—

'A power from the unknown God,
A Promethean conqueror, came;
Like a triumphal path he trod

The thorns of death and shame.
A mortal shape to him
Was like the vapour dim

Which the orient planet animates with light;
Hell, Sin, and Slavery came,

Like bloodhounds mild and tame,
Nor preyed until their lord had taken flight.
The moon of Mahomet

Arose, and it shall set :

While, blazoned as in heaven's immortal moon,
The cross leads generations on.'

It has not been our purpose to criticize the poetry of Shelley; but we venture to suggest that our view of his character is entirely supported by his writings. Let our readers compare for a short time the Prometheus of Eschylus and the Prometheus of Shelley. They will find a great deal in common; they will find, we venture to assert, much in the more modern that equals, much even that excels, his ancient model. In power of expression, and perhaps occasionally in obscurity, it would be difficult to decide their contending merits. In power of inspiration, in magnificence of conception, in lyric beauty, the English poet is certainly not inferior. But in one point he is inferior, and that is a sense of artistic proportion. In poetry as in life, self-restraint and self-discipline are equally necessary-a fact which is certainly forgotten by a school at the present day-and the form that that must take is an adherence to the somewhat conventional rules of art. The Prometheus of Shelley has no real plot and no real unity; its speeches are often wearisome by their length, and the mind is often confused by the extraordinary array of spirits that take the place of the Chorus of ocean nymphs. Full of passages of extraordinary beauty, it yet fails from being able to take its place among great poems by a complete absence of harmonious order. And so in the smaller poems. We may safely assert that the more complex the metre-that is, the more artificial restraint there is-the more beautiful they are. The most beautiful, perhaps, is the Ode to the West Wind. And it is written in a metre which few English poets have ever been able to master. A well-known critic has stated that it was because he was the greatest poet who has ever sung

of liberty that Shelley deserves a recognition he has not even yet attained. We believe that this criticism is based on thoroughly wrong principles, and certainly is incorrect in the present instance. It is when writing on liberty that all the poet's faults are most developed he did not require inspiration-he required restraint, and liberty was a theme which invoked an excess of enthusiasm. The contrast of Wordsworth is instructive. The mild conservative dreamer required some external impulse to stimulate his powers, and it is just in his sonnets on liberty that he gains that stimulus. They contain his finest work, and one of the noblest literary monuments to liberty in the English language. Shelley failed just where he would most willingly have succeeded, and he failed from just that defect in his character we have noticed—a want of self-restraint.

We have attempted to delineate Shelley as we believe he really was, without exaggeration and without misrepresentation. We have attempted to point out what we believe to have been the radical defect of his character. We are far from believing he was a bad man; we certainly cannot consider him an angel or a deity. We shall consider our labours have not been in vain if we can prevent one or two unjust misconceptions, and if we can restrain one or two of his admirers from a worship which is injurious alike to themselves and the object of their adoration. One point more, and we have done. We venture to think that Shelley's life was the most complete condemnation of his theory of conduct. And to those who may be seduced by it we will put the case as strongly as we can. Here is a man who, as you hold, was a man of great moral beauty, of great benevolence, of great purity of thought, generous, high-minded, an earnest searcher after truth, and yet-you cannot deny it—he brought unhappiness on himself (no one was more unhappy than Shelley, says Trelawny) and on many others; he was guilty of constant errors, and some actions which were worse than errors; he committed acts of immorality and acts of injustice. Surely the one thing he needed was that which he most vehemently refused to submit to—an objective moral code, and an intellectual standard of truth. He read Plato eagerly, and extracted from it much that suited his theories, but never learnt the one lesson which the Greek philosopher continually impresses upon his readers-the beauty of Law and Order. To him the world is admirable just in so far as it is the embodiment of general laws, and man is admirable just in so far as his soul lives a life of harmony, and will, and restraint: the

excessive wanderings of the imagination, the undue cultivation of the passions, unrestrained emotions, disordered thoughts, are all evil. Man, in obedience to his highest intellectual principles, must live a sober, well-regulated, well-ordered, welldisciplined life; his wild, impetuous, savage nature restrained by divine philosophy: νόμος βασιλεὺς· ἄρχει ὁ νόμος.

ART. IV.--IS RESERVATION LAWFUL?

Reservation of the Blessed Sacrament for the Sick and Dying not inconsistent with the Order of the Church of England. By the Rev. T. W. KEMPE, M.A. (London, 1887.)

THIS essay is interesting, but cannot in its present very rambling form be considered as serving any practical purpose. The careful reader soon discovers that it does not prove that which it more or less strongly asserts, that its facts are in many cases confused, weak, and irrelevant, and that Mr. Kempe must be conscious that the task of proving the correctness of even the moderate statement in his title-page is beyond his power. The title-page is composed with diplomatic modesty, but the body of the pamphlet, without cause shown, is far more dogmatic, and at length ceases to be a serious argument at all.

Mr. Kempe relies much upon, and makes the most of, the very ordinary fact that men of various shades of opinion were engaged in the revision of the existing Prayer-Book. When was it otherwise, and how could it be otherwise in such a work? And he writes as if we are practically and chiefly concerned with the motives and opinions of an individual, or of a minority among the revisers, and as if we are free to sit as revisers upon them, and to call them to account, when our concern is simply with the outcome of their collective deliberations as legalized by Convocation. Mr. Kempe's mind is much confused on this point. The revisers of 1661 did not do all he would have had them do, and he impatiently refuses to believe that they did not. But they did well under great difficulties what the times permitted, and they were too wise to run the risk of failure in so serious a work as that with which Divine Providence had entrusted them. Alexander

Knox, stating the case of these revisers some eighty years ago, and generously recognizing their difficulties, said of their work: 'Without any change of features which could cause alarm, a new spirit was then breathed into our Communion Service.'

Certain differences of opinion among the revisers upon which Mr. Kempe lays so much stress are of no moment at all. They are things of the past altogether, and were of moment only until their work was finished. There must be, we know well, differences of opinion in a council or committee, as long as men are men, until a decision has been arrived at by a majority. No Roman Catholic would think of urging that the result arrived at by the two recent councils at Rome is at all weakened or affected because a minority of able men among the assembled bishops differed from and argued against the majority. The two dogmas were finally accepted by the bishops, present and absent, as a matter of course. The minority neither wrote pamphlets nor further urged their opinions to mitigate the force of the dogma, as, judging by this pamphlet, Mr. Kempe would have thought it to be their duty.

The

To accept both the letter and spirit of the Prayer-Book of 1661 with a frank loyalty, and without any such special pleading as Mr. Kempe uses, seems to us to be of the first importance, and a duty which requires no proving. Our force and usefulness as a Church depends upon our doing so. Church of England has spoken by this book, and if we cannot submit our private views and inclinations to it, the end must inevitably be that we shall be 'made a very strife unto our neighbours, and our enemies will laugh us to scorn.'

We propose to treat this essay on the terms of its titlepage-terms which are still more definitely expressed in the course of the argument. Mr. Kempe has narrowed the question of Reservation to one of consistency with the PrayerBook; and, having raised so important a question as that, we shall not feel bound to travel beyond his lines. Holding his view to be untrue and unproven, we wish he had rather employed his ingenuity in showing cause for the restoration of Reservation, and in discovering some of the reasons for its omission by the revisers. We can well imagine some of them, and they are worthy of investigation. To do this would have been helpful, interesting, and to the point, and we think it would have better satisfied his own conscience. For in spite of very strained explanations and of laborious references to men and periods which have no connexion with the case, he

is yet so clearly conscious of failure to bring the Prayer-Book into agreement with his wishes that he is driven to suggest the cutting a knot which he is quite unable to untie. Instead of that 'calm and judicial temper' with which, as he truly says, an inquiry of this kind should always be conducted, we find the spirit of a very keen advocate. He weights himself heavily and fatally by discussing as one subject two entirely distinct questions, to the serious prejudice of that which he wishes to promote-the practice of Reservation.

Mr. Kempe has not the mind of a born general. He claims allies which are not to be depended on. The PrayerBook is certainly not his ally, as we shall show from his own expressions, in which there is a great and too dazzling exhibition of useless learning. This, used in Mr. Kempe's manner, may be impressive to hasty, superficial, and prejudiced readers, but he cannot conceal that it is unsatisfactory to himself.

At p. 5 he writes, for instance, in words which should be carefully noted:

'The needs of the sick and dying cannot be adequately supplied by rigidly insisting upon (what is assumed to be) the literal force of the later formularies of the Church of England, and therefore it is respectfully submitted that the spirit of the Church is most dutifully and intelligently observed by following the continuous stream of Catholic tradition in making provision for the communion of the sick and dying by reserving the most comfortable Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.'

Such a suggestion put into plain English must mean that as the existing Prayer-Book (described as 'the later formularies') does not (although the pamphlet in its title-page and elsewhere says that it does) favour the practice of Reservation, but has deliberately left out certain previous rubrics, and has made arrangements for the communion of the sick of quite another sort, it is therefore advisable to take one's own course, exercise one's own will and judgment, and disobey the Church's voice in her Prayer-Book. But, if so, we ask with some surprise, of what use is the ingenuity which we shall find that Mr. Kempe has exercised so abundantly throughout his essay to prove that the Prayer-Book allows the Reservation of the Sacrament? Such a recommendation of disobedience is only consistent with the view that his general argument is a failure, that his title-page is in error, and that Mr. Kempe holds some power of dispensation. To make confusion by thus overleaping boundaries seems to us to be inconsistent with all faith in Providence. The wrong of it is not reduced by grandiloquent language, nor, as a salve to