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members. In one of the most important debates which have taken place in recent years in the House of Commons-I refer to the occasion when the Afghan policy of the Government was considered-I believe it will be generally admitted that few more effective speeches were made, and certainly none that were conceived in a broader spirit, than the speech that was delivered by Mr. Burt.

Besides the change in the law with regard to the necessary expenses of elections which has been just considered, it is possible to suggest many other ways in which the present cost of elections might be reduced. When the ballot was first introduced, many confidently hoped that there would be so little use in canvassing that paid canvassers and paid agents would in future scarcely ever be employed. The expectations thus formed have unfortunately been so entirely disappointed, that it is believed that in many constituencies at the last election a larger amount was spent than had ever been expended before on paid canvassers and paid agents. It not unfrequently happens that the payments which are thus made simply represent a legalised form of bribery, for, although any elector who is paid as a canvasser or an agent is unable to vote, yet the money which he receives often prevents him voting on the other side, and secures many votes from his family and connections. So far as I am aware, no valid reason has ever been given why the number of paid agents which a candidate should be allowed to employ should not be restricted within very narrow limits, and why the use of paid canvassers should not be prohibited altogether. If a man has any claim to represent a constituency, he ought to have no difficulty in making his qualifications known, either by his own speeches or through the efforts of his friends, and there is something derogatory both to the candidate and to the constituency in the fact that it should be thought necessary to employ canvassers at two or three guineas a day who, often having no interest in the election except as to the amount of money which they receive, are perfectly reckless in the assertions they make and the pledges they give on behalf of the candidate by whom they are employed.

Reference has already been made to another circumstance which exercises a very powerful influence in increasing the cost of county elections. In boroughs it is not legal to pay the travelling expenses of any absent voter. As many of the electors in a county constituency are non-resident, the law with regard to counties is different. The travelling expenses of any elector may be paid at a county election, and the published returns show that the charges thus thrown upon the candidate for a county seat often amount to as much as 2,000l. or 3,000l. One advantage of imposing some limitation upon the ease with which those who are non-resident can now obtain votes for counties, would be that it would destroy one of the chief arguments which are adduced in favour of maintaining the legality of the payment of the travelling expenses of county voters, and in this way a

very important diminution in the cost of county elections would be effected.

In endeavouring to direct attention to some of the questions which will have to be considered whenever a measure is brought forward for the extension of household suffrage to the counties and the redistribution of seats, I have carefully avoided discussing the subject with any party bias. It is not possible, I believe, to foresee the effect which many of the changes which have been suggested would have upon the balance of political parties. Whenever any such attempt has been made thus to anticipate the future it has generally signally failed. Some of those who were regarded as the shrewdest political observers confidently supposed, when the last Reform Act was passed, that the newly enfranchised borough householders would, prompted by a feeling of gratitude, give a large majority to the Conservative Government. The general election of 1868, however, resulted in the greatest triumph for the Liberal party that had been won for nearly forty years. During the Reform debates in 1867 the opinion was very generally expressed that the minority vote would prove of great advantage to the Conservative party. At the general election of 1874, however, there is every reason to conclude that through the operation of the minority clause the Liberals only lost a seat in one constituency, Glasgow; while they gained a seat in each of the four boroughs of Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester, and the City of London, as well as a seat in each of the following seven counties: Berkshire, Bucks, Cambridgeshire, Dorsetshire, Hertfordshire, Herefordshire, and Oxfordshire. Again, it was always

contended that the ballot would be a great advantage to the Liberals, and that one of its most certain effects would be to free the counties from the influence of the landowners. In the first election that was fought under the ballot the Liberals sustained a signal defeat, and in no previous election did the power of the landed interest more decisively assert itself in the county constituencies. But even if it were possible to foresee what would be the immediate party result of any proposed change in our representative system, other considerations incalculably more important have to be taken into account in determining what principles ought to regulate a measure of Parliamentary reform. Electoral arrangements which one year may prove advantageous to Conservatives may next year prove equally advantageous to Liberals. There is, however, no fluctuation and no uncertainty in the benefit which will be conferred on the nation in having its system of representation placed upon a just basis. All who care more for the permanent efficiency of Parliamentary institutions than for a temporary party triumph should unite in trying to give to every section of opinion in the community the opportunity of being represented by those who are most able and independent.

HENRY FAWCETT.

BURNS AND BÉRANGER.

THE second half of the eighteenth century, which produced several poets of the highest genius, whose works promise to be the imperishable heritage of future generations, also gave birth to two poets of a secondary rank, who exercised over the minds of their contemporaries a far greater influence and achieved a wider popularity than their gigantic compeers. Not that popularity is either the test or the reward of genius. Punch and Judy is a more popular play than Hamlet or Othello, and the waxen figures at Madame Tussaud's excite more admiration from the multitude than the masterpieces of Phidias or Canova. But these two poets were popular on their merits, and not only adorned the literature of the age in which they lived, but left their works as monuments for a future time. The first was Robert Burns, the idol of the Scotch, and representative of all that is most manly in the Scottish character. The second was Jean-Pierre de Béranger, the idol and representative of the French. Wordsworth says of the Sonnet that with that key Shakespeare unlocked his heart.' With a less elaborate but more perfect instrument, the Song, Burns unlocked the hearts of his countrymen of every rank and condition; and Béranger charmed the fancy and guided the judgment of a less earnest but highly accomplished and generous people.

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These remarkable men owed nothing to parentage or fortune; and if they owed something to culture it was not to scholastic training, but to the education which they painfully acquired for themselves in the school of poverty and suffering, and to the innate force of character which enabled them not only to triumph over obstacles that to inferior men would have been insurmountable, but to turn them to account in the formation of their minds and the development of their genius. The one was the son of a sturdy, independent gardener and farm-labourer, the other of a thriftless idler inhabiting the slums of Paris, too poor to support a household, and dependent on his father for the board and shelter he ought to have provided for himself. Born under such adverse circumstances, they had both of them to toil from boyhood to manhood for the scanty bread that did not always come when earned, fighting a desperate battle for bare subsistence against a world in which their presence did not appear to be needed,

and which, if it did not deny them food, gave them very little of it. The one lived into his thirty-eighth year, amid continuous, sometimes all but crushing, adversity, and died lamented by conscience-stricken Scotland, which had done nothing for its greatest man, even when it knew him to be great, but which could not find regrets enough to strew upon his grave when regrets were unavailing. The other lived to double the age of his predecessor, and, by his death and the extraordinary manifestations of national feeling that it excited, alarmed the most magnificent monarch that ever governed France, and compelled him to prop the insecure foundations of his throne by giving the poet's body an escort to the grave of a hundred thousand armed men, not so much to honour his memory as to keep the peace and prevent the proclamation of a Republic in the streets. Never since the beginning of the world did a poor poet create such a terror by his death; and never was poet, rich or poor, honoured by such tremendous obsequies!

Such writers as Burns and Béranger, destined to exercise their greatest and, in the case of Béranger, their sole influence through the agency of the Song, could not have appeared in any country where an ancient popular music was not in existence to serve as the ocean on which their little argosies were to float. Scotland, Ireland, and France possessed such music, graceful, tender, passionate, and inspiriting; but England and the Teutonic and semi-Teutonic nations, then as now, were more or less cosmopolitan in their musical tastes, and had few or no indigenous melodies that struck any deep chord in the popular heart, or appealed to anything higher than the conventional sentiment or transitory fancy of the half-educated. But in Scotland, Ireland, and France, and wherever the warm Celtic blood predominated in the veins of the people, the national music was part of the national mind; and thus the work of the poet who made this music the messenger of his thought was certain of a favourable if not of an enthusiastic reception. And this was the great secret of the success of Burns and Béranger, and procured for them a ready access to the heart of that large generous public which underlies the small minority of the educated and literary classes.

Burns, toiling in low estate, with his hand to the plough or the reaping-hook, had an observant mind, a clear intellect, and a passionate heart; and the passionate heart burst into song at the early age of sixteen, when the budding charms of a lovely companion in the labours of the harvest, a year younger than himself, awakened him to the knowledge that he too was a poet, and could celebrate, as well as any of the bygone bards of his country, the glories of a bright responsive eye, a winsome smile, and the glamour that the beauty of one sex throws over the susceptible youth of the other. From that time forward for more than twenty years, and to the closing months of his life, his imagination was continually inflamed by the seductive love

liness of some rural goddess or queen of beauty-a goddess to him, though she were but a servant-girl or a herd lassie, and scarcely even beautiful to the common eye, whose perceptions were not glorified, as his were, by the light of imagination. And in many of these instances it was not only his imagination, but his heart, that was fired, leading too often to results that cast a shadow over what might have been the happiest periods of his existence, besides doing irreparable injury to the fair objects of his adoration. Had he but laid to heart the warning of Lucrece in Shakespeare's beautiful poem, not to buy the mirth of a minute at the price of a week's wailing, or 'to sell eternity for a toy,' he might have spared many fair young women a sharp sorrow, and himself even more than them, for he knew when he went wrong, and always bitterly repented. The love songs which he continued to pour out in marvellous profusion, inspired sometimes by perfervid admiration for the sex, and as often by the irrepressible force of his genius, were modelled for the most part on the older Scottish songs in Allan Ramsay's Tea-table Miscellany and other collections. But the modelling was never slavish, and if he imitated or paraphrased the often objectionable lyrics of the past, he invariably chastened and refined them, transmuting their ancient and tarnished brass into modern gold of the purest mintage.

It is to be noticed that his songs, even at this early period, betrayed nothing of the peasant, and little of the scholar, and that they immeasurably surpassed in simple grace, unaffected tenderness, and natural passion, all the pre-existing love lyrics in English or Scottish literature, even those of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. But his imagination soared to more ambitious heights than the composition of songs, and his fame soon spread over Ayrshire and all the west of Scotland as the writer of many poems, written in the soft, euphonious, and copious dialect of the Scottish people, a dialect spoken at that time not only by the peasantry, but by the upper classes, and that was more frequently heard in the pulpit and the forum than the correcter English of the south. His humorous and satirical pieces, such as Death and Dr. Hornbook, the Holy Fair, the Address to the Deil, the Unco Guid and the Rigidly Righteous, the Twa Dogs, Holy Willie's Prayer, and others in the same style, found especial favour, and were passed from hand to hand in manuscript, and recited amid hearty applause and appreciation in every howff,' or public house, and tavern in the district. These howffs' were frequented by a peasantry very superior to men of a similar class in Anglo-Saxon England, because they had had the inestimable advantage of the excellent parochial school system established in Scotland in 1646, and were able not only to read and write, but to think, and to discuss the knotty points of their Calvinistic theology, as well as the public events of the time.

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Although the Rev. Sydney Smith, who ought to have known better

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