beyond. The negative position of knowing nothing but phenomena is the only logical one to their masculine intellects; but as they consider women too weak and timid to endure the shock of unwelcome truth, there is amongst them a semi-cynical winking' all round, a readiness to prevaricate, and to speak and act before women in a dishonest and deceptive manner.

This state of things is degrading to both sexes, and in its tendency to thrust men and women apart there lies a very great social evil. Sympathy, and all the tender feelings that unite and bind together, creating a healthy social solidarity, are less likely to spring and flourish where there is a wide intellectual breach; and the instinctive perception of right and wrong (which Mrs. Lathbury regards as woman's special characteristic) will do little to influence men, when based on principles they have abjured for themselves as false and misleading.

Again, morals are taught only on the basis of Christianity. Children are shown no other justification of duty than the arbitrary command of God. It is right to honour father and mother, and wrong to covet and steal, because God said so to the Hebrews more than 3,000 years ago, and wrote it with his finger on tables of stone.

But when a boy leaves school he hears his father talk of the Hebrews as a barbarous uncivilised race, and he may see him smile at their anthropomorphic conceptions of Deity. His mother meanwhile reads the finger passage with devout and reverent air. How is the boy to reconcile these facts? Either his father must be wicked, or his mother foolish, and, whichever alternative he accepts, there is injury done to his young moral nature. He ceases to look up equally to both parents. He rejects the one or the other as a trustworthy guide in the conduct of life, and very probably he throws off all authoritative restraint in consequence of the conflicting influences around him.

It appears, then, that woman's highest, most sacred human interests require of her to enter into the struggle, and acquaint herself with the reasons why so many men are no longer Christians at heart. For if they are wrong she must defend her Christian position logically before them; if they are right, an all-important work has to be done, in laying a secure foundation for moral teaching, and sweeping away the cobwebs and dust that are sure to dim the eye of conscience in the young.

A mother must expect her boys to be logical, even if her girls are not so; and it is difficult to see how conscience can be maintained, far less strengthened and further developed, in homes where the intellectual atmosphere is full of antagonistic ideas.

This is no age for the exhibition of woman's loving nature in the closet alone. Mrs. Lathbury says: Prayer, in one form or other, makes up the life of every loving nature.' We trust she is greatly mistaken.

The picture of such waste of energy, in view of what it might accomplish in a wider sphere than the closet, is appalling, and makes one wish that a cataclysm, and not the slow work of mental evolution, might take us suddenly beyond this transition period.

Mrs. Lathbury describes women as emotional in temperament and timid in intellect. Their nature and pursuits are different from those of men, and therefore Agnosticism, if embraced, will affect them differently. The occupations they at present are devoted to-viz., tending the sick and aged, educating the ignorant, and praying for the erring-will necessarily become distasteful. They will turn away from these, and either sit still and see their best hopes fade away, or throw themselves eagerly into the more active lines of employment in order to drown thought and fill the void that loss of belief will entail.

The inference throughout this reasoning is that women will always remain exactly what she sees them to be now-that, although the outward conditions alter, the essential nature of the sex is unchangeable.

But herein agnostics take a different and much more hopeful view. Human nature is to them infinitely modifiable, and while admitting that woman has suffered, and is likely to suffer, in passing from old creeds to new, still adaptation goes on, and even for the individual they anticipate reconcilement and not despair.

It is precisely to Agnosticism they look to aid and hasten this reconcilement. Were the women of the present day bravely to adopt the negative standpoint, and insist on education being freed from all theological assumptions, and above all were they to see to it that moral precepts were inculcated without reference to supernatural agency, then assuredly the next generation would be spared much suffering which they themselves have passed through.

Mrs. Lathbury's view of education appears singularly contracted. She anticipates that agnostic women would cease to care about educating the poor, since, without belief in a future life, education will only tend practically to heighten and intensify unhappiness.' 'Let us place ourselves,' she says, 'in the condition of a man with education enough to know that the whole of his surroundings are wretched, and it is only a question of money that makes the difference between his working all day on his back in a coal-mine and his master working in a comfortable room. How much happiness will his education bring him?'

What

Any one who has read the lives of Edwards and Dick, the lowly and obscure naturalists, needs no answer to this question. self-education may do, in the way of giving pure enjoyment amidst grinding poverty, is too plainly set forth in the history of these men's lives. There are not perhaps very many natures to whom the riches of culture are sufficient for happiness independent of material comfort; but education, in the wide sense, gives positive pleasures and benefits,

and it is absurd to represent it as likely to breed only discontent unless accompanied by hopes of heaven.

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That the logical education of agnostics of the present day requires improvement Mrs. Lathbury points out. She says: Enthusiastic for all progress, he forgets that a progress that comes to an end with death is no true progress at all, and that which is untrue for the individual cannot be true for the human race.' It seems hard to accuse all agnostics of this strange confusion of ideas. The real proposition they put forth is, that while individual life is short, the life of humanity, composed of myriads of individuals, generation after generation, through countless ages, still goes on, and may progress with steady step towards an ideal perfection scarcely now conceived of. Each individual must necessarily assist or retard this movement to the higher goal, according as he progresses or deteriorates within the narrow limits of his own individual existence.

And now to touch upon the question of immortality. Will the agnostic promise,' we are asked, 'that the human heart will have no longing after something higher than our own poor human perfection?'

The aspiration and attempt of the fabled frog to become the nobler bull would call for admiration had the thing been only possible; nevertheless, the lesson taught by the disaster seems: How much more admirable, had the lowly frog been satisfied with its own position in the economy of nature!

To summarise-Mrs. Lathbury's warning to agnostics should be disregarded: (1) because, by speaking out, they may prove most helpful to timid women who are now in a transition stage; (2) because men and women are already too much divided, and by the reticence. of the former the intellectual breach may become wider, and it is an evil morally injurious to society; (3) because children suffer from this breach, for without parental harmony home influence cannot be wholly beneficial; (4) because, were they to carry out Mrs. Lathbury's counsel and be as silent as the grave, the movement would still go on, whereas, if agnostics act truthfully and speak out calmly, it will not bring the disastrous consequences she depicts and deplores.

There is already a considerable band of female agnostics in this country. They have no mind to whine over the inevitable or to be obstructive in the universal onward march; still less are they aggressive. They neither push nor draw into their supposed pit of despondency fellow-creatures who are unwilling; but whenever occasion offers they express their opinions freely and fearlessly. They have not lost relish for life; their former employments are not gone; they are not eager for professional work in order to drown thought; they are not plunged into suffering through hopelessness, and sitting supine in bitterness of soul. And in the light thrown upon the subject by the lives and characters of these women Mrs. Lathbury's picture of the effects of Agnosticism appears a caricature.

J. H. CLAPPERTON.

JOHN DONNE.

THOSE Whom taste or accident leads to old books often find occasion to pause and meditate over high tributes of praise paid to men whose names have long since become unsuggestive sounds, except to the studious few. The man whose name stands at the head of this article lived in the greatest age of our literature, and was affirmed by contemporary judgment to be one of its greatest writers. Carew proposed as an epitaph for him the lines:

Here lies a king who ruled as he thought fit
The universal monarchy of wit.

Ben Jonson, whose critical temper always moved him to be precise and discriminating in his eulogies, apostrophised Donne as 'the delight of Phoebus and each Muse,'

Whose every work of thy most early wit

Came forth example, and remains so yet.

No doubt, in estimating the value of such testimonies, we must make a certain allowance for the circumstances. It was the custom for authors in those days to certify one another's merits in glowing language. Authors now know a more excellent way; mutual admiration is expressed anonymously. But at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were no influential Reviews to be 'got at '; and friends showed their goodwill by sending the author of a new book copies of commendatory verses, which were printed and issued with it as a sort of guarantee or introduction. We should do wrong, of course, to attach much critical value to such panegyrics; they obviously cannot be accepted as the verdict of contemporary opinion on an author's worth. A collection of all the commendatory verses published during the reigns of Elizabeth and James the First, would not be a faithful mirror of the estimation in which the writers of that time were held by their contemporaries. But these verses furnish a certain clue to contemporary opinion if we have regard to the character of the panegyrists. The commendation of a foolish person by another person only a trifle less foolish than himself does not carry much weight. But the enthusiastic admiration of such men as Jonson and Carew, and the host of eminent writers who paid tribute to Donne's memory when his works were published after his death, was not to

be so cheaply purchased, and it is strange that a man who in such an age was numbered among the masters of literature should have received so little honour from posterity.

Neglect, indeed, is not the only indignity that the poetry of Dr. Donne has suffered. It was stamped with emphatic condemnation by the great critical authority of the eighteenth century. Dr. Johnson recognised Donne as a master and the founder of a school, but it was a school with which he had no sympathy. He nicknamed Donne and his followers the metaphysical poets,' and he culled from their works a variety of specimens to prove that the characteristics of the school were unnatural and far-fetched conceits, enormous and disgusting hyperboles,' 'violent and unnatural fictions,' slight and trifling sentiments.' At the same time he did not deny that there was something to be said in their favour.

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Great labour, directed by great ability, is never wholly lost; if they frequently threw away their wit upon false conceits, they likewise sometimes struck out unexpected truth; if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. . . . If their greatness seldom elevates, their acuteness often surprises; if the imagination is not always gratified, at least the powers of reflection and comparison are employed; and in the mass of materials which ingenious absurdity has thrown together, genuine wit and useful knowledge may be sometimes found buried perhaps in grossness of expression, but useful to those who know their value; and such as, when they are expanded to perspicuity and polished to elegance, may give lustre to works which have more propriety, though less copiousness, of

sentiment.

Such was Dr. Johnson's opinion of the works which his great namesake in the Elizabethan time pronounced to be examples,' and did his best to rival; they were worth digging into as mines, but their art was detestable. A very different opinion was formed by the great critics at the beginning of this century; but, unhappily for Donne's general reputation, for one person that reads De Quincey's essay on Rhetoric or Coleridge's priceless fragments of criticism, twenty read Johnson's Lives of the Poets. M. Taine, in his rapid survey of English literature, has unhesitatingly adopted Johnson's condemnation, and developed it into an historical theory. The poetry of Donne and his imitators M. Taine marks as a sign of the decadence of the grand inspiration that produced the literature of the Elizabethan period. The flood of great thoughts and great passions had spent itself; the mighty men of genius, through whom the heroic spirit had spoken, were succeeded by a feebler race, who, instead of giving free vent to fire that was burning in their hearts, strained and tortured their intellects in the devising of pretty compliments, and sought to outdo the natural language of overpowering passion by cold and artificial hyperbole. M. Taine admits that there is something of the energy and thrill of the original inspiration in Donne, but he does not admit that there is enough to exempt him from the