to achieve these ends be carried on. Not improbably may some "Delphic" utterances be made with a view to throw oil on the sea, which even many of his own followers are beginning to feel that Lord Halifax has prematurely troubled, and to lure the half-awakened and alarmed to lie down again and sleep and dream of peace. But, as regards the situation, we may well quote the words of one of the greatest and most clear-sighted of modern prelates-words addressed to a body. of Protestant Churchmen who consulted him as to the course which they should take in view of the dangers which threatened a few months before his death : "Never before in history was our Church in such a condition. We had laws and courts, but a particular form of punishment-viz. imprisonment-prevented parishioners from applying to the courts to redress their wrongs or obtain decisions. It was a state of rottenness which might last a week, a month, a year, or a few years, according to the course of public events, but he did not hesitate to say it must end in destruction. A Church without discipline was a Church foredoomed. He believed England was as Protestant to-day as ever. There was nothing to lead him to think that the laity had any sympathy with the approaches to the Mass which a certain ecclesiastical party were seeking to introduce and he wished to say that so long as he occupied the chair in which he sate, his whole influence would be thrown into the scale of trying to keep the English Church what it was when he was ordained, and as true to the Reformation as in those days when the Mass was a thing unheard of therein. He would ten thousand times sooner see the Church disestablished than the Mass reintroduced." When Protestant Churchmen are of the same manly opinion as this great prelate, and no longer hesitate for any reason to say so, and to act accordingly, then, but not till then, will the reformation they so earnestly desire, in matters ecclesiastical, be brought about. own way. 66 With one word more I close. The Churchmen whose views I have here represented long for the true Reunion of Christendom-the day when all Christians shall become one flock" (we are not told "one fold"), "under One Shepherd ”—no less earnestly than Lord Halifax longs for the Reunion of which he speaks. And they are convinced that that day will come in God's own time, and in God's But they decline to anticipate it, by any attempts to achieve Reunion through the sacrifice of truths which they have bought at great price. History has recorded how futile and disappointing all such attempts have been. They believe, too, that till that time arrives, the best mode in which the unity of the Spirit can be maintained (and they already thankfully recognise its existence in many ways) is by teaching Bible truth in Bible proportions, and by careful abstention, on the part of all Christian Churches, from making extravagant pretensions and claims, especially about their ministers, not a vestige of support for which can be found in the pages of the sacred volume. To what extent closer relations might be brought about by such a course it is hard to forecast; but when the question discussed in this paper-Is Christian Reunion possible?—is submitted to them, and when the means suggested to attain the end in view is a sacrifice of truth, they at least will feel bound to reply emphatically-and their answer will be given in the light of history, the light of reason, and the light of revelation" Impossible." N. SODOR AND MAN. ON THE SOBRIETY AND STEADINESS OF POETS-BOHEMIA IN LIFE AND LITERATURE --THE VERLAINE MYTH-A VISIT TO VERLAINE-MR. HENRY ARTHUR JONES AS A LITERARY DRAMATIST. as little of this as of the old view summed up in "genus irritabile vatum." Poets seem to me the homeliest and most hardworking of mankind-'tis a man in possession, not a daimon nor a disease. Of course they have their mad moods, but they don't write in them. Writing demands serenity, steadiness, patience; and of all kinds of writing, poetry demands the steadiest pen. Complex metres and curious rhyme-schemes are not to be achieved without pain and patience. Prose is a path, but poetry is a tight-rope, and to walk on it demands the nicest dexterity. You may scribble off prose in the fieriest frenzy-who so fiery and frenzied as your journalist with the printer's devil at his elbow?-but if you would aspire to Parnassus, you must go slow and steady. Fancy inditing a sonnet with the compositors waiting for "copy"! Pegasus were more truly figured as a drayhorse than a steed with wings; he jogs along trot-trot, and occasionally he You, being changed, will find it then as now." The fact is, of course, that inspiration is no guarantee of perfection. The limitations of inspiration vary with the limitations of the writer a proposition that may be commended to the theologians. Genius can no more safeguard a man against his own ignorance than it can find a rhyme to 'silver.' Inspiration could not save Keats from his Cockney rhymes nor Mrs. Browning from her rhymeless rhymes. I met a poet in a London suburb-it seemed odd to see one out of Fleet Street-but after a few bewildered instants I recognised him. There was on his brow the burden of a brooding sorrow. I sought delicately to probe the cause of his grief, and he confessed at last that in a muchpraised poem just published he had made a monosyllable dissyllabic. He had never got over a youthful mispronunciation, and in an unguarded moment of inspiration it had slipped in. This prosaic view of poetry is distasteful to many, who like to think that "Paradise Lost" came out in a jet. But all these grandiose conceptions belong to the obscurantist view of human life, which is popular with all who hate, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, "to think clear and see straight." People fancy that the dignity of human life demands that artists at least should be Ouidaesque, but the true dignity of the artist is to be sublimely simple rather than simply sublime. The finest art-be it literature, music, or painting-is, after all that inspiration cando has been done, a matter of painful pegging away; and the finest artists will be found quietly occupying themselves with their art without pose or fuss. That side of the business is largely monopolised by the little men. But even the big men sometimes fall victims to the popular conception, as when a Byron stagily takes the centre of the universe, and looms lurid like the spirit of the Brocken. We do not need biographical scandal-mongers to tell us what "the real Lord Byron" was like. He was like "Don Juan," his own poem: shrewd, cynical, worldly, |