truly English tone, all through the poem; a healthy, simple admiration of what is simple and beautiful wherever he finds it. He rejoices, like Homer or Theocritus himself, in eatings and drinkings, in sunshine, in bathing and dancing, in kissings and innocent flirtations, and in a good racy joke, too, now and then,-some of which last, as we hear, have roused much pious horror at Oxford, a place where prudery is tolerably rampant, as it generally is wherever a good many young men get together. It is remarkable, by the bye, and we have verified it, too, in the matter of this very poem, how the first person to discover any supposed impropriety in a book is sure to be an unmarried man, and the very last a married woman; whether from the superior pure-mindedness of the former class, the public may judge. It is a pity that men will not remember that the vulture's powers of scent, which could wind a dead sparrow among all the rosegardens of Damascus, are not indicative of cleanliness in that most useful bird. Would that they bore in mind the too-often-forgotten dictum of Dean Swift, who had had experience enough, certainly, in that time, that the nicest man has the nastiest thoughts,' and, moreover, that Honi soit qui mal y pense is the motto not only of English chivalry, but, we had almost said, of Protestantism itself; and that those who wish just now to be true Englishmen, would do well to abide by it.

But to return. The poem evinces

also a truly Greek spirit in its sense
of the dignity of the every-day re-
lations, and the humblest employ-
ments of life, a truth which is cle-
verly separated from the absurdities
which are often jumbled with it, by
occasional sly caricatures of the
school which consecrates potato-
forks and wash-tubs, and which, in
its disgust of the evils of luxury,
conceives itself bound to fall in love
with the merely accidental vulgar-
ities of poverty. The question of
what is, or is not, truly dignified,
runs through the whole poem, and
helps to raise it gradually above
mere Greek animalism into the re-
gion of the Christian nineteenth cen-
tury, into disquisitions on rank and
marriage, man and Providence, often
of great vigour, depth, and pathos.
The author indulges, too, in those
frequent repetitions of the same line,
or part of a line, which are so com-
mon in the Greek poets, both epic
and pastoral; and, we think, with a
very pleasing effect. These repeti-
tions act like the burden of a song,
or the recurrence of the original air
in music, after wandering variations.
They make one feel, as in the old
Greek poets, that the author is in
earnest, and enjoys his conception,
and likes to take it up, and look at
it, and play with it again and again,
lingering over it almost reverently,
as if conscious that there was some-
thing more in it than he could bring
out in words-an Infinite hidden un-
der the most trivial Finite, which
must be felt for again and again ere
it reveal itself. As an instance, p.
36:-

Bright October was come, the misty-bright October,
Bright October was come to burn, and glen and cottage;
But the cottage was empty, the matutine deserted.

Who are these that walk by the shore of the salt sea water?
Here in the dusky eve, on the road by the salt sea water?
Who are these? and where? it is no sweet seclusion;
Blank hill-sides slope down to a salt sea loch at their bases,
Scored by runnels, that fringe ere they end, with rowan and alder;

Cottages here and there out-standing bare on the mountain,

Peat-roofed, windowless, white; the road underneath by the water.

There on the blank hill-side, looking down through the loch to the ocean, There with a runnel beside, and pine-trees twain before it,

There with the road underneath, and in sight of coaches and steamers, Dwelling of David Mackaye and his daughters Elspie and Bella, Sends up a column of smoke the Bothie of Toper-na-Fuosich. This allusion to autumn, as another instance of our meaning, is several times repeated towards the end

of the poem, and each time with some fresh delicate addition to the charming miniature painting:The soft, misty mornings, and long dusky eves.

And then how

The brackens are changed, and heather blooms are faded, And amid russet of heather and fern, green trees are bonnie; making us recollect the stealing on of the swift, long, northern winter, and the breaking up of the party, with a sobered, and almost a saddened feeling, which harmonises, too, very artistically with a more serious tone, both of thought and of verse, which takes gradually, towards the end of the poem, the place of the genial frolic of its commencement.

The exclusively Oxonian allusions and phrases may be objected to, and certainly a glossary of a dozen words or so would have been a convenient appendage. But we think the author perfectly right in having introduced his Oxford slang. The thing existed -it was an integral part of his subject. Oxford men have peculiar phrases, peculiar modes of life and thought he had no right to omit them. For ourselves, we cannot sympathise in the modern cosmopolitan spirit, which cries down all local customs, phrases, and costume; and wants to substitute a dead level uniformity for that true unity which is only to be found in variety; which prefers, as Archdeacon Hare well instances, the dead blank regularity of a modern street, to the rich and harmonious variety of a pile of old Gothic buildings; which would civilise Highlanders by making them abjure kilts and take to paletots, and is merciless to all peculiarities-except its own.

We recommend this whole story, as a fair and characteristic specimen of Oxford life, to those whose whole notions of the universities are drawn from the shallow Cockney cavillers of the day. We are no more contented than they are with the present state of the Universities. No more, for that matter, are the rising generation of the University men themselves, both masters and bachelors; they are as clamorous for reform as the mob can be, with, as we think, rather better notions of what reform ought to be. But though Oxford is not our Alma Mater, we must in her defence assert, once and for all, that the young men there, and in Cambridge, too, taken en masse, will be found far superior in intellect, earnestness, and morality,--not to men

tion that most noble and necessary part of manhood, much sneered at in these Cockney days, physical pluck,-to any other class of young men in England. Compare them with the army, with the navy, the medical students. Compare them with the general run of shopkeepers' sons in town or country; compare them with the rising generation of young men in London, with their prurience, their effeminacy, their quill-driving commercialism, joining (we speak from experience) too often the morale of an old rake with the physique of a puling girl. Again we may recommend our readers to look at this picture of what an Oxford tutor, and an Oxford reading party, in most cases, are. And even if it should prove a little too favourably drawn to hold good in every case, it may serve as a fair set-off against the exaggerations on the opposite side of the question.

Let them remember that it is the evil, and not the good, of every institution and class which becomes notorious; that while they do hear of the book-worms who ruin their intellects by pedantry and their health by morbid ambition, of the profligates who destroy themselves and their families too often by reckless extravagance, that these things are the exception and not the rulethat if they were not the exception, the Universities could not hold together for twelve months, -- that their own members would pull the colleges about each others' ears. doubt there are abuses and absurdities: none feel them so sorely as University men themselves. When an honest and earnest satirist, like Mr. Thackeray, will attack them, gownsmen will be the first to cry

Νο

hear,' to thank him for laughing at them, for shewing them where to laugh at themselves; while as for the crowd of whipper-snappers, who seem to fancy just now that the Universities are fair game for every ignorant and inexperienced quilldriver who gets his living by reechoing, cuckoo-like, the vulgar outcry whether right or wrong, and who bear as much likeness to Mr. Thackeray and Punch as a tom-tit

Had but the heart that shrills a three-years' boy
A voice to speak, 'twould say that Life is Joy:
Note thou the youth whose impulse nought can tame,
That Life is Action, tongue and limbs proclaim:
The man whom well-spent years from dread release,
Secure in knowledge tells thee Life is Peace:
And the grey sage, who smiles beside the grave,
Knows Life is All, and Death a dusty slave.

If all the forest leaves had speech,
And talked with one rhetoric fit,
What wonder must arise in each

That all would not attend to it!

"Within translucent halls above the moon,
Where ether spreads beneath a blue lagoon,
And faintly 'mid a web of cloud and star
The still earth gleams unfathom'd leagues afar,
The Past and Future dwell, and both are one,
An endless Present that has ne'er begun.
The new-born infant dead in Norway's cold,
The Pharaoh lapt in hieroglyphic gold,
All fronts that shew the pure baptismal ray,
And all whom Islam bids repent and pray,
And Trajan's worshippers and Timour's host,
In calm light live on that eternal coast,
Where change has never urged its fluctuant bark,
Nor sunless noon has faded into dark.
For all that each successive age has seen
In this low world is always there serene;

And e'en the glow-worm, crush'd by Nimrod's hoof,
Lives like the Assyrian king from pain aloof.
There all is perfect ever, all is clear,

But dimm'd how soon in this our hemisphere.
Where e'en the deed of yestereve grows pale
In twilight thought before this morning's tale,-
Unless for Sons of Memory, who by lot
Enjoy the bliss of all things else forgot;
Dwell in the house above, and from that hold
Entrance mankind with wonders manifold;
And making that has been once more to be
Reclothed in foliage bare Oblivion's tree.'
So spake a German artist on the height
Of Caracalla's Baths, in still delight;
Beholding thence the green Campagna's waste,
Its long-drawn aqueducts and tombs defaced,
And all the hills around from where the gay,
High-tow'ring Tivoli, looked in distance grey,
Past old Præneste and Frascati's grove,
And far o'er all the Mount of Latin Jove,
Till from Albano, sloping to the plain,
The land is bordered by the glittering main.
All this, while he beheld, his uttered thought

Seemed but the landskip's meaning given unsought,
And he perused the noble things he saw
As one who read high songs with joyous awe.
I sat beside him and I loved the man,
His zeal undoubting, and his life's pure plan;
But when once more we met his dust was laid
Not far from Shelley's, in the cypress shade.

THE TALE OF AN ARAB STORY-TELLER.