about George? He is neglecting her. I wish she was here." "So do I, by Jove! But she seems pretty happy, too. I can't make it out." Old Sir George had got the works of that great clock called Stanlake into such perfect order that, once wind it up, and it would go till the works wore out. The servants were so old and so perfectly drilled that really Gerty had but little to do. Her rambles never extended beyond the estate, but were always made with immense energy, for some very trivial object. At first it was the cowslips, and then Reuben taught the boy the art of birds'-nesting, and the boy taught his mother; and so nothing would suit her but she must string eggs. However, as the summer went on, she got far less flighty. And the Secretary and his wife noticed the change in her letters, and were more easy about her. He The next winter passed in the same total seclusion as the last. Mr. Compton saw a little change for the worse in her towards the end of it. He now gathered from her conversation that she had somehow got the impression that George was gone away with Mrs. Nalder. elicited this one day after that affectionate woman had, hearing for the first time Gerty was alone, come raging over to see her. Gerty told him that she thought it rather bold on the part of that brazen-faced creature to come and ring at the door in a brougham, and ask if she was dead, after taking away her husband from her. She did not seem angry or jealous in the least. Mr. Compton did not know, as we do, that her suspicions of Mrs. Nalder were only the product of a weak brain in a morbid state if he had, he would have been more disturbed. But, assuming the accusation to be true, he did not half like the quiet way in which she took it. "She will become silly, if she don't mind," he said. The summer went on, and Gerty went on in the same manner as she had done in the last. It happened that on the 17th of August Mr. Compton went and stayed with her at Stanlake, and settled a little business, to which she seemed singularly inattentive. Nay, she seemed incapable of attention. She talked to him about a book she had taken a great fancy to, "White's History of Selborne," which Reuben had introduced to the boy, and the boy to his mother; indeed, all her new impressions now came through her boy. She told him about the migration of the swallows,— how that the swifts all went to a day, were all gone by the 20th of August. Some said they went south; but some said they took their young and went under water with them, to wait till the cold, cruel winter was over, and the sun shone out once more. This conversation made Mr. Compton very anxious. He thought she was getting very flighty, and wondered how it would end. He thought her eye was unsettled. On the evening of the 21st of August the Stanlake butler came to him, called him out from dinner, and told him that her ladyship and the young gentleman had been missing for twentyfour hours. To be continued. LORD STANLEY not many weeks ago delivered a speech far more remarkable than the majority of so-called parliamentary utterances. It was an essay upon modern politics, touching upon many topics which interest statesmen and thinkers. Among many striking passages, none deserved greater attention than that in which his Lordship described his feelings as to the Italian movement. He fully recognised the fact that the Italian people desired above every other object the possession of Rome. He wished them success in the attainment of their desires. He expressed genuine sympathy with the material benefits which flowed from the progress of Italian unity, and showed plainly enough that he was not inclined to offer any opposition to the schemes of Victor Emmanuel and his people. But Lord Stanley (and this is the point that he could scarcely understand why it was that the Italian people should be prepared to run all risks in order to force their way into Rome. "If they like," was the tone of his remarks, "to pay an immense price for an old town with a venerable name, let the Italians pay their price and get their bargain; but to myself, as a calm and sensible lookeron, the bargain seems a bad one. Rome is not a good military position, and is never likely to be an important commercial city; it is certainly a little strange that a whole nation should incur the enmity of popes and emperors to get hold of a mass of old ruins." It is no part of our purpose to discuss either the Roman question or the correctness of Lord Stanley's estimate of the worth of Rome to Italy. The tone of his criticisms, his frank avowal of inability to enter into the ideas which worth at least a momentary notice. His manner of looking on this Italian question is, after all, the manner in which Englishmen, even when well educated, look on the schemes and aspirations of foreigners. They do not "understand" the ideas which influence other nations; and thus, even when, as in many cases, they sympathize with foreign movements, they give their sympathies on grounds very different from the feelings and principles which influence the men by whom these movements are guided. When the popular vote raised to supreme power in France a man. whom all England held a hair-brained adventurer, the public were taken utterly by surprise, because, in spite of Béranger's popularity, and in spite of the circumstances attending Napoleon's funeral, not one Englishman in ten thousand had understood the hold which the idea of imperialism had obtained on the minds of the French peasant proprietors. Nor is it the views of Frenchmen alone which it is hard for England to understand. Read the remarks of any newspaper on the affairs of Greece or America, or of Germany, and you will see at once that the intelligent editor avows, and almost glories in, the belief that the sentiments which sway foreign nations are incomprehensible to men of common sense. is no reason to suppose that Englishmen are exceptionally slow in appreciating the motives which influence people unlike themselves. There Ger mans who avow the belief that Müller was executed because Lord Russell was outwitted by Prussia are at least as ignorant; and, if the nations of the Continent to a certain extent understand each other, this arises simply from the fact that Continental nations possess to some extent a common history. For what after all constitutes, not the sole cause, but certainly one main cause of the incapacity of one nation to comprehend the feelings of another is the little attention generally paid to the influence of the ideas produced by the long course of national history. Fo ings entertained by Englishmen, rightly or wrongly, towards their own aristocracy, whilst Englishmen cannot prevent themselves from attributing to the nobility of other lands the good and bad qualities of their own peerage. The Club of the Jacobins could as little see why English Liberals did not hate all aristocrats as English Whigs could understand why French peasants should burn their seigneur's château whilst country farmers felt no ill-will towards the Duke of Bedford. To explain this difference of feeling required a careful examination of the different courses taken by the history of France and England, and the different ideas and associations generated by historical differences. It is to the history of ideas and of institutions-which are, in fact, one thing from two points of view-that we must look for the solution of at least half the moral and political problems of the day. It is therefore with the greatest pleasure that we welcome a singularly able treatise on the growth and history of one great institution, which, though it has now passed away, has influenced, directly or indirectly, not only the course of events throughout Europe, but the ideas, moral, political, and social, which have swayed European history. the Arnold Prize Essay for 1863, the full title of which we quote below,1 Mr. Bryce has laid before the public, in a marvellously short space, and in a masterly manner, a history, not so much of the Holy Roman Empire itself, as of the ideas which the Empire embodied, and of the changing opinions and theories by which an institution which in later days seemed, and, indeed, was, a mere mass of anomalies, was kept alive. In The great historical fact learnt from even a cursory study of the annals of the Holy Roman Empire is the almost inextinguishable vitality of the impression made on the imaginations of man 1 Arnold Prize Essay, 1863 :-The Holy Roman Empire. By James Bryce, B.A., Fellow of Oriel College. Oxford T. & G. Shrimpton; London and Cambridge: Mac kind by the power of Rome. As early, at least, as the days of Polybius the nations of antiquity had become impressed with the notion that Rome was destined to gather together what was then the whole world in one gigantic political system. Moreover, Polybius himself, and other theorists of his day, looked upon this system as destined to a long, if not an indefinite, endurance. What the instinct of mankind had foretold while Rome was yet a "free state" was actually accomplished when Roman freedom perished, and the great world-empire of Rome became so firmly established that men came to feel that the existence of an imperial system was, as it were, a law of nature. The coronation of Charlemagne, though it inaugurated an institution in many points unlike the rule of the Cæsars, was meant to be, and seemed to the men of his age, a simple return to the natural order of things—a restoration of the great Roman Empire. The idea of that empire could not die. In the very foundation of a new order of things historical students rightly see proof of the permanence of an ancient idea. The longing for the " nomen Imperatoris," and for the social order which it typified, may be said to be at the root of the strange eagerness with which generation after generation attempted to keep alive or to restore the Empire. Even to persons brought up under modern ideas, it is possible to look upon Charles the Great as in some sense the successor to the Cæsars. What, however, would have been impossible in modern ages is a second revival of the imperial power. That Otto the Great and his successors should look upon themselves as occupying the position of Cæsar and of Augustus is certainly a strange phenomenon "The Restora"tion," writes Mr. Bryce, "of the Empire by Charles may be accounted "for by the width of his conquests, "by the peculiar connexion which "already subsisted between him and "the Roman Church, by his command"ing personal character, by the tempo 66 "The causes of its revival under Otto "must be sought deeper. Making every allowance for favourable inci"dents, there must have been some "further influence at work to draw "him and his successors- -Saxon and "Frankish kings-so far from home in pursuit of a barren crown, to lead "the Italians to accept the dominion "of a stranger and a barbarian, and to "make the Empire itself appear through "the whole middle age, not what it seems now, a gorgeous anachronism, "but an institution, divine and necessary, having its foundation in the very nature and order of things." That the Roman Empire should rise, as it were, from the grave under Charles the Great; that it should be reasserted under Otto the Great, in a state of society more dissimilar than any other that has existed to the condition of society which first gave birth to the Empire-these are facts sufficiently strange to impress even the most careless observers with wonder at the vitality of historical ideas. Yet events long subsequent to the reign of Otto give the strongest of all proofs of the resolution of mankind not to let the name of the Empire die. It is, in fact, when the Empire is materially weakest that the strength of its hold on human imaginations is seen most strongly. When, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Henry VII. entered Italy, he possessed less material power than many of the barons of Germany. He relied on one source of strength only--the strength of his prerogative; nor did he rely on it wholly in vain. Crossing "from his Burgundian dominions with a scanty following of knights, and ascending from the Cenis upon Turin, "he found his prerogative higher in "men's belief, after sixty years of 66 neglect, than it had stood under the "last Hohenstaufen. The cities of "Lombardy opened their gates, Milan "decreed a vast subsidy, Guelf and "Ghibelin exiles alike were restored, "imperial vicars were appointed everywhere, supported by the Avignonese "ambition of his restless neighbour "King Philip IV. Henry had the "interdict of the Church as well as "the ban of the Empire at his com"mand." After all, his power was but the shadow of a great name. We have pointed to three crises in the annals of the Empire as examples how, amidst all the changes of times and manners, a great institution preserved its life and its identity. For those curious in what may be called the external history of the Empire, Mr. Bryce has collected together a greater store of curious information than readers will with ease find in the pages of any other writer. But the great merit of his work, and that which gives it importance for our present purpose, lies in the skill and originality with which he traces out what may be termed the ideal history of the Empire. Ideas and institutions are, as we have before said, often almost the same thing from two different aspects. This is true of all institutions. The actual power of an English law court consists, to a great extent, in the power attributed to it through the popular ideas of the respect due to law. But what is true, in some degree, of all institutions, was true, in an infinitely greater degree, of the Holy Roman Empire. The actual, tangible material forces of the Empire were never so great as they were deemed. When turned against the free cities of Italy, they proved weaker than the resources of revolted burghers. In the height of its strength, as in the time of its weakness, the strength of the Holy Roman Empire lay in the awe with which it impressed the world. What then was the source of this awe? Mr. Bryce finds it to have depended on certain mediæval doctrines and theories which have now almost ceased to exert influence. The recollection and tradition of Roman power did much to impress upon mankind the notion that the natural state of humanity, and the only state under which civilization could flourish, was under the sway of one supreme strengthened and made almost a part of mediæval religion by the notion that the universality and the unity of the Church were bound up with the universality and the unity of the Empire; or, as Mr. Bryce again and again puts it, a universal Church and a universal Empire were but two aspects of the conception of the necessary unity of the whole society of Christians. National churches and national governments were equally opposed to the mediaval desire for unity. This very desire for unity is utterly foreign to modern feelings. For, though theologians have their conventional expressions, borrowed from the language of a past age, as to the desirability of external Christian unity, probably not probably not one ordinary Englishman in ten thousand feels it a real distress that different churches use utterly different forms of worship. If by the increase of a penny income-tax it. were possible to establish one liturgy, say throughout England and Scotland, Parliament would refuse to impose the additional penny. It is even difficult for us to conceive how any desire for unity could have blinded men for many centuries to the fact that the Holy Roman Empire, with all its theoretic pretensions, was in no true sense either a continuation of the rule of the Roman Cæsars, or a bond of real political unity throughout Christendom. The difficulty is much lightened, if not entirely removed, by two considerations. The first is, that the men of the middle ages were ignorant of history to an extent hard for us to imagine. It was not only that they were ignorant of the facts of history, though their ignorance in this respect went very far-as may be seen by the curious fact that a general belief made the seven electors an original part of the imperial constitution, not two centuries after the electors obtained their powers. What was of much more consequence was the absence of what is now termed historical feeling. The Ancient History which men knew they knew wrong, transferring, in a way which at first sight seems almost |